John Wooden’s Pyramid of Failure

When I played on my 9th-grade basketball team I was already past my prime. (I peaked in sixth-grade.) We lost most games shortly after the tip-off—if not earlier when the other teams saw us warming up. Our coach didn’t help much.

This was his first time coaching a basketball team. He was a lacrosse guy and could’ve used some good YouTube videos had they been available. He was a huge fan of John Wooden, the legendary UCLA coach, who won 10 NCAA national championships in a 12-year period as head coach for the UCLA Bruins, including a record seven in a row. It was ironic that he couldn’t quite say Wooden’s name correctly, pronouncing it as “Woo – den”.

Wooden had some exceptional players—Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Sidney Wicks, and Bill Walton, to name a few. We, on the other hand, most certainly did not. The life philosophies Wooden instilled in his teams trickled down to us through our coach, though they arrived as watered-down platitudes like, “Listen to your parents” and “Study hard and get good grades.” As ninth-graders, these nuggets of wisdom were repeated so often by our coach and other adults in our life, that we just tuned them out.

Coach did, however, have one signature play called “The Big Wheel.” I still remember it—not because it worked but because it was so ineffective the other teams laughed when we ran it. Picture a point guard dribbling the ball while the four other players lined up and did some hopeless move to get open. If the point guard didn’t see anything, the first player would just go to the end of the line and the process would repeat. To say the play fooled nobody was a massive understatement. The defense stood there looking confused and amused. Our "highlight" reel featured Jake Green frantically pivoting from side to side before deciding that his best move was a pass to the referee, who gracefully stepped aside as the ball bounced harmlessly out of bounds. Meanwhile, Danny Porter seized a tip-off near the other team’s basket with gusto, barreled toward the basket with undeniable determination, and executed a flawless layup… into the wrong hoop.

But what I really remember most about that season was my own lack of commitment. One day during practice Coach turned to me and asked, “Hey, Eric, do you ever work up a sweat?” Although I’m currently a fitness enthusiast in my early sixties who still does triathlons and ½ marathons, I was a somewhat lazy adolescent who didn’t see the value of working too hard in practice just to be a bench warmer on a team whose feature play was “The Big Wheel.”

The most significant memory was when I decided—after joining the team for a water break during practice, and for reasons still unclear to me—to rest on a stack of gymnastics mats. I wasn’t just sitting. I was lying on my side, propped up on my elbow like I was lounging on a beach in some 1940’s postcard and just watching practice. Coach, understandably baffled, asked, “Hey, Eric, would you mind coming over here and joining us?”

The entire team looked in my direction, in the opposite corner of the court and started laughing. To this day, I still have no idea what was going through my head. Was I making a statement? Was I tired? Was I modeling for a Renaissance painting?

We didn’t win many games—or any games, as I recall—and that was my last year playing organized basketball. Although the Big Wheel never worked, I got a good story out of the experience and I like to think Coach Wooden would be proud. Probably not, but I like to think it.