The Wooden Effect | The Influence Of Coach Wooden's Presence

Success Magazine just released its December issue, and John Wooden graces the cover.  Don Yeager wrote the cover story, using interviews of a few of the many athletes and coaches that Wooden influenced throughout his life.  Below, Dick Enberg talks about how powerful Coach Wooden’s influence was on anybody in his presence.

You look at his eyes and see how he could be a tough disciplinarian even though he was a man of God," sportscaster Dick Enberg, a longtime friend, recalls.  "We see a lot of his photos from later in his life where he had that sheepish, sweet smile and innocence all over his face, but if you go back to his coaching days, his players knew what he meant when he burned a hole through them with those eyes of, at times, toughness.  If you stayed around him enough you learned an awful lot about life and yourself and how to be good.  You felt a responsibility to conduct yourself the way Coach would want you to behave if you were wearing one of those jerseys sitting on his bench, so you checked your behavior each day that you were around him.  Now that's power.  That's influence in all the right ways.

A lot of strong personalities and strong leaders feel that in order to really fulfill that role, they have to change everyone around them and make them like themselves, but Coach wasn't like that.  I mean he had his plan and you lived within the plan, which was of course teamwork and love for one another and the team being more important than the individual, and winning (not necessarily the score) defining your success in life.  But Coach didn't impose his religion, his philosophy, his lifestyle on others.  He allowed each of us to be an individual."