COACH JOHN WOODEN, longtime basketball coach at UCLA.  I picked up a book about his career from the Development Office at MOPA.  It’s not the kind of book that I can settle in with for a long read; but my attention was captured by the book’s sub-title, “The Power of a Lot of Little Things Done Well,”  so I read on.  The cook was written by Pat Williams with Jim Denny helping put it together.  The title of the book is “Coach Wooden’s Greatest Secret.”  I didn’t have to read far to get the reason I knew I’d like John Wooden.  Pat Williams met often with the coach, usually for lunch or dinner, and at one of those meetings when they both knew the book was going to be written, Williams asked, “Coach, if you could pinpoint just one secret of success in life, what would it be?”  The coach said, “The closest I can come to one secret of success is this: a lot of little things done well.”

Coach Wooden, a graduate of Purdue University, always thought of himself as a teacher first and a coach second.  He was a high school English teacher and basketball coach and then a college coach in Indiana before he took the UCLA job where during a period of twelve years his teams won ten NCAA national championships. 1948-1949 was his first season at UCLA. Everybody who knows basketball knows that he was a great coach and a very good man.  The good man died in 2010 a few months before his 100th birthday.

So I am recommending Coach Wooden’s Greatest Secret.   I am also recommending Coach Wooden’s advice: Do little things, a lot of them, well.

Today’s photograph is the bark in the second picture.  The first picture, the reflecting pool in Balboa Park, and the third and fourth pictures were taken a few days ago.  The two pictures of paintings are from the San Diego Museum of Art.  The last one is actually a Canaletto.  The next to the last photograph was thought to be by Canaletto until recently.  It is done by a student of the great artist.  I thought they belong with John Wooden’s story.  I took both of the paintings from Venice with my cell phone. 

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