Dream It! Do It! (Disney Editions Deluxe) Read Online Free PDF Page B

long or short—an assistant blew a whistle and the team moved on to the next planned teachable moment. Failure to prepare is preparing to fail is one of Coach Wooden’s best-known lessons, but there were so many more contained in the myriad of popular books Coach wrote before he passed away in 2010 at age ninety-nine. Many of these gems were contained in The Wisdom of Wooden , written with Steve Jamison and published by McGraw-Hill after Wooden’s passing: Be quick, but don’t hurry… Don’t let making a living prevent you from making a life… Be true to yourself… and, of course, Make each day your masterpiece.
    I had two favorite experiences with Coach Wooden—neither of which were on the basketball court. The first occurred in 1954, when a quirk in the NCAA rules allowed an incoming student from San Pedro, California, eligibility to play either varsity or freshman ball; frosh teams were the first step in an athlete’s college career at that time. This student was no ordinary athlete; he was the player of the year in the Los Angeles high schools. One day I received a call at The Daily Bruin from Coach Wooden, asking me to come to his office. His message was clear; he had decided that Willie Naulls, the player in question, would play immediately for the varsity. To paraphrase Coach’s message: Marty, I would never tell you how to write your story for the student newspaper. But please remember there are four newspapers in Los Angeles and all the sportswriters will write about what an impact Willie will have on our team. He’s going to have tremendous pressure from every one of those newspaper reporters. (In 1954, Los Angeles sports coverage appeared in the Times , Mirror News , Examiner , and Herald-Express . Today, only the Times survives.)
    Coach didn’t have to tell me how he was hoping I would handle The Daily Bruin story. It was emblematic of how his first concern was always for his players.
    Small wonder that all those All-Americans and pro all-stars who came along later—Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton, et al—continued to come to him for advice even thirty and forty years after their playing days ended. (And Willie Naulls did become a star: all-American, first-round NBA draft choice, three-time pro all-star, three-time NBA champion with the Boston Celtics.)
    The second event was a talk Coach Wooden gave as part of a wonderful series called “My Last Lecture” at the University Religious Conference in October 1955. By then, I was editor in chief of The Daily Bruin , and wrote this editorial urging my classmates to attend his lecture:

    Fifty-five years later, I was a member of the board of directors of the UCLA Alumni Association. Ravi Doshi, the president of the Alumni Scholars Club, approached me with some questions about the “My Last Lecture” series. He had seen my 1955 editorial, and was intrigued by the following idea: “What would the great teachers at UCLA in 2010 tell their students if they had but one lecture to give—their final lecture on this earth?” he asked me. A fellow Alumni Scholar, Max Belasco, had heard online a speech by that title delivered by a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who was dying of pancreatic cancer. I had yet another connection: that professor, Randy Pausch, had worked as a consultant at Walt Disney Imagineering.
    Ravi and the Alumni Scholars put their own twist on the idea: they conducted a popular vote in which two thousand students selected the professor they most wanted to hear deliver a “last lecture.” In April 2010, Dr. Asim Dasgusta, professor and vice chairman of the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics, launched a new Bruin tradition based on a fifty-year-old idea, when a sold-out lecture hall of students heard him talk. “I just wanted to tell students what I’ve learned through the years of my life as a scientist for thirty years,” Dr. Dasgusta said.
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    UCLA in the early 1950s was sometimes