Sports Biblio Digest 10.14.18: Tex Winter, 'The Mind of the Basketball Gods'
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: New Babe Ruth Bio; Sandy Koufax, Labor Hero; Bill James; Rob Neyer; Sabermetrics Fatigue; Verne Lundquist; How Australian Cricket Lost Its Way; Football Fan Lessons in Auschwitz; Sports and Pulitzers; Remembering Jim Taylor and George Taliaferro
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James Naismith invented basketball, but Fred "Tex" Winter is the figure credited with being the game’s offensive architect for the contemporary age.
When basketball, especially at the professional level, was becoming identified with the singular star who could take over a game, Winter showed some of the sport’s biggest names how they could still have their star power and spread it through the rest of their teams in dominating fashion.
The modernizer of the “triangle” offense drew up a framework for Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls to win six consecutive NBA titles. Later, he did the same thing with Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers, which won three crowns.
The connective tissue was Phil Jackson, who employed Winter as more than just a sidekick. Winter, who was 96 when he died this week in Manhattan, Kansas, was a close friend and confidante of the coach with more NBA titles than any other. Without Winter, Jackson said in remembrance, none of that would have been possible:
“I wasn’t a very good coach and didn’t have a lot of knowledge, and he had a lot of knowledge. He’s like the mind of the basketball gods.”
For Steve Kerr, part of that Bulls dynasty and now overseeing one of his own with the Golden State Warriors, Winter “changed my life.”
Bryant referred to Winter as “my yoda,” a coach with a reputation as “a stickler for details” with few parallels in the game.
Jack McCallum of Sports Illustrated wrote that Winter and fellow Bulls assistant Johnny Bach:
“Were delightful to be around, invariably together, a grounded patch of earth in the heady celebrity atmosphere that swirled around Jordan. I used to joke to them that they looked like a two-man high school discipline team, roaming the halls. Bach, dashing and silver-haired, would grab the offenders and read them the riot act, while Winter, rumpled and bookish, would pull out a tattered violations codebook and hand down the punishment.”
What Winter drew up on chalkboards, and walked through in the practice gym was devastatingly simple, but still took some manner of persuasion for its practitioners to embrace.
The “triangle” featured three of the five offensive players moving themselves, and the ball, in coordinated fashion, on one side of the floor: A post player, a wing man, and a ball handler, with the others reacting in anticipation.
Coordinated movement also expanded the versatility of the skills on the floor, making defending and playing within its structure more of a challenge. As Shaquille O’Neal, part of Bryant’s Lakers teams said of Winter:
“I liked to go out of the triangle every now and then, but, he would just convey the message that it works and we’d sit and watch film and he had to say, ‘Sometimes you have to be not Shaq the dominant guy, you got to be like a decoy, get others involved.’ ”
John Paxson, another Jordan-era Bull who is the franchise’s current executive vice president, called Winter the finest teacher of fundamentals in the history of the game.
Winter, who coached at Kansas State and other college posts for 30 years before going to the NBA, simply looked at basketball as a game of geometry, and the court a place to be dissected accordingly.
He retired from coaching in 2008 and suffered a stroke the next year. When he was enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame in 2011, Winter was unable to speak. Instead, his son Chris gave his induction speech.
A Few Good Reads
At The Athletic, Rustin Dodd goes long on Bill James, now at work with his wife on a book about the history of his beloved Kansas, but still eternally obsessed with baseball.
The guru of the sabermetrics revolution, who inspired “Moneyball” and much of what has come since, has just finished a project for the Red Sox, who’ve employed him as a consultant in recent years, but he can’t wait to delve into the next baseball thing.
“The more you know about the game, the more enjoyable—the more fun it becomes. And this cycle has been running in me for 50 years, so that by now I’m entirely consumed with it, and only marginally able to do anything else.
“And I’m up in my dirty little office upstairs, just obsessively studying this and that. Not because I have to …I just can’t stop doing it. I dream about baseball every night.”
My friend Mike DiMauro, a sports columnist at The Day in New London, Conn., is a Yankees fan fed up with the long-ball excesses of sabermetrics, as he wrote this week following quick elimination by the Red Sox:
“Not that moonshots don’t sell tickets. But with two on and two out in a tie game—and the left side of the infield more open than Wyoming—I’d settle for an RBI single. I know. That makes me antiquated for using such a pedestrian, old-man term such as ‘situational hitting.’ Somehow, the Yankees won 27 championships using it instead of fretting over ‘hit probability.’
“This is not baseball. This is math class on Viagra.”
At The New York Daily News, Bill Madden rounds up his favorite baseball books, including a warm nod to the venerable Arnold Hano;
Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich, a Jewish emigre from Russia, has an alternative plan to banning anti-Semitic fans of the London football club from attending games: Send them on an educational trip to Auschwitz instead. Fan outbursts last year in a game against Tottenham Hotspur, a London club with a rich Jewish heritage, prompted the proposed bans;
At Outside, Brad Stulberg, author of “Peak Performance,” writes refreshingly well on a familiar subject: Why walking may be the best exercise. After a hot summer, it’s feeling like fall where I live, and it’s the best time of year IMO to do that.
Sports Book News
Reviews are out, including from The Wall Street Journal, for Jane Leavy’s anticipated Babe Ruth biography, “The Big Fella,” which publishes Tuesday;
Prolific baseball author Paul Dickson, also in WSJ, reviews Rob Neyer’s latest book, “Power Ball,” about a 2017 game between the A’s and Astros that illustrates the sport’s data evolution. Neyer talks with fellow baseball author Jonah Keri on the latter's podcast here, including his new stint as a minor league commissioner;
From Lincoln Mitchell’s soon-to-be-released “Baseball Goes West,” an excerpt in Salon about Sandy Koufax, an unlikely baseball labor hero, along with fellow Dodgers ace Don Drysdale, a decade before the advent of free agency;
Verne Lundquist’s new memoir, “Play By Play,” is excerpted at Sports Illustrated, and his avuncular presence on America’s airwaves is sorely missed.
Coming soon: The Sports Biblio Fall Books Preview.
‘Sports Shorts’ Down Under
Thanks to reader Russell Jackson of Slattery Media for alerting me to a new project he's developed for the Melbourne-based publisher. It’s a series of short sports books, starting around 25,000 words, that he says is an experiment in Australian publishing.
First off the presses is “Crossing the Line: How Australian Cricket Lost Its Way,” by Gideon Haigh, the prolific cricket writer’s 37th book. Jackson said Haigh, “working with such rich material and drawing upon thoughts formed over the last decade,” came in at around 40,000 words, about half of a typical full-scale book.
Writing in the Australian Book Review, Kieran Pender says the book is “a piercing analysis of the woes afflicting Cricket Australia, expertly informed by those at the heart of the game.”
The “sports shorts” are also published in paperback, and Jackson said future installments will include works cricket legend Sir Donald Bradman and his relationship with media mogul Kerry Packer, and enigmatic rugby star David Campese.
“We're really leaving it up to the writers to grab hold of topics that appeal to them. Some of these will be purely journalistic, others will be more playful and creative," said Jackson, a former deputy sports editor at The Guardian in Australia. I’ve noted previously his 2017 story on cricket writer Major Rowland Bowen, whose notorious self-amputation is not the only unusual thing about him.
Jackson said the shorter-length concept was inspired by the Yellow Jersey Press, a sports imprint of Vintage that just celebrated its 20th anniversary. In particular, he enjoyed a “short” about John McEnroe by Tim Adams published in 2004, that was hailed as “an elegant, erudite homage to a vanished world” in a review at The Observer.
Jackson asked me if there's such a trend emerging in the U.S., but I'm not aware of anything along the lines of shorter-length sports books. There are a few dedicated sports publishers, mostly of full-length books, such as Sports Publishing/Skyhorse Books and the university presses, especially at Nebraska and Illinois. If readers know otherwise, let me know.
Media Lodge Notes
Nieman Reports looks at The Athletic, Bleacher Report and other digital entities in a longish take on traditional sports media’s battle for relevancy. Says one of the digi-moguls: “We’re way more interested in creating shared experiences around sports,” which to me smacks of what I’ve come to despair about my profession. More than anything, fans just want to watch a ball game, which seems to be lost on sports media, legacy and otherwise.
On the move: Jemele Hill, late of ESPN, has landed at The Atlantic, and immediately weighed in on the U.S. Supreme Court saga; Yahoo! Sports baseball writer Jeff Passan is headed to ESPN after the first of the year; and former Grantland writer Brian Phillips has been hired by old boss Bill Simmons at The Ringer. Phillips, most recently of MTV, is the author of a new essay collection, “Impossible Owls,” mostly non-sports topics.
I find some of Phillips’ writing overwrought, but I did enjoy his late soccer blog, The Run of Play, which contains archives and has a plug for the book.
Pulitzer Errata and Addenda
Last week in my lead item on the passing of Dave Anderson, I noted that in 1981 was the first sportswriter to win a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, followed by Jim Murray in 1990. Readers pointed out that Red Smith was the first in that category, in 1976. Another reader brought to my attention the Pulitzer won by Arthur Daley, also of The New York Times. That was for local reporting in 1956, before the commentary category was created.
In 2012, Sara Ganim and the staff of the The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., won the local reporting Pulitzer for coverage of the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State.
In 2000, George Dohrmann, then of the St. Paul Pioneer-Press, was the Pulitzer winner for beat reporting for uncovering an academic scandal involving the men’s basketball program at the University of Minnesota.
A few other sports-related Pulitzer items: John Branch of the Times won the 2013 prize for feature writing for his story about skiers killed in an avalanche. His 2012 series on hockey star Derek Boogaard was a Pulitzer finalist and led to his book “Boy on Ice,” published in 2014.
Other notable sports finalists include Ira Berkow (1988 commentary), Robert Lipsyte (1992 commentary), Tony Kornheiser (1997 commentary), Frank Fitzpatrick (2001 national reporting) and The New York Times (2011 public service), the latter for its series on concussions.
Here’s more from Ed Sherman in 2015 on the paucity of sports topics represented at the Pulitzers in recent years.
Passings
Jim Taylor, 83, was the primary running back in the early years of the Green Bay Packers dynasty under Vince Lombardi in the early 1960s. He enjoyed five straight years rushing for 1,000 yards or more, a classic heavy-duty fullback in the vaunted Packers Sweep attack, a role that might have been ushered out with his retirement.
Taylor's 8,207 rushing yards was a team record until 2009, and he was the first Lombardi-era Packer inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Said Lombardi:
"Taylor may not be as big as some fullbacks, but he has balance and determination. He is hard to knock off his feet and he fights for every yard."
George Taliaferro, 91, was the first black player drafted in the NFL, by the Chicago Bears, in the 13th round in 1949. He never played a down for them, although his six-year pro career included stops with the Colts and the Eagles.
It was also what Taliaferro did with the rest of his life that was remembered by those who knew him, including his long advocacy for civil rights.
He earned a master’s degree in social work, was a dean at the historically-black Morgan State University in Baltimore and had a documentary made about him.
Taliaferro, a versatile athlete who starred at Indiana University and played seven positions in the pros, is in the College Football Hall of Fame. When he arrived in Bloomington in the 1940s, he noted that “I felt like a fifth-class citizen.”
He returned there in later years, with many family members also earning degrees from IU, and was on staff at the university in an administrative role.
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This is Digest issue No. 139, published Oct. 14, 2018.
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