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.

Thumbnails Oct 11

by Tony Medley

Moneyball (9/10): I realized that baseball was run by people low on intelligence and common sense when I was a freshman pitcher at UCLA and got out. Billy Beane, on the other hand, forsook a Stanford scholarship to play ball. He didn't have major league talent, but ended up as General Manager of the Oakland A's who didn't have the money to compete with the wealthy oligarchs of the baseball world like the New York Yankees. This is the story of how he took on the baseball hierarchy that was wedded to antiquated thinking and false premises, and changed the game. Expertly directed by Bennett Miller, Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill give Oscar®-quality performances as Beane and his statistical guru, Peter Brand, helped by fine performances by the entire cast.

Contagion (9/10): This could just as easily have been entitled "Paranoia," because anybody watching it could become infected by worry that anything they touch could lead to almost certain death. With an all-star cast, director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, 2000) has crafted a tense drama describing what might happen if a world-wide epidemic struck without warning akin to the great influenza outbreak at the end of World War I in 1918 that claimed 50 million deaths within the space of a few months. What makes this movie so compelling is the makeup (Kate Biscoe, Suzi Ostos, and Aimée Lippert). The people who are hit with this virus look exactly like they would look if they were coming down with something terrible. Even though it deals with a serious subject seriously, this is a terrific, entertaining movie.

Drive (9/10): Brilliantly directed by Nicolas Winding Refn (from a script by Hossein Amini and a book by James Sallis), with fine performances by Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, and Albert Brooks, this is a film that grabs and holds despite eye-covering graphic violence. No movie needs scenes of knives going into people's throats and blood gushing all over everything. As a result, this good film sometimes descends into gothic horror. There's too much talent here, and too good a story, to demean it with such reprehensible graphic brutality. What really makes this movie tick is the award-quality music (Cliff Martinez). While it's muted and in the background, it keeps the tension constantly mounting. This is a wonderfully made movie, but be prepared for the eye-averting violence that permeates the film.

Puncture (7/10): Based on a true story, co-director Mark Kassen also co-stars with Chris Evans in this thriller as personal-injury attorneys trying to take on the health care industry to crusade for safer hypodermic needles. Evans gives a compelling performance as a drug-addled lawyer facing enormous odds. The film paints a startlingly frank picture of the corruption of the American system of civil justice.

Colombiana (7/10): Zoe Saldana is a stone cold killer out for revenge to get the Colombian drug lord who ordered the murder of her parents in this finely paced, well-photographed fun.

The Lion King (4/10): After making a fortune on this when it was released in 1994, Disney has remastered the original into 3D and rereleased it. To make the original, 600 artists created more than one million drawings for the film, which is made up of 1,197 hand-painted backgrounds and 119,058 individually colored frames of film. The problem with 3D is that when it's not shot in 3D, but instead remade in post production, it mutes the colors drastically, and that is what has happened here. Why go see a cartoon if not for the gorgeous color cartoons have always displayed?