Wooden will always be "The Wizard", but it is definitely a different game now.
By Mark Kreidler
Special to ESPN.com
Lute Olson will never be John Wooden. Can't be, can't be, can't be.
Nobody ever calls Olson the Wizard of Tucson. Folks rarely make pilgrimages to the desert to sit at his knee and bask in the warmth of his greatness. The 10 NCAA titles for Wooden at UCLA are, quite frankly, untouchable forever and ever, amen.
Wooden was special, and Wooden had Walton and Alcindor, among others, and Wooden won and won and won, and oh, the glory of the times. As Olson prepares to pass Wooden and become the all-time winningest basketball coach in Pac-10 Conference play, in fact, you can count on a flurry of media creation reminding you that there was one, and only one, John Wooden.
Verifiably true. And that, as we stand here today, is the good news.
Lute Olson, that is, goes in on his own. His Pac-10 victories have come during the greatest collective age of the conference, forged of teams competing in the modern college game and the era of the instantaneously rich NBA prospect.
He faces obstacles that at times reach ludicrous proportion, not the least of which is keeping his own job long enough to even approach the great Wooden's career conference mark. He has earned his wings.
No offense to Wooden, but it just ain't that easy anymore. It isn't easy to get the players you want or need. It isn't always easy to keep those players healthy and eligible and out of trouble. It is rarely easy to keep the truly great ones from ditching your program after a couple of years and heading off to refine their games while signing fat pro deals and striking out on the endorsement trail.
For that matter, it's a small amazement that Lute Olson has coached at Arizona long enough to threaten Wooden. What is it, 21 years? Do you have any idea what the average college coach's life span is in any one job? These guys start getting fired about three months after they get to campus -- and not only that, they accept it as the cost of doing business. The clock is always ticking.
Olson isn't Wooden, you bet. John Wooden could tell his players how to tie their shoes and wear their socks and not get laughed out of the room (although he says a few players laughed with him), and that alone may stand as one of the true marks of his ability to communicate and command respect at the same time.
Wooden was a brilliant, brilliant coach, a great tactician, a human being at a time in their lives when some of his players desperately needed to see that in their head coach. He also happened along at a time in history when the Pac-10 (it was the Pac-8 at the time) was almost unbelievably mediocre.
The distinguished Olson has distinguished himself in 21 years in Tucson.
Wooden's rise to the top coincided with a decided downturn among many of the other programs in the conference. Writing in the Arizona Daily Star recently, Greg Hansen noted that Wooden's teams once went through a 15-season stretch without playing a single conference game against a nationally ranked opponent. Fifteen seasons. Olson's teams have played 23 such conference games over the past five years alone.
The point is not to denigrate John Wooden, of course. We didn't all run to the medicine cabinet for a heaping two-tablespoon dose of Moron. Wooden's legacy and record almost exist outside time and space; he has been such a force in the game for so long, so revered and yet still so capable and bright and involved and consulted, that it is actually possible to forget he stopped coaching a full decade before Olson came to Arizona in 1984.
No, the point is to underscore the notion that Lute Olson isn't merely the guy who hung around long enough to approach Wooden's all-time mark. Quite the opposite: Olson is the coach who approached the record by succeeding quite substantially, and year after year, frankly against most odds. It's a kind of success that strikingly few modern coaches -- Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams -- are able to sustain.
Those two-plus decades since Olson headed West from Iowa have been marked by some of the greatest tumult in the history of the college game. Rosters have been decimated by the NBA's increasing hunger for young talent and the natural give and take of a semi-open market. Most coaches today know that if they have an exceptional talent, they will sooner or later (probably sooner) be faced with the issue of whether that player will stay for two years or three.
Four? It's just about out of the question. Put the talent-turnover issue alongside modern booster scandals, the kind of crushing media attention that was unheard of in Wooden's day and the rise of the NCAA Tournament, with its pressure-inducing financial windfall for the 64 teams who climb into it, and you have a recipe for an abbreviated career at any one job.
Olson has won his games at a time when tenure among college coaches is basically an inside joke. His record at Arizona really is as noteworthy for its stunning longevity as for anything else -- and that is taking into account the fact that he has won at almost the same searing clip as did Wooden, with his wonderful teams of the '60s and '70s.
Olson, of course, hates the analysis, which only identifies him as a fully sentient human being. He knows it's a loser's game to begin comparisons to the Wizard. All are eventually diminished in the presence of Wooden, and that's just the fact -- an acceptable fact, really, for anyone who loves and appreciates the game.
But this, too: Before this season is done, Lute Olson, not Wooden, will hold the record for the most league games ever won by a basketball coach in the history of the Pac-10 Conference.
Olson will have come by that record honestly, to say nothing of bloodfully, sweatfully and tearfully. It's the modern era, and two decades of A-level work on the job qualifies as a minor miracle. Olson can stand on his own, and on his work, just fine.
Mark Kreidler is a columnist for the Sacramento Bee and a regular contributor to ESPN.com. Reach him at
[email protected].
