Out of print for more than 30 years, now available for the first time as an eBook, this is the controversial story of John Wooden's first 25 years and first 8 NCAA Championships as UCLA Head Basketball Coach. Notre Dame Coach Digger Phelps said, "I used this book as an inspiration for the biggest win of my career when we ended UCLA's all-time 88-game winning streak in 1974."

Compiled with more than 40 hours of interviews with Coach Wooden, learn about the man behind the coach. Click the Book to read the players telling their stories in their own words. This is the book that UCLA Athletic Director J.D. Morgan tried to ban.

Click the book to read the first chapter and for ordering information.

Rush Hour 3 (1/10)

by Tony Medley

            If you want to see a film that epitomizes the vapidity of the American film-making industry, this is the one. This is the third in a puzzling series of films; puzzling because they have all been of a kind, awful. But the first reached 242 on the all time gross list and the second moved up to 131. So a third was inevitable.

            They are all alike. Lee (Jackie Chan) is a hard working LAPD cop now. His buddy, Carter (Chris Tucker), has been demoted to traffic cop. But they hook up; otherwise there would be no movie.

            I was ready to leave within the first minute as we see Carter directing traffic in downtown Los Angeles, causing pileups, but more interested in hitting on two women whose car he has just ruined by his maladroit directions. All the while he is clowning and acting like a 21^st Century Stepin Fetchit, a character he continues to ape throughout the film.

            There is a ridiculous plot that takes them to Paris so we can see some scenery. The film is chock full of silly stunts, greatly enhanced by CGI.

            As with the first two, this is directed by Brett Ratner, who has yet to make a watchable movie. He was also responsible for 2004’s After the Sunset, in which he took a cast with exceptional talent (Pierce Brosnan, Selma Hayek, Don Cheadle, and Naomie Harris, among others) and produced a debacle that most people should be thankful they missed. It was so bad it got an 18% rating on Rottentomatoes.com.

            I don’t know what is worse, the horrible script by Jeff Nathanson, Ratner’s direction, or Tucker’s acting. Nathanson wrote the first two, also, in addition to turkeys like Catch Me If You Can (2002) and The Terminal (2004). Of course, both of those were directed by Steven Spielberg, who has perfected the craft of the terminally long, boring movie. So it’s difficult to know if Nathanson was to blame for bad scripts or Spielberg was to blame for bad directing and editing and failure to cut. Probably both.

            Here there is no debate that the script is terrible. Nothing Tucker does is funny. He is trying so hard that it wears you out to just watch him make such an effort to make people laugh. What he made me do was cringe.

            There really is no acting in this film. Let’s face it, Jackie Chan may be a nice guy and good at kung fu, or whatever you want to call that martial arts madness, but an actor he’s not. Max von Sydow shows up, but he hasn’t had to actually act much since Ingmar Bergman’s Smultronstället (1957, better known as Wild Strawberries). He’s still playing the unemotional assassin he perfected in Three Days of the Condor (1975).

            The film is nothing if not predictable. There is not one iota of tension, and the bad guy is so obvious that when he makes his first appearance, he seems to be yelling, “I’m the bad guy!” If you can’t pick him out, you need to see more trash like this.

August 6, 2007