John Wooden Interview

In my junior year at UCLA, I got the opportunity to interview legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden for the UCLA Athletic Hall of Fame. I wanted to do something distinctly different for the Hall of Fame because most of the videos I had seen had Coach telling the same basketball stories in nearly the same way each time. But when you listened to his players, they rarely talked about his basketball coaching instead focusing on his wisdom and strength of character.

Thanks to a very supportive team of Kevin Borg and Ken Weiner at UCLA Athletics, I was able to craft the story I wanted with no background music, just the simple, honest words of John Wooden to tell the story. I later reworked this for the dedication of the Nell and John R. Wooden Court at Pauley Pavilion and also did some work for his memorial service at UCLA in 2010.

The most flattering words I've found were written by Doug Ward writing on ESPN.com:

UCLA has arguably the finest film school in the land, but one of its most irresistible features is the seven-minute short on John Wooden in the Hall of Fame’s Spirit Theater.

Here is a brief excerpt from the end of the video: