Summer
2003
Field of Dreams
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Wooden
— who retired after 27 years at UCLA as the winningest coach
in NCAA history with a record 88 straight victories and 10 national
basketball titles — taught that the merits of a champion flow
from the headwaters of the soul. He would say to his players: “Discipline
yourself and others won’t need to,” and encourage them
to “be more concerned with your character than your reputation.
Character is what you really are; reputation is what you are perceived
to be.”
His
winning formula boiled down to a simple axiom captured in his famous
Pyramid of Success: Respect yourself. Respect education. Build integrity
and high standards off the court first.
COLLEGE
ATHLETICS seems to straddle two parallel universes. The
first is the universe of conventional wisdom and expectation in
which the most important question often is “How do you build
a winning program?,” to which the conventional answer touts
fancy facilities, sometimes-flexible academic standards and expensive
coaching staffs.
Clearly
this is not, and has never been, UCLA’s universe. Nor could
UCLA compete on such terms. Academic standards are rigid, Pauley
Pavilion is an historic facility in need of a facelift and the football
team has never had a campus home stadium — and probably never
will, given the school’s small footprint and its proximity
to densely populated communities. UCLA’s coaching salaries
have historically been below the national average for the big-money
sports of football and basketball. (Ben Howland’s salary as
new head basketball coach — a base of $900,000 a year and
incentives that could push his income to over $1 million, paid from
revenues generated by the athletic department — is the most
lucrative ever offered by UCLA. Even so, it still falls well below
that of many top collegiate coaches in the U.S., some of whom earn
in the realm of $2 million annually.)
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