The coach who changed the shape of basketball

For Tex Winter, basketball was all about triangles. While working as a coach at Kansas State University in 1962, Winter published a 320-page book titled The TriplePost Offense that described his theory in intricate detail. Winter’s system required three players—a big man near the basket, another player on the wing, and a guard bringing up the ball just outside the three-point line—to form a triangle on one side of the court. The spacing between players would prevent double teams, while constant movement and passing would create opportunities for open shots, with new triangles constantly forming. Winter’s system, which became known as the Triangle Offense, would come to dominate basketball for a generation, serving as the blueprint for the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers dynasties of the 1990s and 2000s. “Basketball,” Winter said, “is a game of geometry.” Morice Winter was born in Wellington, Texas, said the Los Angeles Times. When Winter was 10 years old, his father, a mechanic, died of an infection. The family moved to Huntington Park, Calif., where Winter’s Southern twang earned him the nickname “Tex.” Winter played basketball in high school and at the University of Southern California, where he was also an “accomplished pole vaulter.” Winter learned a nascent form of the Triangle Offense at USC playing under longtime coach Sam Barry, said The New York Times. He spent the next three decades tweaking the system, racking up an impressive 453-334 record as a college basketball coach. Winter included 135 play diagrams in his tome of triangle plays. When his son Brian saw a manuscript, he said they “looked like complex and interesting hieroglyphics.” Phil Jackson, hired as head coach of the Chicago Bulls in 1989, embraced the Triangle Offense, said SI.com, with Winter, as an assistant coach, mentoring him. Together, the pair would win a combined nine NBA championships with the Bulls and Lakers. Star players like Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, and Michael Jordan “would grumble from time to time” about the highly structured, pass-heavy offense. But they ultimately came to appreciate the results, as well as the “rumpled and bookish” Winter’s encyclopedic knowledge of the game. “You’d be an idiot to say that the Triangle created Michael Jordan,” Winter said. “But it certainly helped him get to where he got.”

a well-sourced account of the CIA’s involvement in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and in coups in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, and 1995’s Nightmover, about the agency’s bumbling efforts to unearth a Soviet mole who turned out to be CIA officer Aldrich Ames. The CIA was so angered by the revelations in The Invisible Government that it appointed a task force to consider how to discredit the book. It recommended the use of “such assets as the Agency may have” to plant bad reviews.The effort failed, and the book became a No. 1 best-seller. Born in Manhattan to a lawyer father and a mother who sang professionally, Wise started working as a reporter while still a student at Columbia University, said The New York Times. He joined the New York Herald Tribune after graduating in 1951 and began writing espionage exposés while serving as Washington bureau chief. Wise soon became known as the best-connected writer on the spy trade: One of his main sources for The Invisible Government was former CIA head Allen W. Dulles. Wise published three espionage novels in the ’80s, filled with James Bond–esque gadgets based on real agency innovations, said The Washington Post. They included deadly “toxins from shellfish delivered by poison darts” and pet cats wired up with listening devices. “Who’d suspect a cat?” Wise said in 1981. “Well, as a matter of fact I would. I have two cats, and I’m extremely suspicious.”