By Lee Strawther
The Sporting Tribune
The John R. Wooden Award will celebrate it’s 50th anniversary this season. Leading up to the award ceremony on April 10, 2026, The Sporting Tribune in partnership with the Wooden Award and the Los Angeles Athletic Club will highlight past winners of the Wooden Award and the Legends of Coaching Award.
Hall of Fame basketball coach John Wooden once said, “Talent is God given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful.” Looking back, he may have been speaking of his former player Marques Johnson. He was equal parts confident, physical, graceful and imposing as a player, but more importantly he was a great teammate and competitor.He was born Marques Kevin Johnson on February 8, 1956 in Natchitoches, Louisiana, where he lived til age five before his family relocated to California to circumvent the racism of the South.
Following a stellar high school career at Crenshaw High School where, as a senior, he garnered the Los Angeles City Section 4-A Player of the Year award in 1973, he was offered a scholarship to play not far away at UCLA, directly from the legendary coach Wooden himself.
Johnson played under Wooden for two seasons (1973-1975) before his retirement and College Basketball Hall of Fame Coach Gene Bartow the following two seasons (1975-1977).
As a freshman he joined a UCLA squad that had been 60–0 the previous two years. As a sophomore, Johnson helped to lead the Bruins to Wooden’s 10th and final NCAA Division I men’s basketball championship.
Ultimately Johnson went on to average a team-leading 21.1 points and 11.1 rebounds per game as a senior, while winning the inaugural John R. Wooden Award. He ultimately owned college basketball that season, also bagging Pac-10 Player of the Year and Naismith College Player of the Year honors before being selected as the third overall pick by the Milwaukee Bucks in the 1977 NBA Draft.
As a professional the 6-7 forward was known for his combination of grittiness and finesse, and spent his first six seasons with the Bucks before returning to Los Angeles for a three-year stint with the Clippers, followed by one year with the Golden State Warriors. He finally ended his professional playing career after spending the 1989-90 season with Fantoni Udine in Italy.He averaged 20.1 points, 7.0 rebounds and 3.6 assists per game over his 11 year professional career and claims to have come up with the term ‘point forward’ for the position he played out of necessity for the Bucks during the 1984 season.
“I’m the MJ that Michael Jordan had on his wall at North Carolina, my poster, What Goes Up,” he said earlier this year when summing up his basketball career in an interview on Fox Local Wisconsin. “That poster was on Michael Jordan’s wall when he was at North Carolina. He always talks about how I was one of his favorite players coming up. So to me, that’s Hall of Fame worthy, isn’t it? You got the greatest of all time saying that, you know, that you were his inspiration.”
In addition to his basketball exploits, Johnson has also dabbled in the field of acting. He majored in Theater Arts at UCLA, and had enjoyed starring in musical theater in high school. He went on to appear in numerous movies and television shows over the years.Most notably known for his character Raymond in the film White Men Can’t Jump, Johnson also made television appearances on the likes of Boston Legal, L.A. Law, Baywatch and A Different World, to name a few.
In 1988, he was inducted into the UCLA Athletic Hall of Fame. The Bruins retired his No. 54 jersey in 1996 and in 2008 he was inducted into the Pac-12 Hall of Honor. Finally, in 2013, he was inducted into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame.
Johnson has five sons and two daughters. A sixth son, Marques Kevin Johnson Jr., died in a drowning accident at the family’s home pool in 1987.
Last year he became a board member for Serenity Inns, a treatment facility designed to help men struggling with substance abuse in Milwaukee. Last April he celebrated 23 years of sobriety himself.
Since 2015, Johnson has worked as both a full-time and part-time analyst for Milwaukee Bucks telecasts on a variety of platforms. In 2018, he won an Emmy as top analyst in the Midwest-Region for his broadcast work.