Winter Might Not Be Ready to Try New Angle

There goes Tex Winter, still tinkering, still tweaking players, still seeking perfect execution of his beloved triangle offense.

That’s him lobbing entry passes into players who seem twice his size.

There’s the legendary eater, finishing off another meal in the media dining room before a game at Staples Center.

At 80 years old, the Laker assistant coach is still going strong. But one of the little subplots of these 2002 playoffs is that Winter could be going, going, gone.

“I haven’t made the announcement yet, but I’m considering [retiring] at the end of the year,” Winter said.

He was very close to calling it quits after the Lakers won the championship last year. The Lakers brought Kurt Rambis to the bench as an assistant coach, and Winter wanted to be assured that he wasn’t being pushed aside. A lighter workload was one thing; obsolescence was another.

“I’ve always said I don’t want to be around just to be accommodated,” Winter said. “I want to feel like I can make a contribution. And I feel like I can. When I feel like I can’t, then I know it’s time to quit. It may be time to quit anyway depending on my health and what I want to do the rest of my life.”

That’s the tricky part. What to do next? He doesn’t have a clue. He hasn’t really thought about it. He hasn’t thought about anything or dedicated himself to doing anything other than coaching basketball for the last 55 years.

“I think him and Chick [Hearn] are just alike,” Laker forward Robert Horry said. “If they hang it up, they’re going to cease to exist.”

Winter’s journey began a month after college graduation in 1947, when he joined the Kansas State staff as an assistant, and his career has taken him through the Big 12, the Pacific 10 and the Big West conferences (when they were known as the Big 8, the Pac-8 and the Pacific Coast Athletic Assn.), in addition to the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference.

He was head coach at Marquette, Kansas State, Washington, Northwestern and Long Beach State and in the pros with the San Diego Rockets. He also has been an assistant at Louisiana State and the Chicago Bulls. In college and the pros, he has coached or coached against such basketball legends as Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Oscar Robertson, Michael Jordan and Shaquille O’Neal.

“I’d have to say I’ve seen it all,” Winter said. “I’ve been very fortunate.

“I didn’t invent the game, but I’ve coached it longer than anybody. Sometimes the players say I act like I’ve invented it.”

And if he didn’t write the book on the game, he wrote a book 40 years ago, “The Triple Post Offense,” which outlined the offense that Jackson has used in winning eight championships.

So now what?

Should he travel the world? He already has done that through basketball. In the last two years alone he has been to Australia, New Zealand and Greece teaching at basketball clinics.

Live a daredevil’s life? Those who have done it will tell you nothing is more frightening than landing an airplane on an aircraft carrier, and Winter did that 82 times while training to be a Navy pilot during World War II. Four of his colleagues died ... and that was during the practice runs on the aircraft carrier Sable in Lake Michigan. The war ended before he was called to duty.

Maybe it’s time for more television commercials. He liked making that IBM commercial, the one where he drops in on a team (including former NBA stars Moses Malone, Bill Laimbeer, Muggsy Bogues and Detlef Schrempf), gives a to-the-point lesson on his triangle offense and charges an outrageous consultant fee.

“It’s been a great experience,” he said of his acting debut. “Not to mention the residuals.”

He got the gig because a player he coached at Northwestern, Chris Wall, now serves as a creative director for the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather.

When someone mentioned in a meeting that they wanted an old basketball coach, Wall said, “I’ve got the ideal guy for us.”

It’s an example of the type of lasting bonds Winter has formed throughout the years. Another Northwestern player, Billy McKinney, recalls helping Winter move his stuff from an apartment to a condo.

“You usually don’t have that type of relationship with a coach, where you would help him move,” said McKinney, now an executive vice president for the Seattle SuperSonics. “But he had that kind of impact on my life.”

And even though Winter has been telling McKinney that he’s going to retire for the last 10 years, McKinney said: “I’d have to see it first. I’d have to really see it.”

Winter thought he was ready to retire once. He and his wife Nancy had the Toyota truck packed up and were ready to head to her home state of Oregon.

That was 17 years ago.

That was before he even got to the good part of his career, the time when he coached the best of the best, won world championships and made tons of money.

That was before he got a call from an old friend asking him to join the coaching staff of the Chicago Bulls. The request came in 1985 from a guy named Jerry Krause, the new general manager of the Bulls.

Winter knew Krause from the days when Krause was a scout for the Baltimore Bullets, and they had always been friendly. When Krause agreed to pay him twice as much as he’d ever earned as a college coach, they were in business.

Winter was an assistant to Doug Collins, along with Phil Jackson. Four years later, Jackson replaced Collins. Two years after that, the Bulls won their first of six championships.

When Jackson came to the Lakers and wanted Winter to join him, it was like coming home. He went to high school in Huntington Park, went to junior college in Compton and played at USC.

It’s difficult to imagine Jackson on the bench without Winter sitting beside him.

“He’s been a great soldier and a student and sat along me and beside me for many hours of videotape,” Jackson said. “He’s made adjustments over these playoffs for a long time. I still don’t see why he won’t continue a consulting role and kind of find a way into it at some level.”

Jackson has heard the same thing from Winter every year, that he would have to sit down at the end of the season and decide if he wanted to come back.

Things do feel a little different this time.

“This is the year that he didn’t travel on the road with us, unless there were special situations,” Jackson said. “One time he did go on the road with us, he ended up in the hospital in the emergency room [after a bad reaction to a spicy postgame meal in Philadelphia in January]. That was really kind of an exclamation [point] behind that maybe this is a situation where it is nature’s turn to kind of dictate terms. This is a guy that’s defied age. He’s been a youthful man all his adult life, his mature life.”

The only accomplishment missing from his resume is a spot in the Hall of Fame. He has been nominated again, this time as a “contributor.” The inductees will be announced June 5.

So Winter hopes he’ll get in this time, after coming up short four times.

And he ponders what else there could be in this world. He’s not averse to change. After all these years he just learned to type, because lately he spends a lot of time at the computer sending e-mail and checking his investment portfolio. More new lessons await.

“I’m sure there’s a lot of other things in life other than just basketball,” he said.

Then again, “My idea is to get someplace where I can bring all my junk and just stay put.”

The “junk” consists of mementos he has collected in his career. And his most cherished items are his eight championship rings.

“I wear the last one, generally,” Winter said. “But I like ‘em all.”

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J.A. Adande can be reached at: [email protected]