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.

The Forbidden Kingdom (1/10)

by Tony Medley

Running Time 113 minutes.

Swish, whoosh, clunk! Swish, whoosh, clunk!

If there’s one genre I truly loathe, it’s the kung fu movie. The fights are so ludicrous, the odds so ridiculous, the stories so silly that any success is a sad commentary on today’s viewing public.

This film is worse than stupid. Directed by Rob Minkoff and written (really?) by John Fusco, it has Jason Triptikis (Michael Angarano) as a New Jersey teenager who gets possession of a magic pole and is instructed to return it to its owner, who happens to be The Monkey King (Jet Li), who has been a bronze statue for 500 years. So he’s whisked to China (more magic) and meets a drunken kung fu master, Lu Yan (Jackie Chan), who is reluctantly enlisted to help Jason get the pole back to The Monkey King. En route they meet The Silent Monk (also Jet Li), who also agrees to help. That’s the story that can be told, and is told, in 15 minutes of real time. The rest of the 113 minute running time consists of Swish, whoosh, clunk! Swish, whoosh, clunk! Fights with no good guy ever getting hurt, despite taking on thousands of armed warriors, and people flying through the air and falling from great heights and lots of spins and jumps and kicks and sound effects. Swish, whoosh, clunk! Swish, whoosh, clunk!

The only real actor in the movie is Angarano, who actually does a pretty good job with this deplorable material, and acting with people who couldn’t deliver a line if their lives depended on it.

All the martial arts movies have become clichés. There is no longer anything entertaining about some Asian with his hands open and a funny looking pose vanquishing thousands of foes all by himself. Generally these guys speak in poetic aphorisms that are supposed to contain great truths, like “The sky is blue and the grass is green and one must always seek truth and justice just as the sky seeks blue and the grass seeks green.”

Swish, whoosh, clunk! Swish, whoosh, clunk! Enough!