Coach Tex Winter: Triangle Basketball by Ann Parr NDX Press
book review by Peter M. Fitzpatrick
"The defense doesn't just stand there while we do our things, so we have to be able to read it and react."
Tex Winter helped lead countless basketball teams to victory through his Triangle method of playing. The Triangle emphasizes passing rather than dribbling, shifting offensive tactics in moment-to-moment adjustments to what the defense is doing, and sacrificing individual efforts on behalf of a well integrated team effort. It requires attentiveness, quickness, and the ability to adapt one's play to constantly shifting defensive maneuvers. The basics of basketball must be thoroughly mastered first. Only then can the conscious minds of the players focus on tactics rather than technique. Winter wrote about this method in a 1963 book entitled Triple Post Offense. After coaching at Kansas State University for close to twenty years, he went on to join Phil Jackson in leading the Chicago Bulls to a string of victories that have made names like Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Dennis Rodman world famous. Then he helped lead the Los Angeles Lakers, with players like Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neil, to basketball stardom.
Always something of a quiet presence in all the sports media frenzy that has come to surround professional basketball, Coach Winter has received a much deserved accolade in this large-sized, multi-colored, and picture-filled biography. The author describes his impoverished Depression-Era childhood, his gradual rise to athletic prowess, and the coaches that showed the young man how tactics and strategy could be applied to the sport of basketball. In easy to read prose with plenty of quotes from the Coach himself scattered throughout, the text is a delight to thumb through at random while reading the blurbs beneath the countless photographs. It can also be read from start to finish to get a better picture of both the theory and the man behind the theory. Either way, it is a delightful story of a man who embodies the virtues of hard work and team spirit. His record reaffirms that those values still hold.