There they sit beard by clipboard, very much at home as Lakers, Phil Jackson and the rest, Tex Winter and Jim Cleamons, Ron Harper in the lineup, Chicago just an item on a resume now, with a new job, in a new town, at a new arena. Even John Salley, the once and momentary Bull, has been resurrected for no apparent reason.
What is so jarring is that Tex is poring over his charts as diligently as ever, and Jackson is on his feet whistling through his fingers to get Derek Fisher’s attention just as he used to Scottie Pippen’s, and there is even Chip Schaefer, once the Bulls’ trainer, working with Kobe Bryant with just as much concern as he ever had for Toni Kukoc.
Unneeded and unheeded there, they are all treasured here, the next new things in a town as inconstant as whatever works.
“They call me a savior,” Jackson says, showing proper modesty, “but it’s up to the players, really.”
It isn’t that it seems wrong that the golden and glittery Lakers (hey, Dustin Hoffman, don’t walk by Steven Spielberg without saying, hello . . . love you, baby . . . Rene Russo, you look fabulous) now employ and depend on Big Chief Triangle. But it is sobering to see all of them working against the Bulls.
More so than Mike Ditka against the Bears or Tony La Russa back in town in another shirt or any of the several Cubs managers showing up in assorted foreign laundry. More than a single player, a returning Jeremy Roenick or a Greg Maddux doing in his old team.
Jackson meant more than all of these to Chicago, the cruise director of the greatest Chicago sports dynasty, the man now more revered among these phonies (is that Andy Garcia eating oysters in the front row of a basketball game?) for doing nothing much yet than he ever was in Chicago for doing more than anyone ever imagined.
“I had no reflex at all about seeing those (Bulls) jerseys, none,” Jackson said after the Lakers had whipped the Bulls by a mere eight points Friday night in one of the worst basketball games anyone will ever see (which one of the Baldwin brothers is that yawning?).
Here Jackson is profiled by national news magazines and featured in national TV ads, so clearly the next new star of a franchise of stars, and looking fit and trim in matching jacket and pants, loving it all, loving fame, a much bigger deal than ever before.
“In Chicago we had this other big guy,” Jackson explained. “No. 23.”
What a strange bit of alchemy this is, for Jackson to have broken away from Michael Jordan and Dennis Rodman and Pippen, from that great and wonderful jangling circus, to be immediately anointed with wisdom and pedigree here as if no one ever doubted he had everything to do with what the Bulls once were.
“I have a new old saying,” said Shaquille O’Neal. ” `To be the best, you have to listen to the best.’ And he’s the best.”
Jackson, he means. Phil Jackson. Obviously, this is not the same simple spinner of campfire tales who managed to keep the Bulls in proper orbit around Jordan. This is the man with desperately needed answers.
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“They’ll have to adapt to my system,” Jackson says of the Lakers, “not me adjusting to who they are. I’m not going to bend to their will.”
This is the man who allowed Rodman his personal space, remember, who sometimes had to send scouts to find Rodman. And he is upbraiding his chief asset, O’Neal, for being a clunky and unreliable free throw shooter, who scolds his shooter, Glen Rice, in public for being lazy and lacking aggressiveness.
Not only has Jackson turned into a bit of a players’ bully, there is a smugness to him now, a man sought and listened to, well-paid at $6 million a year for five years and sure of why he is here. He is here to make a team (“Gen-Xers or whatever they are called,” Jackson says, not hiding a sneer) that should not need him think it cannot get along without him. And it does seem to be working.
Jackson will never duplicate here what happened in Chicago, but it is important to him that he do some of it. Once. Twice. That will prove his separate worth from Jordan as well as validate his place with Jordan.
Chicago is left with only the souvenirs of both of them.