Happy Birthday, Coach!

On Wednesday, Oct. 14, Coach John Wooden is turning 99 — and you can help him celebrate by wishing him a happy birthday.

 

Simply go to the “Coach John Wooden, Happy Birthday” website, and you can write your own personal message in a “virtual birthday card” to the beloved UCLA basketball coach. By doing so, you’ll be joining Duke University’s men’s basketball Coach Mike Krzyzewski, the University of North Carolina’s Coach Roy Williams, sportscasters Bob Costas and Dick Vitale, and thousands of other Wooden fans from all over the world.

 

The goal? To collect 9,999 birthday greetings, which will then be bound into a notebook for posterity and given to the coach as a birthday gift. As of Oct. 13, more than 1,500 fans from 13 different countries on five continents had logged onto the site with their birthday wishes.

 

Also planned for the coach’s birthday on Oct. 14 is the release of his newest book, “A Game Plan for Life: The Power of Mentoring with John Wooden” (Bloomsbury Press), co-written by Don Yaeger. The first half of the book focuses on seven people who helped foster the values that Wooden has carried throughout his life, such as his wife, Nell; his father, Joshua Wooden; and his basketball coach at Purdue University, Ward L. “Piggy” Lambert.

 

“Two of the people Coach Wooden chose as his mentors are people he never met — Abraham Lincoln and Mother Teresa,” said Yaeger. “I asked him, ‘How could they be your mentors? You never met them.’ And he said, ‘Mentoring is really about living a good life. And if you live a good life, other people will notice.’ ”

 

Wooden has influenced millions of people by doing just that, so the second half of the book is devoted to firsthand accounts by seven people he has mentored. It’s no surprise that such well-known athletes as Bill Walton and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar are here. But also included is Wooden’s great-granddaughter, Cori Nicholson, who always thought of her great-grandfather as a teacher and who decided to honor him by becoming a kindergarten teacher in Southern California.

 

The seventh mentee was chosen partly because he had never met Wooden, Yaeger explained, and that created a sort of synergy with the mentors Coach had never met, such as Lincoln and Mother Teresa.

 

“Bob Vigars is a middle-school teacher in Canada who has read all of Wooden’s books and who teaches the coach’s maxims to his students every day. He looks at John Wooden as his greatest mentor, even though he’s never met him,” Yaeger said. “And that’s awesome. It’s really about the circle of life.”