My long plane ride to Boston for the annual ASSA meetings provided me with the chance to read a biography of UCLA's great coach John Wooden and Leon Panetta's autobiography. At UCLA, John Wooden's long run of multiple NCAA College Basketball Championships sets a high bar for the athletics program. His success also poses a challenge for the nerdy UCLA faculty because everyone thinks of basketball when you think of UCLA. I would much prefer if people thought about "Economics" when UCLA is mentioned but this link hasn't been made by many.
John Wooden lived to the age of 99. During his long life, he was straight arrow who did not drink or curse and he was always trying to teach his players. A Midwesterner, he had to adjust to teaching "individuals" such as Kareem and Bill Walton. The book portrays him as a "square" in the midst of the turbulent 1960s and Vietnam, race relations and the Hippies raised issues on the college campuses. Through all of this turmoil, he kept his cool and just did his job.
The most interesting part of the book is how little his players really knew him when he was their coach. He was a private man and he wasn't a cheerleader or their buddy. In his later life, his wife died relatively young and he spent his later years reconnecting with his old players. The book does a wonderful job sketching how his players (who were now grown men and middle aged) sought to connect with their old coach and how at this later date he was willing and able to connect with them. While the players (especially the bench scrubs) didn't fully appreciate the life lessons he was teaching them when they played for UCLA, in later life these same athletes each had an epiphany concerning the role that Coach Wooden had played in their life. Many professors can read this book and wonder whether we are having a similar impact. While we spend fewer contact hours with "our players" (the students), we should still aspire to have the same impact that he did.