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.

Multiple Sarcasms (1/10)

by Tony Medley

Run time 97 minutes

Not for children.

This is such simplistic garbage it’s hard to sit through. I despise movies that deprecate the responsibilities of marriage and obligation to children that arise therefrom. Worse, it’s full of graphic descriptions of female sexual parts. This is apparently the way all adult secular humanists speak to one another. There’s even a section dealing with a young girl’s first period. Ah, isn’t it wonderful to be so adult we can deal with these things in a Hollywood movie where there is really no need for it? I haven’t seen a movie more demeaning to wives and mothers since the despicable “Mrs. Doubtfire” (1993).

In this film, a selfish husband, Gabe (Timothy Hutton), forsakes his loving wife, Annie (Dana Delaney), and precocious daughter, Elizabeth (India Ennenga), to pursue his goal to write a play.

Specifically, this movie is deplorably disrespectful of wives. Hutton’s character is pretty hard to swallow. He’s supposed to be an architect for a big firm, but he dresses like a bum, never shaves, and doesn’t do any work. No way he could survive in a job.

The film is so full of Hollywood’s favorite clichés, I stopped counting. Hutton has a best male friend, Rocky (Mario Van Peeples), who is gay. He’s got a beautiful best friend, Cari (Mira Sorvino), with whom he is more emotionally intimate than with his wife. He’s got the super-precocious daughter who thinks and acts like an adult that has become de rigueur in the films of modern Hollywood; a daughter, who is a lot more mature than he. Oh, yeah, then he’s got a tough-talking female agent, Pamela (Stockard Channing).

What’s really infuriating about this movie is that it wants you to feel good about this jerk breaking up his marriage to a wonderful wife, and believe that the breakup of the marriage has absolutely no emotional effect on either his wife or his young daughter. This is right from the creed of secular humanism that preaches that one’s primary concern should be with individual fulfillment, forget obligations and responsibilities. If it feels good, and if it’s good for you, go for it and forget how it affects others. A movie that respected the place of a wife and mother in a marriage would at least have one scene that showed that Annie was less than understanding about Gabe’s lack of responsibility, but there is no such scene.

The acting, however, is very good, which is the only thing that keeps it from being totally worthless. Delaney and Sorvino are especially good.

April 26, 2010