While impressive and deserved, the award to Phil Jackson as NBA Coach of the Year is not only tardy but inadequate. It does not begin to describe Jackson’s duties as front man for the rolling carnival and sporadic freak show that is the Bulls.
If it were only basketball, as it was mostly during the three championship years that Jackson did not win the award, Jackson would have been ignored once again.
“It’s right on time,” Jackson said. “I’ve often said it is the kiss of death. I hope it’s not.”
The 72 victories certainly helped because no coach had ever done that before. Dick Motta, the last Bulls’ coach to win the award, needed only to win 51, finish second and lose in the first round of the playoffs.
These prizes usually go to the coaches of overreaching second level teams, good choices this year being Doug Collins of Detroit and Mike Fratello of Cleveland.
But it took more than history, and more than coaching. Winning with Michael Jordan is expected, like counting on cracked ice in a stretch limo. What won for Jackson was his handling of the whole mismatched bundle that is the Bulls. He did it with dignity, with patience and with style.
Mystic, ringmaster, wet nurse, immigration adviser, Jackson has had to be all of these and more.
Like old Bodhidharma himself, Jackson spread the philosophy of the one reality, of the charmed circle and the sacred triangle, of the pack, of the team, until you expected him not to use X’s and O’s in his chalk talks but Native American cuneiform and ideograms.
I expect the final choice might have been between Jackson and the dalai lama, the edge going to Jackson because the lama couldn’t beat anybody off the dribble.
“I thought this year wasn’t as much work as in other years,” Jackson said. “But certainly some of the off-the-court work is as difficult as it is on the court.”
Jackson is as different from his performers and they are from each other. His greatest accomplishment has been to keep the whole teeming circus from collapsing on itself.
Ladies, gentlemen and children of all ages, in this ring we have the tattooed power forward, king/queen of the backboards, depending on what pops out of the closet today.
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This is a rare and astonishing sight, for those of you who have never personally visited the demimonde. He’s a cross-dresser, a provocative author and dangerous head-butter. See him throw his shirt, see him take his shoes off, see him apply eye-shadow.
In another ring, we have the world’s most long suffering second banana, once his own person, but again umbilically tethered to our featured attraction. He is a wizard of the hardwood in his own right, but unselfish and deferential, happy to cast a mingled shadow and clean up after the elephants.
And in the center ring, presenting the greatest basketball force on Earth. See him walk on air. See him spin and whirl and stick his tongue out. Make way, make way. He’s reinventing himself and needs all the room he can get.
Just off the main tent, we have the imported attractions, from eastern Europe, from southern Canada, from western Australia, from Detroit.
See them scowl and howl and occasionally leave their feet, big bodies, thin bodies, three-point shooters, man-up defenders, all the necessary others. Somehow Jackson has kept the whole menagerie involved enough to still listen to what he says and happy enough to tolerate one another.
Coach of the Year? At least.
This may be the greatest job of handling conflicting egos in the history of man, not counting Noah, of course.