Big Chief Stand Alone
By Bernie Lincicome
Another book is inevitable, Phil Jackson’s sixth, from a basketball lifer who reads more than he writes. Devout literacy may be a more amazing achievement than 10 souvenir rings, harder than coaching NBA championships from four distinct groups.
The other story of the Lakers skipping past Orlando to win these NBA Finals (Kobe without Shaq being the first) belongs to the most improbable of subjects, an old hippie with a world view beyond the gymnasium.
Maybe no coach has ever had a softer landing than old Swift Eagle, everywhere he goes or returns to after leaving, talent awaits his mystical influence. If not Shaq and Kobe then, Kobe and Gasol now, with a significant touch of Lamar.
Jackson’s legend was fertilized in Chicago, when his hair was thicker and darker. His tale was further amplified in Los Angeles, his image festooned with assorted local affectations, the soul patch, the professorial beard. Now his grandfatherly cheeks are as smooth and pale as milk, fat free, of course.
Why does this man ever stop smiling?
It is this simple. Jackson has reached the greatest coaching achievement since…well, since anybody. In any sport.
He has left Red Auerbach (9 titles) behind, and hockey’s Scotty Bowman (9 Stanley Cups). Jackson had already surpassed Paul Brown in football (7 titles in two leagues) and Vince Lombardi (5 NFL titles) and Casey Stengel and Joe McCarthy in baseball (7 World Series).
To think that this once-time bohemian heretic has become the greatest coach of all time is as improbable the aloha shirt replacing the cummerbund.
Jackson did so with great players but so did Auerbach and the rest. He got Michael Jordan to play well with others, Shaq and Kobe to play together. And now Kobe to be selectively unselfish with lesser help. All the rest is smoke from a campfire consecrated by holistic hokum and complex sentence structure.
“Make the goal the path and the path the goal,” Jackson has told and retold the Lakers until they pretend it makes sense.
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 I-Pods.
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.”
Jackson, the mystic, with all his strange herbs and wondrous powders to anoint the Lakers and lead them to nirvana, seems less and less sham and more and more shaman.
Jackson’s great strength is not in the limited alphabet of the game, the X’s and the O’s. Nor is it even in his grand and goofy stunts, like taking the team on a boat cruise around Manhattan or passing out unillustrated literature to be left behind in hotel rooms, unread.
Jackson is a facilitator, sort of a perfect master of ceremonies for the varied personalities and appetites that make up an NBA team. Jackson is a genius at fitting the secondary scraps together, giving a value to the eighth and ninth guy on the bench, to the rebounder, to the third option on the play.
All NBA coaches do this, but Jackson has been able to do it better than any other. While it might appear that the success comes only when the team’s stars are ready to step down amongst their supporting casts, what really happens is Jackson keeping the cast ready for when the Jordans and the Kobes and the Shaqs want to use them.
Jackson is the all-time ecumenical champion of covering his bases, or his head, or his campfire, as the case may be. Jackson and his convenient Buddhism and indigenous folk-faith and fundamentalist grounding call together a cosmic cocktail of compatible spirits to oversee his enduring success.
The way sports follows trends, with Jackson’s 10 championship rings as flashing runway lights to the one right way, I see future NBA coaches being required not to know the pick and roll but the Four Noble Truths and the recipe for buffalo jerky.
Phil Jackson. The greatest coach of all time. Imagine that.
