@JhawkAlum
Whew! That fellow swung the hammer!!! Thanks for sharing the link.
I started worshipping Wooden.
Then met him briefly for a few days after he had retired and found him a brilliant and kind person exceeding his reputation.
Learned of his Gilbert connection and felt great dis illusionment.
Studied his career as closely as I could and assessed him relative to the standards of his time.
Decided he spent 15 years playing entirely by the rules and by seeking an edge through integration, but losing out to inferiors like Pete Newell, Sam Berry and his successor, An OSU coach, a Washington coach, and others east like all the New York coaches, and Rupp, and Bubas, that had long relied on sugar daddies like Gilbert AND some that had looked the other way at gambling connections to win big. and even our Phog Allen once he turned a blind eye to the informal forerunner of the Outland Fund that later became the Williams Fund. Wooden was on the brink of losing his job and he had made a huge enemy list by pioneering integration. He finally apparently compromised, hired Jerry Norman, and started apparently recruiting exactly the same way everyone else apparently was during those years. He apparently used the same model. He apparently used an assistant to get the sugar daddy and allow him--the head coach--the same plausible deniability that most of the other top coaches maintained. Wooden to me made the same compromise that all his peers and predecessors had made after 15 years of resisting and being laughed at and mistrusted for not going along to get along. When he leveled the playing field, all his long reputation with African American integration came into play, and he suddenly found himself holding all the aces. His school that had started as a Podunk Normal school added to the UC system in 1947 had become the flagship university of the most desirable region of the country by 1962. The great coaches he had learned harsh lessons against began to retire. The gambling scandals had hollowed out NYC ball and UNC and Rupp refused to integrate. Allen was gone and replaced with Harp who, tried to buck the corruption of the system, as Knight later would, and of his own school, as Knight later would. Harp, the genius innovator of pressure defense, quickly went down shortly, to lack of recruits available to the right way--ruthlessly marginalized as one who would not go along to get along in the game generally or within his own fund raising compromised program itself. But nice mannered Harp went quietly, and unsuccessfully tried to build a fundamentalist flank in FCA. Knight would not later go quietly and flaunted his abusive tendencies.
I have gone through my Protestant disillusion and reformation against the Wooden basketball catholicism. I met him. He was a good man. He compromised, but he did much more good than harm in my book. No one stood up for him all those years before he compromised. He was alone.
Knight apparently thought he had some allies inside and out side his university, when he stood up, likely same as Wooden and Harp did. But when push came to shove, when Wooden compromised, and Harp allowed himself to be marginalized, Knight fought on alone. He enlisted persons to write books to defend him. He spoke out. But he became hung on the petard of his own flaws and then the absence of allies finally got him. The bad guys never forget, whether they are in the shadows or in positions of authority and dignity. Knight had called them out. He had exposed the system through his cooperation with the writing of College Sports, Inc. by Murray Sperber. Nothing in the book was ever cleaned up. The system has apparently morphed up to a new higher scale of normalized asymmetry.
In the movie business, immigrant and America loving Elia Kazan learned the hard way about speaking truth to corrupt power. He, like Wooden compromised and flourished for a time. But then once both had played their parts after compromising, they were both hit by historical revisionism and their greatnesses at what they both did were later trivialized and smeared over in coming decades.
There are different kinds of greatness.
Wooden and Coach K have apparently both compromised. They are represented by the myth of Odysseus. Bend before being broken.
There are others like Knight that refuse to bend and so get broken. They are represented by the myth of Achilles.
The ancient poet Homer expressed the complementary and countervailing myths as he did for a reason. They have survived as they have because they reveal a truth older than recorded human history.
Their is a tragic dimension at times to the great individual's interaction with his culture.
And heroism is largely defined there.
But greatness?
It happens where it happens, how it happens.
Rock Chalk!
