John Mathew Smith, an assistant professor in the School of History, Technology, and Society, was recently interviewed on NPR about his new book The Sons of Westwood: John Wooden, UCLA, and the Dynasty That Changed College Basketball. He appeared on the NPR series Only a Game hosted by veteran commentator Bill Littlefield.

What best explains the annual success of John Wooden’s teams recruiting, or teaching, or the coach’s charisma? What was going on there?

Well, I think it was a combination. I mean Wooden was an excellent coach, fantastic in practice at breaking down the fundamentals, developing team unity and cohesion on the court, but John Wooden we have to remember was at UCLA for 15 years before he won his first national championship, and you can’t win without great players.

So his early championship teams were very guard-oriented with Walt Hazzard and Gail Goodrich — two All-Americans — but then when Lew Alcindor arrived in his first varsity season, in 1966-1967, the offense ran through him. And then after those players left, Bill Walton came, and so [Wooden] changed again with a center.  So his ability to adapt, really I think, is what sustained his success with the combination of these really incredibly talented players.

John Wooden was celebrated not only as a fantastically successful coach, but as a fellow who stood for tradition and order. Was that a legitimate reading of John Wooden?

You know, John Wooden in the 1960s and the 1970s was a symbol of moral authority. This is an age when America’s college sons and daughters have turned a deaf ear to their parents, right? They’re questioning their parents. They’re questioning authority. They’re questioning professors and administrators on America’s campuses.

Wooden projects this image of consensus in a time of  dissent, but ultimately his players did respect his authority, and he was able to bring them together in a way that they were successful when it was time to play.

Some of the most compelling stories in The Sons of Westwood involve John Wooden’s relationship with Bill Walton. Wooden did not like Walton’s social activism, which the coach regarded as certainly inappropriate perhaps even un-American. Walton did not like the coach’s rules involving things like hair length and beards. How did those two get along?

At their core, they were both competitors. They both loved basketball and I think that’s really what brought them together. And I think its part of the beauty — here they are, two very different guys. Here is John Wooden who has very different views of society and morals and politics. And then you have Bill Walton who is the son of liberals, grows up in San Diego, someone who was drawn to social-action movements. [In] the anti-war movement, he gets arrested in 1972 for occupying the administration building. Ultimately Walton respected Wooden as his coach. He challenged him, but there was a certain line that he didn’t cross, and I think that that was true of a lot of the players that did test Wooden on and off the court.

John Matthew (Johnny) Smith (Ph.D., Purdue University) came to HTS in fall 2012 as a postdoctoral fellow and was recently appointed assistant professor in Sports History. His book, The Sons of Westwood: John Wooden, UCLA, and the Dynasty That Changed College Basketball, was recently published in the University of Illinois Press series on Sport and Society. Smith has published three scholarly articles and is currently working on a biography of Muhammad Ali.