Wooden, Floors and the Pyramid of Success
by John Walker
Coach John Wooden, the greatest basketball coach of all time, passed away last month on May 26. I met Coach Wooden back in the early 1990s. He was the guest speaker at meeting I was attending in Los Angeles. The topic was his “Pyramid of Success.” During the presentation he explained the pyramid was what he considered to be the basis of his playing and coaching success over a long career (Coach Wooden was the first person ever to be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame as both a player and a coach).During his presentation I wrote notes furiously and tried to copy the pyramid he projected on the screen from an overhead projector. After the talk I went up to shake his hand and thank him. I told him I tried to copy the pyramid but couldn’t write fast enough. He said, “Oh, that’s okay they sell a poster of the pyramid over in the UCLA bookstore.” I told him I’d buy one before I left town because I wanted to show it at my next train the trainer class. He got a twinkle in his eye and said, “I never copyrighted the Pyramid of Success because I didn’t want to stop people from using it. If you want to, you can make your own copy for your trainers.”
Not long after that we produced the first site-based action kit in the ManageMen series titled How to Coach a Successful Team. The kit was designed to help facilitate the Clark County School District (Las Vegas) to adopt the (OS1) team concept of cleaning. I asked our design genius, George Dansie, to design our own version of Coach Wooden’s “Pyramid of Success” for that kit. Since then John Wooden’s “Pyramid of Success” chart has shipped in every coaching kit we ever produced.
When I read of Coach Wooden’s death late last month I went back and rummaged through my files until I located those hand written notes with my incomplete drawing of the pyramid. I also found a couple of laminated copies of that 1994 pyramid that George designed. Last year I asked George to redesign the pyramid to fit in the new kits we redesigned, expanded and updated in late 2009, fifteen years after our first version.
John Wooden once explained how he came to develop the pyramid:
“When I was an English teacher I found out some parents made their youngsters feel that they had failed if they didn’t get an A or a B. I never liked that way to judge. Nor do I like Mr. Webster’s definition of success, which is more or less the accumulation of material possessions or the achievement of a position of power or prestige. I don’t question the accomplishments, but I don’t think they necessarily indicate success.
I wanted to come up with something that I hoped would make me a better teacher, and give those under my supervision something with which to aspire, other than just higher marks in the classroom or more points in athletic endeavors.
I coined my own definition of success. I used what my father said: Never try to be better than someone else. Learn from others. From those I coined my own definition of success in 1934:
‘Success is peace of mind attained only through self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable.’
We aren’t all equal as far as abilities and in many ways, our minds, our bodies. We are all equal in that respect. After a while I wasn’t happy with this definition. My youngsters didn’t seem to understand it very well. I felt I needed to come up with something you could see. So I started the Pyramid of Success in 1934, completed it in 1948 when I was teaching at Indiana State University after being discharged from the U.S. Navy in 1946.
Any structure must have a strong foundation. The cornerstones anchor the foundation. For some reason the cornerstones that I chose to begin with I never changed. I had a lot of ideas during those years. Changed some, dropped some, substituted something else, and other names could be used, but never the cornerstones.
I think anyone’s success depends on working hard, Industriousness and Enthusiasm, enjoying what you are doing. You can’t work your best if you’re not enjoying what you are doing. No way you can force yourself to. Those were the first two.
At the apex I, of course, had success according to my definition. And gradually I built the rest of the blocks. Between the cornerstones I had Friendship, Loyalty and Cooperation. Then I went up to Self-Control, Alertness, Initiative and Intentness. Then I went up to Condition, Skill and Team Spirit. And those led up to Poise and Confidence. And it all went up to Competitive Greatness.
And then with Patience and Faith you can get to the top of the pyramid, which is my definition of success. They aren’t blocks, but they lead to the apex.”
This year, for 100th anniversary of Father’s day, I gave each of my two sons a copy of Coach Wooden’s book reflecting on his life. Not only was he a great coach, he was an outstanding father and husband, really he had a pretty good record for living life. I thought my sons, both relatively early in fatherhood, might enjoy reading about a man whose life lends itself so well to emulation.
There are a couple of important things about coach Wooden that many people don’t know. Coach Wooden fit into Jim Ginnaty’s theory that everybody has been a janitor. Wooden went to UCLA as coach in 1948. He inherited the worst team in the Pacific Coast Conference. In his inaugural season, he led the Bruins to the first of his 19 conference championships. He was promised a new arena would be built when he moved to UCLA, but that new arena wasn’t built until 1965. Wooden’s teams practiced for 17 years at what was called the “B.O. Barn.”
Keith Erickson played on UCLA’s last team that practiced at the B.O. Barn before Pauley Pavilion opened. When the Bruins played in the old men’s gym, they were stuffed into the facility with the wrestling team and the women’s gymnastics squad. Chalk would inevitably pile up on the hardwood floor bordering the canvas and mats on the old court. Coach Wooden would make sure it was gone before practice and games.
“Every day before practice, he was always the first one on the floor, and he was out there before anyone else was in there with his mop, and he mopped the entire floor back and forth - you know how big the court is, full-length - he mopped the entire floor, back and forth, every day before practice,” said Erickson, a key player on Wooden’s first two championship teams in 1964 and 1965. “I can remember walking in there, and here’s our coach out here doing this. And the reason was, you know, you slip on that stuff, you break an ankle, you sprain an ankle, and you’re out. He didn’t have the ball boys doing it or someone in the administration getting somebody out there. He did it every single day before practice.”
John Wooden once commented on his janitorial activities, “Remember, I came from the farm, the country, and Los Angeles was frightening to me, definitely frightening. I’d say from the beginning, Nellie, my dear wife wasn’t the happiest she could be. Neither were my children at the very beginning, but after three years my children were pretty well settled. They didn’t want to leave their new friends, and we were more acclimated to Los Angeles and always loved UCLA. It was nothing against UCLA. It was just the fact that the facilities with which we had to work with and the conditions under which we played and practiced that way. You may or may not have heard this, but for my first 17 years in that old gym, I with my managers, swept and mopped that floor every day before practice. Every day. I had the buildings-and-grounds people build me two six foot-wide brooms and six foot-wide mops. And, we’d first sweep it to get the dust off from the activity in there during the day, and then dampen these mops, and I took the easy job, I must say. And I didn’t want managers doing things I wouldn’t do myself, but I’d take the easy job and take a bucket and go along in front of them just like I was feeding the chickens to get it a little damp. I did that for 17 years. A lot of people don’t know that.”
Wooden mopped the floor before practice every day. The most money he ever earned as a coach was $32,500 a year. As trainers and coaches in the cleaning industry, we can learn a lot from the best. You can do no better than to study and adapt the coaching ideas of Coach John Wooden. The best basketball coach who ever lived.