LOS ANGELES — We will start with the image of an injured 97-year-old John Wooden, alone on the floor of his condominium in Encino, for as long as seven hours last Thursday night and Friday morning.

And we will hasten to add that that image, while true, should not be grounds for any finger-pointing or assumptions of dereliction of duty by anybody.

Wooden's fall has been in the news since Friday. The patriarch of UCLA basketball and the godfather of the college game broke a collarbone and a wrist.

The news grew a bit more detailed Tuesday, when a concerned Ben Howland said at a news conference that he had visited Coach Wooden, and that Wooden was still in a lot of pain.

Then Howland expanded a bit, and the story took several winding paths.

"It was hard to see him sitting there in that hospital bed," Howland said, before elaborating on a conversation he had had with Tony Spino, a UCLA trainer who has been checking in on Wooden every Monday through Saturday morning for quite some time. Howland said it was Spino who found Wooden that morning.

"You guys would get a kick out of this, and you should call Tony," Howland continued. "It took three hours to get an ambulance to pick him up out of Glendale. There was concern by someone that they wanted Coach to wait while he had his broken wrist and collarbone, because there was somebody else in the hospital and there was a bunch of media around and the doctors were concerned the media would see Coach Wooden. And so it was like, no, no, wait.

"You have to ask Tony. He can tell you the story. Pretty ridiculous."

Asking Tony, according to UCLA sports information director Marc Dellins, was not an option. Dellins said the family would not want the information revealed by Howland made public.

It was a decent try by Dellins, but he knew better. It was a news conference. One of the premier coaches in the game was talking about a legend, and with no apparent agenda other than concern.

Later, Nan Muehlhausen, Wooden's daughter, helped diffuse the situation by explaining that the Wooden family had made the decision to allow the ambulance delay because of its ongoing wish to retain its father's dignity and not deliver him to a lobby full of paparazzi.

Muehlhausen said the family was happy with the way the ambulance people handled things, happy with the doctors and didn't think the ambulance saga had taken nearly three hours.

It turns out that the paparazzi had been on hand at the hospital because of the presence of singer Bobby Brown.

But from all this emerged more questions, the main ones being why a 97-year-old man still lives alone and how it came to pass that he had to survive alone on the floor for perhaps as long as seven hours.

These are the facts, as pieced together from family and friends.

John Wooden lives alone because he wants to. He cherishes his independence, and anybody who has an aging parent knows all about this.

As anybody knows who has heard him speak in public, even recently, his mind is as sharp as ever. It wasn't that long ago that he was driving himself to the grocery store, which he may very well do again in the future.

It is not like he sits alone all day, every day. He was ill recently with a bad cold, and Spino stayed through the night most nights for several weeks.

Had he not, Muehlhausen, or son Jim, or one of his dozens of grandchildren or great-grandchildren would have.

The night of his fall, Muehlhausen watched a UCLA game on TV with him, then he went to bed before she left around 10. Sometime after that, and before Spino arrived, Wooden fell.

His fall was not his first. Nor was this the first time he has spent a night on the floor, alone and unable to get up. Long ago, Muehlhausen insisted, because he remained firm in his desire to live alone in the condo that is full of memories of his late wife, Nell, that he wear a medical alert device.

He relented, then had a fall and was found the next morning. According to a family friend, when asked why he didn't push the button on the device, he responded that he had promised Nan that he would wear it, but he hadn't promised that he would use it.

How much longer we will have Wooden is impossible to determine, even though, at 97, you start facing reality. That's especially so when you look back on the month of March the last three years, a month that was once his prime time more than anybody else's in college basketball. Is it meaningful or coincidence that he has been ill all three years during the heart of the NCAA tournament?

A keynote to all this, and a continual source of hope, came in a conversation Howland had with one of Wooden's granddaughters during his visit to the hospital.

"I said to her," Howland recalled, "boy, is he tough. He's just really, really tough."