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.

A Single Man (3/10)

by Tony Medley

Run time 101 minutes

Not for children.

George (Colin Firth) is a gay professor whose boyfriend, Jim (Matthew Goode) has died in an automobile accident as the movie starts. It devastates George so he plans his last day, planning on killing himself at the end of it. Too bad he just didn’t take the bull by the horns and do it in the morning. Then I wouldn’t have had to sit through the film.

This is directed by Tom Ford, a gay designer. I couldn’t understand why Daniel Craig, the new James Bond, said he wanted to have James engage in a gay sex act in a future film. Tom Ford is the designer chosen by Daniel Craig to clothe him in the James Bond films. Now I understand Craig’s idiotic idea.

George has a next door neighbor, Charley (Julianne Moore), who has the hots for George. Apparently they had a sexual relationship in the past and Charley (an interesting choice of a name for a female character; apparently Ford couldn’t live with a female character with a real woman’s name like Mary or Susie) never got over it.

George has a student, Kenny (Nicholas Hoult, who was the “boy” in 2002’s “About a Boy,” a film I thought the best of the year), who is of ambiguous sexuality. Kenny has a girlfriend, but Kenny seems to come on to George.

Exacerbating the sexual agenda of this film, Ford, who was born in 1961, did incredibly shoddy research on this film. As one example, he presents a dishonest picture of how people actually acted in 1958, which is when this movie is set, three years before Ford was born. There are scenes of students smoking during class while George is teaching. I was attending UCLA in 1958. I never saw anybody smoke in class, ever, and we had very large classes. I went to law school at the University of Virginia in the ‘60s and never saw anyone smoke in class, ever. I asked my girlfriend, who attended UCLA in the mid-60s, if she ever saw anyone smoke in class, and she didn’t. All these people Ford pictures smoking in class in 1958 is pure fiction. Everybody seems to smoke in this movie. But that’s not the way it was then. More people smoked than now, but it wasn’t as pervasive as it was in the ‘30s and ‘40s, and if people smoked in class, it was a rarity, if it ever happened at all.

As another example of his deplorable research, in one scene there is a huge poster of Janet Leigh for the movie, “Psycho.” Alas, “Psycho” was released in 1960. It wasn’t even in pre-production in 1958, so there couldn’t possibly have been a poster for it.

There’s not much to this film, other than watching Firth act, and that’s not enough to justify the price of admission or a Best Picture nomination. If it had been about a heterosexual love affair, it never would have seen the light of day. All George does is go through the day. This film is about as entertaining as watching ice melt.