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.

Ted (1/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 105 minutes.

Not for children.

If you want to have a idea of what eternity is like, sitting through this movie waiting for it to end gives you a good taste of it. I went to it expecting a charming comedy along the lines of Alf, the 1986-90 TV series created by Paul Fusco and Tom Patchett about a creature (an Alien Life Form) who finds himself living with a normal American family.

But Ted is as far from Alf as Texas Chain Saw Massacre is from The Sound of Music. Ted is created by Seth MacFarlane, who is responsible for Family Guy, a show I haven't seen, but am reliably informed is unfunny and goes out of its way to emphasize poor taste. Ted certainly lives up to that description. I'm disappointed that the talented Mark Wahlberg signed up for this. Wahlberg should know better.

Ted is a teddy bear who comes to life when the youthful Mark wishes he could come alive and be his best friend for life. Miraculously, it happens, but as the movie jumps 15 years, the grown-up Ted is a profane, drug-addled punk. Making the story even more ridiculous, Mark has a beautiful, sweet girlfriend of four years, Mila Kunis, who placidly puts up with Ted, allowing Mark to put her in a distant second place in his affections.

The story is a comic book fantasy. Alf was a comic book fantasy, too, in concept. But comic book fantasies, well told with a good moral, can be entertaining. This is not entertaining because of its low moral tone. It is excruciating. Alf was lovable; Ted is hateful. I didn't see it at a media screening, opting instead to see it in a theater with real people in the audience. It seemed to me that the audience was uniformly ready to bolt, jumping out of their seats the minute the closing credits started to roll like the gun had just gone off for the 100 yard dash. I had to sit through it, but nobody else does.

Why do you make a fantasy like this about a teddy bear that comes to life and make it with such a low moral tone that no well-meaning, responsible parent should drag a young, impressionable child to see it?