Another book is inevitable, Phil Jackson’s third, from a basketball lifer who reads more than he writes. Devout literacy may be a more amazing achievement than nine souvenir rings, harder than coaching NBA championships from altogether separate franchises.
All of this awaits the Lakers’ overdue dismissal of the persistent Pacers, probably Monday, a story to be retold more loudly than it was in Chicago because one championship in Hollywood is, of course, worth six in the Midwest.
I see a title for one or both: “Laker Love Triangle,” or “How I Left My Wife for Shaq and Kobe and Found More Jewelry.”
Remember how Jackson left Chicago? On a motorcycle. Off he went to the rest of his life, gone without a wave or a regret, his leaving costing us Michael Jordan and Chicago’s place among NBA royalty. No one ever had a softer landing than old Swift Eagle, while we are stuck with fading scrapbooks and Jerry Krause’s bunk.
Jackson is no longer ours, nor is he June’s, his longtime wife and partner. She gave him the choice of basketball or life with her and he picked basketball. Not that he ever was really ours, not like Mike Ditka will be ours forever, alas.
Yet Jackson’s legend was fertilized among us, when his hair was thicker and darker, his beard an oversight and not a pretension. We have an obligation to keep him as he was.
Jackson is no longer, as he pointed out the other day, the same person who “stepped into the coaching waters in Chicago” and is presently “bathing in the ocean, for sure.”
Jackson has gone all West Coast now, dating the boss’ daughter, living at the beach, driving foreign sports cars. He’s again at the dawn of a basketball dynasty, for which he is due considerable credit. Anyone can coach Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, but so far, only Jackson has been able to coach them at the same time.
He got Michael Jordan to play well with others, too, Jackson’s greatest contribution to the Bulls. All the rest was smoke from a campfire consecrated by holistic hokum and complex sentence structure.
“Make the goal the path and the path the goal,” Jackson told the Lakers and they nodded as if they understood, not that you could tell Friday in Conseco Fieldhouse where they submitted listlessly to the Pacers. Jackson not only makes gibberish into wisdom, he manages to keep the players who must buy it from rolling their eyes and turning up the volume on their Discmans.
In what remains my favorite bit of Phil-speak, Jackson once intoned, “When your vision is based on a clear-sighted, realistic assessment of your resources, alchemy often mysteriously occurs and a team transforms itself into a force greater than the sum of its parts. Inherently, paradoxically, the acceptance of borders and limits is the gate to freedom.”
And this is how he got O’Neal and Bryant to play together? “He’s got the rings,” O’Neal said, using his famous Short Answer Method. “You listen to the man with the rings.”
And now they’ll all get rings, all the Lakers who listened and even the ones who didn’t, with a parade down Figueroa, a banner in the fresh rafters of the Staples Center and the same bull’s-eye on the back the Bulls used to wear.
The old rolling carnival and road show that was the Bulls of Jordan and Pippen and Rodman will belong to Shaq and Kobe and Phil. The NBA is grateful to be rescued from its scattered variety, from the grim cellar where Pat Riley lives and the temporary stewardship of San Antonio, giving us a place to look again. Advertisers and TV networks love that.
More Top Picks Best Backpack Leaf Blowers
Jackson’s challenge with the Lakers will not be the same as it was with the Bulls, for the will and fire of Jordan was sturdy and dependable. The passage was fresh and urgent and consuming, and the journey made up as it happened. With Bryant and O’Neal, still a utilitarian truce, with the temptations of Los Angeles not only for the players but for Jackson himself, and the Lakers lacking that killer competence, there may not be the core obligation to do it better the next time.
This has been a case of Jackson, the mystic, arriving with strange herbs and wondrous powders to anoint the Lakers and lead them to nirvana.
Indiana’s Larry Bird is leaving coaching after three years because he is convinced that three years is as long as anyone will listen to a coach anyhow.
Imagine how much sooner when they can only understand every third word.