Books by Charley Rosen
The Pivotal Season: How the 1971--72 Los Angeles Lakers Changed the NBA
An in-depth look at the most influential Lakers championship team-the coach, the players, the season that changed the NBA.
The 1971-72 basketball season was one to go down in history. For the Los Angeles Lakers it was a season of records, an incredible championship, and many personal victories-by a team featuring several players bound for the NBA Hall of Fame. For the sport of basketball it was a season of transition, when West Coast style overcame East Coast sophistication. And for the fans, it was simply a season to remember.
Charley Rosen, one of the best sports historians in recent years, brings to life all of the memories, events, and spectacles. Featuring an iconic all-star roster that includes Wilt Chamberlain and Jerry West, The Pivotal Season is an account of some of the greatest names in the game and their contributions to one of the most remarkable seasons in history. This dramatic narrative credits the Lakers coach, Bill Sharman, who, though virtually unknown today, was the best basketball coach of his time.
Photographs and action-packed narrative portray the pivotal 1971-72 season in this memorable book of sports history, which includes a special foreword by Phil Jackson. Basketball fans will be able to relive this amazing story of despair turned to triumph, when the Los Angeles Lakers won a record thirty-three consecutive games, persevered and defeated their archrival, the New York Knicks, won the championship-and in so doing changed the sport of basketball forever.
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More than a Game
by Phil Jackson, Charley Rosen
AS THE GAME REVEALS THE PLAYER, SO DOES THIS BOOK REVEAL THE COACH
Phil Jackson is the most celebrated coach in basketball today, earning that respect by guiding his teams in Chicago and Los Angeles to an astounding eight NBA championships. The key to his success, he thinks is his ability to understand the complexities of the players as well as the intricacies of the game. With this memorable book, Phil joins his friend Charley Rosen, a former player and coach who knows success at the game's highest levels, to bring new insight to the challenge of coaching and to honor the innate grace of basketball and its players.
Jackson and Rosen take you from the cracked blacktop courts of the inner city to the polished hardwood of the country's finest arenas, exposing the demanding reality of professional basketball: a world of glamour, glitter, and greed, in which nobility can still be found in the single-minded pursuit of athletic perfection.
From his playing days in college and with the world champion Knicks of the 1970's to his victories courtside with the Bulls and the Lakers, Jackson relates his philosophy of coaching, fondly talks about the memorable players and plays of the past, and candidly expresses his feelings about today's rules and referees. Simply a must for any fan, this book reveals the very heart of the sport, reminding us that basketball is much more than just a game.
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The Wizard of Odds: How Jack Molinas Almost Destroyed the Game of Basketball
In The Wizard of Odds, renowned and best-selling basketball writer Charley Rosen brings us for the first time the full life story of Jack Molinas, one of the greatest basketball players of his era, a man whose gambling addiction and hubris caused his ultimate demise. Drawing on numerous, previously unavailable first-person accounts, including Jack Molinas’s own journal and trial transcripts, Rosen presents the true saga of a man who perhaps better than anyone around him understood the weaknesses of the system in which he lived—so much so that he convinced himself that he could manipulate that system to his advantage with total impunity, in a life’s journey that took him from NBA play to the Mafia and the pornographic film industry, and to an ultimate tragic destiny.
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