Swen Nater

When I was coaching and paid Coach Wooden a visit to talk basketball, the subject of teamwork came up. When I asked him how to get my team playing more unselfishly he immediately said, “You have to convince them of this:

It’s amazing what a team can accomplish when no one cares who gets the credit.”

Moments later, when I asked him how to get my best scorer to share the ball he said, “You must convince him:

The key to stardom is the rest of the team.”

Coach didn’t collect coins, baseball cards, postage stamps, bobble heads, or Precious Moments; he collected proverbs. He doled out economical little truisms that hit home like, “Be quick but don’t hurry;” and he always seemed to have just the right one for the occasion. I’m not sure if any of them were really his. He stole them from Edison, Mother Theresa, Einstein, Twain, and especially Abraham Lincoln and Aristotle. He stole proverb-like poems from Kipling and the great Major League umpire, George Moriarty. They were dead so I’m sure they didn’t mind. Coach Wooden was a walking encyclopedic dispenser of axioms and precepts.

We all remember him as a great basketball teacher and a person with character pretty close to a saint. But we remember what he believed about those things through those little nuggets of truth he left behind like, “The coach’s greatest ally is the bench,” a proverb I wish he would have never learned or forgotten by the time I enrolled at UCLA.

Coach didn’t have a hundred of them; he had several and he repeated them enough times to get the content though our thick skulls. But he didn’t understand that when he said, “Be quick but don’t hurry,” I was only able to do 50% of that—the hurry part. But that’s another story. The point is, if you give someone one of those powerful little brain bombs once, it may do some good. But if you toss bunch of grenades, one at a time, on a regular basis, and for a long time, the meaning—not just the words—of the proverb is going to get through.

I searched the Internet and there are more proverbs than Carter has pills. But there are some really good ones and they carry various messages.

Some can hit you right between the eyes and wake you up like Churchill’s, “The price of greatness is responsibility.” Some can hit you right between the feet and get you moving like Edison’s, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” Some can slip in truth while it gets you laughing like Twain’s, “When I was 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astounded at how much he had learned in seven years.”

Edison’s, “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school,” gets you thinking out of the box and helps you reach your potential.” Babe Ruth’s, “It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up,” can provide incredible courage when the chips are down.

Louis Brandeis gets you to the voting booth with, “The most important political office is that of the private citizen.” Einstein gets you looking within by, “Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.” And Van Gogh gets you looking at the daily calendar with, “Great things are not done by impulse but by a series of small things brought together.”

Proverbs, precepts, or axioms—whatever you choose to call them—can make you lay down your defensive weapons, get you off your Lazy Boy®, put on your work gloves, or give you a new and renewed outlook on life.

The Power of the Proverb
The power of the proverb is three-fold.
1. First, it is most powerful when it’s spoken, not read. Coach Wooden read and studied them for the sole purpose of verbally imparting them when he thought the time was just right and they could help someone. When I needed encouragement, he didn’t hand me a Kinko’s copy of, “Things work out best for those who make the best of the way things work out.” Nuggets of truth do the most good on the spot, when the truth is needed.

2. Second, the power of the proverb is in that it acts like an impartial but wise third party. When Coach gave out one of his memorized sayings, he was in essence communicating, “Don’t take it from me; Lincoln said…” It’s like when your wife tells you she needs a new washer and you ignore it until one of your friends tells you he just bought his wife one. All of a sudden, you see that your wife needs a washer.

3. Finally, a proverb acts like a mirror; its knife-like, penetrating, words can make you look at yourself for who you are, for what you do, and take inventory. Consider, the anonymous poem:

Stubbornness we deprecate.
Firmness we condone.
The former is our neighbor’s trait.
The latter is our own.

I’m making a commitment to ,every morning, read one proverb, memorize it, and look for an opportunity to use it that day. So, if you see me or call me, don’t be surprised if I, like Coach, throw a truism at you, I stole from somebody else. It’s all good.