It wasn’t until the day of the draft that Jerry Krause realized he’d been hoodwinked. By none other than Red Holzman. Krause had thought his team, the Baltimore Bullets, was going to steal Phil Jackson in the third round. He was wrong. Holzman’s team, the New York Knicks, took him early in the second round, with the seventeenth overall pick. But there was this little problem of the Minnesota Pipers to overcome. The Pipers, an American Basketball Association team, offered Jackson $25,000 for two seasons. The Knicks offered $13,500 for one season plus a $5,000 signing bonus. Jackson did the math and signed with New York.
“I had wanted to draft Phil for Baltimore in the second round in 1967,” Krause recalled years later, the disappointment still obvious in his voice. “We took a gamble on another player, and New York got Phil.”
Holzman got Phil. Holzman!!!
It was the steal that mattered most to Krause.
Two years earlier, in 1965, he had purloined another Division II prospect, Jerry Sloan out of Evansville. “A tough kid,” Krause liked to tell people. “He’s got huge hands.” Only the Bullets hadn’t played him much as a rookie. Then they’d let him go in the 1966 expansion draft to the Chicago Bulls. The Bulls saw right away that Sloan was great. Two weeks into the season, the Bullets had phoned Chicago and asked if they could have Sloan back. “No,” Bulls owner Dick Klein had told the Bullets. “A thousand times, no.”
So Krause returned to looking for another steal, and was sure he had found one in Jackson. Way up in North Dakota. Nobody went up there. Not to see a big white kid. But he had these arms. And he was smart. Man, was he smart. And Krause had seen him. He’d been out there and had even flown this kid Jackson into Baltimore for a tryout. Holzman had seen him, sure, but had acted like he wasn’t even interested.
But then fuckin’ Holzman had gotten him. Just the thought of that made Krause ill.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like Holzman. He loved the guy. But that’s what made it worse. He could even remember that red-eye in Kansas City. It was Krause’s first year in scouting, in the early 1960s. Everywhere he turned he was running into Holzman. He had gone to Oklahoma to scout Flynn Robinson, who was playing for Wyoming at the time. The next night, Krause planned to see a game in Wichita, so he was on a late flight that stopped over in Kansas City. There, waiting to get on the same connecting flight, was Holzman. It must have been 4:00 in the morning! They gave each other looks that only scouts could.
“Where you been?” Holzman asked.
Already other scouts in the business were making fun of Krause, a chubby little guy who was secretive and wore a trench coat and a hat, like Inspector Clouseau or somebody. They called him “the Sleuth” and snickered behind his back. Krause’s instincts told him to be coy in answering Holzman’s question about where he had been.
“Down the road,” Krause replied.
Years later, Krause would recall what happened next: “He looks at me and he says, ‘Son, I want to tell you something. I know where you’ve been, and if you’ve got any brains in your head you know where I’ve been, so let’s cut the bullshit and let’s be friends.’”
Little did Krause realize it at the time, but he had just established the most valuable relationship in his professional life. Some umpteen years later Krause would find his way back into baseball scouting, working for Jerry Reinsdorf and the Chicago White Sox. Reinsdorf had grown up a kid on the streets of Brooklyn, a Knicks fan, and he would later come to idolize Red Holzman. Learning this, Krause would regale him with Holzman stories, and in 1985, when Reinsdorf put together a deal to buy the Chicago Bulls, he would reward Krause for those stories by naming him the general manager of the team. Reinsdorf then told the media that he wanted a team based on the Holzman vision of basketball, and Krause was going to give it to him.
The Red Holzman fan club, of course, was much bigger than Krause and Reinsdorf, although in the early days some people in pro basketball wondered if Holzman burned only a 60-watt bulb.
“Red is as dumb as he wants you to think he is,” allowed former Knicks coach Carl Braun. “He’s dumb like a fox.”
“His own life was dedicated to creature comforts, to bottled scotch and good cigars and sirloin,” Phil Berger once observed, “and he brought to the dinner table a homespun soul…”
It was the soul that would nurture both Krause and Jackson—the former in scouting, the latter as a coach.
It was Holzman who picked Jackson up at the airport on his first trip to New York, a day made memorable when, on the ride to his hotel, some wanton youths standing on an overpass threw a rock through Holzman’s windshield, providing Jackson with an instant and unforgettable lesson on the city’s wretchedness and Holzman’s unflappability.
He stood just 5′9″, but had been a player himself in the bare-knuckled days of the game, a member of the Rochester Royals. They were owned and coached by a firebrand named Les Harrison and featured Hall of Fame ball-handler Bob Davies. In 1951, the Royals were on their way to the league championship when they hit a downturn, which Harrison corrected by taking his players to a roadhouse, watching them get uproariously drunk, then picking up the tab. Their vision corrected, the Royals went on to claim their title that spring, then retired to years of frustration as the Cincinnati Royals, Kansas City/Omaha Kings, and finally the Sacramento Kings.
Holzman, meanwhile, moved on to become coach of the Hawks when they perched in Milwaukee, where his teams lost 120 games and won just 83. He kept showing his players pictures of his young daughter, reminding them that her daddy didn’t need to be out of a job, but it didn’t work. He was fired, which contributed to the impression that he wasn’t smart. But he somehow managed to move into the scouting hierarchy of the Knicks, the richest team in the league, where he became known for espousing wisdom that could only have come from his rough-and-tumble days with the Royals.
“Never talk about money with your wife at night,” he would advise.
“Never get your hair cut by a bald barber. He has no respect for your hair.”
“Never take medical advice from a waiter.”
By the middle of Jackson’s rookie year, Holzman replaced Dick McGuire as coach. McGuire probably knew a lot about basketball, Jackson had figured, but he was such a mushmouth that the players couldn’t understand what he was saying. Jackson had taken to nodding in agreement whenever McGuire addressed him, but he rarely had an idea what the coach was saying.
Holzman, on the other hand, made his points with a spare precision, and only after he had thought things through. Later, his impact on Jackson could be found everywhere. In coaching, Holzman focused almost completely on defense. “On offense, you guys can do what you want,” he would jokingly tell his players. “But on defense you do what I want.” Holzman was tough and stressed discipline, but he was willing to listen. He allowed forward Dave DeBusschere to install several key offensive plays that freed forward Bill Bradley to shoot, a development that would be critical to the team’s success.
The thing that defined Holzman’s teams was the pressure. His Knicks became the first pro team to rely heavily on the press. In practice, he would stand courtside, dressed in shorts and a windbreaker, urging his players to “see the ball.” On the press, he wanted them anticipating where the offense was going to throw it in attempting to escape the trap. Holzman wanted his players feeding off those passes. That would become their trademark, creating turnovers and converting them into points in easy bunches. “Any game we’re down even 10 points going into the fourth quarter we can still win,” Willis Reed explained at the time.
It was the press that would provide Jackson a reason for his NBA existence, the reason that Holzman wanted to sneak in ahead of Krause and draft him in the first place. In short time, Jackson would find a role coming off the bench with Holzman’s pressing unit in the second period, where his arms and mobility were not just an advantage but a weapon. If the game slowed down into the halfcourt during Jackson’s first years in the league, the crowds in Madison Square Garden would groan and hiss about his ineptitude. But when the pace was high, he was a difference maker.
It was his defensive mind-set that allowed Jackson to get along with Holzman despite his rapid transformation from preacher’s kid to hippie. Jackson seemed to continuously complain about dress codes and other team rules. Like the pairing of Rodman and Tex Winter in later years, some observers took delight in Holzman, attired in his Brooks Brothers finery, having discussions with the bushy-haired, mustachioed Jackson. It was a cerebral connection of which neither fully understood the implications.
“Red was a big influence on my basketball philosophy,” Jackson would explain a quarter-century later. “Everyone on those teams had their own sphere, but Red knew how to let everyone find their own niche.”
Eventually, Holzman somehow managed to entrust this hippie to scout opposing teams while he was on the injured list. And it was Holzman who first saw Jackson’s potential as a coach, something that none of his teammates did. “I thought he’d be growing his own food somewhere,” Walt Frazier later admitted.
Jackson admired Holzman’s “tender touch,” the ability to compromise, to reconcile differences. “He never overloaded you with advice. He doled it out in small packets and in a variety of ways,” Jackson explained. “He had a featherweight punch that hit you like a knockout blow.”
And Jackson’s knack for instigating a change of pace as a coach, giving his players books, or taking a side trip through the countryside instead of pushing his team through another practice—those things stemmed from the appreciation for the finer things in life that Holzman showed his players. Years later, as they watched Jackson at work, the former Knicks would note how much he was like Holzman.
Glory
Willis Reed earned the nickname “Wolf” when he played college basketball at Grambling University because he would hang around the boards gobbling up rebounds like a starved canine going after red meat.
At 6′9″ and 235 pounds, he was a big man but not quite big enough to dominate the NBA with his size. Instead, he used his hunger, that red-meat factor. He was so serious and driven that he walked into New York Knicks training camp as a rookie in 1964 and immediately requested a copy of the NBA rule book.
“I just wanted to understand the game,” he said.
He was a leader, not an overwhelming individual talent, although he could be overwhelming enough at times. Like Bill Russell before him, Reed was quick and intelligent. Unlike Russell, Reed had a smooth shot with plenty of range. Beyond all that, Reed had a presence that began with his overwhelming physical power. He wasn’t a great leaper, but he was strong and determined that no one would outhustle him.
“As a player and a man, he was always on fire,” Walt Frazier said of Reed.
As the story goes, Reed took on the entire Los Angeles Lakers team in a brawl during the first game of the 1966–67 season and whipped ’em all.
By himself.
“He just took over,” recalled Sam Goldaper, the veteran writer for the New York Times. “The most unbelievable fight I ever saw in basketball.”
It was a rough game, Reed recalled. “Rudy LaRusso threw a punch at me going up the floor, and the fight was on. I ended up hitting some people but I never did get a shot at Rudy. It was a wild fight.”
After Jackson was drafted, the Knicks sent him a game film to view in North Dakota. Jackson, who had seen almost nothing of the NBA, sat down with some friends at school and watched in amazement. The film Holzman had sent him was of Reed’s battle with the Lakers.
It was both good news and bad news for the rookie. It meant that he would play alongside Reed, who was a protector for virtually every Knick. Jackson also figured he would face something of a toughness challenge, which he did upon the opening of training camp. Mostly, though, it was a matter of ribbing. His Knicks teammates took one look at the new rookie’s strange physique and dubbed him “Head and Shoulders,” yet another in what was proving to be perhaps the longest string of nicknames in all of sport.
Jackson managed to survive, and even scored in, the Knicks’ first game that season. Soon he and Walt Frazier, the team’s first-round pick, found themselves in a whirlwind of fun on the Knicks’ road trips around the country. Frazier recalled that in each city he and Jackson would check into their room only long enough to drop their bags before heading out for a night of fun on the towns. Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Baltimore, St. Louis, San Francisco, Seattle, and San Diego—each offered its naughty delights, and Frazier recalled that he and Jackson seemed intent on sampling all of them in their first full view of the country’s major cities. Meanwhile, back in New York, Jackson’s young wife was pregnant and trying to find some meaningful way of relating to her new surroundings. Their daughter, sweet little Elizabeth, would arrive in March, as the Jacksons were coming to the understanding that they needed to find a way to get to know each other better in and around the NBA’s 82-game schedule.
Beyond the hiring of Holzman, the season would be remembered for two other developments. The first was the Knicks’ moving from the old Madison Square Garden to the brand new one on 33rd Street. This held some significance for Jackson. The old Garden was thickly populated with gamblers, which Jackson discovered after the fans kept booing him during garbage time at the end of games. He learned that his miscues and even his successes had great impact on the point spread.
The new Garden would still have its share of that crowd, but it was more uptown and quickly attracted a following of celebrities, especially as Holzman found ways to make his team better. By the time the glory years rolled around in 1970, Holzman’s teams had transformed the Garden crowd into a loud, silly horde. The upper deck screamed “de-fense,” and the city-hardened fans seemed to lose a little of their gaming edge and actually softened into something resembling cheerleaders. Like the Lakers in Hollywood, the Knicks soon acquired their courtside attractions. Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Dianne Keaton, Elliot Gould, and Peter Falk were regulars. So was Soupy Sales. And author William Goldman. Suddenly it seemed that all of Manhattan wanted a seat in Holzman’s Garden. Over the next several seasons, they would even find it in the kindness of their hearts to drop the murmur of despair when Jackson produced a miscue on the floor. Finally, they would go so far as to give up some love for Jackson and his mad-scramble ways. They would even take to calling him by his college nickname, “Action Jackson.”
“I’m a person who gravitates to action. It’s in my blood,” he would tell an interviewer.
But all of that came long after his rookie season, a time reserved for inhabiting the shadows when he wasn’t on a road trip having fun. Actually, Jackson preferred the road those first years in New York because he detested the city, its angry residents, and the complications it brought to everyday life. Truth be known, he didn’t so much love the crowds he met on the streets during his walks and bicycle rides as much as he hated trying to find a parking space near the Garden on game nights.
The second memorable, major event of his rookie year was the arrival of Bill Bradley midway through the season. A national idol and the subject of a biography by New Yorker writer John McPhee before he even finished at Princeton in 1965, Bradley had accepted a Rhodes scholarship and put the NBA on hold while he studied at Oxford. Now, with his game having suffered from two years of atrophy, Bradley had returned with a fat contract and a massive media entourage in tow, reporters and writers eager to hang on his every word, every action. Though it would pale in comparison to the crowd following Michael Jordan in 1995, Jackson and his teammates were stunned by the sudden swarm that descended upon the locker room, leaving them all feeling like spectators of some bizarre drama.
Nobody greeted Bradley’s arrival more eagerly than Jackson’s parents back in North Dakota. They had read about his Christian upbringing in Missouri and, fearing the influences that young Phil might come under in Sodom and Gomorrah, were quite hopeful that Jackson could make friends with Bradley. Jackson himself considered Bradley a hero and had his own hopes for a friendship. Instead, he soon discovered a Bradley who was standoffish, embarrassed about the attention he was receiving, and quite aware that his game was nowhere near ready to match the buildup he was receiving.
The rejection stung Jackson, and it would take quite some time to get over it. In 1970, he enraged Knicks fans by confiding to writer Phil Berger that Bradley was strange, afraid to let himself go, that Jackson was weary of his “Platonic kind of shit.”
“My parents love him because he’s supposed to be a Christian, see,” Jackson said. “They throw him up in my face a lot.”
Faced with criticism for his comments, Jackson would complain about the dangers of commenting to freelance writers working on books. Berger would publish the critically acclaimed Miracle On 33rd Street after the Knicks’ 1970 championship season. But Jackson himself would revisit his complaints about Bradley in Maverick in 1975. Eventually, over Jackson’s ten seasons with the Knicks, he and Bradley would develop a deep and lasting friendship—so deep, in fact, that Bradley would offer Jackson the job of running his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1999, an offer prudently declined.
Jackson himself would acknowledge that Bradley had much bigger problems in 1967 than trying to find a middle ground for a rookie’s deep discussions. With the world watching, his game was an obvious disaster. He was too slow to play guard, too weak at forward.
In the wake of his rookie failure, Bradley spent that fated summer of 1968 working days as a community volunteer in Harlem, then taking a train down to Philadelphia in the evening to work with Philly basketball legend Sonny Hill and play in the Baker League games, a summer proving ground for pro players.
“We played in the basement of a church. I was still trying to play guard, and Sonny was very positive,” Bradley once recalled. “He told me I could do it. That was an important summer for me in terms of restoring my confidence, getting back some of the skills I had lost, getting the chance to go against great players like Earl Monroe and Wali Jones, and, above all, making a good friend [in Hill].”
Overnight that next season, there developed a glitch in the harmony that Holzman had begun establishing with his team. It came with the jockeying between Bradley and Cazzie Russell at small forward. The two had competed against each other in college, but Russell had gone right to the pros after the University of Michigan, while Bradley had left for Oxford. Russell had a fat contract, too, and an offensive game to match it. He was a finely tuned athlete, brimming with confidence as a young pro.
Bradley, though, was most comfortable at his natural position, forward—which, of course, was Russell’s spot, too. The situation could have had explosive consequences for a New York team … a white guy and a black guy, both high-profile types, competing for the starting job. It was a story made for the New York press, and the writers had a go at it. The rest of the Knicks, though, left it alone.
“We stayed out of that,” Frazier said of the controversy in a 1990 interview. “It was always remedied by some freak, uncanny circumstances.”
Russell was given the starting nod for 1968–69 but broke his leg, and Bradley took over. Bradley kept the job when Russell returned the next season. The team would play well with Russell filling a big role off the bench. An incredible offensive talent, he obviously wasn’t happy about the circumstances, but he wasn’t loud about it either. Then, in the spring of 1970, Bradley was injured, and Russell moved back into the starting lineup—only the team didn’t fare as well. They suffered some losses, and it became obvious they were better with Bradley as the starter.
“Cazzie had his chance,” Frazier said. “But he was better coming off the bench when we needed something. He could come in and get us points when we needed them.”
Russell had great moves and could create opportunities to get himself open for the shot. There wasn’t much need for him to pass the ball. Bradley, on the other hand, didn’t move nearly as well and couldn’t always get his shot. The team had to set picks to get him free. If the play didn’t work, he passed the ball and seldom forced a shot. That helped, Frazier said, because it created movement in the offense and kept everybody involved.
While immensely important for the Knicks, these events held little initial interest for Jackson. He recalled adopting his young wife’s view of the people they had met in pro basketball. Most of them seemed to have only their interest in the game with little thought for the grave developments in society at large. That changed briefly in April of 1968 when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. All of the Knicks felt a shock, and Jackson recalled his black teammates expressing anger and frustration. But Phil and Maxine Jackson saw the NBA as an unreal, even unfulfilling, realm. They made their way back to North Dakota quickly that first offseason, and Jackson gave much thought to his future, to perhaps a graduate degree in psychology. He even took some courses at UND, but found that experience strangely unsatisfactory.
Despite his misgivings, Jackson fell right in step with the Knicks in camp that fall, Holzman’s first opportunity to really shape his team. However, the team’s shortcomings quickly became obvious as the schedule unfolded, and much of the debate focused on center Walt Bellamy’s inconsistencies. Finally, in December, twenty-nine games into the 1968–69 season, New York traded Bellamy and guard Howard Komives to Detroit for forward Dave DeBusschere, who would become the final element in their championship chemistry. Although he wasn’t much of a leaper, he was a fine athlete. The first four years of his pro basketball career, he also worked as a pitcher in the Chicago White Sox organization. But in 1964, just months after DeBusschere’s twenty-fourth birthday, the Pistons named him their player-coach, the youngest ever in the NBA. He threw baseballs one more season, then devoted his career solely to basketball.
Four seasons later he arrived in New York as a complete forward. Few people were better than the 6′6″ DeBusschere at the subtleties of rebounding, of getting position and boxing out. He passed the ball as well as any frontcourt player in the game. And he had a smooth shot with great range.
The most important thing about the DeBusschere deal was the shifting of team roles that it brought. Komives had started with Dick Barnett in the Knicks backcourt, but his departure meant that Frazier moved in as a starter. Perhaps the best defensive guard in the league, the left-handed Frazier unmasked his offense once he got more playing time. His development as a scoring threat pushed the Knicks to the next level. But most of all, the DeBusschere trade benefited Reed, who had been playing out of position at power forward. With Bellamy gone, Reed moved to center, which set the team’s identity.
“A lot of the pieces fell together at the right time,” Reed said.
Unfortunately, they didn’t include Jackson. Days after the trade, the Knicks were playing in Phoenix when the Suns’ Neil Johnson shoved Jackson in the back as he was finishing a layup on a fast break. The resulting twinge required Jackson to leave the game. Although he felt well enough to play the next game in San Francisco, he got shoved again, this time by Clyde Lee. Days later he was diagnosed with a herniated disk, which resulted in hospitalization and persistent discomfort. At least one doctor suggested that he undergo spinal fusion surgery right away. But Cazzie Russell had just broken his leg, and Jackson got the impression from the team that he should hold off, just in case they needed him to play in an emergency. So he delayed the surgery until the offseason, which resulted in his missing the entire 1969–70 campaign.
With his muscles atrophying by the second, it seemed seriously doubtful that he could play even if asked. So he returned to North Dakota that spring of ’69 and took a course in group therapy that involved a marathon session of intensely personal discussions within the group. The session was supposed to go on for hours, but the setting included a large aquarium, and Jackson, distracted by a strange fish in the tank, tapped so hard on the glass that he broke it. Hopes of anything constructive washed away with the ensuing mess, and Jackson would later use the memory to sum up his early efforts at graduate school.
Once the season ended for the Knicks, he underwent surgery and began the long, painful recovery and therapy that would prove to be the challenge of his young life, with atrophy reducing his muscles to mush, his game to gimpiness. Even worse, doctors ordered him not to have sex for six months after the procedure, which left Maxine and him with the creative fun of figuring a way around the directive.
Mostly, though, the situation meant that Jackson’s journey of discovery took a detour into the dark recesses. He took to drinking, found that maybe he could enjoy smoking dope after all, and wondered if he would ever play again. He even ventured into a courtroom to watch an acquaintance go on trial for a drug charge. The district attorney recognized Jackson and told his investigators to check him out. Fortunately, someone tipped Jackson off with a phone call, and he cleaned up his act a bit and assumed a lower profile. Somehow he fought through this negative energy to do the hard work of rehabilitation, but it took a long time.
The recovery kept Jackson from playing a single game during the Knicks’ glorious championship season. Still, he showed up at training camp, mostly out of curiosity about what offensive changes Holzman would make. Just days before camp opened he had gotten his back brace off, but the team made it clear he would spend the year on injured reserve. In those first days of camp Jackson endured teasing from his teammates about procuring a chastity belt for Maxine while he recovered. The second day of training camp, Jackson showed up late, prompting Holzman to take him aside and tell him, “If you’re going to be part of this, be here on time.”
Jackson’s initial reaction was to withdraw, coming around only to work as a $75-a-game photographer for the New York Post when the team played at Madison Square Garden. But Holzman drew him in as an unofficial assistant, letting him perform limited scouting chores. Mostly he watched the Knicks from the sidelines and learned more than he ever imagined he could. Watching outstanding players such as Reed, Frazier, DeBusschere, Russell, and Bradley conduct themselves with unselfishness would have a profound impact on his ideas about team play. “I learned how to look at the game from the perspective of what the whole team was doing and to conceptualize ways to disrupt an opponent’s game plan,” he wrote in his 1995 book Sacred Hoops.
Just as important, he began to think about coaching as something that he could do. And he began to see the game as a coach.
Much of what Jackson saw involved Willis Reed’s brilliance. First, he was named the MVP of the All-Star Game, then later that spring he was voted the league MVP. He capped that by picking up the MVP award in the Finals, the first player to capture all three in a single season. As captain of the Knicks, he was a natural and imposing leader. He was the link that seemed to keep everyone—rookies, veterans, coaches, even management—together and headed in the right direction.
They had finished the 1969 season with a 54–28 record but lost to Boston in the Eastern Conference finals. “DeBusschere said in the locker room after the Boston series that next year was going to be our year,” Reed recalled in 1990. “We really believed it. Everybody went home eager for next year. We couldn’t wait for the season to start. Everybody came back in good shape and ready to go.”
After a great training camp, they opened the season by winning five, losing one, then taking the next eighteen, which at the time was the league record for consecutive wins. The Knicks rarely looked back from there, loping off to a league-best 60–22 finish.
For decades, New Yorkers had waited for a basketball team to love, and finally Holzman gave them one in 1970. With Dick Barnett and Frazier, the Knicks had the most stylish backcourt in the league. Frazier was “Clyde” from the movie Bonnie and Clyde because of his passion for gangsterish hats and fancy suits. Barnett had the Carnaby Street look, complete with a cane, cape, and spats. He spent many of his off-court hours engrossed in postcard chess, trading moves with other players around the country, often engaging in several games at once. In his book One Magic Season and a Basketball Life, Frazier called Barnett the funniest man in basketball. He was the team’s graybeard, and he had a million tales to tell. He delivered them deadpan, with his considerable storytelling abilities (he would later earn a Ph.D. in education at Fordham).
Jackson hadn’t traveled with this cast, but in the spring Holzman invited him along—and what he found would go a long way toward solidifying his fascination with pro basketball. The drama and excitement of the Knicks’ playoff run would put to rest his doubts about the game, but they did little to abate his doubts about himself.
The Knicks clashed with Baltimore in the first round in a seven-game series. The Bullets had Earl “the Pearl” Monroe at guard, Gus Johnson at forward, and Wes Unseld at center. It was a brutal series, with Unseld and Reed laboring mightily in the post. The Knicks finally closed them out in the seventh game in the Garden, 127–114.
In the Eastern Conference finals, they defeated Milwaukee with rookie Lew Alcindor, 4–1, and New York stepped up to face the Lakers in the league championship series.
It had been an up-and-down year in Los Angeles. Butch Van Breda Kolff had been replaced by Joe Mullaney, the veteran coach from Providence College. Wilt Chamberlain, now thirty-three, had suffered a knee injury nine games into the season and appeared to be lost for the year. But as the playoffs neared, he announced his intention to return, a move that surprised even his doctors. He played the final three games of the regular season and was force enough to help the Lakers thrive in the Western Conference playoffs. They had finished second in the regular season behind the Atlanta Hawks and Sweet Lou Hudson, but with Chamberlain the Lakers swept Atlanta in the division finals.
Despite that win and the Lakers’ overwhelming edge in playoff experience, the Knicks were favored by the oddsmakers. Game 1 showed why. Although Reed had been worn down by battling first Unseld, then Alcindor, he quickly ran circles around Chamberlain. Barnett also was eager to match up with Jerry West, who had gotten the ball and the publicity when the two played together in Los Angeles. New York opened a quick lead, pumped it up to 50–30, lost it, then blew by Los Angeles rather easily over the last eight minutes to win, 124–112. Reed finished with 37 points, 16 rebounds, and 5 assists. With that momentum, the Knicks went on to take a 3–2 lead in the series.
Game 5 in the Garden rang in as one of those golden moments in pro basketball history. Wilt came out strong and determined to cover Reed all over the floor. With a little more than eight minutes gone in the first quarter, Los Angeles had raced to a 25–15 lead. Then Reed caught a pass at the foul line, and Chamberlain was there to meet him. Reed went to his left around Wilt but tripped over his foot and fell forward, tearing a main muscle running from his hip to his thigh. The New York center lay writhing in pain as the action raced the other way and Holzman screamed for the refs to stop the game.
“I drove past Wilt and I just fell,” Reed recalled later. “I was having problems with my knee, and I tore a muscle in my right thigh. I was on a roll, too.”
Reed was out, and the Lakers had a hot hand. The Garden crowd grew quiet. Holzman tried to prop up his players’ spirits during the timeout. He inserted Nate Bowman to play Chamberlain, and that worked for a time. Then Holzman went with reserve forward Bill Hosket, all of 6′7″, who hadn’t seen a minute of playing time in the entire playoffs. Hosket hounded Chamberlain effectively enough, but it really wasn’t getting the Knicks anywhere. By the half, they were down 13.
In the locker room, Bradley suggested they go to a 3-2 zone offense, which would either force Chamberlain to come out from the basket or would give them open shots.
It began working in the third. The Knicks got bunches of steals and turnovers. The fourth period opened with the Lakers holding an 82–75 lead and a troubled hand. “Let’s go Knicks. Let’s go Knicks,” all 19,500 spectators chanted over and over. At just under eight minutes, Bradley hit a jumper to tie it at 87. Then at 5:19, Bradley dropped in another jumper to give the Knicks the lead, 93–91. Then Stallworth scored. Then Russell with one of his acrobatic off-balance shots. Then Russell again on a follow, and it was 99–93. Bradley did the final damage with about a minute to go, pushing it to 103–98.
After a brief flurry, the Knicks took the 3–2 edge, 107–100. Los Angeles had been forced into 30 turnovers for the game. In the second half, West didn’t have a field goal, and Chamberlain scored only 4 points.
“The fifth game,” DeBusschere said proudly twenty years later, “was one of the greatest basketball games ever played.”
The Lakers returned home and corrected their mistakes in Game 6. With Reed out, Wilt scored 45 with 27 rebounds. The Lakers rolled, 135–113, to tie the series.
The stage was set in New York for the Game 7 drama. Would Reed play? The Knicks left the locker room for warm-ups not knowing. Before he had left, Bradley and DeBusschere had asked Reed to give the team just one half. About twenty minutes would do it, they figured. In the training room, Reed was set to receive injections of carbocaine and cortisone through a large needle. There were problems, though, because the skin on his thighs was so thick. The doctor had trouble getting the needle in.
“It was a big needle, a big needle,” Reed recalled. “I saw that needle and I said, ‘Holy shit.’ And I just held on. I think I suffered more from the needle than the injury.”
The doctors had to place the injections at various places and various depths across his thigh in an effort to numb the tear. As they did, Reed howled in pain, and Jackson, who had been hovering in the locker room with his camera, captured what he described as some excellent shots of the moment. However, he never published them because Holzman asked him not to.
“I wanted to play,” Reed recalled. “That was the championship, the one great moment we had all played for since 1969. I didn’t want to have to look at myself in the mirror twenty years later and say that I wished I had tried to play.”
Reed appeared on the Garden floor just before game time that Friday, May 8, bringing an overwhelming roar from the crowd. “The scene is indelibly etched in my mind,” Frazier said, “because if that did not happen, I know we would not have won the game.” The Knicks watched him hobble out, and each of them soaked in the emotion from the noise.
The Lakers watched, too, and made no attempt at furtive glances. Reed took a few awkward warm-up shots. Then he stepped into the circle against Chamberlain for the tipoff but made no effort to go for the ball. Once play began, Reed scored New York’s first points—a semi-jumper from the key—and played incredibly active defense. Seventeen times the Lakers jammed the ball in to Chamberlain in the post. Reed harassed him into shooting 2 for 9. And Reed hit another shot (he would finish 2 for 5 with 4 fouls and 3 rebounds). But it was enough. The emotional charge sent the rest of the Knicks zipping through their paces, while West answered for the Lakers with a flurry of turnovers, many of them forced by Frazier. New York rushed to a 9–2 lead, then 15–6, then 30–17. When Reed left the game, having delivered the half that Bradley had asked for, New York had assumed complete command, 61–37. From there, they rolled on to Holzman’s first title, 113–99. Frazier hit 12 of 17 from the field and 12 of 12 from the line to finish with 36 points and 19 assists. Barnett had scored 21, and DeBusschere had 17 rebounds. But their efforts were second to Reed’s appearance.
“There isn’t a day in my life that people don’t remind me of that game,” Reed would say decades later.
“It was,” DeBusschere said, “a warm, wonderful time.”
Doubt
The outcome of the 1970 season had left Jackson with a mix of public elation and private doubt. The players met three days after the final game and voted him a full share of playoff money, $12,000, on the reasoning that the Knicks had made the decisions that kept him out of action. As glad as he was to have it, the money only increased his feelings of not having done his share to earn it. He recalled these feelings of low worth spilling over into his personal life. On one hand, he was torn by the desire to be free of his commitments so that he could enjoy an active social life. On the other, he felt more guilt.
Not surprisingly, his relationship with his parents had reached a cool distance. Jackson took his family to Grand Forks that summer but never made it over to Williston. To pull their children together, the Jacksons organized a family reunion in a group of cabins in Montana later that summer, affording Phil the chance to see Chuck, who was married and working in Dallas in retail sales; Joan, a mother of four; and Joe, a psychologist in New York. Jackson recalled Joe being alarmed at his state of mind and pressing him to come clean on all his issues, including an ambivalence that was obviously wrecking his marriage. Jackson, though, chose to avoid producing any sort of answers. He enjoyed the time with his family, then headed back to New York for training camp. He did so with serious doubts that he would find much success. In fact, he thought his playing career was probably over.
He had eventually found his way back to activity that previous spring, mixing with his workouts some pickup basketball and even volleyball on L.A. beaches while the Knicks were battling the Lakers. But those things were entirely different from resuming the banging and physical play in an NBA frontcourt. He quickly found upon his return that every little opportunity for contact left him fearful of a reinjury. The league is uncompromisingly unforgiving of any such reluctance.
Because he was on injured reserve the previous season, he hadn’t been included in the expansion draft that summer. Instead, Dave Stallworth and Bill Hosket were lost to new NBA teams, which meant dramatically weakened depth in the Knicks frontcourt. Jackson could see that he was expected to step in and play a major role. The circumstances were further complicated by Willis Reed’s poor health. His heroics during the championship series would mean that he struggled with injuries the balance of his career. That struggle began with the 1970–71 season. He was out, and Jackson had to play. It wasn’t a pretty sight on many nights, but with Frazier, DeBusschere, and Bradley around him, the Knicks remained in the thick of the playoff race.
“I remember him coming in and lighting a spark,” DeBusschere would say of Jackson during the period. “I also remember Red yelling at him, ‘Don’t dribble it!’ And Phil would dribble it off his knee, and the ball would go two rows deep into the stands.”
Reed even returned late in the season in time to be a factor in the playoffs, and Jackson and his teammates figured they were headed back to the NBA Finals to battle for another championship. However, they found themselves embroiled in a seven-game series with the Baltimore Bullets, which the Knicks expected to win—right up to the final moments of that seventh game, when Baltimore managed to blunt Bradley’s final field goal attempt.
The offseason brought a major infusion of talent to New York. Earl Monroe, who had just played a major role in defeating the Knicks, arrived in a trade from Baltimore, and 6′8″ center Jerry Lucas came from the Warriors. Reed, however, would lose another season to injuries, and Jackson would again have to offer up major support.
His physical circumstances were steadily improving, but his relationship with Maxine was fraught with confusion and insecurity, a torture that seemed capable of wrecking his career along with his home life. He had spent quite some time trying to pull away from her, but as the relationship neared its obvious end he attempted to revive their union. Maxine, however, had had enough of his pushing and pulling. She wanted out. And the 1971–72 season became the setting for the end of the relationship. They cried and hugged after the separation papers were signed. She went off to explore the opportunities that a new age of women’s liberation seemed to offer. And Phil Jackson went back to his basketball life, just in time to turn in a splendid effort in the playoffs. It was in an early series against Baltimore that Jackson first allowed himself the delight of intentionally goading an opponent into a mistake. He coaxed Jack Marin into a sixth foul, and out of guilt pledged that he would never do such a thing again, but it would prove to be the first perhaps in his long history of mind game fun.
New York advanced to the championship series, and he played well against the Lakers in the 1972 Finals. The Knicks figured they had an opportunity to upset West, Chamberlain, and company, who had just turned in an all-time best 69–13 record in the regular season, including a 33-game win streak. New York even gained a split of the first two games in Los Angeles, despite the fact that Reed was unable to play. Monroe and Lucas had come in and played brilliantly for Holzman, but Dave DeBusschere injured his hip early in the championship series and was lost. With him went any hope the Knicks had of winning, and the Lakers handily swept the next three games.
Jackson, though, had salvaged much with the season, not the least of which was his teammates’ confidence and respect. “Whenever Phil got out there, you knew he was going to get physical and make something happen,” DeBusschere remembered. “People talk about what a free spirit he was, but he always worked hard and always played within the structure of the team.”
“Jackson’s style as a player developed in accordance with his build, which reminds me of a clothes hanger turned upside down,” Bradley later explained. “He surprised big men by his defensive skill and made them feel they were being guarded by a man with three sets of arms.”
Beyond the revival of his career and the expiration of his marriage, the spring also brought him June, a 5′4″ redhead, courtesy of a Tuesday night pinochle game that Jackson shared with her sister’s boyfriend. She had just moved to Manhattan after graduating from the University of Connecticut, Storrs, in her home state. “I enjoyed basketball, but I wasn’t a crazy fan,” she later recalled.
By 1975 they would be married and on their way to adding four grandchildren to Charles and Betty Jackson’s expanding clan.
What attracted Phil and June to each other in those first days was their mutual inclination to earthiness, which at the time also involved heavy overtones of freakiness. “He struck a common chord in me,” she once explained to an interviewer. “I think we had a similar sort of social consciousness and maybe even intellectual consciousness. We were both a product of the times.”
They both liked the idea of political activism. They were hippies, but not “crazy wild,” Jackson said.
Somehow, the good people of North Dakota didn’t seem to agree.
Dating back to his college years, Jackson had served Boys State, the American Legion’s summer program for youth in North Dakota. Some years, he served as chaplain, but after the 1970 playoffs he headed back to Fargo to fill the dual role of chaplain and assistant dean of boys. Having grown his hair long and taken up pot smoking, he arrived with a different look than the one he had brought to his earlier duties with the program.
Not long after assuming his duties, Jackson and a group of his friends attempted to give Boys State a similar kind of makeover. He instigated group discussions on protest and avoiding the draft and made plans for a seminar on ecology, all to the great alarm of conservative-minded Legion officials. Afterward, they directed pointed public criticism at Jackson and his friends.
“It was a real heavy thing,” recalled Peter Porinsh, himself a recent Vietnam vet who joined Jackson for the program. “We got into a whole political thing. With his political activism, Phil brought a different awareness back to that little piece of North Dakota, which was very, very conservative.”
“It was a troubled time when I grew up, like when I was involved in Boys State,” Jackson recalled years later. “I was interested in giving those boys a chance to be draft dodgers if they didn’t want to go into the service. So there were a lot of things I stirred up as a kid, and I think it ran against some of the established people in the state.
“It was with great embarrassment that a lot of North Dakotans looked at me then, and in my early days in the NBA, with my alternative lifestyle—and they also looked away.”
The incident and two later misunderstandings served to alienate Jackson from his hometown and his state. He returned with June for his tenth high school reunion in Williston in 1973, and although he enjoyed catching up with old friends, Jackson picked up some negative vibes. Those vibes were confirmed when a local newspaper blasted him afterward for his personal lifestyle.
“He took a little heat when he came back for that first class reunion,” Dean Winkjer, a Jackson friend and Williston lawyer, acknowledged. “He had that hippie lifestyle and was a little bit out of sync with the mores of the community at that time. There was a female gossip writer in the weekly newspaper here who was quite critical of him. He never really felt comfortable here after that.”
“My star rose and fell rather quickly in this state,” Jackson would offer years later, after he had time to think about it.
He vented his anger with the publication of Maverick, which further irritated the good people of North Dakota, even some of Jackson’s friends. “I was very unhappy with some of the things that were written about him when he was with the New York Knicks. And I read his book … Some of the things in there I didn’t agree with,” former UND sports information director Lee Bohnet told a reporter in 1992.
Jackson’s comments about his high school football coach and a shot he took at North Dakota hit a sour note. But what really angered folks back home was his story about his family’s disappointment over moving to North Dakota. “North Dakotans had the reputation of being ignorant farmers,” he wrote.
After that, the relationship would never be quite the same, although both sides came around considerably after a number of years had passed. Jackson was honored with North Dakota’s Cliff Cushman Award, an award of excellence from the governor; but even more important, he received the state’s highest honor, the Theodore Roosevelt Rough Rider Award, given to North Dakotans of distinction and accomplishment.
In the early 1990s, Williston renamed its field house for him, and Tom Kvamme, editor of the Williston Herald, came up with the idea of naming the high school’s most valuable athlete award after Jackson. “His sentiments hadn’t been great about Williston,” Kvamme explained. “I started the award with the idea of keeping him connected here.”
The editor pointed out that Jackson had always been particularly gracious in writing a personal letter to each year’s recipient, and he had always managed to pony up some prized item whenever Williston had a fund-raising raffle for its athletic programs. One year he sent Michael Jordan’s autographed warm-up, no small feat in that Jackson disliked prevailing upon his players for autographs and favors of that nature.
The state awards and local honors all came after he had vaulted to success as head coach of the Bulls, and Jackson couldn’t help wryly noting that no one from the state had seemed eager to honor him when he coached in the Continental Basketball Association.
Indeed, it was Jackson’s conversion of his reluctance into persistence in and around the pro game that kept him alive and well in North Dakota hearts. “Phil’s one of those guys who would have been successful at whatever he did,” Bill Fitch would offer after looking back at his career, “because he’s intelligent, thorough, and competitive.”
He wound up playing ten seasons for the Knicks over eleven years, all of it a rush of loose angles and hook shots, stray elbows and crafty play. The run ended when they traded him to the New Jersey Nets before the opening of the 1978–79 season. In training camp, Nets coach Kevin Loughery asked Jackson to go for a ride, leaving him certain that he was about to be cut. Instead, Loughery asked him to accept a reduced role, to stick around as a player-coach, to dress for practice and work against the younger players on the roster and to play in games as needed. Jackson was happy to stick around and was immensely grateful to Loughery for the opportunity.
The thing most people didn’t realize, Loughery would explain later, was that despite his hippie image Jackson was incredibly tough, a feature hardened by his long years trading elbows in the Knicks frontcourt. He was competitive, too. On occasion, Loughery would get tossed from games and Jackson would get to take over. At one point, Loughery even threatened to quit and offered up Jackson as his replacement. The team’s owners, though, didn’t think he was ready. Jackson claimed that he was, but later would admit that he was dead wrong.
Still, the coaching bug had taken a bite.
“I don’t see anything else out there as far as a business, career, or anything that compares with motivating eleven basketball players into a winning team,” Jackson told the Williston Herald in 1980. “The thrill, drama, pressure, and intensity of playing the game can’t be duplicated. There’s not the same feeling of being part of the action as a coach, but there are greater pressures. And the wins and losses are felt more intensely than as a player.”
Eventually the Nets’ run would come to an end as well, and for the first time in many years, Jackson saw no involvement with basketball in his immediate future. With his playoff money from 1973, he had bought land on Flathead Lake in Montana and built a home there. So he packed up his family, which had expanded by three children, and headed there, spending an ill-fated year trying to run a health club and dabbling in junior college basketball. That didn’t work, and it occurred to him that pro basketball was just about all he had ever known. Yes, he had toyed with the idea of education and graduate school, but over the years hoops had thoroughly infested his blood. It was then that he truly came to regret writing Maverick.
“If I had a chance to do it over again I would not,” he told an interviewer later.
Armory Days
Jackson cast about the basketball world looking for an opportunity, hearing between the lines with each phone call that he was a pariah. Then came a contact with the Albany Patroons, an expansion CBA team coached by Dean Meminger, one of his former Knicks teammates. It was Meminger’s sad fortune to be fired, and Jackson’s to be hired.
So he packed up his family and moved to Woodstock, New York, in 1982 to take over an 8–17 Patroons team. “It was important for us, it was important for me,” Jackson would say of the experience. “I was just in the process where I was concerned whether coaching was going to be something I was going to do or not do. Or if I was going to be any good at it.”
The Patroons were owned by the local government and run by Jim Coyne, their founder as well as Albany County’s executive. Later, Coyne would end up serving a four-year jail term in a federal prison camp in Fort Dix, New Jersey, but at the time he was the one man in pro basketball to give Jackson a break.
Actually, Coyne had wanted to hire former UCLA star Henry Bibby, but that didn’t work out. So Coyne dialed up Jackson. “I told Phil how things were going, and I told him I just wanted him to finish out the year and see if he liked it or not,” Coyne recalled several years later. “He told me to call back in an hour, and when I called back, he said, ‘I’ll be there.’ Fate is a funny thing. It’s just being in the right place at the right time. If I didn’t make the phone call, maybe fate would have turned out a different way for Phil and he might not have gotten back in basketball the way he did.”
The job paid $17,500 that first year and left Jackson with a one-way commute of exactly forty-seven miles from his Woodstock home to the Washington Armory in Albany. Jackson pulled in his zany friend and occasional tripping partner from their wilder days, Charley Rosen, as a volunteer assistant. Rosen nicknamed the CBA the “Cockroach Basketball League.”
“The only thing I don’t miss is the hour and ten minute drive from the Armory to Woodstock,” Rosen would say later of the commute he and Jackson made each way.
Jackson’s coauthor of Maverick, Rosen was 6′8″ inches and had played ball at Hunter College. He had met Jackson in the early 1970s when Rosen was running around with Stan Love, the brother of Beach Boy Mike Love. Rosen, a freelance writer, had been an English professor at Hofstra University in the late 1960s. He would quickly become known as an emotional boiling pot on the Patroons bench. He loved the league, and his antics would soon make him a viable entertainment attraction in his own right.
“Charley is a showman,” Rockford guard Kenny Natt, a former Patroon, once explained, “but that kind of thing can work against a team. Everywhere we go, the focus is always on Charley. He talks to the fans, he gets on the refs. He might like that, but the players don’t. I don’t. When you’re a player, you don’t need the extra distractions.”
Jackson, though, loved the friendship and the amusement. Together, they would make an immediate impact in Albany.
“Phil turned the franchise around,” Rosen later recalled. “When he took over for Meminger, it was a very dangerous situation for the franchise.”
The Patroons would eventually fold, as most CBA teams have at one time or another, but not until Jackson had pushed them off on a rather distinguished journey. After his tenure there, he would be followed by future NBA coaches George Karl and Bill Musselman, and the Patroons’ all-time roster would feature a long list of NBA players, including Sidney Lowe, Vince Askew, Scott Brooks, Tony Campbell, Mario Elie, Kenny Natt, Albert King, and Micheal Ray Richardson.
Not many of those guys, however, populated the rosters during Jackson’s five-year tenure with the team. Instead, he dealt with the likes of Frankie Bryan and Michael Graham.
Displaying his counterculture idealism, Jackson’s initial strategy was to pay all of his ten players the same, with married guys getting a $25 weekly boost over the single guys. Jackson gave each of them ample playing time. “It was really kind of a taught thing,” he said. “We talked these guys into that. We talked them into sharing time.”
It was a Shangri-la that allowed him to claim the league championship in 1984. But pro basketball has always been a star system that pays the players with the flashiest games. Eventually Jackson had to give in to that, leading to three immensely frustrated seasons that caused his tenure there to end badly. In one of his last playoff games, he lost his cool and tossed not one but two folding chairs onto the floor, a Bobby Knight type of display far from the laid-back posture he would adopt in his later NBA seasons.
Despite such histrionics, Jackson left mostly fine memories for the people he worked with there. “Phil was just a great guy to play for,” recalled Derrick Rowland, the franchise’s all-time scoring leader, who played five seasons for Jackson. “He understands a lot of the dynamics of the game, the dynamics of people, and brings them together.”
“He’d always come to practice in a tie-dyed shirt, and he was living in Woodstock, so we’d kid him that he was stuck living in the ’60s,” recalled Greg Grissom, who played for Jackson in 1986–87. “He was a kind of player’s coach, but you also knew with him when it was time to be serious.”
When Jackson was about to claim his seventh NBA title, the Albany Times-Union sent a reporter to Los Angeles to ask Jackson to reflect on the difference between his approach then and later. “It’s still playing for the group, I think,” he replied. “It’s still playing for your team. It’s still a desire to win and play hard every time you’re on the floor. I think it’s easier at this level because of the audience and television that comes with this game to motivate players, and the fact that their life is so much better.”
Not to mention easier. The CBA is a league designed to test just how much those involved love the game. This was especially so for those playing in the drafty old Washington Avenue Armory, which seated all of twenty-one hundred. “I remember the first time I was in Albany and we drove by the Armory,” George Karl recalled. “I said to the guy driving, ‘You mean we’ve got to play there?’”
“The Armory certainly shines the brightest of my memories,” Jackson told the Times-Union. “It had character. Practicing in the cold of the gym, dealing with the people in the reserve or the guard or whatever it was. There was always just a little bit of not being a basketball court feeling but it certainly warmed up in the middle of a winter night.
“I used to talk our commander of the Armory into keeping the balls in a warm spot in the ticket office so that the guys wouldn’t have to use balls that were 50 degrees, because that was the temperature in the building,” he recalled. “And we had to always go out and sweep the floor and mop the court because they used it for everything. We had to measure the temperature in the middle of the day when it was the warmest so guys could have a good practice. Usually, they’d come out in their parkas or stocking caps and mittens on.”
The players had to shower in full view of an adjacent public restroom, which meant fans weren’t above asking for autographs with the water running. So much has been written about the road trips that they’ve reached legendary status, with Jackson driving the team van for umpteen hours to Toronto or Bangor, steering while he worked New York Times crosswords.
“It was difficult,” he said. “We’d play four games in four nights on some road trip out West. We fly out to some place, grab a van and then drive to wherever. You’d get four or five hours of sleep at night. It was almost impossible to win on the road. But the players all performed very well. I was impressed by their cohesiveness, their desire to win. They were motivated.”
Ugliness invaded the circumstances in the 1985 playoffs when Jackson got into a shouting match on the bench with star Frankie Sanders, who hated coming out of games. Jackson promptly suspended his star, only to have Coyne, the public official who ran the team, reinstate Sanders over Jackson’s protests.
“Frankie was a prolific three-point shooter, but he got into an argument with Phil and Phil suspended him during the playoffs,” Coyne later explained. “But I said, ‘Hey, without Frankie, we’re not going to continue in the playoffs.’ So I flew Frankie up to Toronto [against Jackson’s wishes] and we won. That was a little bit of controversy, and Phil took it personally.”
The Patroons won that series but lost the next to a Tampa Bay Thrillers team coached by Bill Musselman, the first of three straight playoff losses Jackson’s teams would suffer at the hands of Musselman’s clubs. The 1985 series involved a typical CBA brouhaha when Musselman placed an early morning call to Sanders to tell him to behave. It would be one of the few times that Jackson himself was the victim of an opposing coach’s mind games. The Patroons and their fans were so incensed by the call that they lost focus on the game. Musselman made a big deal of having bodyguards in the Armory in Albany for the third game of the series.
“He will be remembered as the guy who brought stability to the franchise—and the guy who couldn’t beat Musselman,” the Times-Union would later say of Jackson’s tenure there.
The incident in his third season left Jackson depressed and looking around for an exit. During the summers he coached in Puerto Rico, another test of wild players and unruly, sometimes dangerous, fans. Before he left for Puerto Rico that spring of 1985, Jackson got a call from Jerry Krause, who had just been named general manager of the Chicago Bulls. “I kept up with Phil as a player through the years,” Krause recalled. “We’d talk from time to time, and I followed his coaching career in the CBA. When I got the job in Chicago in 1985, I talked to him again. I told him I needed scouting reports on the CBA. Within a week, I had typewritten reports on the whole league, details on every player. What I saw in Phil was an innate brightness. I thought that eventually he’d become the governor of North Dakota. I saw a lot of Tony LaRussa in him. A feel for people. A brightness. Question-asking. A probing mind. A coach.”
Jackson turned in the reports to Krause and departed for Puerto Rico. Later, he was called to Chicago to interview with Stan Albeck, the man Krause had hired as head coach to replace the fired Kevin Loughery.
“I was coaching in Puerto Rico,” Jackson recalled in 1995, “and I flew up directly from San Juan. It was a quick trip. I had to drive into San Juan and catch a morning flight. When you live in the subtropics, you get a lifestyle. I was wearing flip-flops most of the time. I wore chino slacks, because of their social standards down there, and a polo shirt. I had an Ecuadorian straw hat. Those hats are really expensive. They’re not like a Panama, which costs twenty-five bucks. It’s a hundred-dollar hat. You could crush-proof it. As a little flair item, I had a parrot feather that I’d picked up at a restaurant. I had messed around with a macaw in the restaurant and pulled a tail feather out and stuck it in my hat.
“There was a certain image I presented,” Jackson admitted. “I had a beard, had had it for a number of years. I was a little bit of an individualist, as I still am. I have a certain carriage about myself that’s going to be unique. I just came in for the interview. I don’t know how it affected Stan Albeck. Stan was a good coach. He’d been around and had some success. Stan and I had a very short interview. It wasn’t very personal, and I knew right away that Stan wasn’t looking to hire me, although Jerry Krause had locked us in a room and said, ‘I want you guys to sit down and talk Xs and Os.’ Stan found a different topic to talk about.”
“Stan came back to me after the interview,” Krause recalled, “and said, ‘I don’t want that guy under any circumstances.’”
Rejected, Jackson returned to the CBA to endure two more frustrating seasons. With his coaching in Puerto Rico, he had no time to search for talent to upgrade his roster, and with the Frankie Sanders incident, his system of sharing time and money went by the wayside. It didn’t help that his bench talent dropped off considerably.
“I think it was a system that, for the first two and half years, worked,” Jackson told reporters at the time. “Everyone played and everyone got the chance to contribute to a team that was highly successful. A year ago we felt a little talent shortage and we didn’t have enough to get by with ten players and we could only play seven or eight. That changed my philosophy a little.”
Jackson had to do his last season in Albany without Rosen, his colorful sidekick, who had accepted his own CBA head coaching job in Savannah. “I think Phil found it tougher to coach alone,” Albany point guard Lowes Moore said. “I think he found he really wanted to talk to someone.”
The last season closed in particularly painful fashion. Jackson’s team was an underdog to Musselman’s Thrillers but still managed to take a 3–2 lead in the series, only to drop the last two games.
“I knew I couldn’t go back anymore,” Jackson would later tell local reporters. “I’d had enough of CBA coaching. I knew I couldn’t become mired there, that it was time to leave. It happens that no matter how you plan things, they don’t turn out that way.”
He had made $30,000 in that final season, but he didn’t end the relationship right away, preferring instead to keep Coyne on the line while he searched around for college or pro opportunities, anything that would take him away from the situation. He was also pushing the Patroons for more money and turned to reporters to emphasize what he wanted. “With all the accolades and the won-loss record, I’m still not one of the highest-paid coaches in the league,” he said. “If nothing is coming up ahead of me then I will have to find something that is gainfully appealing to me as a breadwinner.
“I might as well get a job in some bureaucratic institution that has a health plan and other benefits and get on with my life.”
His time in Albany, however, had given him more of a resume, a five-year record of 117–90, a CBA championship, and a Coach of the Year award. The previous year he had applied for jobs at the University of Minnesota and at Colorado. Even Yale had seemed interested in his resume.
“I felt I did a good job,” Jackson, then forty, told reporters. “I felt comfortable with the team and I feel comfortable that I am getting better as a coach.”
“Phil made the Patroon organization very classy,” Moore told reporters. “He accomplished many things and he knew it was time to move on.”
Jackson’s hesitation mostly centered on how much June and the kids, twin sons Ben and Charley and daughters Brooke and Chelsea, loved Woodstock. June was director of a hospice there, and both she and Jackson had taken an active role in the affairs of Woodstock’s eclectic community.
Coyne himself wasn’t sure he wanted Jackson to come back for another season. In short time, it would become clear that Jackson had put himself in a bad position, twisting in the wind with no job. Then the Patroons hired his old nemesis, Musselman, and what seemed like Jackson’s only real door of opportunity had slammed. “He beat us three years in a row,” Jackson told the Times-Union when informed of Musselman’s hiring. “I would say he is the most logical choice.”
Jackson’s friends in Woodstock began to worry about him. He spent long hours watching basketball on television that spring and continued to prepare scouting reports on teams, even though he had no purpose for them. One friend asked why he watched so much basketball on TV. Because hoops was the only thing real on TV, he replied.
Jackson contacted the Phoenix Suns and the Knicks but failed immediately to get an interview with either team. “I guess you could say I have had get-to-know-you talks, or nice-to-meet-you sort of things,” Jackson said. “I talked a little bit to [Phoenix general manager] Jerry Colangelo for an assistant job but I think that would be a long shot.”
With the Knicks, it was another unproductive phone chat. “The Knicks are looking for the best possible people,” Jackson said. “And I have a very dedicated niche in the organization as far as being a former player and one that is generally interested in that organization. But, as far as being one credited with NBA know-how [coaching], I have yet to prove my point.”
Finally, he was called in for an interview with Madison Square Garden vice president Jack Diller. Jackson was desperate enough by then to tell them he would take anything. “I want to have a job in this organization, but not any specific job,” Jackson told reporters after the interview. “Most good organizations have quality people who go across the board. That is the way I believe the Knicks want to go.”
Jackson waited by the phone until time to leave again for Puerto Rico, where he also took up a position by the phone. That time, too, passed, and he returned and took his family back to Montana, again with no contact.
Even Coyne began pitying Jackson’s situation and made a public call for him to be hired as CBA commissioner. Reporters phoned Jackson for his response. “It piques my interest, sure,” he said. “I find it thought provoking and soul searching.”
His forty-first birthday came and went, and still no call from an NBA team and no call from the CBA either. The phone didn’t ring until October, after Jackson had already come to the realization that his career as a professional was over.
It was Jerry Krause on the line. This time, he told Jackson, get a haircut and shave.
“Things didn’t work out like I planned,” Jackson would say later, “but they worked out like I hoped.”