The Coaches’ Bench

1910–2010 · United States

The most successful coach in the history of American sport — ten NCAA basketball championships at UCLA in twelve years, including seven in a row and an 88-game winning streak — who insisted he was a teacher first. His Pyramid of Success, built over fourteen years, defined success not as winning but as the peace of mind that comes from knowing you made the effort to become the best you are capable of becoming.

1913–1970 · United States

The son of a Brooklyn butcher who spent fifteen years as an assistant before anyone would make him a head coach — passed over repeatedly, and privately convinced it was because he was Italian. He took over a Green Bay Packers team that had won one game the previous season and, in nine years, won five NFL championships and the first two Super Bowls. His method was not invention but repetition: a handful of plays, the Packer sweep above all, run until they could not be stopped even when the opponent knew exactly what was coming. He was also, quietly and against the grain of his era, intolerant of racism in his locker room, telling his staff that any player who could not accept a Black teammate would be gone.

1943–1993 · United States

The only Black man to win the singles title at Wimbledon, the US Open and the Australian Open — barred as a boy from the whites-only courts of his own Richmond, Virginia. He beat Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon in 1975 by refusing to trade power, junking and slicing until Connors had nothing to hit against. Off the court he campaigned against apartheid, was arrested protesting US policy on Haitian refugees, and founded programmes for inner-city players. He contracted HIV from a transfusion during heart surgery in 1983, was forced to disclose it publicly by a newspaper in 1992, and spent his last year campaigning on AIDS. His memoir Days of Grace was finished weeks before his death.

1913–1980 · United States

The grandson of enslaved Alabamians and son of a sharecropper, who in a single afternoon at Ann Arbor in 1935 broke three world records and tied a fourth in forty-five minutes — still regarded as the greatest hour in track and field. At the 1936 Berlin Olympics he won four gold medals in front of Hitler, and formed a public friendship with the German long jumper Luz Long, who advised him during the qualifying round. He returned home to a country that had not changed: no White House invitation, no endorsements, and a livelihood made for years from exhibition races, including races against horses. "I had four medals," he said, "but you can't eat four gold medals."

1942–2016 · United States

Born Cassius Clay in Louisville, he took up boxing at twelve after his bicycle was stolen and he told a policeman he wanted to whip whoever took it. He won Olympic gold in 1960, took the heavyweight title from Sonny Liston in 1964, joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name, and in 1967 refused induction into the US Army on religious grounds — losing his title, his licence and three and a half years of his prime before the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in his favour. He came back to win the title twice more, at Kinshasa against Foreman and in Manila against Frazier. He also said cruel things about Frazier that he later regretted publicly, and he fought years past the point his body could take it, developing Parkinson's syndrome in his forties.