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The Vignette Coach Wooden And Me Sparknotes

Decent Essays

“Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do”, as the great John Wooden would say. In the vignette Coach Wooden and Me by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the author talks about how his basketball coach became his best friend and influenced his life in many distinctive ways. This tale tells the story of how two vastly different, yet successful individuals in John Wooden and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar altered each other’s lives for the better. I think the author wrote this book to share the wisdom of Coach Wooden in hopes of changing young lives similarly to how his life was changed by informing Coach Wooden’s ideas, for instance his Pyramid of Success and his many inspirational quotes, one being:”Be more concerned about you character than your reputation, as your character is who you truly are and your …show more content…

He “cheated death” twice in his life, one time being in the Navy and was going to be on a boat, but came down with appendicitis and his replacement got killed by a suicide Japanese mission. The second time was when Coach was booking a flight to Oklahoma, but something came up and he had to delay his flight. Sadly, the flight that he should’ve been on crashed and killed everybody on board. Due to these unfortunate events, John Wooden is grateful for everything in his life, and lots of his selflessness rubbed off onto the people around him. Part of this selflessness showed when the author Kareem (a very tall “black” man and a devout Muslim) was going through very hard times in the era where racism was stronger than ever, John Wooden defended Kareem when nobody would and became angrier than Kareem when a racial slur was said towards Kareem. Due to this and many more, Kareem helped out Mr. Wooden in the latter years of his life in return. This became the foundation of one of the most inspiring and unusual friendships in sports

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