The coach beat the tom-tom on game days. The instrument had routine purpose in the lives of the Native Americans, and he was determined it would have the same for his Los Angeles Lakers.
“I guess the drum is basically for gathering in terms of Indian customs,” guard Derek Fisher explained. “They would hit the drum so that people would come together. Whether it was time to eat or time to meet or whatever. He just does that on game days when it’s time for us to go in and watch film. It’s different. But that’s part of who he is, his life experiences. He chooses to share that with his teams.”
On occasion Phil Jackson also burned sticks of sage. He had done the same during his time in Chicago, where he would walk around the Bulls’ locker room with the burning sticks, waving them about when his team was struggling or facing a tough playoff foe. He would pause in front of each player’s locker, moving the smoking stick up and down. One time he stopped and waved the sage twice at Toni Kukoc’s locker. “He needs a little extra,” Jackson said.
He did the same with the Lakers.
“That’s done to drive away the evil spirits,” Fisher said of the sage. “I think everybody kind of knew that he enjoyed doing different things. And he kind of touched on the things that he would like to do when he first talked to us.”
At first, when they heard the drum and saw Phil Jackson chanting, many Lakers fought to suppress their snickers. Kobe Bryant had even read Jackson’s book Sacred Hoops in preparation for the season. So he knew that the coach liked to blend basketball with spiritual exploration. But even that didn’t prepare the young Lakers guard for the tom-tom.
“It kind of caught me off-guard,” Bryant admitted. “I didn’t know about that. I smiled. I laughed, as a matter of fact. It’s funny. He said, ‘You guys gotta get your hearts going. Just like warriors preparing for battle.’
“I said, ‘OK, Phil. All right.’
“Phil said, ‘Is your heart beating a little faster?’
“I was like, ‘No, Phil. No.’”
In Chicago, Jackson had not beaten the drum as insistently. It wasn’t necessary there. Over his years with the Bulls he had come to share a great intuitive feel for the game with Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan. From that shared intuition, Jackson developed a deep and abiding love for his Chicago teams. Even the Bulls’ employees who did not like him—and there were a few—could sense this love for his team, and they admired him for it.
Among his frustrations in Los Angeles was that his young stars showed little intuitive depth when it came to basketball. As a result, the coach found himself trying hard to love this Lakers team. He wanted his players to feel the game the way he and Jordan and Pippen had. He wanted to bring the Lakers together, to push them along to a single heartbeat. He wanted them to be a tribe, to feel bonds.
In Chicago, Michael Jordan had found great benefit in Jackson’s Zen approach and mindfulness sessions. He advised the young Lakers to heed Jackson’s ministrations, no matter how unusual they seemed, even though he himself had sometimes kept his own playful distance from them.
“Michael would always have some pithy or irreverent statement to make when Phil tried these things,” former Bulls assistant Johnny Bach recalled. “It was nothing disrespectful. Phil is very able to handle relationships like that. I kind of enjoyed Michael’s irreverence. It wasn’t harmful, wasn’t nasty. Michael’s humor added that little spark in the coach-player relationship. It was exciting. We would all ask, ‘What did Michael say?’”
Jackson searched for that same spark in his Lakers. Some of them did not understand him. Others were intimidated by him. But they all extended a measure of respect to him based largely on the fact that his Bulls teams had dominated professional basketball. They quickly came to see that the coach and his assistants brought an immaculately detailed approach to their work. As Fisher explained, it was the detail, all the little things, that made them a great coaching staff. So it was easy for the players to accept the tom-tom, as strange as the drumming seemed to them, as part of the package of that detail.
“Even until a couple of months ago it still was funny,” Fisher said late in the spring of 2000. “To see him and hear him walking through here chanting and beating on his drum. Sometimes he’s smiling, sometimes he’s chanting. Sometimes he’s just hitting it.”
“I wondered what he was doing,” Robert Horry said. “Everybody says he always does crazy things, so I was like, ‘This must be Phil being Phil.’”
Being Phil
For those misled by appearances, it’s easy to underestimate Phil Jackson. As a coach, he enjoys displaying that studied nonchalance on the sidelines, even to the extreme of pausing to clip his fingernails while his Bulls lost an overtime game in Dallas in 1998. His eccentricities and offbeat approach are very much a part of who Jackson is, but they also mask a coaching style completely grounded in discipline and fundamentals.
“I do unusual things, yes, but I’m very, very sane,” Jackson said in 1990, in the midst of his first season as an NBA head coach. “I’m a very centered person. I feel very much in control. I’ll know more after I’ve done it for a while I guess. Then I’ll know more about whether you can be successful without having to jump into a mold that’s been prepared for you. There’s no question it molds you. You can’t escape it.”
Contrary to those early fears, Jackson has somehow managed to avoid any mold whatsoever in the years since he offered that observation. In so doing, he has also set an unmatched standard for coaching success. His Bulls, featuring the incomparable Jordan, claimed their first title in 1991, then won five more over the next seven seasons. Jackson capped that run with a one-year sabbatical in 1999, then returned to the league to unite a once-fractured Lakers team and lead it to the 2000 NBA championship.
John Kundla won six championships with the Minneapolis Lakers (including one in the old National League before the Lakers joined the NBA), and Red Auerbach won nine while coaching Bill Russell’s Boston Celtics in the 1950s and ’60s. Then there was Alex Hannum, who won a title as a player-coach with the St. Louis Hawks in 1958 and later coached the Philadelphia 76ers to the championship in 1967, the only other coach to win titles with different NBA teams. And Bill Sharman directed the Utah Stars to the American Basketball Association title in 1971, then switched gears the very next season, guiding the Los Angeles Lakers to the 1972 NBA title. Longtime Jackson rival Pat Riley won four titles while coaching the Lakers in the 1980s and lost three other times in the championship series. From there, Riley moved to New York and coached the Knicks to the 1994 Finals, where he lost a fourth championship.
Jackson’s results have eclipsed them all in one fashion or another, but that hasn’t enabled him to elude his detractors, who readily point out that both his Bulls and Lakers teams featured the game’s dominant player in Jordan and Shaquille O’Neal. Yet Jackson’s many admirers quickly counter that between them, Jordan and O’Neal played thirteen NBA seasons without leading their teams to a championship. They only became champions when Jackson became their coach.
It’s not a new debate in the NBA, long known as a league dominated by the talent of players, not coaches. John Kundla coached his Minneapolis teams to those six championships, then had to wait more than forty years for election to the Basketball Hall of Fame. The knock against him? He coached great players such as George Mikan, Jim Pollard, Slater Martin, and Vern Mikkelsen, which led to the assumption that Kundla’s success didn’t require much effort.
“Sure he had great players, but he did great things with them,” Boston’s Red Auerbach said in fussing about the Hall of Fame’s long-running snub of Kundla. Indeed, Kundla spent his coaching career gulping milk to combat the ulcers irritated by the gnarly task of maintaining peace between feuding stars Mikan and Pollard. Pollard acknowledged the friction between them was “something that could have torn the team apart, but Kundla kept a very even keel.”
“Kundla gets no recognition,” Mikan agreed. “He did a great job of molding the team, taking care of the players’ idiosyncrasies.”
Although he was voted into the Hall with ease, Auerbach himself spent his career laughing off the critics who complained that he won only because of Bill Russell’s dominating center play. In fact, Auerbach coached the Celtics to eight league championships before garnering enough votes to be named Coach of the Year. Auerbach’s pat answer to his many critics was to simply light another victory cigar and puff away, further infuriating an NBA coaching fraternity seething with envy over his success and arrogance. “At first I didn’t like Red Auerbach,” a rival NBA coach once said. “But in time I grew to hate him.”
“Red was hated around the league,” longtime NBA player and coach Paul Seymour said in 1990. “He wasn’t a very well liked guy. He always had the talent. He was always shooting his mouth off.”
Having a great player like Russell made Auerbach a coach, said former Syracuse Nationals coach Al Cervi. “He’s the biggest phony who ever walked the streets of America.”
“Red was a very astute judge of talent,” said Lakers coach Fred Schaus, whose teams battled the Celtics for several championships and lost. “When you have a lot of stars, you have to keep them happy and playing as a team. Red did that. I didn’t like some of the things he did and said when I competed against him. Some of the things he said would bother me. But the guy who wore number 6 out there bothered us more. You had to change your complete game because of Russell.” Schaus said he would have loved to shove the victory cigar down Auerbach’s throat. “We came awfully close to putting that damn thing out.”
Auerbach readily acknowledged that his teams won those championships because of Russell, but it was Auerbach who drafted Russell and made his talent work for the team. Russell himself took over as player-coach after Auerbach claimed his ninth title in 1966, and coaxed two more championships out of the Celtics. At a function honoring Auerbach’s retirement from coaching, Russell told his mentor, “Personally, I think you’re the greatest basketball coach that ever lived. You know, over the years … I heard a lot of coaches and writers say the only thing that made you a great coach was Bill Russell. It helped. But that’s not what did it.
“Now this is kind of embarrassing, but I’ll go so far, Red, as to say this: I like you. And I’ll admit there aren’t very many men that I like. But you I do. For a number of reasons. First of all, I’ve always been able to respect you. I don’t think you’re a genius, just an extraordinarily intelligent man. We’ll be friends until one of us dies. And I don’t want too many friends, Red.”
The building of such relationships was essential for Auerbach. The Boston coaching legend even had a name for the bonds that developed between the players on his title teams: Celtic pride. From the first time he uttered it, the phrase rang with phoniness in the ears of his critics and opponents. Like all professional sports, the NBA from its earliest days has been a deeply cynical enterprise. In many regards, Auerbach was as hard-bitten as anyone who played or coached in the league. But his covenant with his players grew from the idea that their contracts would never be based on their statistics, only on their contribution to winning. That was particularly important for Russell, a shotblocking, rebounding machine who showed only a passing interest in offense. That covenant served well enough for the players’ commitment to each other. They trusted Russell to block the shots or snare the rebounds to ignite their famous fast break, and they trusted Bob Cousy, Bill Sharman, Sam Jones, K. C. Jones, John Havlicek, Tom Heinsohn, and a host of others to finish those breaks with a bucket. When each season ended in victory, they trusted Auerbach not to shortchange them at contract time.
Like many Celtics of that era, Hall of Famer Frank Ramsey, who was sixth man on seven of Auerbach’s championship teams, never had an agent. Ramsey recalled that he would sign a blank contract each season and leave it on the secretary’s desk in team owner Walter Brown’s office. Several weeks later, Ramsey would receive the contract in the mail with the amount he was to earn for the upcoming season filled in. Ramsey, who went on to a successful career in banking after his playing days, never made more than $20,000 in a single season, a level of pay he didn’t reach until his final two years in the league. “We had great teams,” Ramsey said in 1995. “I am not envious of the salaries they are making now. I don’t wish I was playing today. What we did back then was a part of history.”
All in all, that trust between Auerbach and his players added up to eleven titles in thirteen seasons. The degree of difficulty on that substantial accomplishment was that Auerbach achieved it on a relative shoestring, with no assistant coach and no scouts, in a league that usually featured eight or nine teams. As opposed to modern NBA teams, which employ dozens of front-office staffers, the Celtics of Auerbach’s day had fewer than a half-dozen. He did everything, from booking the team’s travel arrangements to scouting college talent, a workload that left him gray and exhausted long before his time. He began NBA coaching at age twenty-nine and retired at forty-nine, too worn out to continue.
Despite the burden he had faced, despite the fact that he had remained active for decades in managing the Celtics, Auerbach expressed no desire to work the bench in an age where coaches are flanked by a half-dozen assistants and a phalanx of scouts and personnel specialists. Asked in 1998 if he could duplicate his coaching success in the modern NBA, Auerbach expressed doubt. “It’s different,” he said. “The money has changed everybody. It’s changed them from the time they’re fifteen years old. They show some talent. The family gets in it. They talk to coaches, AAU coaches, whatever. They talk to agents. They change the whole thing as it used to be. It used to be fun. Years ago, the ballplayers would come to practice with a gym bag; today, they come to practice with attaché cases, followed by their agents, followed by the Madison Avenue boys or whatever. It’s entirely different.”
Auerbach said the perversion of big money makes it extremely difficult for a team or a coach to sustain success, to preserve the loyalty necessary to keep a championship team together. “How do you approach it because of the salary cap and other factors that have been involved in the game?” he asked. “I really don’t know. When a player today who is getting $6 million a year says to the coach or the owner, ‘Look, I want to be aware of any deal that’s made. I want you to go over it with me.’ And he tells that to the coach, too, and the coach says, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ The player tells the coach, ‘Look, I don’t have to take any crap from you. I got a no-cut, guaranteed, five-year contract, and if I don’t like you, I’ll get rid of you.’ And there have been a lot of cases where players have gotten rid of coaches. And those are, to me, your big problems today. The players are getting more and more power, and they’ve taken it over.”
This, perhaps, is what is most unusual about Phil Jackson’s success. In an age when players have the power of astronomical salaries and guaranteed, long-term contracts, he has managed to snare their hearts and minds with an unusual blend of charms. Perhaps no player in the game wields more power than Lakers center Shaquille O’Neal. A gifted giant with a mammoth contract that averages better than $20 million per season, O’Neal has been known to demand a coaching change or even the trade of a teammate. Yet as soon as Jackson took over as coach of the Lakers in 1999, the center gave his unconditional cooperation.
Why?
Because after eight seasons of having coaches accede to his every wish, O’Neal said he had finally found someone to stand up to him and insist on discipline. “Not to take anything away from the other coaches that Shaq’s played for, but this is the first time that I think he’s really bought into what a coach is selling and what it takes to win,” said Lakers guard Brian Shaw, a former teammate of O’Neal’s for three seasons with the Orlando Magic. “Some of the coaches, because Shaq is who he is, didn’t get on his case when Shaq wasn’t doing what he was supposed to. And Phil does. If Shaq’s not doing the job, Phil is the first one to point it out. He says, ‘Hey, you’re not doing this, you’re not doing that. Get your ass up the court and do it.’ I think Shaq respects that.
“I played with Shaq three years in Orlando,” Shaw explained in November 1999 as the Lakers opened their first season under Jackson. “Shaq is really the one making the adjustment. Phil doesn’t have to make any adjustments. He’s coached the greatest players to ever play in Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Dennis Rodman. They’ve won championships. They bought into his system and what he preaches. Shaq has that respect for him just based on that. Michael Jordan listened and executed. If he did it, then there’s something to it.”
“He has his ways. Phil has his ways,” says Ron Harper, who has played on four of Jackson’s championship teams, three in Chicago and one in Los Angeles. “Guys take hold of the things that he says.”
Somehow Jackson has managed the very difficult feat of blending fun and discipline and spiritual exploration for his teams, sort of like combining a trip to the dentist with a carnival ride. John Salley, who has played for Jackson in Chicago and Los Angeles, likens his style to the tough love of a friendly priest in a Catholic boys home, a father who uses the promise of sports to lure the boys to do good deeds. “That’s Phil’s attitude,” Salley explained. “We’re having fun. When we’re not having fun he lets you know. He says, ‘I don’t want to be here and not have fun. We have to have fun, and we have to win, and we have to be together.’”
As a member of the Detroit Pistons “Bad Boys” championship teams in 1989 and ’90, Salley had been an avowed foe, even a tormentor, of Jackson’s Bulls. But in 1996 Salley arrived in Chicago as a Bulls substitute. Like most outside observers, Salley had assumed that Jordan really ran the team. Then Salley had the opportunity to see Jackson at work. “Phil understands the game better than most people,” Salley observed at the time. “And he expects certain things that he knows his guys can give him. He gets the utmost respect from his players. A lot of people say Michael really runs the Bulls. But Phil runs this team. He runs the squad. He runs practice. He runs the film sessions. He splices the film. He organizes practice. He dissects the other team we’re playing against. He knows his stuff.
“He understands the players’ bodies. He understands when not to overuse them. He understands when he can rest you. He knows when to watch enough film. He knows when to push his players, when not to push ’em. He knows who to yell at, who not to yell at. He knows who can take it. And he treats you like a man, as opposed to downplaying you, or talking to you like you’re less than him because of his position. He’s a great coach. He laughs and smiles at life.”
“From the outside looking in, I always thought he was intimidating,” Brian Shaw said of Jackson. “Real serious all the time. But playing for him, I’ve found he jokes around and is real lighthearted. He wants you to come in and put in your work. He allows you to have input. I like that about him. Some coaches, it’s like, ‘I’m the coach. I’m the man with the power.’”
Many coaches, Shaw said, seem to tell their players, “I’ll do the thinking; you don’t have to think.” Jackson, though, wants his players thinking and questioning.
This insistence on fun and freshness has been Jackson’s means of battling the mind-numbing grind of the NBA lifestyle, circumstances that he had first come to detest as a player. “There’s a danger because you get on the treadmill of pro basketball,” he explained during his Chicago days. “You just keep running on the treadmill and you can’t get off.”
Asked how can a coach give himself to the game and not be consumed by it, Jackson replied, “You need diversions.”
Which helps explain the tom-tom, the burning sage, the meditation, and all the other trappings of his approach. Rather than put his 1960s counterculture experiences behind him like many of his baby boom contemporaries, Jackson has gloried in them as a coach, gaining notoriety for mixing Zen and Native American philosophy with proverbs from his Christian upbringing, and clinging to the Grateful Dead, Timothy Leary, and other icons of the period. It’s well known that he loves preaching to his players about the great white buffalo, or giving them obscure books to read, or having them pause amid the looniness of the NBA for a meditation session. “He’s our guru,” Michael Jordan quipped as the Bulls were on their way to an all-time best 72–10 regular-season record in 1996. “He’s got that yen, that Zen stuff, working in our favor.”
Though they may joke, Jackson’s players have come to see that his eccentricities aren’t merely something he does for effect. They lay at the heart of the beliefs he holds dearly. Just as important, they are his means of self-preservation, of protecting himself from the rigors and stresses of his job.
Jackson has long realized that the faith his players show in him is no small thing. “I believe that there is a tenuous trial sometimes between coaches and players,” he said in 1996. “I’ve found that I have the confidence of my group, so that they feel comfortable. And it’s not anything where if I try experimental things that they feel threatened or can’t deal with it. It’s sort of something where I’ve had an open working forum to try a variety of styles and approaches, all of which seem to be enjoyable to them. The only thing they don’t like is monotony and constancy. But we still make one thing constant, and that’s fundamentals. The one thing that we always strive for is to make fundamentals and execution a part of our game.”
All of those facets of his approach have added up to a magical mystery tour for a coach determined to be different. And circumstances suggest that the good times could run on for a while. Jackson celebrated his seventh league title over the summer of 2000 with the knowledge that he had a longterm contract paying him approximately $6 million per season and a team with two dominant players, twenty-eight-year-old O’Neal and twenty-one-year-old guard Kobe Bryant, under contract for years to come. Auerbach retired from coaching after the 1966 season with nine titles to his credit and 938 career regular-season victories. While it was assumed that someone would eventually surpass his total for regular-season wins (which Lenny Wilkens did in 1996), it had been almost unthinkable that someone could reach Auerbach’s championships total. However, Jackson’s success in Los Angeles in just his first year as coach there has suddenly made his catching Auerbach a distinct possibility.
How could a strange duck like Jackson pull off such a feat in an age when all the factors go against such success?
It’s a question envious competitors continue to ask. If anyone knows the answer, it’s probably Tex Winter, Jackson’s longtime assistant and verbal sparring partner. He’s studied Jackson up close for the past fifteen years and has been an integral part of the proceedings. One of the keys is Jackson’s insistence that, while basketball is the heart of the endeavor, the whole thing has to be about much more than the game itself.
“Phil recognizes that there are a whole lot of things more important than basketball,” Winter says. “He doesn’t take himself too seriously. We all take basketball pretty seriously at times. Even then, he’s inclined to relax. I’m amazed at times in the course of the game how he sits back and lets things happen. He likes people to be able to solve their own problems, and so he gives his players the reins. On the other hand, when he sees they’re out of control, then he starts to pull them in a little bit. I think this is his strength, the way he handles the players and his motivation, his personal relationship with the players. That’s borne out by the fact that they’ll accept his coaching, they’ll accept the criticism, even though sometimes it’s pretty severe with certain players. They accept that because it’s who he is, because he’s Phil.”
One of the fascinating elements of the Jackson story is how Winter has factored into it. The two first got to know each other in 1987 when Jackson joined the Bulls as an assistant coach. Over his decades on the bench, Winter had been the head coach at five colleges—Marquette, Kansas State, Washington, Northwestern, and Long Beach State—and had served as head coach of the San Diego/Houston Rockets in the 1970s. His specialty was the triangle offense, a system of team basketball that required stars to share the ball with lesser players. His Kansas State teams of the late 1950s and ’60s hovered atop the national polls, and Winter enjoyed success against the rival Kansas Jayhawks. In fact, it was Winter’s Kansas State team that defeated Wilt Chamberlain’s team in the Big Eight conference in 1958, leaving the gifted giant so frustrated that he decided to leave Kansas early to play with the Harlem Globetrotters. For Winter, it was the ultimate victory of team basketball over the brilliance of an individual player.
Winter was mostly retired in 1985 when Bulls GM Jerry Krause, a longtime friend and admirer, lured him to Chicago with a handsome salary to be “the coach’s coach.” The only problem was, the Bulls’ head coaches at the time didn’t want to listen to Winter’s advice. First, Stan Albeck declined to buy into Winter’s view of the game. Then came Doug Collins, who saw Winter’s triangle offense as unworkable in the modern NBA.
Jackson, though, came to the staff as an assistant and quickly adopted Winter as his mentor. Winter helped guide Jackson when he made the transition to head coach in 1989 and was delighted that Jackson chose to use the triangle for the team’s offense. As the seasons of success unfolded, the older coach soon came to serve as something of a Merlin to Jackson’s King Arthur.
When Jackson moved to Los Angeles, one of his first requests was that Winter move with him. It didn’t take long for the Lakers’ players to understand why. “He’s seen so much basketball and all the players through the years, and he’s seen all the coaches coach,” Brian Shaw explained.
Indeed, Winter had once played junior college ball against Jackie Robinson and later wound up at Southern Cal, where he was a teammate of Bill Sharman and Alex Hannum playing basketball for the legendary Sam Barry. He also challenged for a spot on the U.S. Olympic team as a pole vaulter in the days just after World War II, when the standard weapon was a bamboo pole, but an injury ended his Olympic hopes. He served in the navy during World War II, and in the aftermath became one of America’s premier college coaches, getting his first head coaching job at age twenty-eight.
“Whatever situation you see on the floor, he can talk to you about it, because he’s seen them all,” explained Bill Cartwright, who had worked with Winter first as a player, then later as a fellow Bulls assistant coach. “You recall that everyone used to wear those Chuck Taylors, those canvas Converse shoes, and you talk to Tex, and he’ll tell you, ‘Oh yeah, I knew Chuck Taylor.’”
Having entered a new millennium with Jackson’s Lakers, Winter takes the NBA one season at a time. If you’re pushing eighty, as Winter is, that seems like a prudent approach. That’s not to say that anything about him suggests frailty. Winter is a tough old cuss with a boyish charm. Somehow his fifty-three years in coaching haven’t managed to turn his shock of hair completely gray. And it certainly hasn’t dampened his fire. Former Bulls center Luc Longley has harrowing tales of Winter being physically restrained from coming after him during timeouts. Winter gets deeply offended if the game isn’t played the way it’s supposed to be played, and Longley has been known on occasion to commit this transgression.
Upon becoming a Lakers assistant coach in 1999, Winter grew fond of describing 7′1″, 330-pound Shaquille O’Neal as “the most impressive physical specimen in the history of the game.” Actually, that distinction may belong to the seemingly ageless Winter himself. Lakers players got an indication of this after watching Winter spin through a jump-rope routine in his first days with the team. Most of them only knew him as the old guy who always sat next to Jackson during all those championship runs in Chicago, but the Lakers soon discovered a surprisingly nimble sort who was ready to challenge them or Jackson at every turn.
Brian Shaw recalled this scene from an early road trip during the 1999–2000 season. “We were practicing in Denver, and Phil had one of those heavy medicine balls. Tex was sitting on a table on the side. Phil took the ball and threw a bullet pass to Tex. The ball was coming right at him, and he jumped out of the way real quick. Then he got up and picked the ball up and fired right back at him. He was like, ‘Oh, you wanna fire the ball at me?’ Derek Fisher and I were sitting there, and we just started cracking up. We couldn’t believe that he could move that fast. I hope that if I’m fortunate enough to make it to seventy-eight that I can have as much spirit as he does.”
That spirit has often evidenced itself in Winter’s determination to criticize modern NBA athletes about their play. Winter considers himself a guardian of the game, an assistant coach so ancient and untouchable that he can say whatever he wants to a high-salaried young player. It didn’t take long for the Lakers under Jackson to get a taste of Winter’s fire. One night Brian Shaw took a shot when Winter thought he should have passed. During the ensuing timeout, the assistant coach pounced. Suddenly Shaw found himself in a heated exchange with a fire-breathing dragon who just moments earlier had seemed like an elderly gentleman. “He’s old school, and he comes at you sometimes in a way that you aren’t ready for,” Shaw said, recalling the incident with a chuckle.
Winter hadn’t been in Los Angeles long before his frankness chafed the supersensitive O’Neal, who would get angry at the criticism Winter offered about his play. Quietly fuming, the center would refuse to speak to the coach for several days. “He just kind of grunts his answers,” Winter said. “He’s got a heart of gold, but he gets mad at me and won’t talk. He’s very sensitive.”
Winter acknowledges that this confronting of players is just one of the pressures he has taken off Jackson over the years. “I make his job easier,” Winter says. “Phil knows that.”
“They complement each other,” said Bill Wennington, who played on three of Jackson’s championship teams in Chicago. “Tex is the one that’s gonna yell at you all the time. He’s the one getting on you about the offense, so Phil doesn’t have to do that.”
Jackson himself was quite capable of leveling his own criticisms at players, but the more strident evaluations often fell to Winter, who grew so bold during the final years of his Bulls tenure as to fuss because Jordan’s chest passes needed to be more fundamentally correct.
Winter also took it upon himself to regularly challenge Jackson himself, although it didn’t take him long to bump up against Jackson’s legendary stubbornness. If the head coach seemed too willing to sit passively on the bench without calling a timeout or making an adjustment, it was Winter who would jump in his ear, saying, “You better get off your ass and do some coaching.”
Their debates were legendary around the Bulls’ front offices, as was their friendship.
“Tex is Phil’s buddy,” Longley explained. “He helps him do everything.”
“Like father and son,” Wennington agreed. “They’ve got an understanding relationship. They do have their disagreements. But they understand each other well.”
On many days in practice Jackson would speak to the team, Wennington recalled. “Then Phil would ask the assistants if they had anything to say, and Tex would go off on a tantrum and Phil would say, ‘That’s enough, Tex. Shut up.’ He’d be getting heated up, so of course he would look hurt. But he’d stop and just let it go. Tex is a perfectionist, and sometimes he’d go off on a tirade and Phil would just be looking at him with a grin.”
Methodical Madness
Winter has often marveled at his friend’s intensely psychological approach to building a championship team. He says the key to Jackson’s success lies in his ability to orchestrate relationships with his players, his assistant coaches, his fellow employees, the media, his opponents—in fact, just about all the parties inhabiting the rare environment of the NBA.
“Phil is a master manipulator,” explained a longtime Bulls employee who worked daily with him. “You’re talking about the media, the players, the staff, everybody.”
Most important, Jackson possesses an uncanny ability to measure the impact of what he says and does on those around him, Winter said. “There’s method in his madness. Always. If you see him do something, you can figure it’s calculated. He might be impulsive every once in a while. After all, he is human.”
For the most part, though, if Jackson says or does something, it is a move intended to elicit a specific reaction from his players, from the opponent, from the media. Just the amount of effort and intelligence such an approach requires is almost mind-boggling in itself, said guard Derek Fisher after watching Jackson renovate the Lakers.
To go with that manipulative nature, Jackson possesses a wide array of mental powers and a remarkably persuasive touch with his players. Former Bulls assistant Johnny Bach said one of Jackson’s special gifts is the ability to establish a clear team structure. “We have in the league a lot of people who think they’re a lot better than they are,” Bach said. “And that’s what coaches have to deal with. Can you get five people to play a team game when all the rewards seem to be for individual achievement? You’re talking about fragile egos. Big egos. People who had status and can lose it in this game so quickly. Phil is great at defining roles and having people face up to what the hierarchy is … And he does it in a very intelligent way. He doesn’t do it to put you down. But he clearly addresses the problem.”
“Phil is a very fine counselor,” Winter explained. Jackson began establishing this approach almost from the very first moment he was named an NBA head coach in 1989. Using his counseling techniques, he spent hours upon hours persuading a frustrated Michael Jordan that it was important to trust his less-talented teammates. In one private discussion after another with Jordan, Jackson encouraged the superstar to alter his views of the role players on the Bulls roster.
Such an approach may have seemed easy to outsiders, but it wasn’t. Winter, who takes immense pride in the fact that he coached Jordan longer than anyone, recalled the fall of 1985, when he first joined the Bulls and began observing Jordan up close. “Like everybody else, I was in awe,” Winter said of seeing Jordan in practice for the first time. “His reflections, his reactions, his quickness, just his overall ability to play the game.”
The first thing he felt was intimidation, Winter said. Never mind that he was sixty-three at the time and owner of one of the best coaching reputations in America. Never mind that Jordan was a mere twenty-two-year-old heading into his second professional season. “I was in such awe of Michael that I was hesitant about even talking with him,” Winter recalled. “I watched him a great deal and learned a great deal about watching him and his mannerisms. But it took a couple of years before I felt comfortable even visiting with Michael a whole lot.”
Likewise, Jackson recalled the anxiety he felt upon taking over as head coach in 1989 and the strong urge he felt to please Jordan with his preparation and approach. It wasn’t the kind of anxiety that kept him awake at nights, Jackson said. But it was intimidating.
Jordan was very bright and coachable, yet at the same time he could be quite difficult and demanding. In a half-century of coaching pro and college basketball, Winter said he had never been around a personality as complicated as Jordan’s. “Personality-wise, he’s a study. He really is,” Winter said in 1998. “I’m really sorry that I … I guess I don’t have the intelligence to grasp a lot of things that makes Michael tick, that make him what he is. I think I analyze him pretty good, but he is a mystery man in an awful lot of ways, and I think he always will be, maybe even to himself.”
Without question, Jordan possessed tremendous personal charm, wit, and intelligence to accompany his legendary athletic skills. But it was the competitive drive that set him apart. One of Jordan’s traits was a biting sense of humor that he used to chide teammates and staff members who didn’t seem diligent enough in rising to his stringent competitive standards. And when the sense of humor didn’t seem to work, Jordan never hesitated to singe them with his anger.
Winter portrayed a Jordan who seemed to enjoy belittling his teammates “even to the point sometimes that he can get pretty vicious, even to the point that he’s insulting and ridicules them. But they seem to accept that because he does it in sort of a humorous manner … He gets a big charge for some reason out of belittling people and putting them down. I think he does it because he feels it challenges him to be better.”
“I can be hard when I want to be,” Jordan acknowledged when asked about the matter, adding that his sense of humor was one of his main tools in coping with the rigors of stardom.
“That attitude,” Jackson said of Jordan, “that tremendous competitiveness, sometimes makes it tough to be a teammate, because you see that tremendous competitiveness is gonna eat you up everywhere. It’s gonna eat you up playing golf with him next week, playing cards with him next month. That attitude of arrogance is gonna be there. It’s not always the best for personal connections and friendship. But it certainly makes for greatness.”
Former Bulls guard John Paxson agreed. “Michael is easily the most demanding athlete I’ve been around,” Paxson said, reflecting on his days on the team. “I don’t want any of that to sound like there’s something wrong with that, because there’s not … If you showed weakness around him, he’d run you off. He was always challenging you in little ways. The thing you had to do with Michael Jordan is you had to gain his confidence as a player. You had to do something that gave him some trust in you as a player. He was hard on teammates as far as demanding you play hard, you execute. So there had to come some point where you did something on the floor to earn his trust. That was the hardest thing for new guys coming in, and some guys couldn’t deal with it.”
In those early seasons of his career, Jordan displayed a growing frustration with his team’s inability to win and with the critics who said it was his fault because he didn’t display a desire to make his teammates better. They contrasted him with the Lakers’ Magic Johnson, who was in the process of leading his team to five championships.
As much as Jordan disliked those comments, there was some truth to them, Winter said. “He was a high-wire act at that particular time. I often said back then it was more a degree of difficulty, a gymnastic feat, with Michael in those days than it was a matter of basketball.”
It became Jackson’s task, then, to help this very strong, very frustrated personality relate to his teammates. In a series of wide-ranging discussions with Jordan that lasted over their many seasons together, Jackson sought to soften the rougher edges of this raging competitiveness. At the same time, the coach worked at deepening and strengthening his own relationship with the superstar. Over the years, Winter marveled at the growing bond between the two, which was stronger than any that Winter had ever seen between a coach and star player. Later, some in the Bulls’ organization would see this effort by Jackson as a power move to ally himself with Jordan against the team’s front office. Jackson would disagree, saying he was only trying to do his job of building a winning team.
On that basis alone, Jackson’s effort was remarkably successful. The coach began drawing out Jordan’s understanding of himself and the team dynamics. But the talks went far beyond basketball. “I think Phil really has given me a chance to be patient and taught me how to understand the supporting cast of teammates and give them a chance to improve,” Jordan explained in 1995, once he had an opportunity to reflect on the process.
In an interview given after he left the game, Jordan said he kept special memories of his one-on-one sessions with Jackson. “We talked about so many different things,” he said. “We used to get into philosophies more than anything.”
It was obvious that both he and Jackson enjoyed the talks immensely. “We used to challenge each other,” Jordan said. “I think I would learn from him, and he used to learn a little bit from a player’s perspective at that time. He had played years back, but I was giving him a thought process for a new era. It was a lot of give-and-take. Much more listening from me. Not disagreements but more or less concepts, with him saying, ‘Think about this and think about that.’”
Always, the implied message was greater trust. Jordan said that his trust in Jackson grew as time went by, with the team’s increasing success proving that what Jackson encouraged him to do had merit. As he won Jordan over and the Bulls began claiming championships, Jackson then employed his psychological approach in finding new ways to motivate the superstar and to keep offensive balance between Jordan and his teammates. From there, Jackson pulled together an array of influences to shape Jordan’s mental approach to performing under the intense pressure that comes with high-stakes situations.
“Phil is the master of mind games,” Jordan said at the time.
Faced every game night with the task of urging Jordan not to dominate the basketball in the fourth quarter, to include his teammates, Jackson spoke to Jordan through film clips inserted in the team’s scouting tapes. In 1998, as Jackson guided the Bulls to their sixth championship, he chose to insert clips of the feature film Devil’s Advocate into the Bulls’ scouting tapes. In that film, the protagonist’s wife slices her own throat with a shard of glass. Feeling the need to speak forcefully, Jackson showed his team a film clip of a possession where Jordan held the ball too long, then he cut to a clip of the woman cutting her own throat. Gruesomely effective, Jackson’s editing spoke to Jordan in a way that no verbal communication could.
The passage of time has only increased the sharpness of Jackson’s mental approach, Jordan said in March 2000 after observing his former coach’s success with the Lakers. “He’s still the master of mind games, only better,” Jordan said. “He challenges you mentally. That’s his strong point. You look at the Lakers. The Lakers haven’t changed personnel-wise. Their mental approach has changed, and that’s where Phil’s best qualities are.”
These mind games come in such variety that many times the people around Jackson proceed through the game without even being aware that they are participating, that he has engaged them in it.
“There’s meaning in everything, and why things are done not everyone always knows,” Bill Wennington explained. “Phil is a really deep thinker, and everything he says seems to have a lot of thought put into it. Most of the things he says have at least two meanings, and at times you have to figure out which one he means. But that’s part of Phil. He wants you to think; he wants you to figure out what’s going on. He doesn’t want you to do things just by rote, and he uses that term a lot. He wants you to think and know what’s going on and why you’re doing things.”
In the process of thinking about what Jackson has said to them, players sometimes discover that there was even a third or fourth intended meaning, Wennington said. “At times you think back and you find a third or fourth meaning that you maybe didn’t see right away. He knows how to push buttons and get guys going and get them to achieve goals that maybe other people can’t get.”
The same can be said of Jackson’s dealings with opponents, a practice that has drawn heated criticism over the years. His mind games with the other team usually involve sly comments made to the media, such as using the nickname “Van Gumby” for New York Knicks coach Jeff Van Gundy during the 1996 playoffs, or calling Sacramento Kings fans “rednecks” during the 2000 playoffs. Less obvious to the public is the way Jackson creeps into the minds of opposing players. Sacramento backup center Scott Pollard watched some of his Kings teammates fixate on Jackson’s comments during their first-round playoff battle with the Lakers in 2000.
“He’s great at working the media, I will say that,” Pollard said. “If nobody who was playing in the games, or coaching the games, or reffing in the games, paid attention to the media, then there would be no head games, then he wouldn’t be doing that. Some of us don’t watch this or read that crap. Some of us don’t pay attention to all that. Head games don’t work on some people.”
But others do pay attention, Pollard said. “People read that. If he says the other team doesn’t do this well, then the other team reads that and they start thinking, ‘We gotta prepare for this, because Phil says we don’t do this well. So we gotta do this.’ He’s an intelligent man. If nobody read that stuff he wouldn’t be saying anything. But he knows that everybody’s reading it, the other players are reading it, the other coaches are reading it, so you know he’s gonna throw out those little things here and there.
“He gets some people who read that and pay attention to it, and it hurts their feelings.”
On more than one occasion over the years, Jackson has sat back during the playoffs and watched an opponent chase its tail over things he’s said.
“I chuckle quite a bit at it,” Tex Winter says. “He’s an amazing coach. He’s unorthodox. He likes to play those mind games, the way he comments about the things that happen during a playoff series. He likes to get a point across, likes to jab it into the opponent. The things he presents in his media sessions, he’s calculating.”
He uses all the devices of propaganda, including strong suggestion with his own players in the playoff scouting tapes they review over the course of each series. Years ago, Jackson adopted from assistant coach Johnny Bach the technique of splicing snippets of other information into those scouting tapes, including bits of Three Stooges skits and other images, all used to suggest and emphasize points to the players. Jackson then expanded this process by showing entire feature films, spliced in pieces around scouting tapes, during the playoffs each year. “He’ll splice in little scenes from movies to try to send a little message,” explained former Bull Steve Kerr.
For the first round of the 2000 playoffs, he used American History X, starring Edward Norton, a film about the lives of neo-Nazi youths filled with racial hatred. The film concluded with a moving passage about the futility of hatred and included an appeal for people to listen to the better angels of their nature. This message reemphasized Jackson’s season-long efforts for Shaquille O’Neal to take a kinder view of Kobe Bryant.
But Jackson also played games with the film’s starker images, juxtaposing shots of the skinhead Norton with his swastika tattoo and shots of Kings point guard Jason Williams, a white player with a shaved head. There were even allegations, based on a report in the Washington Post, that Jackson used shots of Sacramento coach Rick Adelman with his mustache to suggest Adolf Hitler. Exactly how this was supposedly done is not entirely clear, because Jackson fiercely guards his scouting film sessions and the Tribe Room, the Lakers’ inner sanctum where he plays the tom-tom, chants, and pursues other group activities.
His mind games with opponents have made Jackson, like Red Auerbach before him, extremely unpopular with opposing coaches and teams around the league. “It’s unfortunate,” Winter said. “With the success he’s had there’s bound to be some natural jealousy. It behooves him to be humble and complimentary of other people.
“I think there’s a lot of resentment in the league because of the success he had in Chicago,” Winter added. “People seem to feel that Phil was lucky to coach Michael Jordan. I don’t think they give Phil the credit he should receive, but at the same time Phil should have been a little more humble. There was the impression that Phil rubbed it in.”
Clearing the Competitive Mind
Jackson also fiercely guards private “mindfulness sessions” given by psychologist and Zen enthusiast George Mumford. These efforts are in large part responsible for Jackson’s image as a “Zenmaster,” a tag he disdains because it elevates his status to that of those who have spent a lifetime engrossed in spiritual endeavors. Jackson’s certainly serious about his beliefs, but he’s no priest.
Mumford’s sessions make sense for professional athletes because they are aimed at reducing the stress of competition by using a mix of meditation, Zen, tai chi, yoga, and common sense. When Jordan spoke of playing “in the moment” as he performed spectacularly in carrying the Bulls to their later championships, he was voicing the theme of these sessions.
Jackson said he considers the Mumford sessions a competitive secret and usually declines to discuss them in detail. Many of his players rave about them, except for some veterans, such as Lakers forward A. C. Green, who gave sessions a lukewarm response for religious reasons.
“George is pretty much there to relax your mind and body. To try and help you resolve the stress that’s involved with everything,” Bill Wennington said of Mumford’s sessions. “He tries to get your basketball life, your whole life, in a peaceful, relaxed state so that you can compete. He doesn’t want you to be stressed out about anything. George comes in and tries to teach the players a way to relax and regain your focus in a couple of breaths. To go out there and say, ‘OK, I’m here, I’ve done this a million times before, we’ve gone over it in practice, and I’m just gonna go and do it.’ If you take it seriously, you find it really works.
“It definitely made a difference with Michael,” Wennington said. “You have to be in the moment. You can’t worry about what just happened, the basket you missed, the foul you made two minutes ago, because it’s over. You can’t worry about what’s gonna happen the next time down the floor. You have to be right there in the moment. It’s most important especially in the playoffs because that’s the time of year where you have to live for the moment. It doesn’t matter what’s gonna happen in Game 3 when you have to play Game 1. You have to be here right now to play basketball when it’s happening. George tries to get it where you’re only thinking about what’s happening right now. And you’re playing for that moment, and whatever is there is all that’s affecting you. The second after it happens it doesn’t affect you anymore because you’re now living here. If you can get that down and just do that, it takes a lot of the pressure off because you’re not worried about everything else.”
Jackson believes in getting his athletes to train their minds, to clear the stress out of the way so that they can be successful. Phil Jackson’s mind games add up to a very comprehensive approach, fun and victories for the believers and followers, and anguish and self-doubt for the opponents. In short, the Jackson formula is to take the mental pressure off your players and put as much as possible on the other team.
Viewed in terms of that formula alone, it’s easy to understand the loyalty Jackson engenders. That’s not to take away anything from other coaches, says Luc Longley, a former Bull who was traded to the Phoenix Suns, “but once you’ve played for Phil it’s really hard to play for somebody else.”
Mind Benders
Not everyone, of course, enjoys the Jackson approach. In particular, many Bulls staff members who had to endure his personality quirks were left harboring a long-burning resentment. Jackson’s battles with team vice president Jerry Krause spilled over into an ugly display in 1998, but he also had many less-public clashes with the team’s community services, marketing, and media relations departments. To many of these people, his mind games seemed unnecessary and sometimes cruel.
On more than one occasion, Jackson reduced staff assistants to tears with a good public upbraiding. Fans have often heard about the time he canceled practice and instead took the Bulls on a ferry ride in New York during the 1994 playoffs. What isn’t known is that Jackson stopped the team bus that day as it was about to depart for the trip and ordered a longtime team publicity assistant, the only female on the bus, to get off. According to team sources, the woman was devastated by the move and has never forgiven Jackson for an unexplained and seemingly unnecessary humiliation.
Other staff members simply learned to adjust to Jackson’s ways. They came to understand that for Jackson there were two groups: the players and immediate members of the team, and the rest of the world. Staff members belonged in the rest of the world, and Jackson didn’t like them getting too close to the players and team. This, of course, is an attitude found among other NBA coaches. “Phil was a good guy,” recalled one Bulls staff member who worked with Jackson a lot. “Phil was Phil. He would bust your balls a lot, a lot of times for no other reason than to exert that attitude that ‘I’m the boss.’ He just liked flexing his muscles. He was unpredictable. A lot of it was to keep you off-balance. If he saw you starting to feel comfortable at practice, in the locker room or on the team bus, he’d definitely put you in your place and let you know he was running the show. You always had to act subservient around him. He did that with the security guards, too. He had a way of saying things that would cut you to the bone.
“He wouldn’t let you get too comfortable. He liked to keep everybody on edge. It was his way of control. If you asked him about it, he would tell you that it was his way of fucking with you or playing mind games with you.
“He always used to say, ‘It’s like I tell my kids, always ask. Don’t assume things. Always ask.’”
This longtime Bulls employee said that as soon as he got comfortable around the team and forgot to ask if it was OK to make each move, then Jackson would cut him down to size. “Then, all of a sudden, you felt like a dick. He didn’t just do this to me, but to everybody. It was never personal. It was just his way.”
Another veteran Bulls employee said that Jackson had become increasingly difficult over the years in Chicago as the Bulls gained more and more notoriety and the demands on the coach increased. “You change a lot,” explained one staff member who worked closely with Jackson. “That’s because the landscape changes. We became the most popular sports team in the world. They all changed. The players. Phil. Everybody. Despite people thinking that he could be very, very arrogant, at times he could still be very funny. He could still take it all in stride and know that everything involving him was not the end of the world. But I can see where people would hate him. Those mind games after a while aren’t funny. Those games are easy to play when you got Michael Jordan on your side. When you got Michael, all your games are gonna work. All the dice come up sevens.
“Another thing you’ve got to remember,” the Bulls’ employee added, “is that Phil’s a former player. Just about all of those ex-players have this it’s-all-about-me syndrome. They’re taught to think that way and they never get over it. One other thing, Phil was the coach of the best basketball team in the world led by the greatest player in the history of the game. You have to have arrogance to coach a group like that. It’s gonna be tough day in and day out if you don’t. You do that job you better have some shit with you.”
Some Bulls employees saw Jackson’s approach as an outgrowth of his growing control battle with Jerry Krause. Anyone who held a private conversation with Krause over the course of the 1998 season heard his complaints that the Bulls’ success had gone to Jackson’s head, that he was an egomaniac hungry for power, that he had been disloyal to Krause, the one person who had allowed him back into the NBA, that the private Jackson was far different from the one admired by the public.
Winter was a friend and counselor to both Jackson and Krause. He had witnessed their success, then watched as the relationship began falling apart in 1996, leaving Winter playing the middle over the next two years trying to keep the two men working together for the team’s sake. Winter acknowledged that there were things that Jackson could have done to make the situation more harmonious. But Winter privately pointed out that Krause had a difficult personality and that Jackson had spent years bending over backward to accommodate that personality until finally wearying of that effort.
Krause, though, portrayed Jackson as a two-faced character who really had very little regard for his assistant coaches, a perception that certain Krause associates in the Bulls’ organization had sought to spread about Jackson. At the height of the hard feelings in the spring of 1998, one of Krause’s scouts went to press row in Chicago’s United Center to explain to a reporter the insidious nature of Jackson’s ego.
Perhaps no NBA general manager had a more investigative nature than Krause, nicknamed “the Sleuth” for his secretive approach to scouting and compiling information about players and coaches. A Chicago native, Krause had worked in and around the NBA for four decades, which meant that he had a voluminous knowledge of the league’s secrets. “I know where all the bodies are buried,” he had once bragged when asked about his own franchise.
It was Phil Jackson’s great misfortune that at the height of their discord Krause gained irrefutable evidence about one of Jackson’s own misdeeds involving the 1994 firing of assistant coach Johnny Bach.
Like Winter, Bach had been an elderly influence on Jackson when he joined the team. A spirited sort who was popular with Bulls players, Bach apparently fell into Jackson’s disfavor because he sometimes encouraged Jordan to follow his own inclinations and ignore the triangle offense. But Bach also was a strong supporter of Jackson’s, which leaves his dismissal as something of a mystery. There was something about Bach that annoyed Jackson. “We were very different people,” Bach acknowledged.
At the time and in later accounts, Jackson portrayed Bach’s firing as a result of Krause’s anger over the 1991 book The Jordan Rules by Sam Smith, a Chicago Tribune columnist. The text contained fascinating inside detail on the team’s drive to its first championship, detail that portrayed Krause as something of a buffoon and Jordan as somewhat ruthless and selfish. Both Jordan and Krause hated the book, and Jackson later joked that The Jordan Rules was one of the few things the team executive and star player could agree about.
Krause alleged later that Jackson deceived him into believing that Bach was the anonymous source for most of the inside detail. Krause learned in 1998 that it was Jackson himself, not Bach, who was the source for much of Smith’s book. How did Krause discover this? He learned it from Bulls chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, who was told of the situation in confidence by none other than Smith himself. Reinsdorf was not supposed to give that information to Krause, but he did.
Smith independently confirmed those events and Jackson’s role in his book. “Phil and the players had much more of a role than Johnny Bach,” Smith said in acknowledging that he had told Reinsdorf of Jackson’s part in The Jordan Rules.
Jackson, though, had continued to explain Bach’s firing as a result of the elderly assistant coach’s involvement, clearly a prevarication on Jackson’s part.
“It was Jerry Krause’s relationship with Johnny Bach that created a very uncomfortable situation,” Jackson said of the firing in a 1995 interview. “It made this have to happen eventually. It had gone all wrong. It was bad for the staff to have this kind of thing because we had to work together.
“Jerry basically blamed Johnny Bach for a lot of the things in The Jordan Rules. And there’s no doubt that Johnny did provide that information. Jerry felt that Johnny talked too much. And Johnny, in retrospect, felt that animosity that Jerry gave back to him, the lack of respect, so Johnny refused to pay allegiance to Jerry just because he was the boss.
“It had gone on for too long a period of time,” Jackson said. “I could have kept them apart, at bay from one another, I suppose for a while longer. But I didn’t like the fact that it wasn’t good teamwork. That was my staff and my area. I agreed to do it. I felt it was a good opportunity because Johnny had an opportunity to get another job in the league quickly. It worked out fine for Johnny, although I would just as soon have not put him through the disappointment, or have to go through the situation myself.”
“Phil lied to me,” Krause said in a 1998 interview. “Phil actually got Johnny fired.”
“It was Phil’s idea to fire Bach,” Reinsdorf said in 1998. “Phil told me that the bad relationship between Krause and Bach had made things impossible. It was Phil’s idea. Nobody told him to do it.”
Contrary to Jackson’s later assertions that things worked out fine for Bach, Bach himself said the firing came at a terrible time in his life, after the 1994 playoffs, just weeks shy of his seventieth birthday. The irony, Bach said, was that the coaching staff had probably never worked better together.
“At the end of that year I had every reason to think my contract would be renewed,” Bach recalled in a 1999 interview. “The first person that told me was Phil. He said, ‘We’re not gonna renew the contract.’ I was stunned. Before I could say much in defense, he said, ‘It’s really best for you that you do leave. The organization has made up its mind.’ I was disappointed. Shocked is a better way of saying it. I didn’t quarrel. I just couldn’t believe it. I went to see Krause and he said the same thing. I just got up and left. I had a lot of crisis in my life at that time. I was in the divorce courts ending a long-term marriage. I had to move. I thought everything was collapsing around me that summer. Then I had a heart attack. It was all a shock, and it took some time to believe and trust people again.”
An excellent coach, Bach was later hired by the Charlotte Hornets. He subsequently learned that he was supposedly fired for the inside information he provided to Smith. Bach said he went back and read the book three or four times looking for damaging information he might have provided. His quotes, though, were on the record and relatively basic.
“I didn’t see a single quote in that book that was out of order,” he said. “Sam is obviously a good investigative reporter. There was a portrait in there that Michael did not like, based on whoever gave it to Sam.”
The book “was quite an accurate portrayal,” Bach said. “I don’t think Sam painted someone as he wasn’t.”
Krause was supposedly distraught more than three years later to learn that he had been deceived into firing an innocent Bach. By then, Bach was working in Detroit as an assistant coach. One night when the Pistons were in Chicago to play the Bulls, Pistons executive Rick Sund told Bach that Krause would like a word with him. “I had mixed feelings,” Bach recalled. “You sort of protect yourself.”
He agreed to the meeting, however, and was more than a bit surprised. “When Jerry spoke to me he was emotional, and so was I. I always thought the organization had made that move, not Phil. I thought it was a huge concession on Jerry’s part to come up to me. I thought he meant it,” Bach said of Krause’s apology. “And I accepted that.”
Bach said he had continued to greet Jackson whenever he ran into him and even addressed the issue with Jackson when they had a chance to sit down man to man over a drink. What he told Jackson that night will remain between the two of them, Bach said. “I’d rather leave it be. Certainly he knew how I felt. I always thought we had a relationship that was strong enough. We had sat there on the bench together for five years. As an assistant coach you don’t always know about these things that are going on. It was always foolish, kind of an indictment that I could never defend myself. Now the whole thing is not important. Once it was.”
The incident, however, begged several questions. Jackson had coveted the opportunity to coach the Bulls, just as he had worked diligently to build a relationship with Michael Jordan. Why would he risk his job or that key relationship in his professional life by providing a reporter with unflattering information about his boss and his star player?
One longtime Bulls employee who worked with Jackson on a daily basis figured the coach provided the information to Smith because it helped him gain more control over his team. The end result of the book was that it served to further alienate Krause from the players, thus securing Jackson’s role as “the leader of the pack,” the team employee said.
As far as the negative portrayal of Jordan, it was the ultimate mind game, a matter of “‘Let’s get down on Michael. Let’s whip this guy and keep him in line for my purposes.’ It was his way of getting on Michael’s side by alienating him from the media,” the Bulls’ employee suggested. “That was why Phil always used the us-against-the-media approach, the us-against-the-organization approach, because if he did that, then he could be the leader of the pack. That’s why I’ve got a lot of qualms with the Zenmaster. You’re not even smart enough to get along with your own bosses and your own fellow employees during the greatest run in basketball history. So how smart are you?”
These voices provide two distinctly different perspectives on Phil Jackson, of those who work for him and those who work with him. What emerges in both is his determination to control the competitive environment he inhabits. Some he cajoles and charms into line. For others he reserves harsher methods. Regardless, his purpose beats as insistently as his drum, moving them about for designs that only he sees. Yet even those who don’t like him marvel at his mastery, at how he can do what no one else can.
Part of the employees’ resentment stemmed from Jackson’s insistence on shutting out everyone except the immediate group of players and coaches and trainers, thus dividing the organization into those within the team and those without. Jackson did this to increase camaraderie and group identification, but it led him to treat most approaching staff members as intruders. Regardless, the few staff members allowed a view of the team’s inner workings marveled at what they saw.
“He really did love his team, really deeply” explained a Bulls staff member who worked around the team daily. “And the team trusted him totally. He included every player, top to bottom. You really knew he cared about them, about the whole group, on the deepest level.”