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.

POM Wonderful Presents: THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER SOLD (8/10)

by Tony Medley

Run time 88 minutes.

OK for children.

One of the real deplorable trends in modern movie making is the presence of product placement. In the old, better, days of Hollywood, labels were turned away from the camera so there would be no favoring of one product over another.

Today, that has gone by the boards. With the cost of movies ever skyrocketing (in 1950, Academy Award winner All About Eve cost approximately $600,000 to make. In 2010, Avatar cost approximately $280 million and didn’t win the Oscar®. Manufacturers of products gleefully line up to have their products promoted in major motion pictures and that money is what allows lots of movies to be made.

Some manufacturers are so eager to be displayed they are little more than prostitutes. Whenever there’s a movie with a laptop computer in it today, it’s shown from behind with the Apple logo. Apple won’t put a simple, easy-to-replace battery in its products, requiring instead that their customers return their products like iPods and iPhones to them for expensive battery replacement. But they stand in line like kids with their tongues hanging out to pay movie producers big bucks to have Apple products shrewdly placed in films.

Writer-director Morgan Spurlock’s last film, Freakonomics  was horrible, to give it the best of it. This, on the other hand, is a laugh-out-loud funny. Spurlock shows how product placement works by showing how he financed this film by approaching manufacturers of products to place them in his movie. The people he approached allowed him to bring cameras into their conference rooms and to film the meetings as Spurlock pitched them. It’s fascinating and funny.

When my screening was through and we exited the screening room on the Sony lot, there was a table full of free products donated by the manufacturers who did agree pay to finance the film and have their products displayed, including POM Wonderful, which markets 100% pure pomegranate juice. According to the movie, they paid $1 million to have their name in the title.