Legendary Indiana high school basketball coach Jerry Hoover grudgingly agreed to a brief phone interview, seeming perhaps a little irritated at all the attention given his retirement from Blackford High in order to avoid increasing his chance of contracting COVID-19.

Perhaps he doesn’t understand the significance of a man coaching at 86 years old and turning a losing team into a winning one for the ninth time. After all, in one conversation, he once picked up a lot of basketball knowledge from a coach who was much older than that.

When asked to identify the greatest of all time in his field, Hoover doesn’t think twice.

Who is the greatest basketball coach? Wooden. Hoover stated, “Johnny Wooden.” “We had a single encounter. When he was ninety-seven, I went out there and spent seven hours with him. Wonderful man. Fantastic dude.

Hoover remarked, “He was really a wonderful man.” First and foremost, he had excellent players. Without players, nothing gets accomplished. Until 1973, Lew Alcindor, often known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, was arguably the greatest player of all time. Alcindor must be the first player signed when establishing an NBA team.

Beyond only coaching the Bruins, Hoover and Wooden shared many similarities. Both guys, Hoover and Wooden, are walk-ons who played basketball for Purdue; they are from Indiana. Wooden is a three-time All-American. Ward “Piggy” Lambert was Hoover’s freshman coach at Purdue and Wooden’s varsity coach. In 1960, Wooden was inducted as a player and in 1973, as a coach, into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. At the age of 84, Hoover was honored as a coach into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in March 2019.