The Cockroach Basketball League follows the tribulations of hard-driving coach Bob Lassner of the Savannah Stars, a team in the Commercial Basketball League—a fiction drawn from Rosen's own nine years experience coaching in the minor-league Continental Basketball Association. Lassner is an aging hippie and divorcé who hails from a Bronx tenement. His obsession with the game of basketball animates this kinetic, gritty ramble through the sport's minor leagues. Lassner is either red with rage or soft with compassion as he struggles to deal with his wayward players. His top scorer is selfish and arrogant; another player faces a grand jury for a point-shaving scheme; still others are drinking and taking drugs. Lassner also faces a meddlesome team owner, racial tension, and the threat of losing his job if he doesn1t produce victories. With The Cockroach Basketball League, Rosen provides a poignant portrait of men—both players and coaches—who may not ever make it to the NBA. Through this look at life in the minors, Rosen offers a unique perspective on college and pro basketball, media hype, and the psychology of dreams deferred.

From the author of the critically acclaimed, National Book Award-nominated novel Have Jump Shot Will Travel comes this players-and-coach's-eye view of life in the Commercial Basketball League, a collection of rag-tag teams just this side of solvency, where the owners and coaches are unscrupulous and the players are one step removed from stardom in the NBA... or the playground hustlers of White Men Can't Jump. In this fact-based novel that does to basketball what Ball Four and The Bronx Zoo did to baseball, Coach Bo Lassner's task of gearing up his team for the playoffs involves much more than orchestrating the on-court X's and O's. In a league filled with NBA hasbeens, wannabes and neverwillbes, it's a struggle just to keep the team's meddling owner out of the way and the players' minds off wine (in their milder moods), women and white stuff long enough to concentrate on the game at hand. In ribald, authentic inside detail, the author (himself a former coach in the real-life Continental Basketball Association) vividly captures the flip-side of the millionaire-ridden world of the NBA - where life truly is "a metaphor for basketball".

Crazy Basketball is the story of Charley Rosen's unlikely and crazy basketball journey--from the CBA to his role as commentator for Foxsports.com.

In less than 120 years an activity invented by one man to alleviate winter boredom for a college gym class has evolved into a worldwide multi-billion dollar enterprise. It is impossible for Dr. James Naismith, basketball's inventor, to have envisioned the extent to which his simple game would reach. Without major changes to his original 13 rules, basketball is now played in more than 200 countries by people of all ages. Thanks to basketball, players like Michael Jordan, Earvin 'Magic' Johnson, Larry Bird, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, and Shaquille O'Neal have become some of the most famous people in the world. The Historical Dictionary of Basketball is a comprehensive account of all forms of basketball_amateur, professional, men's, women's, Olympic, domestic, and international_from its invention in 1891 through the present day. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, an extensive bibliography, and over 600 cross-referenced dictionary entries on the people, places, teams, and terminology of the game.

A New York Times Notable Book Here is the story of an all-Jewish basketball team traveling in a hearse through Depression-era America in search of redemption and big money. A hilarious road novel, The House of Moses All-Stars is also a passionate portrayal of a young Jewish man struggling to realize his dreams in a country struggling to recover its ideals. Charley Rosen gives us basketball as a metaphor for life. Aaron Steiner, the protagonist of The House of Moses All-Stars, is a man very close to the edge. The former college basketball star has watched his dreams of being a successful player fall apart, his marriage disintegrate, and his baby die. In desperation he accepts his friend’s offer to join a Jewish professional basketball team—The House of Moses All-Stars—which is traveling on a cross-country tour in a renovated hearse. Aaron’s teammates—a Communist, a Zionist, a former bank robber, and a red-headed Irishman who passes for a Jew—are, like Aaron, trying to escape their own troubled pasts. As the members of this motley crew travel west to California through an anti-Semitic land that disdains and rebuffs them, they discover a nation grappling with social and economic collapse and fear of foreigners, in conflict with its own democratic ideals of tolerance and opportunity. Told with a rueful eye, The House of Moses All-Stars looks critically and lovingly at what it means to be an outsider in America.

More than a Game covers the years that follow the one featured in the ESPN documentary series "The Last Dance." After leaving the Bulls at the end of the 1997-1998 season—the year featured in the new ESPN documentary series "The Last Dance"—Phil Jackson had one year off and started to write this book—together with his old friend, fellow player and coach, the basketball novelist Charley Rosen. Then Phil took the LA Lakers coaching job, Rosen followed him there, and by the time they finished writing this book it was 2000 and Phil had won yet another NBA championship, the first of five he would win with his new team. In More than a Game, Jackson and Rosen look backward to their origins as players and coaches, forward to the future of the game of basketball, and linger in the moving target of the present—lavishing page after page on the Triangle Offense and all the ways it reveals the essence of the game of basketball they both love so much. This is Jackson in his prime, transitioning from the Bulls to the Lakers, a master of the art of winning, who would go on to claim more NBA championships, eleven, than any other coach in NBA history. As he writes in More than a Game of his newest championship team: "We won because our fundamentals were sound, because Shaq was so dominant and Kobe was so creative, but we also won because we developed a certain confidence in our ability to win."

Outlines a revisionist approach to management that instructs business leaders to think positively and become more effective by adopting a policy of non-interference for high performers, facilitating without micromanaging, and creating a culture of independence and trust.