Phil Jackson and his contemporaries entered college in the 1960s fully expecting to undergo a world of personal changes. What they didn’t expect, perhaps, was to emerge four years later from the haven of university life to discover that civilization itself had slipped its moorings and was adrift. Soon they, too, would find themselves adrift, their lives tossed about in the upheaval. It was as if the infrastructure of the world had come unbolted. “Slipping is crash’s law,” Emily Dickinson once observed. It was certainly the law of the ’60s and the early ’70s. Things slipped, then crashed, and what once had been was no more.
Years later the participants would look back at photographs of themselves during the period and wonder if they weren’t all wearing disguises.
Just about all of them found themselves making abrupt, unanticipated changes in direction. Peter Porinsh, Jackson’s friend and teammate from Williston, was a good example. He had graduated high school in 1962, a year ahead of Jackson, and accepted that football scholarship at the University of North Dakota. He prospered there, playing in the defensive backfield and graduating in 1966. He planned to be a coach, and in fact served as a defensive backfield assistant at North Dakota for the next season after he earned his degree. But then came a tour of duty in Vietnam in the infantry, and thoughts of coaching vanished. In the wake of his war experience, he found himself studying counseling and therapy, mostly trying to deal with the unfathomable events of his young life.
Porinsh recalled that during part of that difficult period Jackson had brought a small piece of stability to the chaos. “Phil did a really nice thing,” Porinsh remembered. “He started a circular letter about all the guys [from Williston and the University of North Dakota] and it went to those of us that were in the military. It went on for a while, a monthly thing that he would send out to keep us all in touch.”
The fact that Jackson had emerged from the sports-intense climate at Williston to become a professional athlete, a New York Knick no less, only enhanced his friends’ appreciation of the newsletter. All the guys from Williston watched intently each time the Knicks played, waiting in anticipation for Jackson to get in the game. “It was like a piece of us was there with him each time he played,” Porinsh explained.
About 1973, Porinsh traveled to New York and spent a night with Jackson in his loft in Chelsea, a night of partying made vivid in Porinsh’s memory by the ringing of the air hammer early the next morning in the machine shop directly under Jackson’s loft. Porinsh remembered his disappointment at Jackson’s brazen pot smoking that night. The young veteran couldn’t understand how an athlete could do that, especially an athlete who had all the opportunity in the world. Porinsh’s anger would be easy to understand. He had been required to serve his country, had seen his own opportunity dissipate into the crazy days and nights at An Khe, then had to return home to a world that expected him to resume his life as if there had been no detour into hell.
“I was a little bit strange at the time,” Porinsh admitted. “I had done my own share of pot.”
His disappointment cast the evening with an air of disagreement, but even that resolved itself in something Porinsh could accept. “Phil was just as open as you could be about that stuff,” he recalled.
Open, indeed, agreed Phil Berger, a New York freelance journalist and author who interviewed Jackson for a profile in the Village Voice about the same time. Berger said he arrived at the loft for an interview to find Jackson rolling a joint, firing it up, and promptly offering him a toke. Berger, who knew Jackson socially, declined the offer and began pondering whether to mention it in his story. He decided against it, figuring the revelation would cause undue harm to his friend’s reputation. But Jackson himself took care of the matter several months later with the publication of his book Maverick, in which he freely discussed his drug use.
“Phil was just very open,” Berger recalled.
Porinsh remembered walking down the busy New York streets with Jackson during that weekend. Rather than distance himself from the fans by traveling to and from games in a chauffeured auto, Jackson walked or rode his bicycle or the subway seemingly everywhere he went in New York, which meant that his instantly recognizable bushy countenance attracted fans everywhere he went.
“Every kid would walk up to him,” Porinsh recalled.
And Jackson seemed to have all the time in the world for them, joking around, talking, being real. “Often he walked to games in New York, and everybody talked to him—bums, kids, cops, businessmen. It didn’t make a difference. Everybody just somehow trusted Phil,” said longtime friend and Maverick coauthor Charley Rosen.
“His honesty is what made things work for him,” Porinsh said. “It always has.”
Years later this would factor mightily into his popularity with fans, who seized on the fact that Phil Jackson was no quibbler. He had inhaled, and it was something he had acknowledged from the very start. He was unafraid to be himself, and, more important, he would show over the coming years an amazing ability to help others be themselves as well. That honesty was the very first thing his players would perceive about him. “It is unique in some ways,” he would say of that basis for his relationship with his players, “and not because they think I just smoked dope, went to parties and wore blue jeans and work shirts. There’s been a lot of exchange of ideas there. We don’t let things pass without talking about the whole of life…”
For Jackson and many of those in his generation, grasping “the whole of life” had become something of a zeitgeist. His own transformation from sheltered child in Williston to streetwise flower child in New York was repeated millions of times over by baby boomers as cataclysmic events and sweeping changes struck one after another in a span of sixty turbulent months.
Jackson began the period at the University of North Dakota early that fall of 1963 as a tentative, youthful Republican bent on supporting archconservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater for the presidency in 1964. Jackson hadn’t been in school long when, on September 25, he and twenty thousand others hastened to the university’s Hyslop Sports Center to hear President John F. Kennedy speak. It was one in a series of appearances Kennedy made that fall in the western states, the heart of Goldwater’s stronghold. With the 1964 elections nearing, Kennedy’s popularity was surging in the polls, boosted in part by his spending of billions to beat the Russians in a race to the moon. At each stop, the president departed from his prepared talk to mention his recent success with the nuclear test ban treaty, which had come in the wake of 1962’s Cuban missile crisis, those seven days in May when the world seemingly sat perched on the brink of nuclear war. Kennedy’s mention of the treaty efforts drew hearty applause from thousands of young Republicans like Jackson at stops in Denver, Montana, and North Dakota. He told them that, yes, these were “anxious days for mankind,” but that the clouds had parted and better days were ahead.
Years later Jackson would reminisce about Kennedy’s hope-inspiring appearance. But it would prove to be only a setup for the first of several cultural shocks awaiting the freshman and his contemporaries. Kennedy would be dead in a matter of weeks, assassinated before the semester was over, and afterward the trouble followed in strange, ugly bunches.
That same year, Dr. Timothy Leary would be booted off the Harvard faculty for his unbridled experimentation with LSD, a drug that the general public had never even heard of. The relevance of that event gained hardly any notice at the time because there was so much more happening. Each of the next three summers would bring an outbreak of deadly race riots in America’s inner cities. In 1966 alone, forty-three different cities were left smoldering and scarred as the frustrations of decade upon decade of racial injustice and segregation exploded into fury.
Volatile as it was, race was just one of the items on the agenda. By 1965, President Lyndon Johnson had committed American ground troops to the war in Vietnam, meaning that hundreds of thousands of young people like Jackson’s friend Porinsh would be drafted and shipped to the other side of the globe to fight a nasty jungle war for which there was no clear purpose or objective. This in turn would bring a civil insurrection, a blur of antiwar protests on college campuses across the country, culminating in the riot at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. By then, Jackson himself had long left his Goldwater thoughts behind. He went to Chicago as a protester.
In the words of historian William Manchester, 1968 was “the year everything went wrong,” beginning with the devastating Tet offensive; followed by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in April in Memphis and another outbreak of race riots; followed by the assassination of Democratic presidential front-runner Robert Kennedy in June in Los Angeles, then the stormy Democratic convention just weeks later; followed by the election of Richard Nixon that November, and the revelation of the My Lai massacre of civilians in Vietnam.
These events forced an inevitable warping of the people and the culture. Folk music had reached something of an apex in 1963, with Bob Dylan gaining a following among the growing number of bohemians on college campuses, and Peter, Paul, and Mary offering up “Blowin’ in the Wind” as one of their hits that year. They also issued “If I Had a Hammer” and “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” a children’s song purported to be about smoking marijuana, although the vast majority of the country’s 190 million inhabitants had little idea exactly what marijuana was. The next year, 1964, the Beatles made their first visit to the United States, and music began the first quick steps in the rush to hard, acid rock. By 1966, Timothy Leary’s admirers had begun following his admonition to “tune in, turn on, and drop out” in response to the strange, problematic events unfolding in each day’s headlines. A year later, a newspaper reporter would describe Leary’s flower child followers as “hippies.” The idea was to escape the world’s angry events by joining a community of peace and love and sex and drugs, a life as free from conflict as humanly possible. “Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now,” sang Jesse Colin Young.
The adult population stared in bewilderment and anger at this youthful rebellion, particularly the hippies. Yet mainstream America needed its own avenues of escapism. Many turned on their TV sets and tuned in to the new array of sports offerings, which, according to William Manchester, turned millions of viewers “into beer-drinking, flatulent spectators watching young athletes romp joyously in gilded playpens.” The opening of the Astrodome in Houston that year helped usher in this age of hyperfascination with competition, as did the broadcast of the first Super Bowl. Critics pointed out that the Astrodome, with its forty-seven thousand upholstered seats, cost a mind-boggling $32 million to build—but that would prove to be a trifling sum compared to the billions that would be committed to arena construction over the ensuing decades.
The women’s movement brought no riots but would shake society with quakes of a different kind. By Jackson’s freshman year in 1963, a series of studies showed dramatic increases in the number of undergraduate coeds engaging in premarital sex, a trend documented that year by Gael Greene’s book Sex and the College Girl. That same year the University of California, Berkeley, reported an alarming increase in sexually transmitted diseases among its female undergraduates, perhaps another factor in that school’s students making one of the first-known requests for the public dispensing of contraceptives.
These, and a million other events, presented a profoundly bewildering atmosphere for youth in the 1960s. It could be argued that Betty Jackson’s strict approach to child rearing had left her youngest son better prepared than most his age to deal with the times. But with so many innocents slaughtered by the turn of events, random fortune seemed to be the element that factored most heavily into all equations.
With his underwear and socks freshly labeled by his mother, Jackson took up residence at the University of North Dakota. It was all the way across the state in Grand Forks, hard against the Minnesota border, a full six hours’ drive from his parents in Williston. Suddenly, for the first time in his life, he could breathe on his own, though his liberation after seventeen years as a Pentecostal ascetic didn’t bring any wanton displays of hedonism. He still attended church every Sunday, still dutifully phoned his parents every two weeks.
He did, however, learn to dance, at the urging of a couple of his black teammates. A female acquaintance helped him find the rhythm to do the Monkey, one of a string of dances spun out of the soul music of that era. It was just one of many fad dances—the Watusi, the Jerk, the Swim, the Bossa Nova, the Frug, the Pony, the Twist, the Mashed Potatoes—that bubbled to the surface of popular culture in those early days, when the mood was still happy and dancing felt right. They would prove to be the first awkward steps of Phil Jackson’s new identity, the one he would establish away from his family’s watchful eye.
His identity as an athlete would also shift, though not as dramatically. Although freshmen were not allowed to compete on the varsity under NCAA guidelines of the era, Jackson was among a group of talented players Bill Fitch had brought to campus in his first year as coach. Jackson’s UND freshman team would go undefeated and even split a pair of scrimmages against the varsity.
He was in the process of maturing, shooting to 6′8″ as his frame filled out. From the start, he gained notoriety for his willingness to tumble across the floor going after loose balls. Soon his teammates nicknamed him “the Mop,” which he figured was much better than “Bones.” His long arms and active nature fit well in Fitch’s fullcourt pressing style, in which all five players were expected to help trap the opposing ballhandlers. Jackson quickly showed in practice that he was hardly the typical center, that he relished the opportunity to cover guards and smaller players, even pressuring the point guard full-court. He was an overwhelming hydra, all legs and arms and elbows, ready to engulf any ballhandler who panicked and lost poise. This helped him acquire a second nickname at North Dakota—“Action Jackson”—which would follow him to New York and help define him as a Knick.
Although Jackson saw little of Fitch that first year, it was obvious they were a match. They both loved defense and took a cerebral approach to the game. A former marine, Fitch was a tough guy, a disciplinarian who would catch Jackson in some transgression and make him drop for push-ups, no matter where they were, on campus or in the gym. But Fitch leavened his approach with relentless banter and one-liners, the same sense of humor that would serve the coach so well when he moved on to direct the Cleveland Cavaliers during their first painful seasons in the NBA. “Last year wasn’t all bad,” he would tell reporters when they asked about his dreaded Cavaliers. “We led the league in flu shots.”
No matter how many push-ups he dished out or how long he made players run wind sprints, it was impossible not to smile around Fitch. If his players screwed up on defense, he’d tell them they couldn’t guard an elephant in a phone booth. In fact, the coach had first snared Jackson with a goofy routine at his high school basketball banquet. The guest speaker, Fitch called up Jackson and teammate Bobby McKenzie to get a present. He told them to hold out their arms and close their eyes, then he clamped a set of handcuffs on their wrists and announced, “When I go home I’m taking both of you with me.”
If there was one thing that Jackson loved, it was a good laugh. “Fitch’s humor rubbed off on Phil,” Peter Porinsh recalled. “And Phil had his own sense of humor.”
The whole North Dakota program showed a flair for fun. In his first seasons on the job, Fitch was reaching everywhere to bring in players. He talked a few football players into coming out for basketball just so they could set bulky, bruising picks for Jackson and his teammates. Soon Fitch’s Fighting Sioux began drawing crowds, not only because they were good, but because they were fun, too.
Their pregame warm-ups began to resemble a Globetrotters circle. “We used to go to the arena early just to see what they were gonna do,” Porinsh recalled. Their comedy routines would include rapid weaves that left the team’s shortest man springing off the back of a kneeling teammate for a dunk. “It was hilarious, and people loved it,” Porinsh said.
It was in this atmosphere, under Fitch’s guidance, that Jackson would develop from a goofy, grinning freshman into a two-time All-American, the school’s all-time leading scorer and holder of an array of records. Fitch was the kind of coach intent on developing his players, and not always on the court. Knowing that Jackson was from lily-white Williston, the coach assigned him a black roommate for road trips, to broaden his horizons and strengthen team chemistry. Jackson responded to it all, to Fitch’s humor and discipline, with a work ethic that craved success.
“You wouldn’t say Phil was blessed with a lot of natural talent,” Fitch would explain later. “But he was a guy who always worked hard and always got better every year.”
“He used to destroy us in practice with his elbows,” former teammate David “Butch” Lince told an interviewer. “John Burckhard [another teammate] and I had more knobs on our heads from him. He was a gangly sophomore and uncoordinated. He had a 43-inch sleeve. How many guys do you know with a 43-inch sleeve?”
As he had in Williston, Jackson continued to amaze friends and teammates with his long-armed tricks in cars. Peter Porinsh remembered Jackson sitting in the middle of the front seat of a sedan and reaching through the rear windows to play with the door handle. “He could reach around when my alarm went off and tap me on the shoulder, and I had to get out of bed to do the same thing to him,” Jackson’s former roommate, Paul Pederson, recalled. “I think his arms were as long as our 7-footer’s were.”
In the classroom that first year, Jackson quickly found his maturity challenged. Foreign languages had always managed to expose a motivational weakness. He had flunked Latin in high school. In college, it was Spanish. Faced with an 8 A.M. class that required his rising before the sun, he cut it seventeen times. When he did show, he faced a showdown.
“I would climb up on a desk and whack him with a newspaper. That was the only way I could reach him,” recalled Graciela Wilborn, his teacher, in a 1990 interview.
He was stalled at the time, unhappy as a political science major and unsure why. A turning point occurred late in his freshman year during a long drive with his older brother, Joe, who was a graduate student at the University of Texas. Always a skeptic about the family’s religion, Joe was several steps ahead of his younger brother in the wrenching process of rejecting it. It had been tough digesting the principles of Darwinism taught in science class because they conflicted with the biblical story of creation, and the differences were too big to ignore for someone like Jackson, who seemed to enjoy pondering everything.
Jackson returned home that summer after his freshman year and promptly resumed his charade as a fundamentalist, all to keep his parents happy. But he returned to school that fall ready for the next stage in his life, which included a more intimate approach with girls. They, in turn, seemed quite eager to get to know him. He had done a bit of smooching in parked cars during his high school days but had spent most of his freshman year at North Dakota in social bewilderment. Many Saturday nights he had stayed in his dorm, playing gin rummy with his black teammates, who had few other options in the cultural isolation they faced in a predominantly white community.
From the immaturity of a typical freshman, he found something different his second year. First, he roomed with Paul Pederson, the team captain who was four years older and a role model for responsibility. Jackson grew increasingly political and was a vocal supporter of Goldwater that fall of 1964 in his campaign against Lyndon Johnson. When Johnson coasted in a landslide, Jackson was sure it meant the end of the Republican Party. He was also hawkish about the conflict in Vietnam and figured that the United States could clean up the whole mess if it simply bombed Hanoi.
By the second semester of his sophomore year, Jackson had decided to choose courses from across the academic spectrum, a step that would eventually lead him to a composite major in psychology, religion, and philosophy. The workload was well suited to his love of reading and his penchant for esoteric late-night debates. Once he got on track academically, college became his adventure, as he would later describe it, “to see what doors I could open.”
On the basketball court, he mopped and hustled his way into the starting lineup, averaged 11.8 points per game, and helped his team to a 12–0 record in the North Central Conference—good enough to gain the first of his three straight nods for the all-conference team. As the season progressed, he and guard Jimmy Hester showed a knack for working together offensively, resulting in Jackson racking up a pair of 30-point games that January of 1965. The Sioux advanced through the regional NCAA playoffs all the way to the national semifinals against Southern Illinois, a team that featured his future Knicks teammate Walt Frazier. Jackson, in fact, was assigned to guard Frazier for much of the game. Frazier scored 18 points, and the Sioux lost in a rout.
Jackson found consolation on the pitcher’s mound that spring and even threw a one-hitter against Arkansas State, which perpetuated his belief that any chance he had to play professional sports would come in baseball. His notion was confirmed when a scout from the Dodgers approached him after a game just to let Jackson know that he was watching.
His basketball play, though, zoomed off the next season as Fitch turned increasingly to Jackson as an offensive option. He answered with a pair of 31-point games in early December, followed by a 40-point performance in February. With Jackson averaging 21.8 points and shooting better than 54 percent from the floor (along with 12.9 rebounds per game), the Sioux were 11–1 in conference play that season and again made a strong run in the NCAA tournament, boosted by Jackson’s 44 points in a win over Valparaiso. For the second year in a row, North Dakota advanced to the national semifinals to meet Southern Illinois. This time Walt Frazier was academically ineligible, but the Salukis still won, 69–61.
Jackson was surprised after the season when he was named an NCAA Division II All-American over Paul Pederson, his senior roommate, teammate, and friend. But Jackson’s combination of scoring and rebounding had gotten him noticed. The distinction only served to increase the pressure on him that next fall when he was the only starter returning. The Fighting Sioux opened Jackson’s senior season in Chicago for a pair of high-profile games. He scored 26 in the opener against Bradley but choked in the second against DePaul, with pro scouts in the stands, and totaled only 7 points. Disappointed, he went out with a female friend and got lost in the city, which caused him to miss curfew and catch Fitch’s wrath. Fitch removed him as team captain and told him, “You can’t make the pros without my help.”
“Either be the leader or else you’re not going to be anything,” the coach said.
Jackson’s answer to the call for leadership was a scoring outburst. Twice in December he scored 35 points in a game, then scored 40 in a road win over South Dakota State. He scored 36 and 37 in a pair of road wins in January, including one game where he was required to attempt a Shaq-like 27 free throws but responded in un-Shaq-like manner by hitting 23 of them.
“He was just an outstanding player,” recalled former North Dakota sports information director Lee Bohnet in a 1992 interview. “He could dominate, and did dominate, games because of his wingspan, shooting ability, and intensity.
“He was very popular. The gals all liked him, and I think his teammates liked him. When he played for Bill Fitch, even though he was the star of the team, he got no special privileges. If he screwed up in practices—and I’ve seen this happen—he would do extra laps.”
That February 24th he scored 50 in a home win over Northern Illinois, which helped North Dakota close out another conference title with an 11–1 record. Jackson was again the conference’s outstanding player and was named to his third straight all-conference team. His averages of 27.4 points and 14.4 rebounds per game earned him yet another All-America distinction.
But with New York Knicks scout Red Holzman watching in the stands, Jackson got into foul trouble and had to sit out 17 minutes (he still scored 21), and the Sioux lost in the regional semifinals to Louisiana Tech. In a consolation game the next night, with no pro scouts on hand, Jackson scored 51 points in a win over Parsons, and his college career was over. Jackson owned eighteen different basketball records at UND and graduated as the school’s all-time leading scorer with 1,708 points.
Among the pro scouts who had found their way to North Dakota was a chubby young Baltimore Bullets representative, Jerry Krause, who was the latest in a long line of people entertained by Jackson’s car tricks. “I had quite a wingspan,” Jackson recalled with a chuckle.
“Phil could do something no one else in the country could do,” Krause would recall years later. “I was scouting Phil for the Baltimore Bullets, and I saw him get in an old four-door Plymouth, sit in the middle of the back seat, and then open both front doors at the same time.”
For UND sports information director Lee Bohnet, it was Jackson’s ability to tune the radio from the back seat that did the trick. “We were going somewhere in town,” Bohnet recalled. “He reached over the front seat and dialed the radio without bending. He didn’t like the radio program that was on.”
Jackson hit it off instantly with Krause, a rotund little man with a hundred stories about the characters who peopled the world of baseball and basketball scouting. “Even as a scout back there thirty years ago, he was a very unusual type of fellow to be out there scouting a basketball player,” Jackson recalled in 1995.
Despite the kick he got from surprising people with his reach, getting drafted by a pro basketball team wasn’t Jackson’s primary concern that spring of 1967. He had bigger things on his mind, notably the personal changes that had begun to escalate with the start of his junior year. He had pledged the Sigma Nu fraternity in early fall 1965 and at the end of pledge week had gotten drunk for the first time in his life, a mortifying experience in which he wound up on stage during a student gathering leading the audience in school cheers. That loss of control had left him so shaken that when marijuana began showing up on campus the next year he declined to try it for fear that he might lose it again.
Besides, he didn’t need it. He was already having too much fun in his personal life. He met his first wife, Maxine, at the start of his junior year. She was a beauty who caught his eye in a campus academic building. He asked her out, took her to see the movie Carousel, and although he was already dating a girl from the University of Montana, decided to add a second romance to his agenda, a complication that grew a bit tangled the next year when his Montana girl transferred to UND.
More than Maxine’s looks, it was her passion for liberal politics that caught his interest. She became an immediate influence. She cared a whole lot about public policy and almost nothing about sports. Jackson’s conservative ideals melted in her presence. There was plenty for them to debate between the fall of 1965 and the spring of 1967 as their romance blossomed. Race riots and war protests gripped the country. Like a lot of people who had once favored the war in Vietnam, Jackson reversed his thinking.
Beyond his sports and his dating, Jackson immersed himself in his studies on his way to a composite degree in philosophy, psychology, and religion. A sociology class hit him hard his junior year with a lecture that depicted fundamentalists as people of a lower class. That summer, sitting in church services back home, he became increasingly irritated by how the ministers butchered the language, by their poor diction and grammar. That irritation and the desire to find something more sophisticated drove the intensity of his philosophy studies his last year in school. He took a special interest in the works of existentialists such as Sartre and Camus and the writings of Nietzsche (which years later he would suggest to Shaquille O’Neal). Ultimately, though, none of it filled Jackson’s emptiness. He was in the process of vacating his former life and deciding what his new life would be. He particularly enjoyed that spring of 1967 with Maxine, but by late summer they learned she was pregnant. They married on September 7, 1967, just ten days shy of his twenty-second birthday. It wasn’t long before Jackson realized that he didn’t know Maxine all that well. What was worse, he didn’t know himself either.