The Breaks of the Game by David Halberstam

Teams began to move west: in 1960 the Lakers went from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, that most lakeless of cities, without even changing their nickname. Then television arrived, helping to connect California to the rest of the nation, and soon after that, the 727 jet, which made intermediate travel easier. Louis was considered the western outpost of American sports. In the early fifties the world of professional sports was eastern, cities like Philadelphia had two professional baseball teams, New York had three, and St. But Gross was very tough.Īsked once, after his team had won a national championship, whether he would be interested in coaching in the pros, Knight had answered, “I’ll never coach where a player makes more than the coach.” A lot of kids, aware of how brief their careers were, sensitive to the derogatory public remarks management often made in the heat of negotiations, lacked the nerve. To win in negotiations like this the client had to have both skill and nerves. Off The Courtīobby Gross, angry over the way he had been treated in the past, turned out to be very patient. He learned, and learned well, that basketball was not a game of height but of quickness, of using speed to set up an intricate series of moves so that one player would end up with a one-step advantage on his opponent. Basketball was a sport where under optimal conditions a great player with considerable ego disciplined himself and became unselfish. A truly great basketball player was not necessarily someone who scored a lot of points a truly great basketball player was someone of exceptional talent and self-discipline who could make his teammates better.

The Breaks of the Game by David Halberstam