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PART VIWOODEN’S TEAM

COACH WOODEN’S FIELD OF DREAMS

KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR: UCLA VARSITY, 1967–69;THREE NCAA NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS

You may have seen the Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams—“Build it and they will come.” Coach Wooden did that. He built his basketball program a certain way—athletically, ethically, morally—because he believed it would attract a certain type of person, the kind of individual he wanted on the team.

And if he didn’t have success that way, it was all right with him because he felt his program made sense; in every way it made sense to him. So he was going to do it that way. Coach was almost a mystic in knowing what would ...

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