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| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 12 customer reviews )
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40 of 41 found the following review helpful:
 A collection of falsehoods Sep 01, 2005
By Judd Vance
This is a story that needs to be told, as this fabulous team is not given enough credit since their single-season victory record has been eclipsed. Unfortunately, the wrong guy is telling it.
Charley Rosen, is simply not a good writer. I had never heard of him until I read this book. Since then, I have read some of his articles on Fox Sports website, and I am more convinced that he is a lazy sportswriter, who won't look up facts and lets no truth stand in the way of his spreading his pompous erroneous ideas. No factoid is too big to ignore nor any truth too difficult to discard in his attempts to spread venom.
It is obvious quickly that Rosen is no fan of Wilt Chamberlain and worships Jerry West and Bill Sharman. Don't get me wrong, Wilt had his faults, and West was phenomenal, and Sharman should be in the hall of fame for his coaching, but I will present four passages to prove how much of a vendetta Rosen has:
Page 14 :
"Indeed, the Lakers were in firm control of the game when Chamberlain committed his fifth personal foul late in the third quarter. Coach Butch van Breda Kolff immediately sent Mel Counts, a lanky seven foot jump shooter, in for Chamberlain.
Unfortunately, one of Chamberlain's most cherished personal records was his never having fouled out of a game. So when van Breda Kolff called for Chamberlain to reenter the fray midway through the fourth quarter, the big man refused, mumbling something about an aching knee. Infuriated by Wilt's monumental selfishness, van Breda Kolff vowed to keep Chamberlain on the bench and win the game, and the championship, with Counts.
As the game raced toward the wire with the Celtics relentlessly eating into the Lakers' lead, Chamberlain approached his coach and asked to return to the action. But the always stubborn van Breda Kolff refused, and Chamberlain sat on the bench for the duration."
Now, let's analyze the outright falsehoods of this passage:
#1) Wilt did not leave the game in the 3rd, but rather, there was 5:13 left in the 4th quarter.
#2) The Lakers were not "in firm control of the game" when Chamberlain left. They were down by 9 points.
#3 & 4) Wilt did not leave because he picked up his 5th foul, nor did he refuse to reenter the game when asked. He left because he went up for a rebound and when he came down, he banged his knee. After hobbling around on the court, he went to the bench to get topical spray applied. Wilt said, "They helped me off the court, and i just needed a breather for a second. Butch put in Mel Coutns for me, but after a minute I said I was ready to come back in. Butch ignored me." Van Breda Kolff even said, "Wilt was hurting and you could see him limping. I put in Counts, he hit a couple of shots and we made the comeback...Wilt told me that he was okay, but I said we'd keep things as they were. He told me a second time he wanted to go back in, but I told Wilt the truth. I said, 'We're playing better without you.' Earl Strom, who officiated the game, said, "In a sense, I respect Butch for making one of the dumbest moves any coach has ever made. You just don't try to win a title with Mel Counts when you have Wilt Chamberlain, but...He always was his own man and he would coach his own way." [All quotes taken from Tall Tales, by Terry Pluto.] For the record, Chamberlain played 43 minutes, and shot 7-for-8, scoring 18 points and pulling down 21 rebounds. Counts was 4-for-13 shooting with 5 rebounds.
#5) The Celtics did not relentlessly eat into the Lakers lead with Chamberlain on the bench, rather, L.A. cut Boston's lead to 1 point.
There - five outright errors in one short passage. This is not obscure information. This can be found in many different books and articles. Rosen decided research was not needed, since he found his own brand of fiction is more entertaining, at least to himself.
Here is Rosen's account of the legendary "Willis Reed" game 7 in 1970: "Chamberlain, clearly intimidated by Reed's dramatic display of courage, was rendered passive and impotent." (p.15) Reed had 4 points and 2 rebounds. Chamberlain had 21 points and 24 rebounds. The Knicks' Walt Frazier, a guard mind you, had 39 points and 19 assists. Either West got burned or his coach lacked the faith in him to defend the hot hand. Do you see this mentioned? No. What Rosen also neglected to mention was that when Reed went down in game 5, the Knicks collapsed on Chamberlain and Rosen's idol Jerry West took only 2 shots the 2nd half, missing both, while the Lakers committed 30 turnovers, trying to force the ball into Wilt, rather than taking the open shot.
In another passage (p. 116), Rosen says after the 1970 finals, Chamberlain and Bill Russell never spoke again. Rosen obviously missed the Bob Costas interview with the 2 of them at the 1997 All-Star game, in which Russell made a public apology, and he must have missed the 1999 (2nd) retiring of Russell's number, in which Wilt was invited and attended, despite being in bad health, 5 months away from his death.
In another passage (p.136), Rosen is writing of Coach Sharman's ponderings about his player's ability to handle the pressure of winning the title. He writes, "West would probably be pressure proof...that left El Foldo (Chamberlain) himself.
Let's analyze this joke:
#1) Number of Championships at that point in time: Chamberlain 1, West 0.
#2) West had lost in the finals in 1962, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69, and 70, 4 times losing in game 7. West never defeated Russell in the post-season. Chamberlain had (1967).
#3) West's only championship came after Chamberlain joined the team.
#4) In the 1972 post-season, West went cold in the conference finals against Milwaukee and in the finals against the Knicks. In the Milwaukee series, West shot 31-for-101 in 4 of the games. In the Finals, West shot 38-for-117, while "El Foldo", the Finals' MVP, averaged 21.6 ppg and 23.2 rpg, playing with a broken arm in a soft cast.
Furthermore, Rosen writes a chapter where he introduces each of the players, and when you read it, you can sense he really loves white basketball players, while taking digs at black players, with the exception being Columbia educated Jim McMillan. He also takes digs at Kareem Abdul-Jabbar throughout the story, while he loves the Knicks, namely Jerry Lucas, Dave DeBuscchere, and his buddy Phil Jackson (whom he co-wrote a book about).
The story of the Lakers is an interesting story, but with so much romanticized fiction tossed in, it detracts from the story and makes you wonder how much is true and how much is made up. The worst part, is it's a darned shame because so few books are written about this team, unlike, say, the 1970 Knicks.
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
Flawed Jan 04, 2006
By Cracker
I was looking forward to this book based on my enjoyment of Rosen's book on Jack Molinas (Wizard of Odds). I was severely disappointed and question my own judgment of the Molinas book. There are a staggering number of factual errors in this book that could have been corrected by thumbing through a copy of the Basketball Encyclopedia or any number of websites that include boxscores of playoff games. I wouldn't have done that but for my own recollections that were at odds with Rosen's reports. I now question whether anything in his other books is worth the paper its written on.
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
 Great Team, Lousy Writer Sep 12, 2006
By Howard Wexler
First off, hats off to Judd Vance for his wonderful review. My comments are similar, there are so many lazy errors in this book that it diminishes a wonderful team.
Page 1 compares the Laker-Buck series of that year to rivalries like Dodgers-Yankees, Hatfields-McCoys, Louis-Schmeling and Michigan-Michigan State.
First off, comparing two good teams that met a couple of times does not make a rivalry. Second, Michigan-Michigan State is a big rivalry? I thought it was Michigan and Ohio State.
Rosen repeats the old cliche that LA anything is style and no substance. What a schlocky and wrong stereotype. I am a born and bred New Yorker and even I think it is a stereotype.
Page 3, if the Bucks double-teamed West and Goodrich, that leaves one man to cover Hairston, McMillan and Chamberlain. Is that ridiculous?
Page 62, Chamberlain and Russell were two vastly different people off the court and on. They were good friends.
Page 247, eastern teams do not play fast-break basketball. I guess the Celtics in the 50s and 60s never ran the ball.
Page 273, the Knicks in the early 70s were not a 1-hit wonder. In 70 they won it, 71 had them in the divisional finals, 72 had them lose to Lakers in finals, 73 they were champions, with the same core team.
It is a shame that this great team received such a careless and slipshod book like this.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
OK, but docked a star for errors Sep 23, 2008
By J. E. BORNSTEIN
"thehal"
This is an entertaining look at the Lakers historic title run in 1972; however, it is filled with errors of fact (Neal walk a rookie in 1961?) and spelling (Dave Debusschere is a Hall of Famer - spell his name correctly)! There are more examples, and they're pretty disctracting - it's tough to see that a major publisher wouldn't do a better editorial job.
 the Lake Show finally wins it all Nov 27, 2011
By Brian Maitland
It's hard to figure out why it took until 2005 for a book like this to come out on one of the most famous teams in NBA history. The 1971-72 LA Lakers not only had a record 33-game winning streak but they were the first LA Laker team to finally break the hoodoo (going 0-7 in NBA Finals since their move to LA from Minneapolis) and win a championship.
The season is followed game-by-game with loads on the off-court stuff. Each game is covered with a brief writeup and important stat/game notes tacked on without having that boring newspaper game report style being forced down our throats.
The quirky things you'll learn are things like Wilt's B.O. (yep, the guy hardly bathed which makes his luck with the ladies even more infathomable), coach Bill Sharman's genius in introducing the morning game-day shootaround (a now standard NBA practice) and how ridding the Lakers of their Hall of Famer Elgin Baylor actually turned the team into a "team."
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