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 stories in their own words.

Click the book to read the first chapter and for ordering information. Also available on Kindle.

The Mustang (3/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 93 minutes.

R

This is not a western. Rather, it’s a prison movie about convicts who participate in a government-sponsored program to train wild horses for resale.

Roman Coleman (Matthias Schoenaerts) is a hot-tempered inmate serving a 12 year sentence for domestic abuse. He has an estranged daughter, 16-year-old Martha (Gideon Adlon) who is pregnant and estranged from Roman, mainly because of what he did to her mother. Myles (Bruce Dern) is the man who is the program’s horse trainer but also serves as a parent figure to the inmates.

Directed by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre and written by her and Mona Fastvold and Brock Norman Brock, with a few other credits, the movie is dark and depressing. Worse, the dialogue is slurred by many of the actors so it’s extremely difficult to understand what they are saying. Like many British and Irish films, although they are in English, their accents are so heavy they need subtitles, this one does, too.

The movie is tense because Roman has such violent temper that one never knows what he’s going to do next. Schoenaerts does a fine job of acting as he goes about trying to train a horse as temperamental as he. Basically it’s a tendentious love story about men and horses.

Unfortunately, the movie is extraordinarily slow and tedious until the last half hour, when it picks up a little, but not enough.