Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court

My Mother’s Great Example

My mother, Roxie Anna, had a hard life living and working and raising a family in our little white farmhouse outside Martinsville. She did the washing, scrubbing, ironing, cooking, mending, and canning with no electricity and no inside plumbing. She did it all herself without any modern conveniences while helping with the farming and bringing up four rambunctious young sons: Maurice, me, Daniel, and William.

At night, during the heat of the Indiana harvest season, Mother would offer us cool slices of watermelon as we sat out on our front porch looking up into the stars.

She gave me my first “basketball,” a wobbly thing sewed together using rolled-up rags she had stuffed into some black cotton hose. Dad nailed an old ...