After traveling all day down the mountain-spackled length of Italy — and no, you can’t find a dozen places flat enough to plow 40 acres anywhere south of Rome — finally some time to do my tiny bit on UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, the most important sports figure in Southern California over the last half century.

Yes, including the 35 years during which he was retired.

Here is what I wrote about him last May, which I will follow with my own modest John Wooden anecdote … as well as one told me by a UCLA alum.

From May 5, 2009:

Wooden, if you haven’t been following him, is probably the greatest living American. No. Really. He is. I’m quite serious about this. Not only did he achieve more in his chosen profession (college basketball coaching) than anyone before or since, Wooden is and always has been a life coach.

He dispenses more wisdom in five minutes than our elected leaders do in five hours. He’s something like a hundred wise grandfathers rolled into one, and if he knew right from wrong when he was young, his long life has given him miles more of perspective about what really matters. It’s all about traditional virtues and hard work and fairness and dignity and teaching and helping … well, all those good things that often sound false and self-serving from lesser beings.

There should be a John Wooden Channel in which we get 24/7 Meaning of Life lessons from the man. I honestly believe everyone who has come in contact with him is a better person for it. We have been lucky to have him on this planet for nearly a century, and we have been supremely fortunate to have him in Southern California for six decades.

Now, my own little anecdote:

It was during the 1975-76 basketball season. I was covering the Long Beach State basketball team  for the school newspaper, and for reasons I no longer recall (TV commentary?), Wooden appeared at the Long Beach Arena and sat courtside for a 49ers game.

It took me the entire first half to muster the courage to approach the great man. He had just retired the previous spring, after UCLA won the last of its 10 national titles on his watch, and in SoCal he was as recognizable as any sports figure on the planet.

Now, approaching Wooden was like going to a meeting with a really dignified pastor. You wish you had worn a suit … or had a suit … and that you had combed your hair a bit neater and weren’t wearing scuffed shoes. It was that “in the presence of greatness” thing he had going on … that I can’t say I have felt with more than one or two other people.

So, I finally walked around to the other side of the court, and introduced myself (after no doubt rehearsing exactly how I would do it). “Excuse me, Coach, I’m a reporter for the student newspaper at Long Beach State and I wonder if you have a few minutes to talk about the basketball team …”

And he did have a minute. (From what I can tell, he always did, whether you were a credentialed reporter or a shopper at the supermarket.) I no longer remember the specifics of what we talked about — although I wrote a column on the chat, a column that was part of the clips I used to get my first job as a professional a few months later … but I’m sure it is in The Daily Forty-Niner archives, if the last hard-bound copy still exists.

He was polite but informative, concise. He was generous but not insincere about the not-very-good Long Beach State team he had sized up in the first half. (And that is an art; critiquing without destroying.) Anyway, I was grateful than, and now, that he made that time for me.

An interlude: John Wooden wasn’t perfect, and he would be the first to tell you if you asked. (He probably would have said something like, “Oh, goodness, no.” And those of us who followed the Long Beach State program saw his human frailties as well as anyone.

There was a time, in the early 1970s , when Long Beach State (under Jerry Tarkanian, then Lute Olson) was the No. 2 program in Southern California. A legitimate threat to UCLA winning more NCAA titles — or even surviving the West Regional. One year, 1971, Long Beach was up nine points in the second half of the West Regional final against one of the Wicks-Rowe teams … but UCLA pulled it out to win by a score of 57-55.

UCLA people were openly contemptuous of the Long Beach program, especially under Tarkanian. Long Beach recruited bad guys, sketchy guys, guys UCLA wouldn’t touch. Long Beach was a renegade program; UCLA was choir boys coached by a saint.

However, it was during this very period that the Bruins had a fan … oh, let’s call him a Fixer and Facilitator … named Sam Gilbert who apparently “helped” some UCLA players in the same sorts of way that Tarkanian did. By 1981 (six years after Wooden was gone), UCLA was on probation and was ordered to disassociate itself from Gilbert — who had been very, very close to the program for a long time, extending far back into the Wooden days.

In the 1970s, “What did he know and when did he know it?” was a question that often came up. (In regards to Richard Nixon and Watergate.) And it is fair to ask the same of John Wooden.

I am convinced he never was part of rules-bending … but I am far less convinced that he was blissfully unaware that certain favors were being done for UCLA players by someone. He was far too smart and too intelligent to not know.  He chose to see the good in everyone, so I believe he chose not to dwell on “those things” that involved Sam Gilbert. But I also believe he knew something was going on … but didn’t know so much that he didn’t have absolute deniability.

But enough of that. That is the entirety of what I have to say about Wooden that is less than fawning.

One more anecdote, from my dentist (at least when I lived in SoCal), Patrick Garcia, a story which the UCLA alumnus related to me during some dental procedure, making it, I’m sure, far easier to bear.

A few years ago, maybe 2004 or so, Doc Garcia and 2-3 other UCLA alums ran into Wooden. At a bookstore. On campus. And apparently (via google) I didn’t write about this before, though I thought I did.

The alums, awestruck, began talking to Wooden, and the conversation began to stretch out, and eventually they invited him into one of their homes (it might even have been Wooden’s home) … and Wooden sat and talked about basketball … and life. And these adult men, approaching middle age, sat and listened to him as if he were the Last Real Oracle on the planet. It clearly was a moving experience for Doc Garcia. Who, as I recall, had the presence of mind to get a basketball autographed by Wooden … and even better, has the memory of those hours at the knee of The Man.

Looking back, it strikes me that John Wooden was one of the last of a sort of American who used to be common but has nearly disappeared in these latter days. Self-made, self-disciplined, sober, diligent, optimistic, striving but not grasping, overtly ethical as well as religious. The country once had men like these by the thousands. Now … well, look around.

I believe that is why John Wooden is remembered so well and so fondly. It isn’t just all the NCAA championships. It is the Pyramid of Success and those ancient virtues that he so clearly lived as well as preached.

If I had the power to give one man — not related to me, and not a personal friend — 200 years of life, it would have been John Wooden. He was a treasure. He taught so much. Even after a century of teaching, he could have told us so much more.