[10] When he was a boy, Wooden's role model was Fuzzy Vandivier of the Franklin Wonder Five, a legendary team that dominated Indiana high school basketball from 1919 to 1922.

The 1932 Purdue team on which he played as a senior was retroactively recognized as the pre-NCAA tournament national champion by the Helms Athletic Foundation and the Premo-Poretta Power Poll.

[24] After Dayton, he returned to Indiana, where he taught English, coached basketball and served as the athletic director at South Bend Central High School[25] until entering the Armed Forces.

John Wooden stated, "I believe my system is perfectly suited to counter all the modern defenses I have seen, and that includes run-and-jump, 1–3–1 trapping, box-and-one, triangle-and-two, and switching man-to-man.

When Mel Taube left Purdue in 1950, Wooden's inclination was to return to West Lafayette and finally accept the head coaching job there.

Wooden felt that leaving UCLA prior to the expiration of his contract would be tantamount to breaking his word, even though Purdue offered more money, a car and housing.

UCLA went undefeated the rest of the year and thrashed Houston 101–69 in the semi-final rematch of the NCAA tournament en route to the national championship.

Lew Alcindor finished his career at UCLA in 1969 with a third consecutive national championship when the Bruins beat George King's Purdue team 92–72 in the title game.

The three straight titles were matched by three consecutive MVP awards in the tournament as Alcindor established himself as college basketball's superstar during the three-peat performance.

[41] A sportswriter commented that everybody outside of UCLA would be happy that glorious day in June when Alcindor finally graduated and college basketball could go back to the routine method of determining a national champion.

The 1970 squad proved that nobody was indispensable to the success of the UCLA program, not even Alcindor, as Sidney Wicks, Henry Bibby, Curtis Rowe, John Vallely, and Kenny Booker carried the Bruins to their fourth consecutive NCAA title with an 80–69 win over upstart Jacksonville, coached by Joe Williams.

In the 1971 NCAA championship game, Steve Patterson outscored Howard Porter of Jack Kraft's scandal-plagued Villanova squad as UCLA won 68–62.

Freshmen became eligible to play varsity ball again, and the Bruins went 30–0 and stretched their winning streak to a record 75 straight in breezing through the NCAA tournament by blowing out Gene Bartow's Memphis State team 87–66 in the final, as Bill Walton hit an incredible 21 of 22 field goal attempts.

In January, the winning streak stopped at 88 games when Digger Phelps's Notre Dame squad upended the Bruins 71–70 in South Bend.

Two months later, Norm Sloan's North Carolina State team defeated UCLA 80–77 in double overtime in the semifinals of the NCAA tournament.

[42] His legendary coaching career concluded triumphantly when Richard Washington and David Meyers combined for 52 points as UCLA responded with a 92–85 win over Joe B.

[50] According to his own writings, Wooden turned down an offer to coach the Los Angeles Lakers from owner Jack Kent Cooke that may have been ten times what UCLA was paying him.

[53] A 1981 Los Angeles Times investigation, interviewing 45 people affiliated with the basketball program, revealed the extent of Gilbert's involvement, describing him as "a one-man clearinghouse who has enabled players and their families to receive goods and services usually at big discounts and sometimes free.

"[54] The Times investigation found that Gilbert's involvement in the program began in 1967, when UCLA stars Alcindor and Lucius Allen were considering transferring to Michigan State.

"[57] In 1973, freshman center Richard Washington told The New York Times the reason he'd chosen UCLA: "I took a dip in Sam Gilbert's pool and it cooled me off and that was the convincer."

"[68] In 1981, after Wooden's retirement, an NCAA investigation sanctioned UCLA for its relationship with Gilbert, putting the program on probation for two seasons and ordering the school to disassociate itself from him.

[54] In 1987, Gilbert was indicted in Florida for conspiracy, racketeering, and money laundering as part of a drug smuggling scheme, but he died of heart failure before he could be prosecuted.

Trial testimony revealed that Sam Gilbert had used Miami drug money to build The Bicycle Hotel & Casino in Bell Gardens, California.

This award has attained the status of being the equivalent of football's Heisman Trophy for college basketball, with the winner announced during a ceremony held at the Los Angeles Athletic Club.

[94] A portion of the UCLA Athletics Hall of Fame at Morgan Centre is a recreation of Wooden's den office in honor of his memory on campus.

[101] Bartow, Wooden's immediate successor at UCLA, went 28–5 in 1976, but was blown out twice that season by Bob Knight's eventual undefeated national-champion Indiana Hoosiers, the second time in the Final Four, and lost 76–75 in the 1977 West Region semifinals to Idaho State.

[citation needed] Wooden himself often joked about being a victim of his own success, calling his successors on the phone and playfully identifying himself ominously as "we the alumni..."[102] In his autobiography, Wooden recounts walking off the court in 1975 after his last game as a coach, having just won his tenth title, only to have a UCLA fan walk up and say, "Great win coach, this makes up for letting us down last year" (UCLA had lost in the semifinals in double overtime in 1974 to eventual national champion North Carolina State).

Wooden met his future wife, Nellie "Nell" Riley, when he was a freshman in high school[105] They were both 21 years of age when they married in a small ceremony in Indianapolis in August 1932 and afterward attended a Mills Brothers concert at the Circle Theatre to celebrate.

Following a private ceremony, Wooden was interred with his wife Nellie in an outdoor community mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Following his death in June 2010—shortly after the basketball season— all UCLA sports teams wore either a patch or helmet sticker with the initials "JRW" inside a black pyramid for the remainder of the season, in honor of his philosophy.