John Wooden

John Robert Wooden (14 October 1910 – 4 June 2010) coached UCLA men’s basketball from 1948 to 1975, winning ten NCAA championships including seven in a row from 1967 to 1973, and was the first person enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame as both a player and a coach. Before Westwood he taught English at South Bend Central High School, and he built his coaching around aphorisms — his Pyramid of Success, his father’s maxims, and a working stock of borrowed proverbs he quoted freely without ever claiming to have written them. That habit is exactly why so many sayings he merely repeated now travel the internet under his name.