They came from everywhere. The first were the Kootenai, probably ancestors of Montana’s prehistoric inhabitants from the west. Next were the Pend d’Oreille, followed by the Flatheads. They all settled in western Montana, west of the Great Divide, in the lower reaches of the Rockies. Later, in the 1600s, others came from the east, mostly seeking haven from the spread of Europeans, from whom they had acquired firearms. These newer inhabitants made their home on the region’s vast plains, east of the Great Divide.
The Crow got there early in the seventeenth century, having decided to leave the Great Lakes region well ahead of encroaching whites. Next were the Blackfeet, fine horsemen and warriors and the Crow’s natural enemy. They too abandoned the forests of the Great Lakes, migrating across the Canadian Plains and bringing with them their Algonquian dialect.
The Gros Ventre, a northern arm of the Arapaho, arrived in the 1700s, as did the Assiniboin, a Siouan-speaking people who took up residence on Montana’s northeastern plains. The rest of the Sioux—the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota—pushed into the picture late, around 1800, having been driven into the Dakotas out of Canada by white settlers. Known for their steam baths and their purification rituals after battle, the Sioux would hold a particularly strong fascination for Phil Jackson.
About 1830, the Northern Cheyenne finally abandoned their agrarian existence in Minnesota and moved to Montana’s southeastern plains to find a new life as nomadic hunters, as did the Chippewa and Cree, who also left Michigan and Manitoba and joined the divergent mix of Native American cultures, the different languages and customs, that collected in the vast region.
And so the Montana territory, with its abundance of buffalo, became their land of exile and their battleground. “We were hunting the same herds in the same place,” explained one Sioux legend, “and naturally we fought.”
Later, many of them would put aside their differences and join forces to defeat Custer and the U.S. Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn in Montana in 1876. Their prominent general was Sitting Bull (whose Sioux name was Tatanka Iyotake), from the Hunkpapa Lakota group, born at Grand River, South Dakota, in 1831. Said to have possessed an abundance of courage, wisdom, and generosity, he rose to lead the “Cante Tinza,” an elite warrior society. The concept of such a society struck a note with Phil Jackson more than a century later, and it became his means of defining a code for his players.
Like the native tribes before them, Jackson’s parents had traveled a rather circuitous path, both to Montana and to their beliefs.
The Jacksons were English Tories who settled in New Hampshire before the Revolutionary War. Once hostilities broke out between colonists and the English, the Jacksons moved to Canada, where they and other loyalists were rewarded with a grant of land from King George III.
Charles Jackson spent much of his early life back east in Ontario, working as a dairy farmer and lumberjack. His first marriage produced a daughter, Joan, but Jackson’s wife and a second child died from birth complications. Despite the fact that he had left school in the eighth grade, he enrolled at Central Bible College in Winnipeg as his grief drove him to the ministry.
It was there that he met Elisabeth Funk. Her people were German Mennonites who had found their way to Saskatchewan, among a wave of European immigrants that swept across Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There, Betty Funk’s father ran a livery stable and gained notoriety for his strength and for his ability to break broncos and wild horses. Phil Jackson’s grandfather was known for dealing with especially spirited horses by pulling them over on their backs while still protecting his own legs.
The outbreak of World War I, however, brought ethnic difficulties for the Funk family. The resentment of German actions in Europe meant that the Funks’ six children were forced to line up at school each day and sing songs and endure insults about the Huns. The circumstances also brought a chill to his livery business, which finally forced Grandfather Funk, as Jackson would later call him, to gather up his family and move south to Wolf Point, Montana, a hamlet on the banks of the Missouri River at the cusp of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. According to legend, this northern plains town got its name in fur-trading days when trappers had poisoned and trapped hundreds of wolves. The traders were unable to skin the wolves before the onset of winter, so the frozen carcasses were stacked by a river landing to await the spring thaw. When the trappers returned at the first hint of warming weather, they found Indians had occupied the landing. The ensuing standoff resulted in the rotting of hundreds of wolf carcasses, a putrefaction that for some time would greet steamboat crews moving up and down the river. Thus the name, Wolf Point.
Jackson’s Grandfather Funk found a new life in Montana running a boardinghouse and farming, but it was a meager existence verging on poverty. For good measure, he also rented out huts to Indians on a daily and weekly basis. It was as a child visiting his grandfather that Phil Jackson first came into contact with Native Americans. He recalls even then being fascinated by them, although he was strictly forbidden to go near the huts or attempt a conversation with them.
It was also at Wolf Point as a teenager that Betty Funk first heard the apocalyptic message of a minister during a revival. The Pentecostal movement had come to life around the turn of the century—first in a Topeka, Kansas, Bible college in 1901 when a young woman requested during a service that “hands be laid on her that she might receive the Holy Spirit.” From that event grew several apparitions of Pentecostal expression, the most notable being the Azusa Street Revival between 1906 and 1909 in Los Angeles, a porchfront ministry that drew crowds to a city neighborhood. Word of the unusual worship, and accompanying complaints, spread until the Los Angeles Times sent a reporter to investigate. He reported the Pentecostals, or “gift people,” as they called themselves, “breathing strange utterances and mouthing a creed which it would seem no sane mortal could understand. Devotees of this weird doctrine practice the most fanatical rites, preach the wildest theories, and work themselves into a state of mad excitement … Night is made hideous in the neighborhood by the howlings of the worshipers who spend hours swaying back and forth in a nerve-wracking attitude of prayer and supplication.”
Despite such negative reactions from the secular world, a number of revivals sprang up across the country, from Kansas to New York to Texas to Seattle, over the next few years, growing so rapidly that the Assemblies of God church organized in 1914 with the mission of spreading Pentecostalism around the world. In one short span, a hundred thousand followers were added in Wales alone, but that paled in comparison to the numbers reached in the American Midwest. By the 1920s, the movement had reached across the plains into hundreds of towns and farming communities.
It found Betty Funk in Wolf Point. She was a farm girl at the time but intensely driven, burning with frustration that the fall harvest had caused her to miss the first six weeks of school and prevented her from being class valedictorian by a mere two-tenths of a point. Her five siblings would all earn that valedictory distinction, and she seemed to live her whole life making up for the difference, caught in a belief that one should drive with unbending effort to realize God’s gifts. Upon graduating high school, she earned a teaching certificate and took charge of a one-room schoolhouse at age eighteen, a position so poorly funded that she had to burn cow chips in winter to keep her classroom heated. Her real love, however, was the King James Bible, which she devoured on a daily basis, making note of her favorite passages in her voluminous memory.
“Christ is the only answer,” she declared at an early age, a phrase that she intoned over and over again while raising her family.
Pentecostalism was a faith in which she could invest her intensity. She was immediately drawn to its mystical nature and the opportunity it provided to bond with the Holy Spirit. And there were other reasons to admire its practitioners. The denomination’s focus on prophecy proved captivating in those uncertain days. Just as important, Pentecostalism didn’t harbor the same sexism and racism of other denominations. From its very first days women and blacks had assumed leadership positions in the church. Specifically, the new movement pointed to Scripture to establish the leadership role for women: “Your sons and daughters will prophesy” (Joel 2:28, New International Version).
Betty Funk’s passion for her faith grew to the point that as her thirties approached she felt a calling. She gave up her teaching and went off to the Assemblies of God divinity school, Central Bible College in Winnipeg. There she found Charles Jackson, with dark eyes, curly hair, and an inherent kindness immediately apparent to all who met him. Just as important, he possessed a faith to match her own.
Phil Jackson’s recounting of family events varies in his two books, Maverick and Sacred Hoops, with one recalling that his parents actually met at the Bible college before Charles Jackson lost his first wife and the other suggesting that his first wife’s death prompted Jackson to go to divinity school.
Regardless, about two years after Charles Jackson and Betty Funk met in school, they were married on March 20, 1938. Soon after, they moved back to Montana to pursue their evangelistic calling with the Assemblies of God church. As evangelists, they had sworn an oath of poverty and concerned themselves with things other than worldly possessions.
In addition to Jackson’s daughter Joan, the couple brought three sons into the world, with Charles (Chuck) and Joe preceding Phil. The union of the Reverend and Mrs. Jackson in itself would set in motion a grand basketball karma: the game that was invented by a Canadian divinity student would come to feature a great coach, the offspring himself of two Canadian divinity students. In turn, this coach would become enthralled by what he described as the sacred, spiritual nature of Dr. Naismith’s sport.
Keeping the Faith
Because his father was an itinerant preacher, Phil Jackson moved about Montana as a child, living in proximity to the range of native cultures that he grew to love at an early age. He was born in Deer Lodge, in the southwestern mountains in the heart of what was once Flathead country, on September 17, 1945, barely a month after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Jackson’s parents actually lived in the shadows of towering smelter stacks in the nearby mining town of Anaconda, but a diphtheria outbreak there had forced Charles and Betty Jackson to go to Deer Lodge for the birth of their third son, Phillip Douglas.
The use of atomic weapons had brought an abrupt end to World War II, and in the days before the baby’s arrival, the federal government had begun announcing an end to the wartime rationing of shoes, meat, butter, and other items. The War Manpower Commission had lifted controls on manpower, and President Truman had moved to restore the civilian economy, bringing the resumption of consumer production.
The war’s end was a welcome development in the Jackson household, although it did little to ease either parent’s conviction that the second coming of Christ was at hand, a belief only reinforced by the atomic devastation in Japan. Over the two decades since Betty Jackson had first been influenced by the fire and brimstone of that revival preacher, her faith had grown in intensity and depth, spurred on by her maternal instincts and her desire to prepare her children for the hereafter.
“Every Sunday since I was born, the apocalypse has been coming next year,” Jackson once told Knicks teammate Bill Bradley in trying to explain his parents’ view of life. Jackson’s young world would be shaped by a growing awareness of his mother’s intense devotion and her focus on the moment of Christ’s return, what she called “the rapture of the saints,” and he would spend his childhood years anticipating that rapture.
If anything, the cataclysmic events of the world war had only hastened the Jacksons’ urgency to spread the word before the end of days. The arrival of this third son interrupted their busy work of revivals and thrice-weekly meetings. He was a large, active baby, thrashing about wide-eyed in his crib late into the night, which apparently presented such a disturbing sight that one fellow churchman of Charles Jackson came to believe that the infant was possessed and in need of an exorcism. The father declined that offer, but the baby’s active nature soon brought its own sort of intervention. He steered his stroller down a flight of stairs and sustained a concussion.
Life was not easy in those early years for the Jacksons. They worked together, with the Reverend Jackson providing the Sunday morning ministry and weekday visitations while his wife taught Bible classes, played the church organ, and offered up the evening sermon with a fiery fervor. They lived in the basement of their church for the first four years of Phil’s life while patiently waiting for the congregation to collect the funding to build a parsonage. With his parents involved in meetings and church business throughout the week, the toddler was often left to the care of others. In particular, he recalled staying with one older neighbor, a woman in her fifties, whose household was so foreign to him that he spent days afraid to go to the bathroom.
By the time Jackson reached age four, the family had packed up again and moved across the state, down into the lowlands to Miles City, near where the Yellowstone and Tongue rivers meet in the range country, a collection of vast ranches on what had once been lands inhabited by the Cheyenne. The time was 1949, when polio epidemics raged throughout the country. Though Jackson supposedly contracted the deadly, crippling disease, his family eschewed doctors and any sort of established medicine. Instead, they considered his recovery a sure sign of faith healing. At least one Assemblies of God minister was arrested and prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license during this period, as authorities in various communities tried to contain the more radical practitioners of faith healing. Faith, however, remained the abiding presence in the Jackson household, where daily life was shaped by a literal interpretation of the King James Bible. Like his brothers before him, Jackson was pushed from his first toddling moments to achieve all that he could in the honor of God. He was barely out of diapers when his mother informed him that at his age his brother already knew a thousand words.
From her third son’s earliest moments, Betty Jackson filled his world with passages from the Good Book and definitions from the dictionary, all to be memorized. She would write down one verse after another in large letters on sheets of paper and place them about his room. Nights were reserved for family games, but there were also fire-and-brimstone discussions, often drawn from the book of Revelation, in which the children were instructed to prepare for the rapture.
In virtually every way, the Jacksons’ spiritual beliefs shaped their children’s lives. Phil’s parents had no money to buy him a bicycle, but one fell off a passing car in front of the family house. Charles Jackson retrieved it, fixed it up, taught Phil to ride, then ran an advertisement in the local paper for the people who lost it to come pick it up. They did, and it would be more than a decade before Phil owned his own bike.
As he grew, Jackson would take his turn inhabiting the suits worn by his older brothers, suits that had already made many rounds in the Jacksons’ schedule of church meetings Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, a schedule that kept the Jackson children squirming in pews as many as twenty hours a week.
When Phil was seven, the Jacksons moved yet again, this time to Great Falls in central Montana, because Charles Jackson assumed the post of superintendent for all the Assemblies of God churches in the state, a position that required his constant travel to supervise more than seventy churches. The family’s already hectic schedule would come to include regular trips to the train station to drop the father off for yet another excursion.
It was in Great Falls that Phil would be struck by the increasing awareness that he was different from the other children at school, that his family kept its distance from the secular world. In time, young Phil came to sense that he was an outsider, one of those Holy Rollers who practiced religion with the strange zeal of speaking in tongues, what seemed like bizarre babble to other denominations. To Jackson’s mother, glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, was the grandest expression of her faith, a mystical experience in which she became filled with the Holy Spirit and began speaking in voices inspired by God. It was a true exhilaration she felt in these brushes with the Almighty, an experience that Phil wouldn’t come to fully understand until he later read William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. Other gifts of the Pentecostal faith included the laying on of hands, prophecy, and faith healing, all of which seemed quite foreign to secular neighbors, which in turn seemed to contribute to Jackson’s growing feelings of estrangement in grade school.
His older brothers were all too familiar with such isolation, the inability to understand their peers’ discussions of television shows and movies and other elements of the rapidly expanding popular culture. They had no earthly idea how to relate. “You could not go along with your peers in any easy way,” Chuck Jackson would later explain. “The separation had already been done for you early on, and you had no control over it—so you’re oddly objective and distanced from a lot of things most kids automatically accept and go along with.”
These isolating circumstances led Phil to believe he wasn’t popular, that he was different. At the same time, he and his brothers felt repelled by the religious practices that were supposed to be so much a part of their lives. The people they knew, seemingly normal people, would become wildly emotional during church services, falling onto the floor in convulsive states or babbling incoherently, all of which left Phil with a growing uneasiness.
Those feelings help explain his fascination with the Indian children who would show up at grade school. Their lives likewise seemed foreign; they didn’t attend regularly; and they, too, were outsiders, inhabitants of another culture trying to find comfort in the mainstream public schools. Because of the cultural divide, there was little opportunity to hold anything more than cursory relationships with these Indian children, Jackson once recalled. But he was aware of them and filled with curiosity about them.
He began fantasizing that he was a Native American living in the 1850s before their world was overwhelmed by European encroachment, or even that he was an adopted Indian child. He went to the library and checked out every book he could find on Indians and Indian culture, bringing home an armload of them—as many as he could carry—to read and read again, picking through the details of the Native Americans’ sad demise and their spiritual approach to life.
In many ways, this appreciation for Native American culture was one of Jackson’s strongest connections with his mother. Having been raised in proximity to the Fort Peck Reservation, Betty Jackson had a familiarity with Native Americans, and in later life her church work would extend to the reservation. In college and as a young NBA player, Jackson would conduct clinics and other outreach efforts to the Native American community. Those who saw the efforts and knew the Jackson family considered Jackson’s efforts an extension of his mother’s influence.
Years later, when he would reveal the nature of his beliefs about Native American spirituality, some observers, including opposing coaches, would assume that it was just so much blarney, that he had come to his views much later in life, as a function of the hippie lifestyle he had followed as a New York Knick. As a result, Jackson’s adult fascination with Native American lifestyle was often greeted with derision, as if it were superficial, some New Age idea that he had gleaned from popular culture. To the contrary, it stemmed from the depths of his childhood, as mysterious in its origins as the other elements of his rather complex psyche.
After Jackson wrote extensively about his beliefs in his 1995 autobiography, Sacred Hoops, New York Knicks coach Jeff Van Gundy, who had shared a contentious relationship with Jackson, derisively dubbed him “Big Chief Triangle,” a name that other NBA coaches and even some Bulls staff members began using to refer to Jackson behind his back during the final months of his tenure with the team. In interviews with reporters, Van Gundy began poking fun at Jackson’s strange approach, mostly in response to the derision Jackson had aimed at Van Gundy. “Our biggest concern in the offseason,” the Knicks’ coach quipped in 1996, “was to find as many Indian artifacts as we could.”
Although he never hesitated to needle an opposing coach, Jackson loathed the thought that his opponents would “demean” his beliefs in Native American spirituality, perhaps the main reason that Jackson sought to keep secret his tom-tom beating and other unusual coaching practices. In one form or another, these practices stemmed from those childhood feelings of being very different, of being an outsider.
“It was a fundamentalist type of belief,” Jackson would explain to the New York media years later. “There was no smoking, drinking, dancing, or movies. TV was allowed, but we didn’t have one. The only records were religious and classical and Christmas music. The only sectarian magazine in the home was Reader’s Digest.
“I can remember waking up one night when I was eleven and discovering no one was at home. I panicked. Thought this was it. The second coming. And I’d missed out. I ran from room to room turning on lights, but nobody was there. I thought they’d all left, all gone to heaven.”
In his autobiographical writings, Jackson actually recalled the panic as an afternoon event in which he came home from school and couldn’t find anyone. Figuring the rapture had started without him, he grew fearful and rushed all over Great Falls looking for his parents until finally he found them down at the radio station taping an evangelistic show.
Regardless of the exact details, it was clear that Jackson’s young life was dominated by a triangle of another sort: faith, family, and school. As a grade schooler, he discovered his increasing desire for recognition and acceptance and popularity, which immediately set him apart from his family in that his mother had taught him that it was nearly impossible to be popular and a good Christian at the same time.
If there was anything that made popularity possible, he soon discovered, it was sports, where his size and rawboned nature provided a decided advantage. Some of these characteristics Jackson inherited from his father, who was no pantywaist but rather a classic example of “muscular Christianity,” a movement in the faith to demonstrate that followers could be spiritual and manly at the same time. It was the same concept that drove Naismith himself to invent basketball at the School for Christian Workers in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891.
Like Naismith himself, Charles Jackson had worked as a lumberjack at a young age, and he would remain an avid outdoorsman his entire life. One of Phil’s vivid childhood memories was his favorite dog Smokey playing with severed deer heads in the family’s back yard. With a limited income, Charles Jackson used his hunting and fishing skills to feed his brood from Montana’s abundant supply of deer, moose, and elk. And he taught his sons to love the outdoors, to hunt and fish, leaving Phil with a lifelong taste for freshly killed game meat, although his relish for hunting was diminished as a child by watching his brother Joe struggle in the grisly task of finishing off a wounded deer by cutting its throat.
Other activities soon occupied Phil’s time, mostly baseball, swimming, skating, and playground games. Somehow Charles Jackson found the time to build the family a home with his own hands and even included a basketball goal and concrete court in the backyard, which seemed to be the start of big things. Red Auerbach once explained that basketball fascinated people with its unique physics. “Because the floor is smooth, and the ball is round,” the Celtics’ coach said. That magical appeal quickly took hold with Jackson. By the fifth grade, he was serious about his hoops. A physical education supervisor at school taught him some things about the game, how to shoot and use his size. Jackson took a quick fancy to the hook shot, which he practiced over and over again with his dominant left hand. That year, his fifth-grade team won the local championship, an event that sparked Jackson’s competitive fires.
He had always been a poor loser, whether it was family board games or athletic battles with his older brothers, but his intense dislike of losing grew even worse. He would storm away in tears after losses to Chuck or Joe. Outbursts of anger were not allowed in the Jackson household, and Phil would show a lifelong aversion to it. But he could barely contain his emotion over losses, and in turn that would become a recurring theme in his adult life. Phil Jackson would become known for many fine elements of his coaching, but graciousness often failed him as a loser, yet another factor that didn’t endear him to opposing NBA coaches.
“To be successful you have to like to lose a little less than everybody else,” Jackson would later explain.
The Jackson family soon faced bigger problems than the boys fighting over games, however. Phil’s two older brothers had reached adolescence, and Joe in particular, who had always seemed to challenge the family’s strict dictates, stepped up the intensity of his insurrection. By nature a kind, contemplative sort, the Reverend Jackson met these uprisings with his usual swift justice, a strapping with his belt in the basement. Phil himself recalled receiving only one such whipping, after which his father supposedly wept. Joe, on the other hand, became quite a challenge to his parents, a problem compounded by his father’s intense travel schedule that often had him on the road days at a time.
The Jacksons finally decided that the only way they could cope with the situation was for Charles Jackson to give up his superintendent’s job and return to a church as pastor, a move that would keep him home to more closely supervise the boys as they advanced through the difficult teen years.
In such circumstances, it is a Pentecostal minister’s obligation to find a church that needs him, a calling, a flock on which to focus his spiritual gifts. Charles Jackson looked about the region and identified two locations: one in the scenic Idaho mountains, the other on the harsh plains of western North Dakota. His family wanted the mountains. Instead, he chose the plains, telling his family, “It’s where the Lord wants me to go.”
North Dakota
And so the Jacksons packed up their belongings and headed up U.S. Route 2 through the heart of Montana’s big open country all the way to Williston, North Dakota, eighteen miles from the Montana state line and sixty miles south of Canada. The town sat just east of the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, at the geographic center of North America, where the arid prairie met a touch of the Badlands. The area’s gently rolling hills were buffeted by winds that swept out of the Arctic, a deep chill in the winter. In summer, the winds would often shift, morphing into a hot blast from the south accompanied by stupendous nighttime thunderstorms.
“Across its empty miles pours the pushing and shouldering wind, a thing you tighten into as a trout tightens into fast water,” Wallace Stegner wrote of the prairie. “It is a grassy, clean, exciting wind, with the smell of the distance in it…”
Bill Fitch had his own take on it. “You can fly a kite there forever,” the coach said of Williston.
“The wind blows like hell, all year long,” agreed Bob Sathe, a North Dakota schoolmate of Jackson’s.
Williston did have the smell of distance, with the horizon stretching out in every direction. Young Phil Jackson was there only a matter of weeks when he realized that on the prairie the sun and wind were seemingly always in your face, coming at you low, right off the vanishing point. The best thing about the wind was what it did for the sky, keeping it swept and clear and deep blue during the day, a grand spectacle that even people who lived there many decades could never quite get over. The days would begin with explosive sunrises and close with dramatic, blood-red splashes. At night, the spread of the stars could be overpowering, especially during the equinox, when the northern lights, the aurora borealis, presented a display of subtler, more intimate nature. Years later, when Phil Jackson was a famous coach and the local residents had finally coaxed him into coming back, he would insist on sleeping outdoors, forget the chill, because he wanted to see those lights, to get up close with that sky.
The price for all of this grandeur was the winters, which in a tough year could stretch from November to May, with the daylight fading not long after 3:00 P.M. It was then, at nightfall, that the wind had real teeth. It was then that you decided whether you really liked being a North Dakotan.
Williston had been founded in 1886, when the westward expansion of the railroad pushed all the way to the Missouri Breaks, in the heart of what had been fur-trading country. North Dakota, too, was a land once thick with Native American culture; much of the state had been occupied by the Mandans, those agrarian cousins of the Crow who lived in earthen houses and were pliable enough to scout for Custer’s cavalry.
The town of Williston had begun life as nothing more than a cluster of tents and shanties, known as “Little Muddy.”
“Just a scattering of old log houses and one damn thing and another,” said Bill Shemorry, a local historian. “The railroad was gonna make a good town out of it, and they tried. I suppose they did a pretty fair job of it.”
Needing to name the community, railroad officials decided to honor one of their investors, Willis James, by naming it after him, the only problem being there were already far too many Jamestowns, including one a few hours away. So the railroad concocted something different, figuring there would be only one Williston, a little jewel on the Missouri Plateau, the upper reaches of the northern plains that ran two thousand to three thousand feet above sea level.
By the time the Jacksons arrived seven decades later, Williston was a thriving hamlet of eleven thousand or so, riding on the wings of an oil drilling boom as wildcatters went for the region’s riches. In 1952, geologists had discovered the Williston Basin, a vast underground oil reserve stretching into parts of Montana and South Dakota, which meant immediate growth for the town and assured that its economy would be attached to oil’s wild ride, rising, then falling, booming, then busting, with the price of crude. Long a business center for the nearby farms and ranches, Williston quickly added drilling supplies to its economic mix, and its schools soon swelled with the children of oil workers.
The Jacksons were among a host of new faces arriving during the boom of the 1950s. Traditionally, the town’s inhabitants were predominantly Lutherans of Norwegian ancestry, immigrants drawn to the area in earlier decades as homesteaders, wheat farmers, and laborers. The community also included a goodly number of Catholics, Methodists, and Congregationalists. But the Norwegians made up the overwhelming majority. “When someone wasn’t Norwegian Lutheran, they were different,” Bob Sathe explained.
That certainly included the Pentecostals, with their emotional style of worship. The Assemblies of God services were housed in a small building that would later be converted into apartments. “The Assembly at that time, it was just this tiny little church,” recalled Audrey Olson, wife of the superintendent of schools.
In another setting, under other circumstances, it could have been quite difficult for a family like the Jacksons to move into a small, insular community. But the Norwegians were a friendly, open people, and Charles Jackson was a man who made a strong first impression with his quiet warmth. He represented a faith that was aggressive in its proselytizing, and he obviously worked at finding and helping lost souls. But the people of Williston could never recall him exercising anything but restraint in his approach with his new neighbors. “He was the type of person that wore very well,” recalled Leon Olson, the principal at Williston High who later became the superintendent of schools. “Some of them wear their religion on their sleeves, but he didn’t do that. He was very quiet, not someone who would be out in the crowd beating a drum.”
One of the first things local residents noted about Reverend Jackson was that he didn’t hesitate to climb onto the roof of his church to make repairs. “He really impressed me,” Olson said. “I don’t know too many pastors who could or would go out on that roof and do the physical work that he did.”
Another who took notice was Fred Eckert, a wealthy wheat farmer. “He saw Pastor Jackson up on the roof of that church early one morning fixing shingles, and Eckert said, ‘That’s the kind of preacher I want,’” recalled Dean Winkjer, a Williston lawyer. Eckert, who had been orphaned as a child, was eager to use his wealth to start a home for children. To do that, he needed to set up a foundation to provide for the funding. In those days, such a foundation needed a church affiliation. Eckert got to know Jackson, liked him instantly, and made the unusual decision to use the Assemblies of God as the church affiliation for the Eckert Foundation. Then Jackson was named to the board of the foundation as part of a team that would oversee the building of two children’s homes in Williston, one for boys and another for girls.
Although Eckert never converted to the Pentecostal faith, he admired Jackson and attended services at his church. “He wanted someone who was deeply committed to his faith, not someone going around looking for newer, nicer things,” said Olson, who also sat on the foundation board.
That relationship between the foundation and Jackson was so strong that it continues to this day, with each Pentecostal pastor who has succeeded Jackson inheriting his seat on the Eckert Foundation board.
It would be easy to understand that a couple such as the Jacksons, who had gained immediate acceptance in the community with the appointment to the board, might seek other high-profile relationships, including memberships in Williston’s various clubs and social organizations. The Jacksons, however, mostly kept to themselves and to their church duties. “They were the straight and narrow, but good, good people,” Audrey Olson said.
“They were satisfied with living out of the limelight,” Leon Olson agreed. “They didn’t seem comfortable pushing themselves to the forefront.” Mrs. Jackson, in particular, kept a low profile, with her focus on her family and her faith.
The small Assembly church and its simple parsonage sat just across the street from Williston High School and its field house. Little could Charles and Betty Jackson have fathomed that the field house would one day be named for their youngest son. The Jacksons moved into the parsonage when Phil was in the seventh grade, and it didn’t take long for conflict to arise. Jackson’s dog Smokey, a German shepherd, got into a fight with another shepherd belonging to another boy, Bubby Brister. Jackson remembered being amazed at Brister’s bravery in breaking up the snarling dogs, and the altercation proved to be the beginning of a lifelong friendship with Brister, who would go on to become a teammate, then a doctor in Wisconsin. He was the kind of friend that years hence Jackson could wake up with late-night phone calls to discuss whatever had bubbled up in his unusual life.
That dog fight was so horrendous that Brister’s uncle, Dean Winkjer, a lawyer who looked after his sister’s child in the wake of her husband’s death, thought he should visit with Charles Jackson. What Winkjer discovered was a distinguished gentleman whose manner communicated character. That, too, marked the beginning of a long-term relationship, as Winkjer and Jackson worked together for years on the Eckert Foundation board.
“My nephew and Phil became very close friends,” Winkjer recalled. It was a friendship driven by their mutual love of football, basketball, and baseball, and the two boys, both exceptional athletes, would form the heart of the town’s most successful teams.
The twelve-year-old Phil made a quick impression on other schoolmates as well. “He was the new kid in town,” recalled Bob Sathe, who would remain a lifelong friend of Jackson’s. “And he loved any kind of sport. Baseball, football, basketball, he was always bouncing any kind of ball.”
Or yo-yoing, another of Jackson’s pastimes.
If he wasn’t playing sports, he was reading. “His nickname was ‘the Book,’” Sathe remembered. “He read an awful lot of books that none of us would have spent any time with. He was always curious. About everything. Very active mind. Loved to get around all kinds of information. Always curious. And knew lots of stuff about lots of stuff.”
Perhaps no one ever made better use of a library card than Jackson. He particularly loved fiction, any story that could carry him away, but it helped if the story included tales about the West. Later, on Williston High’s sports teams, Jackson faced hours of bus rides across the prairie to play games. Leon Olson recalled being amazed at the amount of time Jackson spent reading on those trips. “A lot of kids wouldn’t be caught dead with a book on a trip,” the principal said with a chuckle.
Jackson packed bundles of them. He relished the likes of Dostoyevsky and Pasternak and attempted to stretch his mind over their depth of thought, even if he didn’t always understand.
The outgrowth of this reading, of his upbringing, was that he possessed a surprisingly mature intelligence for his age. “I have always found him challenging to be around. I still do. He was always restless in his thoughts. His mind was always moving to places that you didn’t expect,” said Sathe, who played guard on Jackson’s high school basketball team and shortstop on the town’s American Legion baseball team.
A large facet of this intelligence was Jackson’s sense of humor, which at times could befuddle those around him. “It could be confusing,” remembered Peter Porinsh, a former teammate. “When he had that smile on his face, that little smirk of his, you just didn’t know what he was gonna do.”
Jim Simle, Jackson’s baseball coach, recalled hauling him somewhere in a car, when they pulled into a lane beside someone Jackson knew. He used his long arms to reach out and unscrew the gas cap from the other car. Then as Simle drove away, Jackson grinned and deposited the cap on the front hood of the other car. “He didn’t even have to stretch to unscrew it,” Simle recalled with a laugh. That same sense of humor would serve Jackson well over the years, particularly when it came to the mind games he played with his NBA opponents and the amusements he foisted on his own players. In one fashion or another, from his humor to his demeanor on the bench, much of Jackson’s approach as a coach can be traced to the events of his young life in North Dakota, what many of Jackson’s associates describe again and again as an ideal place to grow up.
As Providence would have it, Williston sported a healthy community ego, particularly when it came to its high school sports teams. “The winters are long,” Sathe explained, “and athletics becomes an important part of everything that goes on. The kids are what the whole community revolves around. Our athletic facilities were second to none. The people dedicated their lives to the kids. The gym sat around 3,2.00, and it was filled every game.”
Radio station KEYZ followed the Williston Coyotes around the state, broadcasting every contest live—football, basketball, and Legion baseball. Although the shortest road game was a 250-mile round-trip and just about always required overnight travel, the school’s teams always took a strong contingent of fans wherever they went. A trip to the state tournament in Bismarck would easily draw four or five hundred Williston fans, each of them willing to spend three or four days out of town following the team, Winkjer explained.
“When you speak of the Williston Coyotes, we’re known across the state as the gung-ho type,” Leon Olson said proudly.
Such a community focus meant that the Jackson boys soon found a way to fit in, despite the family’s outsider status. Joe was brown-haired and 6′3″, but he was nearsighted, which prevented him from doing much in football or basketball, so he developed into a two-time state champion in wrestling. Six-one and blonde, Chuck was a track man, focusing on sprinting and high jumping. And Phil possessed those arms that would sprout to a 43-inch sleeve, which were connected to a most unusual frame. “He had this set of shoulders that never ended,” said Chuck Johnson, a Williston native who went on to become a sportswriter and author. “They looked like a folding table with extra leaves in it.” From the seventh grade on, Jackson discovered that his size and strange physique worked in football, basketball, and baseball. “It didn’t take long for him to make a name for himself,” recalled Bill Shemorry, who photographed just about all of Jackson’s high school basketball games for the Williston Plains Reporter, a weekly. “He was bigger than most of those kids. He was just damn good.”
In seventh and eighth grade, he was quarterback of the football team, center in basketball, and a developing pitcher and first baseman in baseball. Williston had a minor league baseball team, which contributed to Jackson’s early fascination with that sport. In time, he would step into the Williston spotlight, which at the time was the biggest show on earth to those involved, fans and players alike. “Phil became quite the celebrity at a very young age,” Sathe explained.
That newfound status didn’t come without its share of frustration and even heartache, most of it attributable to Jackson’s rapid growth. He was 6′1″, 150 pounds by the time he began his sophomore year at Williston, and on his way to adding another four to five inches over the next twelve months—thus the nickname Bones. “Bones is cheating in biology,” the kids at school would quip. “He’s counting his ribs.”
His size was enough to get him promoted to the varsity in both football and basketball as a sophomore. The two squads presented a stark contrast in the styles of their head coaches that would go a long way toward helping Jackson define his own approach to working with athletes. Harold Pederson, a former marine who had landed at Iwo Jima, was the taskmaster who ran Williston’s football team with tough love and a searing temper. Jackson quickly came to dislike him and later described Pederson in Maverick as “a bullet head who scared the hell out of me.” Pederson’s football teams were among the best in the state, and most in the community held him in much higher esteem than Jackson did. Sathe, for example, pointed out that many of Pederson’s players found the discipline and mental toughness that the coach instilled in them to be important in their lives.
“H.L. was a wonderful man. He was really hardcore, though,” explained Peter Porinsh, a teammate of Jackson’s who starred in football in Williston and went on to play football for the University of North Dakota. Pederson ran his physical education classes in strict military fashion, right down to the execution of calisthenics. “He was a real disciplinarian,” Porinsh said. “But he was really important for all of us.”
“I did not see him the way Phil saw him,” recalled Olson, the school’s principal at the time. “Harold Pederson had a tremendous amount of heart.”
Jackson was moved from quarterback to center his sophomore year, and his good friend Bubby Carlson moved in as the signal caller. The Coyote football teams would enjoy strong success over the next few seasons, and Carlson would go on to earn a football scholarship to the University of Minnesota. Jackson would also play tight end and linebacker over his years of high school football, but it was not his primary sport and Pederson never grew on him, although Jackson’s own teams would come to be known for exceptional discipline and mental toughness.
Jackson much preferred the coaching style of Bob Peterson, his deeply religious, mild-mannered basketball coach who after his days at Williston would go on to distinction in North Dakota Republican politics. As a coach, Peterson hesitated in making his decisions, almost to the point of appearing indecisive. Peter Porinsh laughingly remembered his early years on the basketball team when he wasn’t playing much; all the subs would scramble to sit next to the coach because when Peterson did make a decision he seemed to go for the player right next to him, no matter what the situation.
Peterson also wanted his players to make decisions and share some responsibility for what transpired in the game. “He left a lot of stuff for us to do,” Porinsh recalled. “He was a really gentle man. He never would get really angry.”
Some of Jackson’s high school teammates would note with interest years later that Jackson himself displayed an unusual patience as a coach, plus a knack for never rushing to make changes. Then there was Jackson’s ability to put the game in the hands of his players, to allow them the freedom to make decisions. Many of those traits seemed to stem from his days playing for Bob Peterson in Williston.
Peterson offered constant encouragement to his players, never seemed to get riled at a loss, and proved instrumental in helping Jackson fight through the early crises in his young life—most of them related to the problems that attend rapid adolescent growth, awkwardness, ill-fitting clothes, and self-consciousness.
“At fourteen or fifteen, he really started to grow, and nothing seemed to work right with his body,” Sathe recalled.
This adolescent clumsiness was easy enough to disguise on the offensive line in football. But varsity basketball, on its very public stage in front of the entire community, was quite another matter. Jackson seemed all shoulders and arms and wore thick-rimmed black glasses that contributed to an unusual countenance, which, combined with his tripping and thrashing about and his strange-looking left-handed hook shot, presented something of a spectacle to Williston’s intense fans. Jackson was shy and especially sensitive; he quickly picked up on vibes from the crowd and felt he was being ridiculed and made fun of.
“We had a group of older guys that had that western North Dakota cowboy mentality,” Porinsh recalled of the students in the crowd who made fun of Jackson. “He was so gangly and sort of all over the place. He was a misfit with a different religion. I think he was seen as a little bit of an oddball in a lot of ways. He was also an intellectual.”
The students who ridiculed Jackson did so out of envy, Porinsh said. “They wanted to put a guy in his place.”
Leon Olson recalled that it was obvious that Jackson was talented and intense and that he was going to develop into a fine young player. But in the interim the principal was so concerned about the situation that he sought a meeting with Peterson and the other coaches to make sure that they didn’t put too much pressure on Jackson before he was ready. Even Jackson’s friends weren’t entirely aware of the embarrassment he felt at the time. Later it would become very clear that Jackson resented what he saw as a public humiliation. Bob Peterson saw the difficulties and went out of his way to encourage Jackson.
“Phil needed someone to say it was OK if he messed up,” Sathe said.
Where the football coach demanded performance, the basketball coach took a more soothing approach. He never trumpeted his disappointment. In fact, Jackson was never made to feel that he disappointed Peterson. “I thought the world of him,” Jackson would later recall.
“I think Peterson in some ways was a surrogate father for Phil, at least in high school,” Sathe said.
How deep did Jackson’s appreciation of his high school coach run? Years later, the residents of Williston found themselves having a hard time getting Jackson to return to his hometown. But when Peterson became involved in a political race, Jackson readily appeared at a fund-raiser for him, never mind that it was for the Republican party and Jackson had become a liberal Democrat.
As for those he suspected of ridiculing him for his clumsiness, Jackson’s resentment of them grew the next season when he became a very good ball player. Those critics all seemed eager to jump on his bandwagon then. “By the time that he hit his junior year people really started to appreciate him,” Peter Porinsh recalled. “Then they knew he was somebody special.”
But that resentment would remain something of an unresolved issue in Jackson’s adolescent life. As might be expected, it wasn’t his only issue or perhaps even the largest one.
With his body rapidly changing and his perspective maturing as well, Jackson was moving into the first stages of defining himself. Like his brothers before him, what he found was something distinctly different from what his parents had sought for him. It was perhaps Betty Jackson’s greatest disappointment that all three of her sons rejected the vision of faith that so engrossed her. Chuck recoiled so strongly as to leave Christianity almost entirely as an adult, and Joe became a psychologist who turned his interest to Eastern religions. Of the three, only Phil defined his soul as essentially Christian, with that well-publicized flavoring of Zen Buddhism and Native American spirituality.
The boys would bury their father in 1979, digging his grave themselves as he would have expected them to do. But Betty Jackson would live on, her mind clear, her faith strong, well into her nineties. She would spend her later years in a Bigfork, Montana, adult home, watching from afar as her youngest son gained unimagined fame and fortune. Even as he coached the Chicago Bulls, she held out the hope that he might give it up to return to the faith, to answer the call to serve a church as a pastor. “My mother still tells me, ‘Fifteen hundred people witnessed you being given to God, given to the service of the Lord,’” Jackson said in 1995. “She really sees that as the fulfillment of my life, not basketball. I guess in some small way she considers me a success, certainly by financial standards. But spiritually? She has her doubts.”
Those doubts began with early adolescence, when each of her boys was required to establish his own spiritual identity. Jackson recalled that the summers for his family were marked by tent revivals, large regional gatherings of the Pentecostal faithful that provided Betty Jackson an enthusiastic audience for her evangelism. It was only in this setting that she would accept the spotlight, but when she did she could be quite persuasive.
These gatherings were greeted by Phil in his early years as an opportunity to play with a host of other children, to get lost in their world of fun beyond adult concerns. Then one summer the proceedings took on new relevance. The time had come for Chuck to profess his faith and to be baptized in front of hundreds of witnesses. The oldest Jackson brother wept during the public ritual, something he rarely did, and Phil recalled being impressed by the emotion and meaning of the experience. But it also marked the nearing of his own coming out as a person of faith.
It was supposed to be the beginning of Jackson’s adult relationship with God, where through prayer and meditation he would open himself to the Holy Spirit and be infused with “the gifts,” the main manifestation of which was the ability to speak in tongues. Joe confided to Phil that when his turn came he had faked it. Phil, however, offered his best effort, praying and meditating as directed. But he told God he wouldn’t give up athletics, no matter what. He underwent a public baptism, and his night for receiving the Holy Spirit finally came. He spent hours, until after midnight, waiting to be filled by the Spirit and to give voice to the tongues, but the evening was uneventful, other than his whimpering and brief bouts of tears. Finally, he was allowed to go home to bed.
His mother remained hopeful, spending many nights at home praying with her youngest son. Phil’s feelings of failure persisted for several years thereafter, as did his mother’s growing concern. Many other children in the faith were already leading church services. Jackson struck a fine figure at church, a gawking adolescent sprouting overnight out of his hand-me-down suits, a good son, given to standing with his father outside the church greeting worshipers. In the choir, he carried a strong tune, first as a tenor and then as a bass as his voice matured and deepened. Residents of Williston could see strong traces of that adolescent at church in Jackson long after he became a famous coach. “My father had a certain carriage and a certain character about him that made him distinguishable,” Jackson recalled in 1995. “They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I’ll run into relatives, and they’ll say, ‘Gee, you look just like your dad. The way you carry yourself, the way you speak to your team.’ I’ll get a kick out of that because there’s a lot more anger and ire that goes into coaching than goes into the ministry. But there is something to it. All my life, I had to carry myself as a minister’s son. I pulled a certain status. It makes a responsible position easy, things like wearing a suit and moving in crowds.”
Beyond appearances, however, other elements of his family’s background proved more complex for him as an adolescent. As he perceived it, the Holy Spirit, or at least “the gifts,” eluded him until he, too, began to pull away from his parents’ sphere of influence, finding any means possible, mostly athletics and other school events, to avoid worship services and any in-depth involvement with Pentecostal faith.
“Even at fifteen or sixteen years old, he was always bumping up against his religion, trying to sort that through,” Sathe recalled.
Jackson knew this situation troubled his mother, and he would later recall that she brought a great tenderness to her efforts to deal with him. He wished that there was some way around the situation. But communication and understanding travel a two-way path, and at no time did Betty Jackson ever venture across the street to watch her son play basketball. In fact, some of the people involved in Williston High athletics could never recall meeting Jackson’s mother despite the fact that her son had become the town’s brightest star.
Each game night, as the crowds gathered at the field house across the street to watch her son compete, Betty Jackson remained at home. The Reverend Jackson hardly missed any of the boys’ athletic contests, but she seemed to be emphasizing a point, that no athletic contest should be elevated above the act of worship. In all likelihood, she sat home praying for her youngest son on those nights that she didn’t attend his games.
Bob Sathe, however, cautioned against reading too much into Mrs. Jackson’s absence. “Phil is an awful lot like his mother,” he said. “He is very competitive, and he gets that from her. She is a wonderful lady. She may not have been at his games, but she was always very supportive of Phil, very proud of his accomplishments.”
A few years later, once he had joined the New York Knicks, Jackson returned home and brought with him teammate Bill Bradley, who was struck by the similarities between Jackson’s religious family and Bradley’s own parents in small-town Missouri. The one difference that perplexed Bradley was the apparent distance between the people in the Jackson household and the seeming loneliness it produced.
Indeed, Phil Jackson recalled that in his junior year in high school, when his sister had married and gone away and his two brothers had gone off to college, he was left alone in the house with his parents and discovered he didn’t really know them all that well. He loved them very much, but their world was not his.
Rising
The summer of 1961 belonged to Roger Maris, who belonged to North Dakota, then the state’s most famous athlete. Schoolboys across the Dakotas followed the New York Yankees outfielder through that special but turbulent season as he hit 61 home runs to break Babe Ruth’s single-season record.
Jackson and his American Legion teammates in Williston kept one eye on Maris and one eye on their own fortunes. Over the next two seasons, Jackson would develop into a prospect, rangy at first base when he played there and absolutely terrorizing on the mound when he pitched.
“He had a wonderful fastball and a breaking ball that was incredible,” said Bob Sathe. Jim Simle, the baseball coach who also served as an assistant in basketball and football, thought so much of Jackson’s abilities that he sat the young pitcher down to explain that probably his best chance of playing professional sports was in baseball. “I don’t think that he ever had a run scored on him in tournament play,” Simle recalled. “And with his size he was a fine first baseman.”
Simle said Jackson was so enthused about baseball that he also coached younger kids in the Babe Ruth League and umpired Little League games as well. In those days, with the umpire in Little League standing behind the pitcher, the lanky Jackson presented a comical sight towering over the infield.
Bill Fitch, the University of North Dakota basketball coach, had also dabbled in baseball scouting, and he had first heard of Jackson through the baseball scouting grapevine. Fitch, though, heavily recruited Jackson for basketball and downplayed his baseball abilities, encouraging him to decide on a future in hoops.
“It was the right choice,” said Fitch, who went on to coach in the NBA with Cleveland, Boston, Houston, New Jersey, and the Los Angeles Clippers. “He couldn’t find home plate with a Geiger counter.”
“He did have a little trouble with control,” Sathe admitted when discussing Jackson on the mound. “I never saw anybody stay in the box on that sidearmed curveball of his.”
Coach Simle, however, disagreed with Fitch. “Phil had excellent control,” he said, adding that he also had a great release. “As tall and long as he was, it seemed like the ball was at home plate before he even released it.”
Sathe always wondered what kind of pitcher Jackson could have been if he had trained in a warmer climate. The warm months were so few in Williston, it hardly allowed time for a big-league prospect to develop. Jackson himself would wonder the same thing over the years, privately harboring a fantasy of playing big-league baseball, a dream first stoked during the summer of 1961 when Maris hit 61 homers yet obviously struggled with being in the limelight and dealing with reporters’ probing questions.
“I was able to take from what happened to him, the shyness he had,” Jackson would say later of his experience following Maris’s exploits. “I was an extrovert, I did have a voice, and I was able to be myself, without having to hide [as Maris did from the pressure that year].”
Indeed, Jackson obviously possessed a burgeoning sense of self, of identity, despite the adolescent problems he experienced. For that, much credit was due his parents—especially his mother, with her determination to push her children to do their best. Jackson took piano lessons, played trombone in the school band, and acted in high school productions. The Jackson clan still focused its Saturday nights on the dining room table for family games, especially Carooms, what Jackson would later jokingly refer to as “Christian pool,” a rectangular board on which participants would flick wooden disks. When it came to cards, the family usually opted for hands of Rook—perhaps because the cards were faceless, free of graven images and the corruption they might bring. Jackson was allowed to go to school dances, but he wasn’t permitted to participate—not that it mattered much, because he didn’t know how to dance anyway. In that regard, he really wasn’t that different from the other boys in Williston. “None of us knew how to dance either,” Bob Sathe recalled with a laugh.
Still, it was hard not to want to try the Twist, the new dance by Chubby Checker, just one craze in a vast pop culture explosion ushered in during Jackson’s high school days. The new music by Chuck Berry, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and a host of other nascent stars was bold, provocative, openly sexual. It brought a new energy and a new way of thinking. Young people loved it, and parents feared it.
As might be expected, Jackson craved the many new elements of popular culture, although he wasn’t rebellious in going against his parents’ strict rules. Yet these circumstances conspired to make him particularly beholden to athletic competition. The closest opponent for Williston High required a 250-mile round-trip. Others were much farther, meaning that the Coyotes’ away games just about always featured an overnight trip, which required Jackson to miss Friday nights at church. His involvement in sports provided just the opportunity he sought to pull back from his family’s religious intensity. It also allowed him a peek at the world outside. Even those who had televisions in Williston in those days had access to only two channels, but to Jackson those two channels offered an overwhelming sensory bombardment. To save on expenses, the school would pack six or seven athletes per room on those road trips. Jackson’s teammates chuckled to find him up early on Saturday mornings, long before the TV channels had even come on the air, waiting with the tube turned on in anticipation of what it had to offer.
“The first thing that Phil wanted to do was get up on Saturday morning,” Sathe recalled. “He had that test pattern on the screen and was waiting for the cartoons to come on.”
If the test pattern fascinated Jackson, it isn’t hard to imagine what delight he derived from the array of televised offerings. He was smitten by the rush of images and longed to sit in a movie theater as his friends did to take in a feature presentation on the big screen. He wouldn’t realize that fantasy until Labor Day weekend of 1962, at the start of his senior year at Williston, when he snuck out of the house and stole away to the drive-in movies with brother Joe. They saw Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, beginning Jackson’s long and amusing relationship with cinema, a relationship that he would exploit again and again as a basketball coach.
By his junior season in Williston, Jackson had sprouted to a certified beanpole, 6′5″ and 160 pounds. He presented quite a bony spectacle, with his thick black glasses. “He was all shoulders and arms, and he wore those glasses,” Jim Simle recalled. The arms were particularly important in gathering his teammates’ misses and cleaning up on the offensive boards. He averaged 23.3 points per game that season.
In his memoirs, however, he recalled being possessed of a babyish attitude about competition, what he saw as a whining approach that left him looking for excuses and blaming others. Beyond that, Jackson felt that he lacked natural leadership qualities. He said it wasn’t until he was into his junior season that he began to change, and his turnaround was prompted by one of his basketball teammates, who also played football, jumping in his face during the fifth game and telling him to grow up, that he was gutless, and that he just might get smacked.
Jackson admitted to being frightened by the incident, and he noted that the team went on a winning streak afterward, highlighted by his improved play. Porinsh, who was the senior captain of the basketball team that year, said he didn’t recall whether he was the intimidator Jackson referred to. Porinsh and a couple of other players were late joining the basketball team because of their football commitments. Jackson did not play football his junior year, so he had been practicing before the others arrived on the scene. “We had all come off the football team,” Porinsh said. “We all came in with a sort of tough attitude. I think he got tougher with us around.”
Porinsh downplayed the incident, pointing out that Jackson was driven to improve in basketball without any goading. “It was obvious he really wanted to be good,” Porinsh said, adding that Jackson was quite capable of dishing out punishment. “Nobody wanted to get underneath the boards with him,” the former team captain pointed out. “If one of those elbows hit you in the head, it was just like a knife.”
As for Jackson’s perception that he lacked leadership skills, his former teammates failed to see that. In fact, they saw just the opposite, that he possessed extraordinary leadership for a high schooler, a condition that developed in the atmosphere developed by Peterson.
“Phil led in a different way,” recalled Porinsh, a year older than Jackson. “He was not a rah-rah type. He just had this intensity on his face that told you he really meant what he was gonna do.”
Sathe, a year younger than Jackson, saw him as something of a player-coach, even at that age, who did much to direct the team on the floor. “His senior year, he became a very dominant force physically, but he was even more dominant as a leader.”
Both Sathe and Porinsh said they believed Jackson’s ability to be honest and direct with people was the factor that drove his success then, as well as later as an NBA coach. As he matured in Williston, he showed an ability to approach a teammate about an issue without creating an incident or damaging team chemistry, Sathe said. “That was one of the things about Phil. He was respectful of who you were, but he had the ability to challenge you.”
Jackson and his Coyotes improved dramatically that junior season. They became so good, in fact, that they made it all the way to the state championship game, where they lost to a team from the little town of Rugby, which was led by another player of distinction, Paul Presthus, who was about Jackson’s height but who possessed a smoother set of offensive skills. The Coyotes tried to play man to man, but Jackson recalled that he couldn’t contend with Presthus and the team had to switch defenses, to a box and one. Presthus, meanwhile, enjoyed a 44-point afternoon, and Rugby won by 10.
Jackson considered Presthus his main rival, and the loss was a decided setback. But he returned the next season at 6′6″, 175 pounds, with more muscle. Simle explained that there was no weight training for Williston’s athletes in those days, but if there had been, Jackson’s already rapid development might have reached phenomenal heights.
Jackson was also the team’s only returning starter, meaning he took on an even larger role in Peterson’s patterned scheme. “We had an offense that could be described in five words—‘Get the ball to Phil,’” Bob Sathe recalled with a laugh. The regular-season highlight of this approach was Jackson’s 40-point game against Minot in mid-February.
Jackson averaged about 23 points a game, but the Coyotes struggled early in the season as new starters found their way. Although the schedule included some disappointing losses, including a 66–39 demolition at the hands of Presthus’s rugby team, Williston managed to finish 14–6, good enough to qualify for the state tournament, which the Coyotes approached with some apprehension.
On the drive all the way across North Dakota to the tournament in Grand Forks, Jackson’s team stopped at a gas station. There Jackson tripped on a service station cord and plunged headfirst through a glass door, shattering it. In a later newspaper interview, Peterson remembered his instant panic that Jackson had been disemboweled. Instead, the team’s star center got up and brushed himself off, embarrassed but unhurt. “I knew we were in good shape then,” Peterson said.
Indeed, Jackson overcame that bout of clumsiness to turn in an impressive showing in leading his team to the state title. There, as in many of his other high school contests, he displayed a presence of mind that would become his trademark as a coach. “I have never seen anybody play an athletic event as intellectually as Phil did,” Bob Sathe said. “I never saw him choke under pressure, and we had a lot of those situations. He was always so steady.”
In the first round against Grafton, he scored 27 in a handy win and left the game at the end of the third quarter. Williston beat Minot Ryan in the second round to advance to the championship against Grand Fork Red River, where Jackson sparkled, scoring 35 while leading his team to the championship and earning Most Valuable Player honors.
The highlight of the contest was Jackson’s stealing the ball from Grand Fork’s guard Ron Bergh and going in for a dunk. Most Willistonians remember it as a stupendous dunk, but actually any kind of slam qualified as “stupendous” in those days. “It was a critical point in the game,” Bob Sathe recalled, “and he went down and dunked it. It was quite a play, especially for a bunch of white kids from North Dakota.”
“I had never seen a dunk in a ball game,” assistant coach Jim Simle recalled. “Dunking was not legal in our state at the time. They disallowed the basket.” Regardless, the play pumped up the Williston faithful and took its rightful place in North Dakota’s athletic lore.
Years later, when he made a public appearance in North Dakota honoring his athletic achievements, Jackson spotted Ron Bergh, who had gone on to become a high school coach, in the crowd and made a joking reference to the play. “That, I guess, kind of made me a folk hero in the state of North Dakota,” Jackson said of the dunk.
In the locker room after his team’s championship victory, Jackson encountered University of North Dakota coach Bill Fitch for the first time. Ruddy-cheeked and reeling off one quip after another, Fitch made a strong appeal to sign Jackson for his team. Actually, Jackson had collected a number of cards and letters from various college coaches across the country, the first being a note from Lefty Driesell at Davidson College in North Carolina. The big competition for Fitch, though, came from the University of Minnesota, which offered the prestige of a Big Ten athletic scholarship. The Gophers were then coached by John Kundla, who had won six pro basketball titles coaching the Minneapolis Lakers. Jackson made a recruiting visit to Minnesota, where he met briefly with the older, gentlemanly coach. Much later, he and Kundla would come to share that rare, three-member coaching fraternity of men who had coached pro basketball teams to six championships or more. But at the time, Kundla’s easygoing manner was no match for Fitch’s nonstop banter and energy. The North Dakota coach braved a cross-state trip in a wicked snowstorm to speak at Jackson’s high school basketball banquet. Fitch sealed the deal by joking and guffawing throughout the presentation. He, too, was a tough former marine, but he had a sense of humor to match Jackson’s own.
Fitch had also lured a young assistant coach to help him, Jimmy Rodgers out of the University of Iowa, and he soon would become Jackson’s good friend. Years later, Fitch, Rodgers, and Jackson would all find success as NBA head coaches, with Rodgers later serving as Jackson’s assistant during the Bulls’ glory days. “That shows you how good a recruiter Bill Fitch was,” Jackson observed later. “He sold Jimmy Rodgers on the school and myself. It really is a distinct pleasure to have that fraternity.”
Meanwhile, as the Coyotes were tidying up the remnants of their season, Leon Olson began putting away the team’s uniforms. Broadcaster Bob Miller asked Olson what he planned to do with Jackson’s number 22 jersey. “You ought to save Phil’s number just in case,” Miller said, “because I think he’s going someplace.”
Olson wasn’t sure exactly why, but he took the number 22 home, where it found its way to one of his closets. It would not reappear until years later, when it looked strangely undersized to have fit somebody of such stature.