Author's Note: Any resemblance to UCLA's "Wizard of Westwood" John Wooden and his "Pyramid of Success" is purely intentional.
Long before his unequaled career as a college basketball coach was over, Jerome University's Woodrow (Woody) Johnson had been dubbed the "Genius of Jerome." No one less than a genius could mastermind Arizona's once hapless Jerome Jackals to ten national championships, nine of them consecutive, or put together a win streak of 188 games spanning seven seasons. No matter that those titles were in the often sneered at and overtly semi-pro National Association of For-profit Universities, it's acronym often teasingly spelled sNAFU. Even his critics, and they are few, attest to his brilliance. But along with his overly glorified and too frequently quoted "Ladder To The Top," his guideline for winning both on and off the court, with its seemingly endless maxims that he put forth repeatedly, there was a human side to Woody, revealing that even a genius can have feet of clay.
No, he didn't cheat on his wife, as did another Jerome coach who might have ended his career nearly as idolized as Woody but instead died in the bedroom of a harlot. No, Woody wasn't even accused of recruiting violations as he wooed freshmen. That was yet another Jerome coach - who did that elsewhere and was fired for it but was still hired by the athletic director at Jerome. And no, Woody didn't bad mouth officials when his Jackals lost a close one, although losing games by a point or two was a rarity for his teams.
Woody, however, had a flaw, one that puts him on a par with other greats - Stagg, Rockne, and Howard Jones quickly come to mind - whose treatment of a player or intolerance of certain conduct marred the image that prevailed in the daily press, at alumni reunions or when vote-seeking politicians evoked the coach's name at campaign rallies.
For Woody, the flaw was that his "Ladder To The Top" left no room for other routes to a championship, or achievement in the real world off the court, or, in this case, to heroic action that far exceeded in its importance any buzzer-beating, game-winning, half court Hail Mary. Woody's fault was that he still lived in an age that was passing, and he believed those who played for him and wore the Jackal uniform should reflect those old values on and off the court. When there was protest, his concept of proper decorum was undebatable. The kid who chose to argue never won.
And so it was that Woody carried those values into the social revolution of the 1960s and early '70s. College kids smoked pot, unless they indulged in something more potent. The old relationship between the sexes on college campuses - the way guys and gals had seemingly acted toward each other in Woody's undergraduate days and on into the 1940s and '50s - was gone. And the neatly dressed frat boys of Sigma Chi no longer predominated on campus as students now came to class in scroungy jeans and tank tops. It was not a world Woody could relate to. Not unexpectedly, he fought a last ditch effort to turn the tide. He may have won 85% of the games his teams played, but he couldn't win this one. Except when it came to the moment his players entered the gym.
In the late 1960s, one of his recruits was a kid from Prescott named Frank Gilbert, a lanky, muscular guard. He was not at the top of Woody's list of high school stars to look at, although he was good enough that a Jackal scout pressed Woody to give the kid an athletic scholarship and a spot on the roster. As a freshman, Gilbert played little, scored few points, was not a standout on the floor during the short time he played, and left Woody with doubts about the kid's chance to make the team in his sophomore year.
We'll never know how good, or bad, Gilbert's second season as a Jackal would have been. When he showed up for practice that first day in the fall of 1969 his career as a Woody man came to an abrupt end. With his players in a circle around him, Woody quietly surveyed the squad... and abruptly sent all players except Gilbert off to one end of the court for drills with an assistant coach. Woody stood quietly, sternly, for what must have seemed to Gilbert as an unnecessarily long pause, then sharply told him:
"Get a haircut!"
Gilbert was dumbfounded. Over the summer he had let his hair grow long, covering his ears and hanging down to his shoulders, the style many of his generation, even athletes, now wore.
Gilbert tried to explain. Coach was adamant: "No haircut, no place on the roster!"
Gilbert raised his voice in outrage. A calm, steadfast Woody told him the discussion was over. Gilbert was to leave the gym and not return until his hair was short. It didn't have to be a crew cut, though that was preferred, but it had better be short. With that, Woody sent the boy to the locker room and told him not to return until he had complied. The two never met again.
Gilbert not only left the team, he checked out of college. As it was early in the fall term, he tried to enroll elsewhere. His grades weren't good enough for the schools he would like to have played for, and the state colleges he could get into didn't have teams or coaches that he was interested in. He spent that Fall semester at a Flagstaff community college, was a so-so member of a less than winning team, then dropped out of school... and into the Marine Corps.
His hair came off, but it didn't seem to matter anymore. In light of that, he should have cut it in Jerome and stayed with Woody, but the coach's unrelenting and dogmatic attitude had so annoyed Gilbert that he couldn't do that. Well, if the kid thought a coach was so unwilling to listen to reason, what would he think about marine drill instructors? Whatever he thought, he went through boot camp without more than the usual problems and within a year was in Vietnam.
Coach would have been appalled by the drugs, the insubordination... even the hair. Gilbert and his marine comrades were hardly the model of decorum that Woody had demanded on and off the court. The "Ladder To The Top" had no place in the war zone. Although some of those maxims might apply, no one was spouting them. Despite that, there was no absence of heroism. In Gilbert's case, while he may have been a player Woody could do without, that wasn't the way his fellow marines would view him. Nor was he anymore heroic than all the rest.
It wasn't Woody standing there face to face with a surly ball player, but the scene was somewhat the same. It was the sergeant, telling Gilbert to shut up and get down. Gilbert wouldn't listen. A hundred yards away was a fellow marine, badly wounded and unable to get back on his own to the relative safety of a foxhole. Gilbert was incensed that nothing was being done to rescue his buddy. The sergeant said it was too dangerous. Nothing could be done. Gilbert protested. The sergeant told him again to shut up.
And that's when Gilbert took off, cutting through a hail of enemy fire to the fallen marine, whom, it turned out, he barely knew since the guy was a replacement. Almost effortlessly, the husky Gilbert was able to lift the wounded marine and he started back to the squad. Inexplicably there was a lull in the Viet Cong fire, and Gilbert and his cargo had nearly made it home when the firing resumed. Two steps from the squad's perimeter Gilbert was hit. The Sergeant pulled him and the other marine into a trench. Both were dead. The marine Gilbert went out to rescue had probably been dead before Gilbert picked him up. No one in the squad said anything. They understood why Gilbert did what he had to do.
There must be a moral to this story. If there is, it's not something taken from the "Ladder To The Top." No tired maxim motivated Gilbert to do what he did. Some philosophers would have said his action was contrary to the good of the squad, that they needed him alive and healthy. But there are no philosophers in foxholes.
Frank Gilbert achieved more on that day than any coach with a 188 game winning streak. He didn't live by some rigid rule that insisted on conformity. He knew that winning came from the heart as much as it came from a strict formula of practice and offensive plays. He knew that a coach, or a sergeant, didn't always have the right answer, that there were alternate ways that worked just as well, whether it was letting your hair grow long or dodging bullets to save a fellow marine. He knew that trying, even in the face of ultimate failure, was as important as the victory, even if it meant defeat.
Those were principles that the "Genius of Jerome" seemed to have omitted from his "Ladder To The Top.
