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. This is the only book that gives a true picture of the character of John Wooden and the influence of his assistant, Jerry Norman, whose contributions Wooden  ignored and tried to bury.

Compiled with more than 40 hours of interviews with Coach Wooden, learn about the man behind the coach. The players tell their 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. Also available on Kindle.

The Double Hour (6/10)

by Tony Medley

Run time 93 minutes.

Not for children.

This is a nice mystery with a Hitchcockian, Dallas-type, twist, but almost terminally slow. Sonia (Ksenia Rappaport) is a hotel chambermaid without a boy friend, so she goes to a singles place and meets Guido (Filippo Timi) and they hit it off. Suddenly their idyll is shattered when they are both victimized by a theft from a huge house for which Guido is a security guard.

OK so far, but then we go through an hour of Sonia and the horrible trauma she endures as a result of going through the theft. There’s one scene of her in a bathtub, just thinking, that lasts for what seems like five minutes. And there’s not even any graphic nudity to arouse one’s interest, if you’ll pardon the expression. Pace is clearly not a word with which director Giuseppe Capotondi is familiar.

You know it’s a movie because all of the chambermaids are beauties. I’ve been to Italy many times and don’t remember chambermaids who look like these.

While the acting is uniformly good, Sonia goes through the entire movie with such a dyspeptic look on her face that it’s hard to feel much sympathy, or to comprehend what Guido sees in her. And Guido is such a good-looking guy, it’s hard to buy the idea that he has to troll in a singles place to find a date. But, like I said, this is a movie and it’s full of movie stars. It probably wouldn’t sell if Sonia and her fellow chambermaids were played by people who looked like Roseanne Barr or Kathy Bates, which is probably closer to what most chambermaids look like than the beautiful Rappaport and the others.

It finally crawls to a relatively surprising climax, if that’s the right word for something that drags like this. The main feeling I had was relief that it was finally over. In Italian.