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.

Source Code (9/10)

by Tony Medley

Run time 93 minutes.

OK for children.

From the Robert Wise-style opening (obviously inspired by the openings of West Side Story and The Sound of Music) with gorgeous aerial shots of Chicago, Source Code presents a refreshing new idea for time warp movies. Coulter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) is an Air Force pilot who finds himself in a high tech experiment to find a mad bomber. Coulter is entombed in a chamber communicating with the outside world, Air Force officer Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga), electronically. The experiment captures the last eight minutes of a person’s life and allows Coulter to enter and re-enter into a train speeding towards Chicago and communicate with its passengers in the eight minutes before it is blown to smithereens by a bomb and everybody killed. So he keeps going back, trying to find the bomber, whom Coulter’s controllers think is planning a massive bomb that could annihilate Chicago.

Naturally, his seatmate is a gorgeous woman, Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan). This is a movie after all. Every guy in the audience undoubtedly dreams of finding themselves seated next to someone like Christina.  But Coulter is on a mission and for awhile her charms elude him.

Gyllenhaal does a phenomenal job of acting, and so does Monaghan, and that’s important for science fiction time warp movies because the concept is so preposterous. The good ones, like Final Countdown (1980) keep the plot moving because the actors make it so believable. Director Duncan Jones takes a terrific script by Ben Ripley, an honors graduate of the USC School of Cinema-Television, and makes both of their virginal forays into major motion picture-making a high-tension, highly entertaining adventure.

In addition to the three principals, Jeffrey Wright gives a fine performance as Dr. Rutledge, the single-minded, cold, physically-handicapped genius who created Source Code that allows Coulter to time travel.

Equally important to the acting, directing, and script of a good time warp movie are the cinematography and music. Don Burgess and Chris Bacon, respectively, make heavy contributions to the wonderful pace and style of the film.

Although there are a few plot holes, it’s not possible to make a time warp movie without them, time travel being impossible. But they were so few and so unimportant that they were easy to ignore.