75 Wins & 0 Losses

“I think the players are better, but I don’t think the teams are better.” – John Wooden

John Wooden, who won 10 NCAA college basketball championships in 12 years at UCLA, knew what he was talking about when it came to judging both great players and great teams. After all, he coached and mentored two of the greatest centers of all time in Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul Jabbar) and Bill Walton. And his UCLA Bruins once won a record 75 consecutive games spread over three different seasons.

According to Jabbar, one of the keys to Wooden’s success was the way he used basketball to prepare his players to tackle life beyond their college athletic career. “I think Coach Wooden’s legacy has to do with his ability to use sports as a metaphor for life, to teach great life skills through the means of basketball,” Jabbar said.

Wooden understood and applied the old axiom that “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts”. In other words, a team comprised of players with average skills who work well together can often defeat a more talented team that plays selfishly.

I saw that first-hand back in 1992 when our prison ministry team played a squad of inmates at the North Florida Reception Center in Lake Butler FL. We had been warned by the recreation director that we were going to lose – and lose big – because his team had three players who were at least 7-feet tall. Well, by the time the first quarter was over, the score was 22-0… and our undersized squad was winning. Not because we were better and certainly not because we were taller, but because we put our egos aside and played as a team.

“All you have to do is try your best,” Coach Wooden once said. “Don’t worry what the outcome will be. Try your best. If you can get that across, you’ve done an awful lot.”

Just imagine if the local church, which is the Body of Christ, worked together like one of Coach Wooden’s basketball teams? There would be no stopping us! I suppose that is why, in His high priestly prayer in John 17, Jesus prayed over and over again for one thing: U-N-I-T-Y!

“I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.” John 17:20-21 (NKJV)

• Rev. Dale M. Glading, President