Free Wooden: A Coach's Life by Seth Davis Page B

teammate, a field goal of his own, and a free throw with a few seconds left, enabling the Boilermakers to prevail by 5. As the Courier and Journal reported, “Wooden had the faculty of delivering in the pinches.” He added 15 points in a 15-point pasting of Northwestern and 17 in a 13-point win over Indiana. After watching Wooden increase his season scoring total to a league-leading 93 points against the Hoosiers, Illinois coach Craig Ruby, who was scouting the game, called Wooden “the greatest basketball player I ever saw in action.”
    Many of the victory margins would have been even greater had Lambert not emptied his bench once his team built huge leads. Oftentimes, he would leave Wooden as the only starter on the floor. “He had a way of stalling the game out by fantastic dribbling,” said Wooden’s younger teammate, William “Dutch” Fehring. “He would dribble from backcourt to frontcourt, and all around the court, and nobody could get that ball away.”
    Purdue would not have won in such dominating fashion had it been a one-man show. Still, everyone knew who the headliner was. On one train trip to a road game, Lambert took a blanket away from one of the reserves and gave it to his senior star. “Wooden’s going to play tomorrow. All you’re going to do is sit,” Lambert said. Wooden was no longer an unbridled colt learning how to harness his talents. He was a seasoned veteran, and he had a bag full of tricks. “He had a very unusual thing he did. He would drive down to the foul circle, and he’d change directions, cause he’s like a cat anyway. He would change directions and go either way and he could confuse everybody,” said Kenneth Watson, a friend from Martinsville who watched many of Wooden’s games at Purdue. Bob King added, “Wooden was somewhat of a folk hero here in Indiana. He was a tremendous competitor. He was a guy you had to kill, almost, to beat him.”
    In their penultimate game of the season, the Boilermakers again embarrassed Northwestern, their main challenger in the Big Ten race, by a score of 31–17 behind Wooden’s 15 points. That clinched their second outright conference championship in three years. It was also the fourth time in seven years that Lambert’s team had either won or shared the title. The only question to be settled in Wooden’s finale against Chicago was whether he would score 15 points and break the Big Ten single-season scoring record of 147 set by his friend Branch McCracken two years before.
    Wooden didn’t score 15 points. He scored 21, leaving the new mark at 154 points. Purdue also established a league record for points scored in a season as the Boilermakers completed their campaign with a best-ever 17–1 record. At the time, there were no postseason tournaments or wire-service polls to determine an official national champion, but four years later, when the Los Angeles–based Helms Athletic Foundation retroactively selected national champions in college basketball dating back to 1901, it awarded Purdue the 1932 crown.
    There was no question as to who should get most of the credit. An organization called the All-America Board of Basketball Coaches had convened for the first time that winter to vote on the five most outstanding college basketball players in the United States. The story that appeared in newspapers around the country was authored by a board member who knew Wooden all too well: Wisconsin coach Dr. Walter Meanwell. Though the board did not officially designate a national player of the year, Meanwell made clear who he thought belonged at the head of the class. “If the most brilliant amateur basketball player in the country was to be selected, the name of John Wooden outshines all others,” Meanwell wrote.
    Wooden was even more pleased a few months later when Purdue’s president, Edward Elliott, presented him with the Big Ten’s academic achievement medal. At the end of the first semester of Wooden’s senior year, he ranked nineteenth