A Coach's Diary

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 ...

Dick Vitale shares a story on how he reached out to several coaches when he was still a young high school coach and the advice and assistance John Wooden provided for Vitale and his career.  This story appeared in Success Magazine’s December issue in which Coach Wooden is the cover story, and is written by DonYaeger . The coach was also an active mentor, advocating on behalf of people and seeking out younger coaches he felt demonstrated a commitment to building character as much as constructing winning teams.  “When I was just starting out as a high school coach, I started reaching out to people I admired to find out a moment of their success with a young guy aspiring to be a coach on a collegiate level,” says National Collegiate Basketball Hall of fame member Dick Vitale.  “A lot of people, of course, never wrote back, but I was absolutely in awe when I opened the mail and realized I had received a response from the Wizard of Westwood [one of Wooden’s nicknames]...