In his later years, John Wooden liked to muse about one oddity of his first 12 years as UCLA’s basketball coach.
His paychecks were always signed by the student body president.
One of those presidents, Rafer Johnson, also played for Wooden, meaning that Johnson in effect could have been considered his coach’s boss.
The arrangement stemmed from an ethos that gave UCLA students a large measure of control over their own campus from the 1920s through the late 1950s. The students ran the campus bookstore, the cafeteria and intercollegiate athletics, all of it managed by an organization called Associated Students UCLA that was overseen by a student-majority board of directors.