History on His Side

When North Carolina’s Dean Smith surpassed Adolph Rupp to become college basketball’s all-time victories leader in 1997, a young Southern sportswriter wondered out loud in the press room at Winston-Salem, N.C., if it was safe to pen that Smith was the best college basketball coach ever.

A writer on a cushy “West Coast” deadline (me), covering that NCAA second-round game, dared interject another possibility.

“Well, there was John Wooden.”

“Oh yeah,” the guy said.

How soon they forget, if they ever knew at all.

Wooden, 95, won’t make the trip with UCLA to this weekend’s Final Four in Indianapolis, and that’s a shame if only because Wooden’s pregame introduction at the RCA Dome would have been the weekend’s top feel-good moment and also might have cleared a few cobwebs.

“They talk about the Dukes and all the current teams that are doing well right now and their past history,” UCLA freshman guard Darren Collison said. “But they don’t talk about UCLA as much. I think winning games in this tournament is bringing people’s memories back.”

One would think Wooden’s accomplishments might be unassailable.

Just last week, though, in an ESPN.com story, Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim said Duke’s run of nine straight Sweet 16 appearances under Coach Mike Krzyzewski was equal to UCLA’s winning seven straight national championships.

“What Mike has done is certainly in the same category as what John Wooden did,” Boeheim was quoted as saying.

Last year, before Michigan State played Duke in the Austin Regional, Spartan Coach Tom Izzo was asked to compare Wooden’s 12-year run to Krzyzewski’s success.

“UCLA was awfully good,” Izzo said at the time. “When you look at this modern-day era with the parity being so much better, it is more incredible what Mike has done there.”

More incredible.

Wooden’s record in the Final Four was 21-3.

Krzyzewski is 10-7.

Dean Smith was 8-11.

Wooden was 10-0 in title games; Krzyzewski is 3-4.

Let’s get a grip.

“It’s absurd to say getting to the Sweet 16 equates to winning a national title,” said Pacific 10 Commissioner Tom Hansen, who witnessed UCLA’s budding dynasty as the conference’s public relations director from 1960 to ’67. “There’s no question Duke’s record of the past 15 years is impressive, but how many national championships have they won? Three doesn’t equal 10.”

Smith might be the best coach since Wooden, and Krzyzewski the best coach since Smith, but it’s time to re-rack the facts in this era of juiced statistics.

It seems Wooden’s benchmark of 10 national titles is the only thing holding down the fort as the pillars of his work get whittled away.

Arizona Coach Lute Olson, last season, passed Wooden to become the Pac-10’s all-time victories leader.

Wooden, who retired in 1975, has slipped to 22nd on the all-time Division I victory list, as if Wooden is No. 22 in anything.

Denny Crum, Wooden’s one-time kid assistant, is No. 21.

Gene Bartow, forced out of Westwood after two seasons as Wooden’s successor, is No. 24.

Lou Henson amassed more wins than Wooden and more 20-victory seasons. Norm Stewart had more victories.

The bulking up of basketball has distorted the record, much as steroids have so thoroughly skewed baseball bookkeeping that it’s no wonder a new generation thinks: Joe DiMaggio hit only 361 home runs; how good could he have been?

In Wooden’s 27 years at UCLA, the Bruins never played more than 31 games in a season. Duke played 39 en route to its 2001 national title.

In 1985, when the NCAA tournament expanded to 64 teams, it essentially handed the top-seeded teams a free pass to the second round.

This year, for the 10th time, Duke scored a first-round win over a 16th-seeded team. The all-time record of No. 1s in this matchup is 88-0.

It’s not surprising Krzyzewski and Smith zoomed past Wooden (47 wins) on the list of all-time NCAA tournament victories -- Krzyzewski has 68 and Smith 65 -- but what does it really mean?

Some hold it against Wooden that most of his UCLA teams had to win only four games to win the NCAA tournament -- his 1975 team actually won five games -- as if it were easier back then, when only conference champions qualified for the tournament.

Arizona, in 1997, won the NCAA title after finishing fifth in the Pacific 10, and none of the Final Four schools in 1989 -- Duke, Seton Hall, Michigan and Illinois -- won their conference or tournament titles.

Here’s one statistic Boeheim can’t bust: Wooden’s teams won 38 consecutive NCAA tournament games. Even in the modern era, that translates to six straight NCAA championships, plus change.

Wooden won in the no-shot-clock era when opposing teams often tried to hold the ball; he did it before freshmen were eligible and before the best players left early for the NBA.

If you don’t think the quality of basketball was better then, watch replays of last week’s UCLA-Memphis regional final and the same teams in the 1973 NCAA title game.

Wooden knew more about man-to-man than the ESPN Zone, but neither did he ride a horse to work. In fact, he won his last NCAA title the year before Bob Knight won his first.

Wooden and Smith were coaching contemporaries for 14 years. Wooden won 10 national titles in that span to Smith’s zero.

In the 1968 NCAA title game at the Sports Arena, Smith put the Tar Heels in his “four-corner” slowdown offense in an effort to forestall the inevitable against UCLA. Smith lost, 78-55.

“He couldn’t play UCLA straight up,” said Hansen, who worked the 1968 tournament as a media coordinator for the NCAA.

Smith would not dispute this.

“I decided our best chance to win would be to shorten the game,” he wrote in “A Coach’s Life,” his autobiography. “I’m sure it wasn’t a popular decision among our confident players, but it was still our best chance to win against a truly great UCLA team.... Afterwards I said, “UCLA has to be the best basketball team ever assembled.”

Could you imagine the score had there been a 35-second clock?

The commercialization of the Final Four has made merely advancing to it a pinnacle achievement. Today, teams cut down nets after winning regional titles.

Announcers, with ESPN’s you-know-who on lead megaphone, canonize coaches who reach the Final Four and all but equate getting there to winning it.

Wooden never played a No. 16, never played in the Alaska Shootout and never got into the NCAA tournament with an at-large bid.

Mangle the numbers any way you please, but know that there was basketball history before dunk contests and cable television.

Just think: one solid season at Kansas State and Bob Huggins will have amassed more 20-win seasons than Wooden.

All together now: So what?

Even as time slips and powder blue uniforms fade, remember there are not two, three or four best coaches of all time.

Wooden won’t be in Indianapolis this weekend, but he sends emissaries in the form of modern-day Bruins.

“He is the greatest coach in the history of basketball,” UCLA Coach Ben Howland, an obvious partisan, said of Wooden. “What he accomplished at UCLA in terms of wins and losses will never be equaled again.”

The sad thing is that it even has to be reiterated.

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Across eras

Comparing UCLA coach John Wooden’s NCAA record with those of North Carolina’s Dean Smith and Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, if the latter two had had to deal with the qualification format used during Wooden’s era:

* Number of teams -- During all but the last of Wooden’s NCAA appearances, the tournament field was 22-25 teams, with the highest-rated teams getting a first-round bye. That number increased to 32 in 1975, 40 in 1979, 48 in 1980 and 64 in 1985. The greater number of rounds helped both Smith and Krzyzewski pass Wooden in career NCAA victories.

* Makeup of the field -- There are more Division I conferences now than in Wooden’s day, when only conference champions and a few independents made the field. Roughly half of today’s field consists of at-large selections, the bulk of which are teams from major conferences. So UCLA’s first-round games against conference champions probably were more challenging than today’s games against a 15th- or 16th-seeded first-round opponent.

* Comparison -- To come up with equivalent records for Smith and Krzyzewski, their records are considered only for years in which their teams won the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament, the winner of which was the league’s only representative during Wooden’s era. For those seasons, victories in the second round since 1976 and in the third round since 1980 are deleted for a maximum of four games in any one tournament:

NCAA TOURNAMENT RECORDS

*--* ACTUAL ADJUS TED Coach App. W L Pct. Titles App. W L Pct. Titles John Wooden 16 47 10 825 10 16 47 10 825 10 Mike 23 68 19 782 3 10 21 8 724 2 Krzyzewski Dean Smith 27 65 27 707 2 13 28 14 667 1

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* Flaws in the formula -- Getting the automatic berth from a major conference is no longer of great importance, since many good teams know going in that they’ll make the NCAA field. Duke and North Carolina likely would have won the ACC tournament more often had an NCAA bid been in the balance. Also, there’s no way of reproducing the strict regionalization of the brackets in the Wooden era, when UCLA annually played teams from Western conferences in the first two rounds.

* Conclusion -- There’s no perfect formula for comparing records between eras, but by any measure, UCLA’s 10 NCAA championships in Wooden’s final 12 seasons represent one of sports’ most remarkable coaching feats.

--VAN NIGHTINGALE