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. This is the only book that gives a true picture of the character of John Wooden and the influence of his assistant, Jerry Norman, whose contributions Wooden  ignored and tried to bury.

Compiled with more than 40 hours of interviews with Coach Wooden, learn about the man behind the coach. The players tell their stories in their own words.

Click the book to read the first chapter and for ordering information. Also available on Kindle.

The Way Back (7/10)

by Tony Medley

108 minutes

R.

Ben Affleck stars in a role that is somewhat biographical. He apparently played basketball and he was clearly an alcoholic and it probably cost him a good marriage.

So here he plays an alcoholic (Jack Cunningham) who is recruited to coach his old high school basketball team, which is horrible. As I recall their record is 1-9 when Jack takes over.

Jack’s self-destructive alcoholism dominates the movie. Affleck does a very good job as an alcoholic, probably because he was one in real life. How he acts is believable and true to life. The hope is, clearly, that returning to his past glory as a high school basketball star by coaching the team will give him a purpose and take him away from his alcohol addiction.

Fortunately, the movie does not totally concentrate on basketball. The best parts of the film relate to Jack’s problem dealing with life, his relationships with his assistant coach, Dan (Al Madrigal), his sister, Beth (Michaela Watkins), his wife, Angela (Janina Gavankar) from whom he is separated, and even the team’s chaplain, Father Mark Whelan (Jeremy Radin).

The alcoholic part is the good part.

The basketball part is the weaker part. It’s not like a lot of old Hollywood films where the actors clearly were not athletes (like 1948’s The Babe Ruth Story in which star William Bendix looked like he had never picked up a baseball bat in his life), though. Here, all the basketball playing sequences are very good and the players seem to know what they are doing. In fact, in order to make sure that the basketball sequences were realistic the teams (Jack’s team and their opponents) trained for more than three weeks with coaches to learn 40 scripted plays most of which were used in the film.

What’s not good is Jack’s “coaching,” you should pardon the expression. We rarely see Jack in a practice, teaching his team how to change their ways to play winning basketball.

The filmmakers obviously knew it was important that the basketball play look real onscreen, and what they produced is award-quality. But they failed to show Jack teaching his players anything about playing basketball. Since they spent so much time (more than three weeks) practicing plays, one would think that they would want to show Jack coaching something…anything, and to spend some time on that, like director David Ansbaugh did in Hoosiers (1986).

Instead, about all we see Jack doing is yelling and swearing at his players, and kicking one off the team for being four minutes late. Suddenly, voila! They are beating everyone! Nonsense. Nothing Jack does in the movie would result in turning a bad team into a good team.

The movie does show the bad effects of alcohol, but the downer ending is ambiguous, to say the least. Still, the movie is well-paced, the acting is good, and it is entertaining, especially if you are not particularly concerned with basketball coaching reality.