Page 236 - How to Create a Winning Organization

Wooden on Leadership
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that got up to 88 straight victories before a loss to Notre Dame.
I was the only returning starter on the 1974–1975 Bruins.
Coach went to work with us—fundamentals, drills, team-
work, self-sacrifice. Play hard, don’t get down, wait for your
chance, try to improve each day. Don’t worry about the score-
board. Never a single word about winning. We won the na-
tional championship that year.
At the time I didn’t quite see it, but his behavior was basi-
cally the Pyramid of Success—hard work, energy and enthu-
siasm, self-control, and the rest of it. That’s him. And he
taught it by being himself.
In fact, I kind of thought of him as a professor. When I in-
terviewed with him while I was in high school at Sonora, Cal-
ifornia, I remember, his office at UCLA was full of books,
memorabilia, papers, plaques, certificates, lots of stuff. It
seemed like the office of an English professor.
On the wall he had pictures of his own coaches—“Piggy”
Lambert at Purdue, Glenn Curtis at Martinsville High
School, and Earl Warriner from his grade school days in Cen-
terton. There was a large drawing of his Pyramid of Success
next to them.
Before practice, he’d often be standing there as we walked
on to the court: “How’s your mother, David? Have you
called her?” “You over that cold, Jim?” “How’s the math class
coming?” He knew us as people. You could tell he cared.
And you could tell that he really knew how to teach—just
like a professor.
And, in a certain kind of way he was a professor. What he
taught was how to win. And he did it without ever once men-
tioning winning.