In colorful scrapbook style, readers learn how Tex Winter directed Michael Jordan’s and Dennis Rodman’s roles with the Chicago Bulls during six NBA championships and coached Kobe Bryant and Shaq O’Neal for three Los Angeles Lakers NBA championships plus one more with Kobe in 2010. Every page has all-color photographs, news clippings, and quotes from Tex and his players.
Tex’s ideas about basketball and teamwork began at age ten when his family pulled together following his father’s death during the Great Depression. Landing fighter planes on carrier ships during World War II helped his ideas about teamwork, too. He was an outstanding basketball player and Olympic-level pole vaulter at both USC and in the Navy.
Tex became Kansas State University’s first fulltime assistant basketball coach and soon took the head coach job. He filled several more head coach college positions before joining the Chicago Bulls in 1985. Following their six NBA championships, Tex and head coach Phil Jackson moved to the Los Angeles Lakers for four more championships.
Tex completed sixty-two consecutive season of coaching the world’s best players. He is credited with changing the game of basketball into an organized effort with his triple-post-triangle team method of playing basketball. There were no “stars” on Tex’s seven college teams, his Houston Rockets team, or with the Chicago Bulls or the Los Angeles Lakers. He set up his famous Triangle Offense where team players depended on one another to form three corners and pass around for the best shot. Tex changed the game permanently and has ten NBA championship rings to show for it.
Tex Winter
Me with Tex Winter (front) and my husband, Jack (back)
Tex was my husband’s college basketball coach at Kansas State University. I had known Tex for more than twenty years and was fascinated to learn more about his life every time we were together. I began to ask about writing his story. “Oh, no,” he’d say every time. “Find somebody who has something interesting to say.” I finally started writing his story anyway, interviewing him every time I had a chance and visiting with players he had coached throughout the years. I visited family members in Atlanta and Portland, Oregon. The real thrill was interviewing Phil Jackson, Kobe Bryant, and the Lakers’s staff personnel in Los Angeles. They love him as much as I do. Players like the book. His family loves the book. Maybe by now he thinks he has an interesting life story after all, but I doubt it. He’s a beautifully humble man, not one to need attention or acclaim. But put him on the basketball court, and he’s dynamite!!
