Although he had retreated to his abode in upstate New York, Phil Jackson maintained a keen interest in the Chicago Bulls throughout the 1999 season, to the point that he would phone Tex Winter to offer his evaluation of the struggles of the dramatically weakened roster.
“He calls occasionally and has left messages for me,” Winter confided. “He’s interested. He’s followed the team. He leaves his impressions of what’s happening.”
Jackson’s communications were typical among the group of men who used to be known as “your six-time world champion Chicago Bulls.” In the months after the breakup of their very special team, the people who were the Bulls still tried to keep alive the special relationships they enjoyed as pro basketball’s darlings.
Their relationships had become a matter of E-mails, voice messages, and quick courtside visits. Pippen, who was traded to the Houston Rockets, had a long-distance relationship with close friend Ron Harper, who remained a Bull. “We’ve just kinda been calling each other and leaving crazy messages on each other’s phones,” Pippen explained.
Former trainer Chip Schaefer moved to southern California, where he worked as a representative for Oakley, the eyewear company—which meant one of his new bosses was Oakley board member Michael Jordan.
Former assistant coach Jimmy Rodgers was splitting his retirement time between New England and Florida.
And Dennis Rodman was in the midst of a brief, painful tenure with the Los Angeles Lakers. Guard Steve Kerr had been signed to a fat new contract by Krause, then traded to the San Antonio Spurs; and Jud Buechler underwent a similar process that landed him with the Detroit Pistons. Ditto for Luc Longley, who had been sent to the Phoenix Suns.
Just like the days when he was the team’s trainer, Schaefer still served as something of a central figure, an information clearinghouse, for the group. He had communicated with virtually every member, including Jordan himself. “There was more than a little bit of melancholy in his voice,” Schaefer said of Jordan’s call to inform him of his plans to retire.
It was too soon for nostalgia, though. And the group didn’t seem obsessed with disdain for Krause, the man who engineered the demolition of the championship roster, Schaefer said.
If there was a unifying feeling among all the expatriates, Schaefer said, it would have to be contentment. After all, many of the players left town in trade deals that paid them millions. With that contentment came a sense of relief that they were no longer caught up in the acrimonious atmosphere that engulfed the team during their last championship drive.
“Everybody was just so fried,” Schaefer said of the end of the dynasty.
No one was more “fried” than Jackson himself, who had grown weary of arguing and fighting with Krause over the future of the team. Now Krause ran the miserable Bulls, and Jackson maintained that he had found peace away from the stress and limelight of the NBA.
“I’ve been trying to do as little as possible,” Jackson told the Chicago Tribune. “I would say right now I’m a retired NBA basketball coach. I feel great about what I have been a part of [in Chicago], but I’m a little reluctant now to think about going back to work.”
“I made up my mind I had to retire and regenerate my batteries this year,” Jackson said. “I’m speaking two or three times a month, talking about concepts of leadership, to companies, CEOs, church groups, though one criteria was it had to be in the Southern belt so I can keep my tan all year.”
“It got so difficult to be in the middle of all that conflict last year,” Steve Kerr said. The truth be known, though, Kerr would have preferred to stay with the Bulls. His family was comfortable in the Chicago suburbs, and he was a favorite of the fans and the media.
But Krause believed Kerr leaked inside information about the team to the media during the 1998 season. Even Winter tried to talk Krause into keeping Kerr and explained that the guard had not been disloyal. But Krause would not have it. Kerr was clearly close to Jackson, and Krause was not going to keep around one of “Phil’s guys.”
Kerr said Krause actually called him after his trade to San Antonio went through. “It was a nice call,” Kerr said. “He thanked me for my contributions to the team.”
The reason Krause was so pleasant in the phone call, Kerr quipped, “is that he was so glad to be getting rid of us.”
Still, he added, it was nice to get the call. Too bad Krause hadn’t made a regular practice of phoning the players every six months or so just to chat and say thanks for playing hard.
“I think it would have gone a long way for Jerry if he had called the other guys on the team as well,” Kerr said.
For those who had left the team, there remained concern for the players and coaches who stayed in Chicago working among the shambles of what was. But there was also anticipation, as both former and current Bulls waited to see where Jackson landed as a coach for the 2000 season.
Jackson, after all, remained the leader of the group, and many of the members harbored hopes of working with him again in his next job. Since his move to upstate New York, Jackson had spent most of his time at home working on his relationship with wife June. When he did go on the road, it was to make motivational speeches or to raise money to boost the presidential hopes of Bill Bradley, his friend and former teammate.
Despite his success as a fund-raiser, Jackson continued to strike out with the Bulls. He approached the team about purchasing a table at a Bradley fund-raiser in Chicago but was turned down.
“He ran it by the Bulls to buy a $10,000 table,” Winter said, “but I don’t think they wanted to do it. From the standpoint of the organization, they felt like they’d like to stay out of the politics of it.”
It would have seemed that Reinsdorf, long known as a Bradley admirer and a supporter of Democratic politics, would be an ideal candidate to contribute to Bradley’s cause. “Phil hasn’t hit me up,” Reinsdorf said with a laugh in a brief interview.
The team chairman added that the Bulls couldn’t contribute to Bradley’s campaign owing to the fact that they had multiple owners, which could be a violation of federal election laws.
As for the Bulls, Winter said that Krause had spent most of his time on the road scouting and hadn’t been around the coaching staff much. Considering the painful, frustrating nature of the season in those strange days after the gold rush, that was probably a good thing. Jackson maintained a particular interest in the team’s efforts to continue using the triangle offense, Winter said. “Phil’s impressed with the way the guys are staying with the offense, but he’s also indicated the triangle is difficult for us to use because we don’t have good shooters.”
Winter, who had been despondent over the Bulls’ poor showing in 1999, was obviously boosted by Jackson’s continued interest.
“I think he’s following us pretty closely and some other teams, too,” Winter said, referring to the fact that Jackson was a hot commodity as an NBA coach.
As a coach, Jackson had no weaknesses, Schaefer agreed. “He can motivate players, he can discipline players, because people respect him. He has a presence about him, from his big shoulders to his contemplative nature.”
At least one current Bulls staffer, however, questioned how Jackson would fare with the current team. “I’d love to see Phil come back here this year,” he said. “I’d love to see how Big Chief Triangle would do now.”
Other Jackson associates agreed with Winter that the coach would likely be back in the league for the 2000 season, with speculation centering again on Los Angeles, New York, Denver, New Jersey, Washington, and even Portland and Charlotte.
The speculation about Charlotte heated up in late March 1999 as rumors raced around the NBA that Michael Jordan was about to buy a share of the team and hire Jackson as the Hornets’ next coach. That scenario, though, proved far-fetched. Jackson had not even responded to questions about it. Instead, his close associates said he was enjoying himself, “living in the moment,” as befit his Zen philosophy, and had given absolutely no thought as to what he was going to do.
“He wouldn’t want to go back into a situation where he wouldn’t have a chance to win,” Winter said.
“There are a couple of criteria I have,” Jackson said. “If I take a coaching job, I’d like to have a chance to win. And in the Eastern Conference I see a lot of opportunity. I see the East on old or dead legs. Indiana, Miami—their [player] leaders are pretty long in the tooth. So the potential could be good in the East.
“In the West, where most of the good teams are, there are only two or three teams with a chance to win. Obviously, Utah has a great chance to win this year. L.A. has an outside chance. Portland has a chance to win in the future as a young team coming up.
“But if someone asked me to take over as an architect, a term the Bulls once used for Jerry Krause, putting a team together and a coaching staff, I may not even coach. Some of the things that happened last year were opportunities in that situation. I don’t have to pound on my chest and say, ‘That’s my job.’”
Wherever Jackson ended up, Winter said he thought Jackson would use the triangle offense. Jackson’s continued use of the offense was important to Winter, who said he viewed the triangle as his coaching legacy.
“He’s embraced it, and he feels like it’s as much his as it is mine,” Winter said of Jackson’s beliefs about the offense. “And it probably is. I like to think that through Phil the triple-post offense will live on. More through him actually than through me.”
On the other hand, Jackson admitted that he might decide never to coach again.
“I am aware of the effect the game has on your health and well-being,” Jackson said. “I feel really good. But I don’t forget what it’s like to spend relatively sleepless nights because a referee made a bad call and you lost a game or your team didn’t withstand the barrage of the visiting crowd or whatever.
“I think things come to us for a purpose, so I’m willing to listen to what my opportunities are. One of the things I believed was the key to my year was to sit out and wait and make a decision this summer. That involves not jumping the gun, not trying to make up my mind before summer.
“It would be real easy to run off to the first thing that draws my attention. But I really think I need to sit back and weigh all my options and do something when the time is right. When the clock clicks back on and says, ‘Let’s get busy again,’ I’ll make that decision.”
By April, young Lakers star Kobe Bryant had begun phoning Winter. The guard didn’t know the elderly coach, but he wanted to ask his advice about basketball matters. “What’s he doing phoning Tex?” Krause had asked when he learned of the calls.
Bryant told Winter he was in love with the triangle offense. What Bryant didn’t tell the older coach was that he had long had a premonition that Winter would one day coach him. What Winter didn’t tell Bryant was that Jackson was intrigued by the challenge of meshing Bryant and center Shaquille O’Neal into a team frame of mind.
“The job he’d like to have would be the Lakers,” Winter said.
The Building
As coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, Kurt Rambis came to his moment of truth with stunning swiftness. One could hardly blame him for not seeing it coming. One moment his future seemed extremely bright; the next, his head coaching career was all but over.
That’s just how harsh the National Basketball Association can be.
What made the experience even harder was that it was men he had known, men he had worked long and hard with, men he had enjoyed success with, men who considered themselves his friends, who terminated him, essentially deleting his options and leaving him twisting in a cold wind.
Just months earlier, Kurt Rambis, the young Lakers’ assistant coach, had been the man everybody wanted to hire. There was the head coaching job of the Sacramento Kings, his for the taking. Or the Los Angeles Clippers—less desirable, given the Clippers’ culture of despair, but an opportunity all the same.
Rambis, though, was given reason for pause by the Lakers. For a while it had seemed that longtime assistant Larry Drew was poised to take over if head coach Del Harris was fired. But the demand for Rambis had driven Lakers management to covet him as well. Rambis was clearly a coaching talent, and the Lakers didn’t want him to get away.
The message Rambis got was that he, not Drew, would be next in line if Harris left.
So Rambis passed on the other jobs that summer and decided to wait, to see what his future held. After all, the Lakers’ roster was stocked with talent. It offered the opportunity to move in and coach Shaquille O’Neal, Eddie Jones, and Kobe Bryant.
Later, when Rambis had all the time in the world on his hands, it would be easy to look back and see that the karma was all wrong from the start. But none of that was apparent at the time. When the Lakers fired Del Harris just a dozen games into the strike-shortened 1999 season, it wasn’t an ideal situation. The coach who replaced him wouldn’t have the opportunity to begin the season in training camp. It was there that a new coach had the time go over his system with the players, to do all the work necessary to instill his philosophy with the team.
Once an NBA season begins, there is precious little practice time for making changes. Rambis knew this would be a problem. He knew that if he accepted the job, he was faced with inheriting Harris’s lax practice approach and an offense that the players often failed to execute. But Rambis assumed that after this transitional short season he would have a full training camp the next fall.
Lakers management had considered releasing Harris before the 1999 season, but then decided to give him one more try. Then the team opened with 6 wins and 6 losses, and owner Jerry Buss figured it was time to make the change.
Having earned his millions in real estate, Buss had always been a gambler. He loved poker and was known to refer to his assets, even the players on his Lakers teams, as his “stack of chips.”
Rambis didn’t realize it at the time, but when he took over the Lakers in February 1999, he was one of Jerry Buss’s chips. Buss didn’t consider the gamble on Rambis a wild one. After all, he had made the same bet in late 1981 on another young coach named Pat Riley. That season, the Lakers had opened the schedule in a turmoil that stewed as the weeks went by. Magic Johnson and his teammates didn’t like the approach of Paul Westhead, even though Westhead had coached them to the 1980 league championship.
Finally, Buss decided to fire Westhead in hopes that team executive Jerry West would agree to take over the coaching chores. West, however, declined the opportunity, leaving Buss to settle for the young, unproven Riley. It took some time for Riley to learn to assert his will, but he matured quickly as a coach. By the end of the season, the Lakers were in championship form, and Buss’s gamble made it appear as if he possessed some special hoops intuition.
So it seemed reasonable nearly two decades later that Buss would again decide to gamble on a young assistant with no head coaching experience. Like Riley, Rambis had been a valuable role player for Lakers teams that won titles. He had that understanding of the game. Rambis even possessed enough of an offbeat image to remind some observers of a young Phil Jackson. Rambis also had connections that ran deep in the organization. A California guy, he had been a teammate of Lakers minority owner Magic Johnson, and he was liked by West. Better yet, Rambis’s wife Linda and Jerry Buss’s daughter were close friends. Rambis’s main flaw was that while he was lucky, he wasn’t lucky enough. To start at the top of the NBA and succeed, you have to be very lucky.
The Lakers soon demonstrated there was little luck to be had in 1999.
While he was betting on Rambis, Buss decided to raise the ante, shoving more chips onto the table with the signing of oddball forward Dennis Rodman. The volatile Rodman had always proved to be a challenge for a variety of NBA coaches, but from his very first moment on the job, Rambis was faced with adding Rodman to a roster already debilitated by bad chemistry and dissension.
Rodman’s basketball smarts and rebounding brought a dizzying ascent. Rambis won his first nine games as coach of the Lakers and then a bunch more. While the atmosphere around the Great Western Forum grew giddy, veteran observers harbored a sense of caution, even foreboding. And with good reason.
Not satisfied with things merely going well, Buss decided to roll the dice yet again, this time with a blockbuster trade. Buss dealt team leader Eddie Jones and backup center Elden Campbell to Charlotte for sharpshooter Glen Rice and forward J. R. Reid. The supposed upside of such a trade was the teaming of a shooter of Rice’s caliber with a post weapon like O’Neal. On paper, it made an unbeatable combination. But no matter how fine the prospectus, trades always take time to work in pro basketball. It’s nearly impossible to produce an instant chemistry, or to predict whether there will be a chemistry at all. Players need time to adjust to each other, to the new styles of play.
Yet if there was one commodity that Kurt Rambis didn’t have in the whirlwind spring of 1999, it was time. Even with the chaos of management’s moves, he somehow kept the club moving mostly in a positive direction, despite the fact that he faced one crisis after another as March turned to April.
Later, Jerry West would make it known that he wasn’t in favor of signing the troubled Rodman or of making the trade for Rice. But it was his job as team executive to try to fulfill the wishes of ownership, West explained, and Buss wanted to trade Jones because the guard’s contract would be up soon and he was already expecting a substantial raise. The owner also wanted to ship Campbell because the backup center earned $7.5 million per season in a long-term contract that would only escalate.
Buss didn’t like the idea of paying a backup so much, West confided.
Rambis wondered about the reasoning behind the flurry of moves, but he never really had the time to sit down with management to discuss them. They clearly had a destabilizing effect on his team; even worse, the moves only exacerbated the sour relationship between O’Neal and third-year guard Kobe Bryant.
Even with the chaos, Rambis said he didn’t worry too much. He assumed at the time of the trade that he would be able to sort it out the next fall in training camp. At no time did he realize that this was it for him, that this was his one brief opportunity as an NBA head coach, that it was his neck going on the chopping block as Eddie Jones went on the trading block.
With the turmoil, Rambis found himself forced to spend way too much time talking with players’ agents and parents and assistants, all of them seeking to be coddled and reassured over every little concern about playing time and shots and personality conflicts. Dealing with these things took immense effort in a shortened season where extra games were packed into each week to make up for the contract battles that had cost the NBA the first four months of the schedule.
As the difficulties unfolded, Rambis made an effort to talk with each of the team’s three stars—O’Neal, Bryant, and Rice. What confounded him was that each one of the three offered radically different perspectives on what was needed to make the team work. He was stunned to realize that his team’s three stars were not remotely on the same page. Worse yet, the three talked hardly at all with each other, meaning the team was caught up in an undeclared tug-of-war over playing styles. And as an interim coach, Rambis had little or no real power to deal with it.
As the season wore on, Rambis came to see Rice as a “one-trick pony,” a marvelous shooter who was not able or willing to do the multifaceted things needed on a championship team. Rice wanted the coaching staff to devise and run plays for him that allowed him to shoot coming off screens set by teammates. This, of course, came into immediate conflict with O’Neal, who wanted to receive the ball in the post and shoot it or draw double teams and throw it out to open teammates on the perimeter.
Beyond that, Rambis was alarmed by the energy he had to expend in keeping the hard feelings between Bryant and O’Neal from flaring into open warfare.
Soon, Kurt Rambis found himself caught in a funnel, sucked away by a whirlpool of selfishness and distrust among his players. Once wry and teasing with reporters, Rambis grew increasingly testy, erupting in anger and annoyance at seemingly innocuous questions. Employees around the team began whispering, “Kurt’s in way over his head.”
Seeking to reverse this negative energy and salvage the season, Rambis decided to break through the barriers in hopes that he could thaw the icy relationship between his stars.
O’Neal was the leader of the team, although the big center didn’t want the responsibility of dealing with his teammates. Rambis went to O’Neal and implored him to be more accepting of the twenty-year-old Bryant, who had entered the league at age seventeen fresh out of a Pennsylvania high school. Bryant was immensely talented, but his decision to bypass college had left him with no real understanding of team concepts. Under great pressure as the league’s most talented center, O’Neal had quickly grown impatient with Bryant’s youthfulness. Then, as the Lakers failed each year in the playoffs during their first two seasons together, O’Neal’s impatience grew into an intense dislike of the standoffish Bryant.
Rambis reasoned that O’Neal should change his attitude because he was the team leader, the one player capable of pulling the group together. You can heal this rift; you can reach out to Kobe, Rambis told his center. Bryant was young and hard-working and just learning the game, the coach pointed out, and the center should make a move to reconcile with him. The coach later recalled that O’Neal’s only answer was a blank, cold stare. Nothing more. That, Rambis would come to understand in retrospect, would be the moment, his one chance to heal the relationship, to bring an end to the team’s deep division.
It wasn’t going to happen.
Instead, the season played itself out in a sad drama, with Rodman being released in April after a drunken appearance at practice. Even with the distractions, Rambis coached the Lakers to 25 wins against 13 losses and a first-round playoff victory over the Houston Rockets. But then things fell apart against the San Antonio Spurs in the second round. For the second year in a row, the Lakers were swept from the playoffs. It was a bitter, ugly defeat, one that filled the players—especially O’Neal—with a deep anger that would linger for months. The big center left Los Angeles without bothering to attend the team’s season-closing meeting and returned to his Orlando home, where he stewed in frustration.
The series loss to the Spurs was so humiliating that forward Rick Fox decided afterward he had lost all love for the game.
No one, however, was sicker at the turn of events than Jerry West, who had spent most of his fourteen-year playing career watching seasons end in frustration and shame. To Lakers fans, the sixty-year-old West was a familiar, beloved guardian of the team’s fortunes. When the team moved from Minneapolis to Los Angeles in 1960, he was there to greet it, a first-round draft pick out of West Virginia University. He quickly combined with second-year forward Elgin Baylor to form the heart of a young, exciting team that made the gritty, cynical game of pro basketball a hit in glitzy southern California. West and Baylor led the Lakers to one playoff battle after another over the next dozen years, and in the process managed to capture Hollywood’s hard hearts. In those early years in southern California, the celebrity crowd included Doris Day, Danny Thomas, and Pat Boone, who sat court-side in the L.A. Sports Arena and brought pro basketball its first real taste of glamour.
A taste of ultimate victory was another matter.
Six times in the 1960s, West and his Lakers faced the Boston Celtics in the NBA Finals. Six times they lost. Red Auerbach’s Celtics, featuring Bill Russell, were that good. Finally Russell retired, and West and his Lakers had their opportunity.
On their seventh try for a championship, the Lakers met the New York Knicks. They lost again. They finally won in 1972, then lost an eighth time in the Finals the next year, to the Knicks team that featured Phil Jackson coming off the bench.
“I don’t think people understand there’s a real trauma associated with losing,” West said of his championship frustrations. “I don’t think they realize how miserable you can be. Particularly me. I was terrible. It got to the point with me that I wanted to quit basketball. I really did. I didn’t think it was fair that you could give so much and play until there was nothing left in your body to give and you couldn’t win.”
The more elusive it proved to be, the more the championship came to have an almost mesmerizing hold on West. “The closer you get to the magic circle, the more enticing it becomes,” he once explained. “I imagine in some ways, it’s like a drug. It’s seductive because it’s always there, and the desire is always there to win one more game. I don’t like to think I’m different, but I was obsessed with winning. And losing made it so much more difficult in the offseason.”
He retired from playing in 1974 after a falling-out with then-owner Jack Kent Cooke and stayed away from the franchise for two years. Those two seasons marked the first time in their fourteen years of existence that the Los Angeles Lakers missed the playoffs. Finally courted back to the team with a settlement of his dispute with Cooke, West spent three misery-laden seasons coaching the club, discovering in the process that he was simply too high-strung, too unforgiving of lax efforts, to be around the players on a daily basis.
He found existence more tolerable in the front office, where his keen eye for talent helped him add the right players to a roster anchored by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson. The Lakers won five NBA titles in the 1980s with West shuffling the deck as an executive. But that did little to abate his ever-growing anxiety over the state of the franchise. “Jerry always seems like he’s having a terrible time, or something bad is impending,” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar once observed. “He’s always worried.”
“The bottom line is, my number-one priority in life is to see this franchise prosper,” West explained. “That’s my life. It goes beyond being paid. It goes to something that’s been a great source of pride. I would like people to know that I do care. It’s not a self-interest thing. I do care about the winning and the perpetuation of the franchise. That’s the one thing I care most about. I don’t care about the pelts and the tributes. I like to work in my own weird way, working toward one goal, that’s a winning team here.”
Through the range of difficulties over the years, West had managed to persevere as an NBA executive, a complicated job that very few did well. Most people who tried running pro basketball teams soon found themselves sunk in confusion and despair. West, though, was clearly tougher and more determined than his peers. Anyone dealing with him on trades and other NBA deals soon learned that underneath his courteous exterior he possessed a toughness hardened by his upbringing in West Virginia’s hardscrabble coal fields.
He seemed to view everything as a function of his high competitive standards. There was a right way to approach every facet of the game. In Jerry West’s mind, you either adhered to that standard or you failed. Most people in the NBA never seemed to even recognize or understand that standard, much less have a concern about adhering to it.
In Los Angeles, the basketball not only had to be good, it had to be entertaining and star-driven. West understood better than anyone that success was built on a star quality that could attract Hollywood’s and the world’s interest. The tentative nature of that formula had made itself known abruptly in November 1991 when Magic Johnson announced his retirement due to his HIV infection. “Since I came here in 1960,” West said at the time, “the Lakers have always had one or two players that have been at the top of the league in talent. In perpetuating this franchise, our next move is, where do we find another one of those guys?”
With Johnson’s departure and subsequent failed attempts at a comeback, West embarked on an extended period of maneuvering to pull together another championship chemistry. Identifying the players, seeing the invisible, was the first part of that very difficult task. After that, he had to manipulate the NBA’s byzantine personnel structure so that the Lakers could get the rights to those special players. That had become nearly impossible with the league’s salary cap and expansion over the 1980s and 1990s.
“The problem is, it’s like a poker game,” he explained. “Any team that has a player play ten years is probably going to be out of chips pretty soon. So you have to try like crazy within the scope of this league to keep your team young and productive. In the past, we’ve been able to bring in younger players and phase out older players at the end of their careers.”
Despite his determination, that replenishing process stalled in the seasons after Johnson’s retirement, as the franchise sorted through an array of players and coaches, trying to find a competitive mix. For five long seasons, the circumstances dragged on with West torturing himself looking for answers. Meanwhile, the Lakers plodded through one unproductive season after another. Always a bundle of nervous energy during games, he grew into a picture of anxiety, often retreating to the Forum parking lot during games while the outcome was being settled. Or he could be seen standing near section 26, peeking past the ushers at the action, his body twisted with tension.
The circumstances pushed him to search harder around the league, looking for a sign that some supremely talented young player would emerge from the amateur ranks or that some impressive veteran from another team would find the contractual freedom to become a Laker. While the situation stretched his patience, West busied himself by acquiring the finest complementary players he could find, so that he would have the pieces in place for adding the prize talent once it became available.
Finally, early in the 1996 offseason, West saw an opportunity to attract O’Neal, a free agent with the Orlando Magic, and Bryant, a seventeen-year-old prospect entering the draft out of high school. Getting them presented a huge gamble—if he miscalculated, all of his hard work of the last five years would be wasted. It was a risk that would cost tens of millions; but after years of yearning to compete for a championship, both West and Jerry Buss were willing.
West figured he would have to come up with a $95 million offer to get his prize. But ultimately that would prove to be many millions short of what was needed. The Orlando Magic pushed their offer to retain O’Neal to $115 million, then a little more. The anxiety climbed to unbearable levels for West and his staff. To push their offer to $123 million, they released seven players, including Magic Johnson. Dumping their roster of players seemed to border on lunacy. If O’Neal stayed in Florida, the Lakers would be forced to bring in a host of low-rated talent to fill the gap.
The pressure of the situation almost drove West to a nervous breakdown, but eventually he won out, securing both O’Neal and Bryant in a flurry of deals.
Getting them in place, however, proved to be only part of the problem. The immediate expectation among fans was that with O’Neal the Lakers would challenge Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls for the league title. Instead, the Lakers never could overcome the veteran Utah Jazz. In 1997, O’Neal and his teammates lost 4–1 in the second round to Utah. The next season, the Lakers won 61 games and advanced to the conference championship series, only to be swept by the Jazz.
Each defeat had shredded West’s emotions, but the third straight season of embarrassment, ending with the sweep by the Spurs, was clearly the worst. The team’s obvious disarray had prompted calls for a coaching change. Finding someone to guide his assemblage of talent had proven to be West’s greatest difficulty. Since the departure of Pat Riley in 1990, the Lakers had been through Mike Dunleavy, Randy Pfund, and Magic Johnson before West turned to Del Harris, an old friend, in 1994. A skilled Xs and Os practitioner, Harris had elevated the team’s victories in each of his four full seasons, from 48 to 53 to 56 to 61. His practices, however, were not well organized, and Harris, a kind, deeply religious sort, had a tendency to drone on. West had hated firing him, but it became clear early in the 1999 season that the players had quit listening to him. Then Rambis, the hand-picked successor, had struggled during key moments of the playoffs, as rookie coaches were known to do.
West expressed irritation at these struggles, but he was fully understanding of them. From all indications he was prepared to retain Rambis, until a groundswell of support developed for a coaching change.
The name most commonly tossed about as a Rambis replacement was Jackson’s. Jackson had actually sent up the first trial balloon for the job in the spring of 1998 when he had published excerpts from his diary in ESPN the Magazine in which he mused about coaching the Lakers and wondered whether O’Neal would be smart enough to play in Jackson’s triangle offense. Like others around the NBA, West had been irritated at the time with Jackson’s boldness.
West had been a good friend of Jerry Krause since the late 1970s, when Krause worked as a Lakers scout. The two men would often commiserate over the difficulties of their jobs and discuss events in and around the league. In the 1989–90 season, when West’s relationship with Lakers coach Pat Riley soured, he would unburden himself to Krause. Later, when Krause began having his difficulties with Jackson, he would tell West about Jackson’s manipulation, ego, and mind games.
West and Jackson had competed against each other as players. “I remember this one dubious moment Phil had with Jerry West,” Walt Frazier, Jackson’s old teammate, remembered with a chuckle. West’s Lakers and the Knicks, with Jackson as a role player, had battled in the NBA Finals in 1972 and ’73.
Sometime during those seasons—Frazier didn’t remember the exact game—Jackson supposedly inflicted an injury that perhaps framed their relationship.
“The game was over,” Frazier said, each sentence punctuated by another chuckle. “West was walking off the floor. Phil flared his elbow and broke the guy’s nose.
“West was just walking off the floor. He was flabbergasted, like everybody else,” Frazier said. “You see, West had already had numerous broken noses in his career. But he turned around and there were those elbows of Phil’s.”
The incident was typical Jackson, Frazier recalled. “Phil was just that way, man. He was so awkward, and those arms were so long. In our practices, nobody wanted to get near him.”
Angry over the comments, Jackson would later deny that the incident ever happened. And West said he didn’t remember it either, although he added that it could have happened. He said his nose had been broken so many times it was difficult to remember.
Aware of a possible conflict between Jackson and West, Winter explained that Jackson would come back into the league only if he found a team with the right level of talent. Jackson coveted the idea of coaching the Lakers, Winter revealed. To do that, however, Jackson would have to gain the blessing of West, which seemed unlikely.
On the final weekend of the 1999 season, as the Lakers were about to be swept by the Spurs, West was sitting in the nearly empty Great Western Forum when a reporter mentioned Jackson.
“Fuck Phil Jackson,” West said.
Thinking that he had been misunderstood, the reporter again mentioned Jackson.
“Fuck Phil Jackson,” West repeated, emphasizing the words and his disdain.
West wasn’t alone in his opinion. While Jackson was wildly popular with millions of NBA fans, many coaches and team officials around the league openly loathed him. In New York, feelings against him had turned particularly strong that spring. Jackson had been cast as a potential replacement for Knicks coach Jeff Van Gundy and had quietly agreed to discuss the job with the team’s front office. That decision blew up in controversy when the story broke in New York newspapers that the Knicks were talking employment with Jackson even as they had a coach under contract. Center Patrick Ewing responded to the news by declaring that he wouldn’t play for the former Bulls’ coach. Ewing said he’d rather be traded.
Other coaches around the league chimed in on what they saw as an underhanded move. The uproar was strong enough that it played a role in Knicks executive Ernie Grunfeld’s leaving the team.
The response blindsided Jackson, according to Frazier, the Knicks’ longtime broadcaster. “Coming from some of his peers. From guys in the coaching profession making derogatory comments. But it was more jealousy than anything, because he’s been so successful. This is a business. Someone’s going to make you an offer and you’re not going to listen?”
“I think he’s burned his bridges,” Tex Winter said of the circumstances.
As if the Knicks’ fiasco wasn’t enough, in one of his rare 1999 interviews, Jackson commented that the 1999 championship would be undervalued because it was a shortened season, a statement that further angered his colleagues around the NBA. Then in early May, when he was honored by the Bulls at halftime of their final regular-season game, Jackson held a press conference beforehand and made reference to Rodman’s release by the Lakers. He offered the opinion that Rodman hadn’t gotten the same support in Los Angeles as he had gotten when he played for Jackson in Chicago. Although Jackson was seemingly referring to Rodman’s off-court support, from agents and other professionals, West took Jackson’s comments as criticism of the team’s management itself. “Apparently we don’t do things right,” West said angrily, adding that the Lakers had done everything they could for Rodman, including paying the salaries of his two security guards.
“He might have burned the bridges,” Winter said of Jackson. “It’s unfortunate. With the success he’s had there’s bound to be some natural jealousy. It behooves him to be humble and complimentary of other people.
“I think there’s a lot of resentment in the league because of the success he had here in Chicago,” Winter added. “People seem to feel that Phil was lucky to coach Michael Jordan. I don’t think they give Phil the credit he should receive, but at the same time Phil should have been a little more humble. There was the impression that Phil rubbed it in.”
Clearly West was Mr. Basketball in Lakerland and was set to begin a new $13 million contract in 1999–2000 as team vice president. But West himself admitted that his perfectionist streak had made him a miserable coach. And there was little question that his presence as an executive added huge pressure and expectations to the people coaching and playing for the franchise.
Rambis had obviously struggled with all of the pressures and expectations.
“You also got Magic Johnson looking over everybody’s shoulder,” Winter said of the difficulty of coaching the Lakers. “He’s another icon. That’s a tough situation. I don’t know if Phil would be smart to get in that situation. As long as Jerry West is there, it would be tough for Phil.”
The only hope for Jackson in Los Angeles rested with Lakers owner Jerry Buss, who had acknowledged his interest in Jackson. The team was moving into the new Staples Center and had expensive skyboxes and season tickets to sell. Jackson would obviously be a marquee name in that regard. Buss, though, seemed understandably reluctant to force the issue. His efforts to get involved in Lakers management had backfired disastrously.
Meanwhile, Rambis had an uneasy feeling about his job. Even before he had been hired as the interim coach in February, there had been talk of hiring Jackson as the team’s new coach.
To West, the idea of hiring Jackson seemed like another Buss gamble. But he was also aware of the need to fill those seats and skyboxes. Jackson’s own public comments had served to create huge doubts in West’s mind. He was the guardian of the team. He wasn’t about to turn it over to a Machiavellian force. Still, Jackson clearly had star quality; something the franchise had always needed to operate in Hollywood.
West had assembled a collection of talent, but the team’s play had left Lakers fans with an empty feeling. Quite simply, they had played without conviction in the 1999 playoffs, and the team had gone nearly a decade without contending for a championship.
Something had to be done to get fans excited about the 2000 season. Could the Lakers do something to bring in a player? the team’s management asked. It became clear to Jerry Buss and his managers that they couldn’t spend $6 million on a player and generate the kind of excitement that Jackson could. There was no player available at such a price tag whose presence would make people go out and buy tickets, or make corporations purchase skyboxes.
In fact, spending $6 million a year on Jackson would be a tremendous savings, and they would sell a lot of tickets.
Later these financial considerations would be explained to Rambis. Even the deposed coach had to admit it. In a sense, Rambis became a victim of the building and of his owner’s gambling.
Discouraged, confused, and bitter, Rambis would clean out his desk at night and stay away from the franchise for weeks. But Buss would bring him back, first as a broadcaster and then as a scout. To add to his workload, Rambis would be left to conduct tours of the Staples Center for Buss’s friends, tours of the very building that cost him his job.
The Seventh Championship
In the end, the decision to hire Jackson was left with Jerry West. The team vice president put away his anger and looked at the circumstances. He could rehire Rambis, who had much promise as a coach. But Rambis remained untested, and if he was retained the team could well find itself looking for a coach yet again the following the season. There had been enough change, West said. The team needed a veteran coach to deal with its internal strife.
Both O’Neal and Bryant had offered as much in encouraging West to hire the fifty-three-year-old Jackson. O’Neal had even indicated he might leave the franchise if Jackson weren’t hired. West knew the center wouldn’t walk away from his huge contract, but he also knew Jackson was the right choice.
In mid-June, he and the Lakers announced Jackson’s hiring at a press conference, ending speculation that had dragged on more than a month. Jackson had been in Alaska, finishing up a fishing vacation with his sons, and got off a boat one day to learn from an Eskimo boy that he had been hired as the Lakers’ coach.
There would be discussions and brief negotiations, but the matter was a foregone conclusion. Asked about Jackson, West told L.A. reporters, “What Phil talked about was how to get players really to trust themselves, how to get everyone to share the ball. And in the offense he plans to run, everyone has to do that, or no one’s ever going to score. That to me is the most important aspect of having him here. I don’t think we have to worry at the end of the season about coaches anymore. I think we have to worry about trying to improve our personnel and also trying to get to the next level.”
“It was the fact that my talents and the talent of this team did match up well together,” Jackson said. “I just felt that this was something that kind of meshed. I know Shaq, I’ve been in many situations with him. I’ve got a feel for him a little bit. I think he’s not played to his ability in the last couple of seasons. He can be better than he is. He can be the most valuable player in this league.
“I’ve been very intrigued with Kobe Bryant, who I think has got Michael Jordan-esque type of ability and yet is a player that’s still uneducated in basketball and in life. And he’s willing to learn.”
The Lakers were going to use the triangle offense, Jackson said. “When you have a system of offense, you can’t be a person that just is taking the basketball trying to score. You have to move the basketball, because … you have to share the basketball with everybody. And when you do that, you’re sharing the game, and that makes a big difference. It’s like trusting each other, and when you trust each other in basketball, then it goes to the other end of the court.”
Running the triangle meant that he wanted Winter as his assistant coach. Winter agonized over his decision, to remain with his old friend Krause and the rebuilding Bulls, or go to L.A. to the richly talented Lakers, where his offense would again shine in the spotlight. Krause was bitter and angry, far more than Winter had expected, when he informed the Bulls VP of his decision. “I wanted him to be upset,” Winter would say later. “I didn’t want him to be hurt.”
Jackson also brought in former Bulls assistants Frank Hamblen and Jim Cleamons, and retained Bill Bertka from the previous Lakers’ staff.
Asked if he also planned to bring in his old team, Jackson replied, “My old players? I’d like to have them all. Obviously, we had the right crew there in Chicago. But most of them are under contract and Michael’s retired and Dennis has gone into some other ozone…”
Although Jackson and the staff wanted the front office to obtain Pippen from the Rockets, West emphasized that he was against it. Besides, the real question on people’s minds was Jordan. He immediately insisted on no plans to return to the NBA as a Los Angeles Laker. He did, however, have some kind words of advice for the young Lakers who soon would be working with Jackson. The Lakers should keep an open mind about Jackson’s quirky approach to coaching, including his use of Zen Buddhist philosophy, Jordan said. “It can relieve a lot of tension in your life, and I’m pretty sure they got a lot. Actually I think they’re gonna be happy with Phil. He’s gonna give them a certain structure and a certain guidance that they probably need. They got the talent. It’s always been there. It’s just how you utilize the talent in a focused situation. And I think Phil is good at that.”
There was immediate speculation that the triangle would be difficult to install in Los Angeles. In recent years, three NBA coaches attempted to install the triangle offense to help rid their teams of offensive stagnation. The three—Jim Cleamons, Quinn Buckner, Cotton Fitzsimmons—all lost their jobs after players revolted with complaints that learning the system was too difficult, too unnatural.
The previous season, Rambis had attempted to install some plays that would allow new offensive weapon Glen Rice to shoot coming off screens. O’Neal tried them for a few weeks, then informed Rambis after a players’ meeting that the plays would have to cease.
“If I’m on a team where we come down and call plays every time, then it’s time for me to quit,” O’Neal confided later. “Then I’m not gonna be an effective big man no more. If that’s the case, then they’re just using me as a token to set picks. I don’t want to play like that. I want to run and get crazy and look at the fans and make faces. If I’ve got to come down and set picks and do all that, it’s time for me to quit. Then I ain’t got it anymore.”
How would O’Neal accept the triangle, which is a much more difficult adjustment than simply adding plays to feature a new teammate?
That question enveloped Lakers fans as training camp opened in 1999. Over the summer, Jackson, Winter, and assistants Jim Cleamons and Frank Hamblen came to Los Angeles and watched the Lakers’ summer-league team struggle to run the offense.
Kobe Bryant was eager to use the triangle. But would O’Neal and the other Lakers have the patience and take the time to learn the offense? “That’s the big question,” said former Bull Steve Kerr. “Phil told me he thinks it takes two years, two years to learn the triangle. You tell me what NBA coach has two years to fiddle with an offense? Most of them get fired before then, and I think that’s a big reason why you’re seeing the same offense all over the league.”
Jackson assistant Jim Cleamons had left the Bulls and taken over the Dallas Mavericks, where he attempted to install the triangle, only to find that each of his young stars recoiled at the idea of passing the ball. Each player wanted to prove that he was “the man,” executing some nifty one-on-one move each time he got the ball. Their insurrection cost Cleamons his job.
Perhaps Jackson would have the status and stature to make it work in Los Angeles, Kerr said.
Whatever path the team took, one thing was clear: the young Lakers had better be ready to work—in practice. “The difference with the Bulls from every other place that I’ve been—every coach I’ve been with in the NBA has been very well organized—the difference in Chicago was the focus on fundamentals every single day,” Kerr said. “We started every day with basic drills, footwork, passing, ballhandling. Every single day.”
He admitted that it was hard for coaches to get modern pro players to do that, which was why the leadership of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen had been so valuable. “The first time I saw Michael and Scottie standing fifteen feet apart throwing two-handed chest passes back and forth for ten minutes, I realized the Bulls were really going to focus on fundamentals,” Kerr said. “It’s the foundation of the game, and if you don’t work on ’em, you’re not gonna have that foundation.”
So much of Jackson’s success in Los Angeles would depend on O’Neal. The coaches felt that Shaq’s adjustment to the offense could be eased if he had a teammate who understood every element of the triangle and acted as a coach on the floor. The discussion came back around to Pippen, who had expressed his eagerness to rejoin Jackson in Los Angeles—so much so that he was trying to force his trade away from the Rockets. But Jerry Buss decreed that Pippen’s huge contract was too expensive for L.A. to pick up.
The Portland Trail Blazers, though, were owned by billionaire Paul Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft. Eager to make the Blazers better, Allen gave Blazers GM Bob Whitsitt permission to ship six reserves to Houston for Pippen, who had just passed his thirty-fourth birthday. The vastly wealthy Allen didn’t mind paying Pippen’s four-year, $54 million contract, which boosted the Portland player payroll to more than double the league’s $34 million salary cap.
Jackson had badly wanted Pippen, but instead the former player became his old coach’s worst nightmare. Suddenly, the opposition in Portland had a player who understood Jackson’s system. Worse yet, Pippen was a motivated warrior. He wanted to win a seventh league championship after winning six with Michael Jordan and the Bulls.
“When I saw Portland make its run for him, they had the reserves and the right things happen for them to get it done,” Jackson would explain later. “Sometimes, it’s a matter of economics…”
“When it happened, I was able to say, ‘We let our biggest opponent step into the gap and supply themselves with a player who could eventually end up costing us, big-time.’”
With Pippen out of the question, Jackson turned in earnest to the job of getting the Lakers up to snuff with the offense. It would be a task, but his year off had recharged his energy and he was ready. In fact, he allowed himself to be photographed bare-chested on the L.A. beaches for a Sports Illustrated feature, a move that strangely resonated his day as a young lion in 1973 during his Malibu acid trip. Clearly, though, he was sending the message that he was replenished.
“For me it was a very long year,” Jackson said. “Obviously it was something that was definitely new. I moved out of Chicago to upstate New York. I was able to do a variety of things. I was able to take a winter vacation, which I had never done in my life. And it was spent doing some things for Bill Bradley and his campaign. It was very interesting for me just to be kind of a private citizen, so to speak. That was very good. It was very good for me, very good for my family, very good for the relationships that I’ve had with my family. It was very invigorating for me to feel like I can go back and come to this game with a lot more energy than I ever thought I could come back to.”
When Jackson moved to Los Angeles, wife June stayed behind in New York. The couple had worked to regain their relationship following the revelation of Jackson’s infidelities in Chicago. If he had elected to end his pro basketball career, they might well have succeeded in repairing the damage, several friends observed. He had been offered the job working with the Bradley campaign, and June Jackson would work on Bradley’s behalf. But Jackson chose to do the thing he knew best, and accepted the Lakers’ offer.
“Phil could have continued to work on Bill Bradley’s presidential campaign, taught at a university, written, or stayed home in Montana and become a trout fisherman for the rest of his life,” his agent, Todd Musburger, told the L.A. Times.
Friends said he arrived in Los Angeles and went to work with an excitement about his professional life. But his personal life left him obviously discouraged. His children delighted in visiting frequently at his beachfront home. But his choice served to chill his relationship with June. She had no desire to resume her painful experiences.
“She wants to get out of the shadow of being an NBA wife,” Jackson acknowledged.
In an interview with writer Frank DeFord, Jackson would acknowledge that his life was shaped by a father who showed warmth and a mother full of drive. His relationship with his father left him craving the team relationship, he explained, and added that his mother’s influence left him attracted to a woman’s intellectual nature.
“Matters of the heart were not always easy with me,” he explained. “I had to unlearn a lot of things about women.”
The bicoastal circumstances would soon bring an end to his marriage. In the spring, the Chicago Sun-Times would receive a tip from someone affiliated with the Bulls that Jackson was romantically involved with Jerry Buss’s daughter Jeanie, a Lakers executive who several years earlier had exposed her shapely body for a Playboy pictorial, even posing nude in Lakers offices at the Forum. When Rodman arrived on the scene in 1999, she had dated him briefly. It was from Rodman that she supposedly learned what a good guy Phil Jackson was. The union of the coach with the team owner’s daughter did not present what Jerry West considered ideal circumstances. And critics in Chicago suggested that Jackson had finally found a way around his problems with management. Yet over his years in Chicago, Jackson had long learned to practice discretion in his private life, and he did the same in Los Angeles. His relationship with Jeanie Buss appeared to have no influence whatsoever on the team’s performance.
It would, however, elevate his love life to tabloid status, yet another sign that his celebrity had grown beyond that of a mere coach. Beyond that, it gave some of his NBA critics another opportunity to sneer at the image that Jackson had projected with his Sacred Hoops philosophy.
Some observers snipped that Jackson had been lured back to the game by the money, but he had turned down the opportunity to earn $8 million per season with other teams to take $6 million per year with the Lakers. Jackson’s close associates said he clearly missed the opportunity to teach the game, and that was what brought him back.
“This is the right place for me,” Jackson said. “I believe they’re a group of players who want to get there but don’t know how.”
Winter later observed that Jackson returned to the game under immense pressure because it was a substantial gamble in terms of his reputation. Everything he had gained as coach of the Bulls could be lost in Los Angeles, and there were critics hoping that Jackson would stumble. “I’m no savior,” Jackson said, acknowledging the scrutiny.
Jackson had once explained that he based much of his decision-making on Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan: “Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, the question: … Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good. If it doesn’t, it is of no use.”
His chosen path was one he had taken before—in 1989—to take a talented, divided team and teach it the triangle. “Phil from the very beginning has been sold on this philosophy, this concept of team play that we preach,” Winter would explain later. “From the very start. Sometimes even more so than me. Phil had to dig in. That he did. He had to convince Michael. That was the first thing.”
Jim Cleamons recalled those first efforts to teach the triangle to Jordan and the Bulls.
“It was all new,” he said. “It was new to the team. It was new to me. It was a learning process. Phil knew the team and had a good feel for them. Getting them to do the daily work was no trouble. The team had a good work ethic. But the fact is, Michael was Michael. He knew he was so talented, he figured he had to do it all, that that was the only way they were going to have success.”
Teaching Jordan to share with his teammates brought waves of turmoil. Now the coaches faced a similar task of convincing O’Neal and Bryant of a new approach. But Jackson also knew so much more about what he was doing a decade later, Cleamons pointed out. “P.J. knows now what he wants out of this system, knows how to demand certain things. I think that whole teaching technique and how to build your system, he now has that down in his mind. In 1990, we didn’t know what to expect.
“Now you know what you want to teach and how you want to teach it. Tex knows. We’re a staff coming in together. Tex has been with him eleven or twelve years. Frank’s been with him three or four. This is my eighth year. We’ve all had experience in teaching the triangle to teams that are resistant or less talented. All of those situations make this much more palatable.”
Plus, he had prepared himself for the Lakers. Derek Fisher pointed out that Jackson hadn’t been around them long before the players realized that he had spent quite a bit of time studying them.
Jackson knew exactly what he had to do to move things in the right direction. In Chicago, Tex Winter had watched in amazement as Jackson built a strong relationship with Jordan. “When you have a relationship that strong with the star player, the rest of the team just kind of falls in line,” Winter explained. “Phil worked very hard at cultivating that relationship with Michael.”
Now Jackson began the process by building a similar relationship with O’Neal. Winter explained that Jackson knew that O’Neal was motivated by the opportunity to score lots of points, so he fashioned a trade-off with the big center. If O’Neal would show the leadership Jackson wanted, then the triangle offense would give him the opportunity to score big numbers.
This, of course, got down to the basic conflict between O’Neal and Bryant. When Jackson was hired, Bryant had purchased Sacred Hoops and gone up to his hotel room in Los Angeles to greet him. O’Neal traveled to Montana to visit with Jackson. Obviously, both were eager to please their new coach, even to curry favor with him.
It was O’Neal who would take top priority in Jackson’s plans. The coach began by placing responsibility squarely on the center’s 7′1″, 330-pound frame. “This team should be looking to win 60 games,” Jackson told the L.A. media as training camp opened. “That’s a realistic goal.”
He paused in the middle of that thought and looked at O’Neal sitting nearby. “The ball is going in to Shaq,” Jackson said. “And he’s going to have a responsibility to distribute the ball. It’s going to be good for the team, and good for him.”
Good indeed. O’Neal would go on to average 29.7 points per game while operating out of Jackson’s triangle offense, good enough to lead the league in scoring and earn O’Neal’s first MVP honors. O’Neal dubbed himself “The Big Aristotle” in an MVP acceptance speech that he had been polishing for years.
For all the excitement over the big offensive numbers, Jackson reminded O’Neal and his teammates early and often that it was defense that would distinguish them. To play it, Jackson wanted O’Neal in shape and filled with desire to block shots and defend the basket.
“Maybe I could play a little defense from the bench, who knows?” Jackson joked in that first press conference from training camp. “Defense is conditioning. People get beat because they aren’t in good enough condition. When you are tired, you can’t have a gritty attitude. We will work on conditioning.”
Still, Jackson’s initial disappointment over not getting Pippen led him to forecast a 5–5 start for his team in November.
And that came before an October 13 injury forced Bryant to miss the first 15 games on the schedule. Yet even a setback such as Bryant’s broken right wrist proved to be a blessing. It allowed the coaches to mold the team identity, then to add Bryant’s frenetic energy to the equation in December, like some sort of super-octane fuel.
It would also allow time for the rift between Bryant and O’Neal to begin healing. On that issue, Jackson wasted little time. “I’m going to stop some of the gossiping, stop some of the rumormongering among the personnel here,” he promised that first day.
At the time, Jackson and his coaches didn’t realize just how deep a divide they faced. After the season, Winter would confide that he was shocked by the level of hatred O’Neal expressed for Bryant when the coaches first arrived on the scene.
“There was a lot of hatred in his heart,” Winter said, adding that O’Neal didn’t hesitate to vent his feelings in team meetings. “He was saying really hateful things,” Winter explained. “Kobe just took it and kept going.”
O’Neal’s main message to anyone who would listen, including management, was that the team could not win a championship with Bryant. West had been strong in pushing aside O’Neal’s desire to remove Bryant from the team, but there were signs that management had heard the message so often that they, too, entertained doubts. During the offseason, former O’Neal teammate Penny Hardaway had contacted O’Neal about joining the Lakers. The center jumped at the opportunity and phoned management. The implied message was that Bryant should be traded, but management declined that move.
During the season, as the coaches worked to heal the rift between the players, Winter explained that it had been made clear that if the coaches’ efforts didn’t work, then “a move would have to be made if they can’t play together.”
The team wasn’t about to trade the massive O’Neal, which meant that Bryant would have to go.
Like West, though, the coaching staff saw Bryant as a Jordan-like player. His hands were smaller than Jordan’s, but the athletic ability, the intelligence, the desire, were prodigious. What wasn’t clear was whether Bryant would grow to possess the alpha male nature that made Jordan so dominant in his late twenties. Bryant was still so young, it was hard to evaluate him for that. He certainly possessed the drive and work ethic.
But Jackson put off the temptation to form a close relationship with Bryant. The coach correctly read that O’Neal’s nature craved such a relationship, and Jackson turned just about all of his undivided attention to his relationship with O’Neal. The coach would later explain that the center did not have the same inquisitiveness as Jordan, and the conversations he had with O’Neal were not as expansive. Still, they spent much time talking.
Early in the season, Bryant would point out that he had yet to sit down for an in-depth conversation with Jackson. Bryant kept expecting that conversation to occur. But it never would. Jackson kept his time for O’Neal.
Some on the coaching staff pointed out that Bryant could have approached the coach about such a talk, but the young guard had such a strong sense of team issues that he seemed happy to let Jackson focus his efforts on soothing the center’s harsh feelings.
For much of the healing between the center and guard, Jackson and Winter relied on their triangle. The main idea was that because the offense was so structured, it would make the relationship between O’Neal and Bryant smoother on the court. Still, the coaches found there was so much residual anger on the part of O’Neal and other veterans against Bryant that Jackson had to spend months counseling O’Neal on how to get over it.
The danger, said Winter, was that O’Neal seemed to influence the entire team against Bryant. So he and Jackson worked regularly on changing that attitude.
“The coaches voiced to us that they weren’t seeing the same things we were seeing when they watched film and when they watched what was going on,” Derek Fisher explained. “They didn’t see the same selfishness or one-on-one play that we saw. What I tried to tell some of the other guys is that this is our fourth year now—me, Shaq, Robert [Horry], Rick [Fox], Travis [Knight]—so we still had issues that we had dealt with before this year.”
And those issues were still cooking on the team agenda, Fisher said. “It was kind of similar to a relationship between a man and a woman where you get upset with all of these things from the past that come up. That’s really where a lot of this stuff stemmed from. The coaches saw that a lot of this stuff would come in due time. But we were so impatient because we had dealt with it before.”
For a time, it seemed that no matter what Bryant did, O’Neal and other teammates wanted to find fault with it. Winter revealed that he finally put together a videotape to prove to O’Neal that Bryant was doing just what he was supposed to do.
“I think Kobe’s really leaning over backward to get the ball in to Shaq,” Winter would confide as the season progressed. “If there’s a problem there—and I think we’ll work it out—it’s that I don’t think Shaq appreciates what Kobe is trying to do to help his game.”
And so it became easy for the coaches to take Bryant’s early injury as a blessing. The guard’s absence allowed the team’s entire focus to fall upon O’Neal, which worked nicely into Jackson’s plans. He had named O’Neal captain and spent considerable time talking through a new approach to the game. Jackson wanted more leadership, conditioning, and defense out of O’Neal. As Winter explained, Jackson knew that O’Neal was motivated by scoring points, so he gave the center more scoring opportunities as long as he fulfilled the rest of his obligations. Jackson also regularly called O’Neal’s hand if he failed to do the right thing.
His efforts with O’Neal were intended to send a message to the rest of the roster to fall in line. It soon worked.
“It’s hard to not have a view of what Phil does,” Rick Fox said in November. “He is our leader now. In his interaction, he’s gone as hard at guys as I’ve seen anybody go at someone. Maybe harder than they’d ever be on themselves. And that’s a challenge. He’s pushing buttons to make sure guys continually come to work, come to step their games up and get better.”
Jackson also showed an early liking for zinging criticism at his players in the media. “Then he’ll smile about it,” Fox said. “I think he’s just honest.”
Jackson, in fact, told Sports Illustrated that he doubted whether O’Neal could be a leader because his poor free throw shooting meant that he couldn’t deliver at the end of games. Jackson made this comment to the magazine before he had actually discussed the issue with O’Neal himself.
“He’s very open with his criticism,” Fox said. “At the same time he’s very open with his praise. You can live with somebody who when his mouth opens, you get the truth. Sometimes the truth hurts, and egos are bruised. But all he’s doing is putting guys’ egos in check. It’s a fine line. He’s obviously very good at what he does. We’re still a group of people who will have to go through 80 or 90 games together.”
O’Neal was snoozing on the Lakers’ charter airplane during a late-November flight when he suddenly awakened to find Jackson leaning over just inches from his face.
“You played like shit in practice today,” Jackson said and walked away.
O’Neal said it was almost creepy, because Jackson reminded him so much of his stepfather, who was just as tough on Shaq as a child. “He’s my white father,” O’Neal said of the coach.
“Phil is all over Shaq, all the time,” Lakers reserve John Salley said. “But Shaq can take it. It works for him.”
All the other Lakers saw that O’Neal was respectful of and obedient to Jackson’s discipline, and they, too, fell in line. In a short time, Jackson had become the top dog in Los Angeles.
Early on, opponents made a practice of heaping fouls on Shaq. O’Neal responded with frustration and got tossed out of one game and suspended for another. Jackson forcefully reminded him that that was no way for a leader to act.
“He told me to be smarter,” O’Neal said. “I always protect myself, but I shouldn’t react right away when something happens. I will just wait a couple of seconds and then get them.”
Opponents around the league began noticing that O’Neal was more focused, more effective with Jackson’s coaching.
“He’s handing out a lot of punishment, too,” Phoenix coach Danny Ainge said after the Suns lost to the Lakers on November 15. “He’s like the neighborhood bully. He’s like a sixth-grader playing with second-graders.”
O’Neal had 34 points, 18 rebounds, and 8 blocks against Phoenix.
“I’ll tell you what,” Lakers forward Glen Rice said. “He could do that every game.”
November had brought immediate trends for O’Neal and the team. They opened the season with a big road win over Utah, only to then lose a game to Portland in which Pippen’s fierceness clearly intimidated the Lakers. He seemed to know where the Lakers’ offense was taking them before the Lakers knew, a development the team first saw in a preseason game.
“We used to own them,” Derek Fisher said of the Blazers. “We beat them every year, regular season or playoffs. They just couldn’t match up with us mentally or physically. They knew it and we knew it.”
But the Lakers now saw a profound difference in their opponents to the north. Suddenly, the Blazers had a new confidence, a new awareness. They began acting like they were better than the Lakers. And they began beating them.
“They knew the plays we were going to run before we did,” Fisher said. “They had this new attitude.”
Pippen was having a dramatic effect on his new team. “The presence of Pippen on the court was really felt,” Jackson said. “The effect that Scottie had when we played against Portland because of his ability to read the triangle, how to disrupt our offense, how to play Glen Rice, some of the things that he did are obvious.”
Jackson’s answer had been to sign free agent and former Bull Ron Harper, who would provide steadiness and leadership throughout the season, especially later with Bryant’s return. Harper would be a steadying, calming influence whenever the young guard’s competitiveness raged to the point that it pushed him out of control.
The Lakers recovered from that November setback in Portland to cruise through the month with an 11–4 record, which helped O’Neal earn Player of the Month honors.
Just before Thanksgiving, Jackson’s old team, the Bulls, visited the Lakers in their shiny new home, the Staples Center—only these Bulls hardly resembled the terrorizing force that Jackson had coached.
Made up of promising rookies and castoffs, the Bulls somehow managed to stay close to the Lakers, mostly by fouling O’Neal. On one sequence after another, O’Neal was hacked, with the smacks ringing out in the dead atmosphere of the new building. Each time O’Neal made a free throw, the audience reacted wildly, only to settle back into a stupor moments later.
Many of his free throws, though, traveled a truly awful path to the basket, each of them greeted by groans from the crowd. Winter liked to call O’Neal’s free throws scud shots, which didn’t endear him to the big center.
“Tell me that that wasn’t a painful game to watch,” Jackson said afterward. “I counted over a hundred foul shots.”
“Are you trying to help Shaq with his free throws?” a reporter asked Jackson.
“I think most of L.A. is trying to help Shaq,” he replied. “I have people stopping me in the middle of the street while I’m walking my dog and tell me, ‘Let me tell you what I can do to help Shaq.’ I told him that when I’d gotten 1,000 letters and videos and cards that I’d drop them all in his lap. But I know he’s gotten that same amount.”
The game also brought the opportunity for Winter to visit with Krause. The Bulls VP had finally stashed most of his anger and had brought in Don Haskins, the recently retired coach from the University of Texas–El Paso, as his basketball sidekick. Jackson and Krause, however, did not visit.
Jackson did take time to explain his progress with the collection of Chicago media present. “We’re much farther along than I thought we’d be as a basketball team,” Jackson said of his Lakers. “I think we’ve been able to do that on the strength of Shaquille’s individual ability right now. We’re not a very good executing team. We don’t have a lot of team speed. But we have occasionally played some real good games against some very good teams and won some games on the road that maybe we shouldn’t have.
“Ron Harper gives us a lot of definition on the floor,” he added. “Sporadically we can play defense. I don’t think we have that total effort yet. But we have a shotblocker, a force in the middle. We rebound the ball pretty well. We have some idea of how we’re doing things conceptually.”
Many in the Chicago media were amused by Jackson’s boost in celebrity with his relocation to the West Coast, including his appearance in a national ad campaign for an on-line trading company.
“You didn’t get all this attention in Chicago,” a Chicago reporter pointed out. “You didn’t make the cover of news magazines and all this stuff.”
Jackson smiled and replied, “Number 23 was the big guy there.”
Do you look at this as an opportunity to establish yourself as a coach outside Michael’s shadow? another reporter asked.
“I don’t look at it that way,” Jackson said. “I just look at it as a team that gives me an [opportunity] to try and transcend a different age group, a different generation, with the influence that I have, and the style that I try to bring to a team. I want to see how well I can adapt to this group, this Generation X or whatever they are, these Gen X kids, and try to get our philosophy across to these young men and see if we can play our style of ball that we like to play in this element.”
Two nights later, his team endured a thunderous appearance by Vince Carter and the Toronto Raptors, a defeat that left Bryant antsy to play.
His return, however, wouldn’t come until December 1, when he came off the bench to score 19 in a win over Golden State.
“It was nice to have Kobe’s energy,” Jackson said. “He’s just a wild, impulsive kid right now. He’s still feeling his way.”
“God, I had a headache I was so excited,” Bryant told reporters. “My head was literally throbbing. The first half, I felt like I was on speed or something. I couldn’t calm down…”
Immediately the media began asking about the prospects of Bryant and O’Neal getting along with Bryant’s energy changing the Lakers’ attack.
“I don’t foresee any problems,” Jackson said. “If there is, we’ll rein him in.”
The Lakers used the young guard’s presence to secure a much-needed win over the Trail Blazers the very next game. Bryant settled the issue by blocking a late Pippen shot and corralling Portland’s Damon Stoudamire on defense.
All the veterans on the team had been eager to see Jackson immediately begin disciplining Bryant, Fisher recalled. But that didn’t happen. “He still waited for a while before he started. He didn’t just jump in. He really didn’t,” Fisher said. “He allowed Kobe to come in. I think Phil wanted to see firsthand how things were, how Kobe participated in the games and practice, how we felt about him, how he felt about us. Phil waited to see all that before he made any judgments about whether there needed to be adjustments. He didn’t just come right in and tell Kobe he needed to curtail his game or his creativity. He really allowed things to develop, then here or there when it was pertinent, he would say something. It was never as if he was saying things to Kobe as if Kobe was the only guy on the team who needed to make adjustments, or to improve in certain areas.”
The season would also bring a quick answer to the question of Jackson’s own ability to get along with West. “I was worried when I first came out here,” Winter admitted. A public perception existed that West and Jackson might have differing opinions on personnel issues, egged on by Jackson’s penchant for offering his opinion to the media.
But Winter suspected that Jackson’s presence had helped take the pressure off West, who had been faced with trying to sort out the team’s gnarly chemistry problems.
“I think Phil helps get the monkey off Jerry’s back a little bit,” Winter said. “I think they’re gonna be all right. At least I think so.”
The other side of the issue was that the coaching staff took an immediate liking to West and seemed somewhat awed by his comprehensive view of the game. He saw everything, things that no one else could see. An early item of concern, the relationship with West quickly became a huge positive.
The players had also been ready to cooperate, Winter said. “The thing that impresses me is that they’re all really trying to do what we want done. At this stage of the season that’s really important.”
That good attitude was essential as the players attempted to learn the triangle offense. “They seem to appreciate the fact that we’re coaching them,” Winter said. “They’re trying to stay with it.”
The transition to the offense was helped substantially by the Lakers’ opening night win in Utah, Winter said. That was especially true for shooter Glen Rice, who had struggled adjusting to the triangle during the preseason. “He was thinking a little too much, but I wasn’t worried about Glen because he’s got such a great touch,” the assistant coach said.
Even the early success, however, didn’t change the fact that the Lakers had a long way to go to improve. “What amazes me is how poor they are fundamentally in passing the ball,” Winter said.
Winter said he had been surprised by O’Neal’s determination, although it was clear the Lakers’ center didn’t have Jordan’s fire. “He’s not a Michael Jordan type of leader,” the assistant coach said. “He’s not that vocal type of leader. But he plays hard, and everybody respects his desire to win.”
The coaches were also curious to see how O’Neal would adapt to the triangle. “He’s a good learner,” Winter said of O’Neal. “He’s picking it up pretty quickly. The only problem is, he’s still thinking in terms of power. That’s what he is, of course, is a power player.”
The triangle, though, stressed the finesse of passing and cutting. “Sometimes he has a hard time waiting for the cutter,” Winter said of O’Neal, who readily admits that patience is not one of his strong suits. “He’s a little overanxious at times. As a result, he sometimes misses a lot of point-blank shots. But he’s quite a player.”
It was obvious that the team needed a power forward to help O’Neal with the heavy lifting in the frontcourt. Although West had clearly stated his opposition to bringing back controversial forward Dennis Rodman, Jackson continued to hint to L.A. reporters that Rodman might be an option.
Winter said he hoped the thirty-eight-year-old power forward did not join the Lakers. “He’s called Phil a few times, and they’ve talked,” Winter said. “I don’t think Phil has ever actually called him. Dennis is Dennis. He’s too impulsive. Phil would keep him in line better than most, but he’s gonna do what he wants to do.”
The Lakers would soon find that they didn’t need Rodman. With the addition of Bryant, they would instead soar off to a winning streak. They would continue to show surprising poise over the coming weeks, losing a game to Sacramento before ripping off 16 straight wins that would carry them well into January. Finally they lost a January 14 game at Indiana’s Conseco Fieldhouse—and just like that, the Lakers came unglued. Suddenly they found themselves in a 3–7 free fall, and all the old panic resurfaced. O’Neal’s feelings against Bryant gained strength. Soon the players were again pointing fingers and blaming Bryant’s desire for stardom as their problem. “We can’t win with Kobe” was O’Neal’s insistent message.
Winter, though, saw the problem as nothing more than bad defense and maybe a touch of self-satisfaction in O’Neal. “We’re getting broken down,” the seventy-eight-year-old assistant coach said. “We’ve been vulnerable to penetration all year long, the high screen and roll. Kobe has a real tough time with it. So does Derek Fisher. And the side screen and rolls. That’s most everybody’s offense this day and age, especially against us.”
As for the chemistry issue, Winter said the coaches were treading softly. “Most coaches, Phil included, have always sort of had a whipping boy,” Winter explained. “And I think he’s very careful not to have that become Kobe, because he realizes that he’s got a great young player here and he doesn’t want to squelch him too much. And yet he wants to control him.”
The players had admired Jackson for sitting back and letting Bryant learn from his mistakes. But it soon became apparent to the coaches that many of the Lakers were almost demanding that Bryant be disciplined.
As for O’Neal, Winter said, “My main concern is that I don’t want him to be satisfied with where he is. I want him to realize what he’s doing wrong, even on the free throws … He’s not easy to coach. He has kind of a resentment for anybody to tell him anything that he’s doing wrong. He’s not an easy guy to coach.
“I think Phil treads very softly on Shaq,” Winter said. “I think he still is trying to read the situation as to what is the best way to motivate Shaq. I don’t think he knows yet. And I certainly don’t know.”
Mainly, Jackson focused on encouraging O’Neal to put away his anger. The harsh feelings against Bryant could surge through the entire roster. It was an old problem, Rick Fox said. “The times that we’ve become frazzled and unraveled as a team it’s been around situations where we embarrass ourselves.”
Derek Fisher figured that the All-Star weekend had a profound effect on Bryant, as did the coaching staff’s efforts to make the Lakers realize that they were silly to harbor anger from events that happened over previous seasons when Bryant was a young player finding his way along.
Bryant seemed to come out of All-Star weekend a changed man, Fisher said, as a player focused on team play. A big factor had been Jackson’s quiet encouragement of Bryant not to participate in the slam dunk contest. Bryant was defending champion, and Vince Carter was drawing raves. Fisher said the Lakers knew Bryant wanted to have a go at Carter, but he set that aside so that it wouldn’t bring a focus on individual accomplishments over team things. It proved to be a crucial factor in the team’s growth, although O’Neal was clearly mimicking Bryant’s crossover dribble during All-Star warm-ups, then tossing the ball up into the stands to emphasize the guard’s turnovers. Such open hostility had to cease, Magic Johnson confided, concluding that Jackson would soon get it under control.
But another factor at All-Star weekend was Seattle’s Gary Payton helping Bryant to understand screen-and-roll defense. “I don’t think Gary knows how much he helped me,” said Bryant, who demonstrated such dramatic defensive improvement afterward that he would wind up being named to the league’s All-Defensive first team.
Ultimately, it was the winning that helped the Lakers put away the hard feelings. A late February victory over Portland sent them on another victory binge—this time 19 straight games of surging confidence. The highlight of the win streak was a win over the lowly Clippers, with O’Neal scoring 61 points on his birthday. The streak finally ended with a mid-March loss in Washington. Afterward, new Wizards executive Michael Jordan enjoyed a cigar at his former coach’s expense.
“Phil has always been the master of mind games,” Jordan said of his old coach’s new success. “He still is.”
“You know what happened in Washington?” Fox would later explain. “We had won 19 games in a row. Honestly, this was sad to say, but the game had gotten to where there was no real challenge. We were playing our best ball during that stretch. We were hitting on all cylinders. It was clicking, it was routine. Each night, we stepped out and it was rhythmic. Everything seemed to play out just as it did the game before. And so, you look at that and you realize, we started creating the challenges ourselves. We started to test the system, we started to become lax on defense. We wanted to see how big a hole we could dig ourselves before we came out. It was like we were testing how good we really were.”
Immediately after losing to the Wizards, Jackson’s bunch ran off another 11 wins, with the grins growing at every stop on the schedule. All the trouble, however, had not been vanquished. April brought a pair of disappointing losses to San Antonio, including one to end the season in which Spurs power forward Tim Duncan sat out with an injury.
“It wasn’t the most confident way to finish a 67-win season, losing two games, including one on the road,” Fox admitted. “Duncan was not in the game and we still lost. I wouldn’t say your confidence wavers, but it’s obvious there was a tension. You say to yourself, ‘Wow, this hasn’t been the way we played all year.’ We were a little angry amongst ourselves, a little testy with each other. When you come from a setting where you’ve failed before, and the reason you’ve failed is because you’ve fallen apart, the remnants of that can always bubble up.”
Some Lakers were privately angry with Jackson for playing rookies and substitutes rather than going all out in the final loss to the Spurs.
Jackson, though, continued to take the long view. The Lakers had home-court advantage for the playoffs. They had learned to play a little defense, they had learned to run the triangle offense, and they had learned to play together, to put aside their anger.
Miracles
For so many years the Lakers had been screwing up in the playoffs. Swept by Utah. Dismissed by Utah. Swept by San Antonio. It became a part of their personality.
But Jackson had helped them to a 67-win regular season. Suddenly, hopes surged that their playoff troubles were behind them.
The Lakers’ coaches, though, weren’t so sure. They were uneasy about how this fragile team would perform in the playoffs.
Sure enough, they struggled to put away Sacramento and Phoenix and Portland. A key win came in Game 2 of their second-round series with Phoenix. Bryant hit a last-second shot to seal the victory. Nothing had to be said; the message had been clearly sent that this team could win a title with Bryant. As his first-round film selection, Jackson had shown his team American History X, a dramatic rejection of hatred that ended by quoting Abraham Lincoln’s call for healing parties to choose the better angels of their nature, clearly a message to O’Neal about the futility of deep dislike.
It was the battle against the Blazers in the Western Conference finals that provided the kind of challenge that forces a team to grow up. As the series opened, Jackson figured to distract Pippen, the Blazers’ leader, with a run of trademark mind games. Behind the scenes, the Lakers’ coaching staff plotted a strategy designed to put even more pressure on Pippen, often criticized over the years as being mentally fragile, by making him do more and more over the course of each game. They wanted to force him into running the Blazers’ show and initiating the offense.
“Ultimately,” Jackson told reporters, “he’s the one.”
Pippen would have to do everything to lead Portland to a title. Defend. Make shots. Keep the young players from losing their cool. Keep the coaches in line.
After watching Pippen eliminate Utah in the semifinals with outstanding play, Jackson was impressed. “That’s Scottie,” the Lakers’ coach said. “He gets into a corner, jumps out, and plays great sometimes. He can do a lot of things to create havoc at both ends of the floor for you. I’d like to think I helped him develop that ability, as a coach, but he had that resolve.”
Then Jackson added his first dose of pressure. “I personally think if Scottie doesn’t lead this basketball club and take this team by the horns, they’re not going to get by us,” he said. “He’s going to have to be the one who gets them by us. Of course, I’m going to try to take that strength of his game away.”
Some of the Lakers’ coaching staff, especially Jackson, didn’t care for the circumstances of going up against a player they held in high affection. Winter, however, acknowledged that he loved the competition of facing a player who knew their system better than perhaps anyone.
“Having had him on my side for so many years and knowing him as well as I do, it’ll be interesting to see if we can get the type of matchup that still gives us an ability to corral Scottie or hold him in check … he’s the one who has to be attended to all the time,” Jackson said.
Asked if he was feeling the pressure that Jackson was trying to put on him, Pippen replied, “I know my way around the game. That’s not going to affect me. I’ve learned from a lot of episodes I’ve been able to go through in my career.
“Phil feels like he’s the greatest at it,” Pippen said of Jackson’s mind games. “He’s already tried to do that, saying our team has no leader and that we’re overpaid. Whatever Phil says, it’s not going to be personal.
“There’s nothing I can do with Phil, anyway. He’s not on the court. I have to be more effective against his team and his players.”
Blazers guard Steve Smith called it “trickery” by Jackson, adding: “With a young team, sometimes there is discussion about what he is saying. On our team, no one has even discussed it.”
In Game 1, the Lakers survived a desperate fouling tactic by Portland coach Mike Dunleavy aimed at sending O’Neal to the line. Such efforts had long been dubbed “Hack-a-Shaq.” Repeatedly squeezing, holding, and wrapping him up, the Blazers forced O’Neal to shoot 25 free throws in the fourth quarter. It did little more than delay the game to the point of irritation. The Lakers used the stopped play to set up their defense for each possession, and won handily.
After a solid all-around performance (19 points, 11 rebounds), Pippen wasn’t thrilled with the O’Neal strategy. “I didn’t make that call,” Pippen said of the tactic. “I think everyone knows Shaq is a better shooter now. He stood up and made the foul shots. He made everyone look kind of stupid. It’s a gamble to do what we did today.”
The real focus of the series would fall on the Jackson–Pippen relationship. Jackson had once described Pippen as “a brooder … who could fall into a deep funk for days.”
Jackson used Game 1 to probe Pippen’s psyche. In the first half, when Pippen was working furiously on defense, the Lakers’ coach called Pippen over. “I told him he can’t guard everyone on the whole team,” Jackson said. “He said, ‘I’m gonna try.’”
Told that Jackson had revealed their conversation, Pippen frowned and said, “We’ll leave it at that. I’m not even thinking about my relationship with Phil Jackson. I just want to get out of this building.”
The Blazers then changed the tenor of the series by claiming Game 2 in a massive 106–77 win in Staples Center. Jackson responded by calling the Blazers “jackals” and insinuating that Pippen was leading his teammates in celebrating after the victory. Needing to make a show of their determination, the Lakers had strangely played without emotion and energy. The coaching staff left the building dumbfounded.
“We didn’t expect a blowout,” Jackson admitted, adding that he didn’t like the way the Blazers celebrated at the Staples Center after delivering the most one-sided loss the Lakers had suffered all season.
“What we remember is the attitude Portland carried off the floor,” Jackson said. “[The Blazers] were kind of jackals down there on the bench. We have to remember that when we go to Portland, that they might have been just a little bit too much so.”
The Blazers contained Kobe Bryant for most of the second half in Game 3 in Portland, but Bryant produced some big plays in the game’s final moments to give the Lakers a 93–91 victory and a 2–1 series lead. He blocked a last-ditch shot by Portland center Arvydas Sabonis to preserve the victory, and also had a big steal on the Blazers’ previous possession.
“I had to take a chance. We’ve played all season long for this,” said Bryant, plagued by fouls for much of the second half. “I’m not going to let a guy get a clear look just because I have five fouls.”
Sabonis wailed for a foul, but replays confirmed that the block was clean.
“I feel like we did a good job of really passing the ball inside, getting penetration from the post,” Pippen said. “We were getting very easy shots from the post. I mean, we only lost the game by two points, so I don’t feel like we really settled for the jump shot.”
“It was a surge for us,” Bryant said. “Kind of a statement to Portland that we’re not going to give up, that we’re here to fight, that we’re not going to give up no matter what the score is. I think that block was a statement to them that we’re not going to give up.”
With the Blazers fuming and seemingly divided, the Lakers then got another win in Game 4, with both contests marked by the Blazers’ high energy to open the games and the Lakers’ late surge to win.
At one point in Game 4, Jackson and Pippen engaged in a staring match. “No, there was nothing there, just looking at each other, kind of,” Jackson said after Game 4. “We weren’t conversing. We were just kind of checking each other out. There was nothing to be said. Scottie was playing really hard and I was just checking out what he was doing.”
Harper said whatever hostilities might be arising were only temporary and only in the heat of the moment.
“Pipp loves Phil,” Harper said. “He loves Phil to death. This is just a thing. They’re two good friends, that’s all that is. Pipp loves to play hard.”
Before the game, Jackson agreed that Pippen had displayed much emotion: “Scottie’s always been an enthusiastic player, maybe not to this level, but he’s always played with a lot of enthusiasm, and a certain amount of love of the game comes through in his play.”
Down 3–1, the Blazers returned to L.A. and found a way to win in a game that reflected Pippen’s great competitive nature. Jackson had complained that Pippen threw an elbow to John Salley’s head during Game 4, an act that should have brought Pippen’s suspension.
Pippen responded with fire in Game 5, using the occasion to break Jordan’s all-time record for playoff steals. “We know in our hearts we can outplay this team,” said Pippen, who scored 22 points, grabbed 6 rebounds, had 6 steals, blocked 4 shots, and got the entire Lakers’ backcourt into foul trouble. “We have throughout this series, but we haven’t completed it in the games. We feel like we’re going to outplay them every time out on the court.”
After Game 5, Jackson told Pippen he shouldn’t have been allowed to play. Jackson talked to Pippen as both were leaving the court.
“I said, ‘You shouldn’t even have been playing in the game and you had a great game,’” related Jackson in reference to an elbow to John Salley late in Game 4 that drew Pippen a $10,000 fine from the NBA. “He elbowed … clearly a cheap-shot elbow to the back of the head, and he was just fined $10,000. I told him he shouldn’t be there.
“He said, ‘Thanks a lot.’ I don’t think he meant it,” related Jackson.
“Phil is not my coach,” Pippen said when asked about the exchange. “I’m not listening to Phil. I’m not listening to nothing you tell me about Phil.”
Pippen had scored 12 points in Game 3, and played even worse in Game 4, with 11 points on 4 for 12 shooting, with 5 turnovers and only 2 assists. “Today I didn’t get in foul trouble,” he said of Game 5. “It allowed me to be able to push the ball in transition and stay aggressive.”
“He just took over,” backup guard Bonzi Wells said of Pippen, who played well despite two dislocated fingers on his left hand. “He came out and attacked them. He stayed aggressive and played hard. That’s what won the game for us.”
His play helped the Blazers to again believe in themselves, and they produced a convincing win in Game 6 back in Portland. Only six other times had an NBA team come back from a 3–1 deficit to win a series, but the Blazers seemed capable of pulling it off.
Pippen’s confidence had enthused his teammates. “He’s our veteran player, he’s our leader, and we just tried to follow suit behind him,” Bonzi Wells said. “He’s been there. We just try to follow his lead. He just said we’ve got to play hard, we’ve got to be intense out there. We’re the only people that are rooting for each other in this gym.
“We’ve got to stay together, and if we stay together, good things will happen.”
“Scottie’s a warrior,” Blazers coach Mike Dunleavy said.
“They played desperado ball,” O’Neal said.
The Lakers were strangely passive again, obviously intimidated by Pippen’s mental toughness. Only Rick Fox off the bench attempted to stand up to Pippen’s aggressiveness, which brought a heated exchange in the fourth period. To the fans, it perhaps seemed like a silly incident, but to the Lakers’ coaches the gesture was significant. Jackson knew that someone had to stand up to Pippen’s intimidation. “Being a part of those unsuccessful teams, being a part of that, you know you look back,” Fox said of his decision to stand up to Pippen. “Each year at the end I looked back and said, ‘What could I have done more? Did I leave something out there? Was I as emotional or into the series as I should have been?’ When you sit back and you have that time, which is a whole summer, you say, ‘Man, I wish I had given just a little more. I wish I had had just a little more fight. I wish I had sent just a little more of a message. I really wanted to be a champion. I really wanted to win.’ That was our downfall the last few years. We never really went out in the playoffs and set a tone and sent a message that we were fighting for this game and that we were about doing whatever it took to win.
“I told myself I was just not gonna let a series go by where we went down as cowards basically,” Fox explained.
“Phil’s got them trying to get into my head, trying to get cheap shots on me, I know what he’s doing,” Pippen said.
Fox’s efforts to counter Pippen’s intimidation drew the ire of Dunleavy, who told reporters afterward, “They were taking fouls with a little extra mustard on them, and we didn’t appreciate it.”
Mainly, the Lakers lost because they were no-shows on defense, which forced them into a seventh game back in Staples Center.
“Now we have to bite, scratch, kick, and claw,” Brian Shaw said.
Whenever his teammates seemed to doubt that they could win it all, Pippen would bring out one of his six championship rings from his days with the Bulls. “He’s flashed me the gold a couple of times,” Bonzi Wells said. “He blinded me with the diamonds. But that’s Scottie. He’s here to give us a taste.”
All of which stoked both teams’ competitive fires for Game 7 back in Los Angeles.
In the third quarter the Blazers outplayed the Lakers and took a 16-point lead, and seemed sure to end the Lakers’ championship hopes. Instead, Jackson’s team miraculously produced the biggest Game 7 fourth-quarter comeback in NBA history.
Portland led 75–60 with 10:28 to play, but the Lakers stopped Portland 10 consecutive times.
It was Bryant’s block of Bonzi Wells’s shot that led to a Shaw trey that cut the lead to 10 with 9:38 remaining.
“We all sat in that locker room after Sunday’s game in disbelief,” Stoudamire said. “There wasn’t much anyone could say.”
Afterward, the Blazers could only look on in glum, stunned silence as Los Angeles celebrated its first trip to the NBA Finals in nearly a decade.
“That was a daunting uphill battle that we had to face,” Jackson said after his team had eclipsed a 15-point fourth-quarter deficit to win 89–84. “We made it back.”
The Blazers had controlled the early periods by again gumming up the lane and not allowing O’Neal to do his heavy lifting. But then the Lakers did a little gumming of their own, getting stop after stop after stop in the fourth period as the Blazers settled into a mask of horror.
“You lose yourself in it,” Glen Rice said of the comeback, a 25–4 run. “We were thinking, keep going, keep applying the pressure, continue to keep going down on the offensive end, and keep getting good shots, and hopefully this team will fall in the end.
“And they did.”
Once the Lakers got going, the Staples crowd fed their energy, which was highlighted by Bryant’s alley-oop to O’Neal for a thunderous slam and an 85–79 lead. O’Neal offered up his seal of approval afterward: “Kobe’s a great player.”
“When he went to the hole, we caught eye contact and he just threw it up,” O’Neal said. “I just went up … that was an opportunity for me to get an easy bucket.”
“I thought I threw the ball too high,” Bryant said. “Shaq went up and got it, I was like, ‘Damn!’”
O’Neal’s words had much more weight than outside observers could have ever imagined. They emphasized an emerging yet still tentative bond between the two, and they rewarded one of the finest, most intensely psychological coaching efforts of Jackson’s distinguished career.
Together
The Zen way is the middle path: not too high and not too low, thus avoiding both the bright and dark recesses of human nature. Jackson and his mindfulness expert George Mumford had worked at training the minds of the Lakers to avoid the rough mental edges of competition.
Kobe Bryant, in particular, had found this approach to his liking.
Not long after returning from injury in December, Bryant had made it clear to Jackson that he didn’t really need the mind games and motivational ploys.
“Just coach,” Bryant had said.
He liked to keep things simple, was already hypermotivated, and saw no need for Jackson’s psychological approach.
Yet when it came time to introduce Mumford to the equation, Bryant welcomed the sessions because they offered specific mental training, much of it in the Zen mold, for reducing the stress of playoff competition, when the pressure hit the high side. Considering that O’Neal had set up the season as an agenda on Bryant’s worthiness to serve a championship team, the pressure could have been unbearable. But the young guard seemed resolved not to let that happen.
Bryant found that he and some of his teammates enjoyed discussing the mental elements of competition with Mumford. “It was good because it gave people a chance to talk about things that might be on their mind, the hype, the pressure,” Bryant explained. “I think it’s good for them to talk about those things. It increased our performance a lot. It really has. I’m surprised other teams don’t do that kind of stuff. Working with George helps us to get issues out of the way before they even start.”
The pressure of performance, of the playoffs, can corrode a team’s performance, Bryant explained. “Once it creeps into your team and your teammates, it can be destructive. Some people know how to handle it, some people don’t. The pressure can get to you. You got to know how to suck it up.”
Out of a sense of machismo, most NBA players don’t want to acknowledge that such pressure even exists; however, Jackson and Mumford encouraged the Lakers not only to acknowledge it, but to deal with it before it had a chance to hurt their play. The mindfulness, the Zen focus on only the present moment, had been important tools for Jordan in his championship days, and that made it easier for the Lakers to accept and use.
For years, Bryant had felt the negative vibes coming from O’Neal. Jackson and his staff had worked to quell that negative element within the team, and the unfolding season brought increasing evidence of their success. Yet O’Neal’s frequent complaints that the team couldn’t win a championship with Bryant still rang in everybody’s ears. A weaker personality would easily have crumbled under the circumstances, regardless of the coaches’ efforts. But Bryant was far from weak.
“The pressure is there, the pressure is there,” he acknowledged during the playoffs. “But it’s how you deal with it. When you feel it, it’s how you deal with it. You just give it your best. You prepare yourself as well as you can. You go out there and execute as well as you can. Then you sleep at night. That’s all. Then you get up the next day and do the same thing. Keep it simple.”
Likewise, Bryant found Jackson’s film sessions useful. As in past seasons, the coach had worked his players through a series of feature films to prepare for the playoffs, splicing the entire feature in and around clips of the Lakers playing, using certain scenes to chide his players about their choices and actions. First for the Lakers had been American History X, followed by The Green Mile. Jackson had a way of pausing the film at the most devilish, profane moment to emphasize one thing or another, often to the great hilarity of his players. Derek Fisher pointed out that many of these video lessons seemed to point out one or another of Bryant’s transgressions. Even so, Bryant said he didn’t mind being singled out. “It’s interesting,” he said. “I like to try to figure what Phil was actually thinking when he put the clip in there. All the messages he has. It’s good for you. I enjoy it. The team finds it funny. Some clips are funny. Some are made to be taken a little more seriously.”
Whatever was done, it all added up to Jackson’s very unique package, Bryant observed. “I think what has shaped this team, as far as his personality goes, is his sharpness as a person. He’s very picky. He pays attention to detail. I think with this team that was something that we lacked in the past. We had a tendency to overlook things, just see the surface.”
Jackson’s approach so impressed the L.A. Times that the newspaper sent a reporter to question the Buddhist community about Jackson. “The Buddhist thought in following the middle path is to take life’s ups and downs in a balanced and centered way,” the Reverend Tom Kurai of the Sozenji Buddhist Temple in Montebello told the newspaper.
Balanced and centered, indeed. Denying ego, sublimating oneself to the team—these were themes that Jackson preached over and over again. His players didn’t entirely heed the message, but they did just enough to get by during the playoffs.
In fact, it was their mindfulness, their focus on the moment, that helped the Lakers deliver that seventh-game comeback against the Blazers. And Jackson, the coach known for being so reluctant to use timeouts, used two key ones to tighten the Lakers’ concentration and to shift their intentions from simply throwing the ball down to O’Neal in the post, a move that the Blazers had shut down time and again.
Through the third period, O’Neal had but two field goals for the game and would not score from the field during the disastrous third period. “What we basically told the team is that every time we forced the ball in to him, we were creating turnovers either for Shaq or for us,” Jackson said. “Complete the effort, continue the action, make them have to play defense, and then look for him if he’s available—and we found that and he got loose a little bit in that fourth quarter … The whole team was standing in the lane around Shaq, we kick the ball around the perimeter and guys were trying to penetrate when shots were there.”
Just as impressive, the leadership that Jackson had encouraged in O’Neal all season finally showed up in grand fashion. The leadership of his play had always been there, night in and night out, on the way to an MVP performance. But now it was O’Neal’s dealings with his mental approach that struck his coaches and teammates. Instead of sinking into frustration in those difficult moments, he showed his teammates that he could stay focused and positive. “When you have a leader like that, everybody’s watching him, to see his body language,” Brian Shaw explained. “And, despite the fact that things weren’t maybe going the way he wanted them to, he still kept his wits about him.”
“I didn’t think our players played with a lot of pressure in them,” Jackson said later, with a degree of satisfaction.
The other keen development in the win over Portland had been the signs of a bonding between O’Neal and Bryant.
It was as if Bryant refused to get discouraged, and that paid off by season’s end. “I think they came to respect each other,” Winter said, although the coaches could never be sure what the players were merely doing as a public gesture and what they truly felt.
Asked about O’Neal, Bryant shrugged. “We just do it our separate ways,” he said. “That’s all we did all season long. It just depended on what we needed in certain situations. So even though we go our separate ways, it all linked up in the end.”
Many observers thought that after their win over Portland, the NBA Finals against the Indiana Pacers would be anticlimactic for the Lakers. But Jackson and his staff were concerned because the Pacers were such a fine shooting team. However, they didn’t look that way in Game 1. Reggie Miller made just 1 of 16 shots, and the Lakers won in a breeze, mainly by getting the ball to O’Neal and watching him work against an Indiana defense that for some reason failed to double-team. His 43 points and 19 rebounds produced a 104–87 victory in Game 1.
“This offense is designed to go away from pressure,” Derek Fisher said. “We tried to attack the pressure against Portland. Indiana tried to single-cover Shaq. I’d be surprised if they don’t play the next game differently.”
Certainly Pacers coach Larry Bird and his assistants quickly tired of answering questions about their strategy. So the Pacers offered quicker, stronger double-teams in the second contest, and the Lakers answered by shooting out to a 33–18 lead after the first quarter. Eventually, the Pacers’ double teams had some effect, and they cut the lead to two points in the third period.
To make matters worse for Los Angeles, Bryant had injured his ankle early in the contest. But the late stretches of the game became Shaw’s hour to shine, just as he had down the stretch in Game 7 against the Blazers. His shooting and O’Neal’s overpowering presence were enough for Jackson’s group to take a 2–0 series lead, 111–104.
Hobbled and on crutches, Bryant was unable to play in Game 3, which created immediate speculation that the Lakers’ coaching staff would turn to Glen Rice as a second major scoring option. Jackson, however, had watched Indiana’s Jalen Rose take advantage of Rice’s defensive weaknesses. He continued to award chunks of playing time to Rick Fox. Rice, Derek Fisher, Robert Horry, and other Lakers had long been troubled by the intuitive nature of Jackson’s substitution patterns. Some had adjusted to the coach’s whims better than others.
Rice had struggled and finally spoke out after Game 3, a game he finished with only 7 points on 3 for 9 shooting in 27 minutes. He also hadn’t seen much action in the final quarters of Game 2 with Bryant injured. “I just don’t think that it was a great effort of getting myself involved a little bit more,” Rice told reporters. “I spent a little bit too much time on the bench.”
Jackson responded, “I thought they bodied Glen well off of any screens we tried to provide for him. He caught the ball, he was crowded and pushed into driving. He got a couple of his baskets off the drive, lost the ball a couple of times off the drive. But they identified Glen very well, and I thought they prevented him from getting good looks.”
“If you sit on the bench for 12 minutes and then you go in the game with a minute and something left, it’s hard to get going,” Rice said of the late stages of Game 3, when the Lakers struggled and Indiana finally got a win to pull within 2–1 in the series.
The issue disappeared briefly in Game 4, which will be remembered as Bryant’s moment. He returned from injury and joined O’Neal in matching the Pacers bucket for bucket down the stretch. The battle went to overtime, O’Neal fouled out, and Bryant was faced with leading the Lakers by himself in a key moment. In a gesture brimming with more meaning than fans could understand, Bryant went over to the center who had questioned him so long and told him not to worry, that he would deliver. In the past in Chicago, Jackson and Winter had spread the floor in such moments and allowed Jordan to go to work. But with the Lakers, spreading the floor had never worked, Winter explained, because opposing teams would never leave O’Neal and kept the defense packed in. The spread floor might have worked if O’Neal had been willing to develop a 10- to 15-foot shot, allowing him to move away from the basket. But he had resisted that at every turn.
Now, though, he was off the floor, and Jackson ordered the Lakers to spread the formation wide to confuse the defenders. This allowed Bryant the room to work, and it was further aided by his sore ankle, which meant that he pulled up for midrange jumpers rather than trying to drive all the way to the hole.
Observers would later describe the performance as Jordanesque. In overtime, Bryant delivered the Lakers a series of key baskets and offered irrefutable evidence that O’Neal had been wrong. The victory gave them a 3–1 lead in the series.
“The system worked out well for us,” Bryant said. “In the fourth quarter, the triangle offense sometimes kind of goes out the window a little bit. The system in itself allows us to spread the floor toward the end of the game and penetrate. That works because with the triangle offense everybody is a threat throughout the ball game. So the defense is scared to leave off of guys to try to stop me. They’re scared to leave off of Robert [Horry] and they’re scared to leave Rick [Fox] alone to try to stop me, because they know those guys will make shots.
“In Game 4 it worked really well,” Bryant said. “We were able to spread the floor, and I hit a couple of jump shots for us and took us to the brink. During the season, I wanted to use the spread floor. I told him, ‘Phil, man, why don’t you open the court?’ He said, ‘We’re not ready for that. We’ll get to that.’ I say open it up. That’s when I can go to work. But I’m glad that we waited till the playoffs to use it.”
Before the Lakers could be crowned, though, they suffered a terrible defeat in Game 5, which sent the contest back to Staples Center in Los Angeles for a sixth game.
That was only fitting, because the city hadn’t celebrated an NBA title since Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar led the Lakers to a win over the Detroit Pistons in the 1988 NBA championship series.
This time, the honor was O’Neal’s. Bryant scored 26 points (on 8 for 27 shooting), grabbed 10 rebounds, and had 4 assists, two of them to O’Neal, as the Lakers charged back to take the lead late in the game.
“In the fourth quarter, we found a place where they couldn’t stop us,” Jackson said afterward.
With Fox and Horry hitting key shots, the Lakers moved to a 101–94 advantage, despite a stretch of O’Neal missing free throw after free throw. The Pacers, though, used free throws themselves and a Rose trey to tie it at 103 with 5:08 left.
The Lakers surged to 110–103 with 3:02 to go, but the Pacers pulled within one at 110–109 with ninety seconds remaining. This time the Lakers’ coaches went to screen-and-roll action out of their offense, a surprise for the Pacers in that the Lakers rarely used it. That was enough, with O’Neal setting high screens for Bryant, to get enough late free throws from Bryant for a 116–111 victory and the franchise’s first championship in a dozen seasons. The big center, so loathe to set picks and do non-scoring chores on offense in seasons past, was executing Jackson’s disciplined vision of the game.
“We went back to the same thing that worked for us in Game 4, spreading the floor and penetrating, and then attacking them,” Bryant said. “I was able to get to the free throw line and knock down some free throws.”
“I think we needed Phil to do it,” O’Neal said. “Phil and his coaching staff was a staff that was going to bring this team over the hump. We always won 50, 60 games. When we got into certain situations in the playoffs, we could never get over the hump. We had home-court advantage but we made a lot of mistakes in the playoffs. But Phil was able to keep his poise and have us watch film.
“When you look at a guy like Phil, if you’re a leader, he’s not worried. Why should you worry? He prepared us very well. A lot of tape. Going to the practice facility two times a day, playing, watching film … Phil was a great motivator and a great people person and he did a great job with all the role players.”
Could another coach have done it? the L.A. Times asked Jerry Buss.
“Great question,” the owner replied. “I guess the answer’s no. There’s some great coaches, but I think this took a very special combination of talents. Pat Riley, a long time ago, was able to knit together a bunch of superstars and make them into a team. Phil has been able to do that with this team. And at least in my mind, I’d have to doubt that anybody else could have done it.”
Seeing the journey’s end, Jackson typically looked back to the beginning: “The first practice I had in October, I stopped the practice and I said, ‘You guys can’t play with the kind of energy I demand as a coach, and you have to lift that up.’ They found a way to do that. But that was the key to whether we could win or not.
“I didn’t think they could play with the kind of intensity defensively that it takes to be a championship team. From that standpoint, I’m very pleased they were able to bring that level up to a maximum effort this year.”
Could this team win a run of championships like his Bulls?
“Wow, I don’t know if I can hypothetically go to that level,” Jackson said.
Jackson clearly didn’t want to take on yet more pressure in that moment of celebration. But for the first time in his career, his coaching accomplishments were truly his, there for millions of NBA fans, and even his fellow coaches, to acknowledge.
Given time to think about it over the summer, Tex Winter said it was remarkable that Jackson had coached a second team to a championship. Yes, the longtime assistant had seen Jackson deal harshly with staff people over the years, and he had been just as frustrated as players by Jackson’s unusual substitutions patterns at times. “They’re not by themselves,” Winter said. “I’ve been there hitting him in the ribs a lot of times, telling him he’s got to get this or that guy out of the game.”
The success had obviously changed Jackson in some ways, Winter said. “He’s an amazing guy, but very complex, not easy to figure out. All this success can change a person quite a bit. But he’s still Phil. Still very different.”
Although people couldn’t see it, Jackson had been under tremendous pressure when he came to the Lakers, Winter said. But over the months, the coaching staff began to see they were making a difference, and that pressure on Jackson lightened and he seemed to enjoy more of it.
As with the Bulls, Jackson’s Lakers began to feel special bonds with their coach. Rick Fox, in particular, felt a strong connection. Several years earlier, he had read Sacred Hoops and discovered that he and the coach shared a similar background, being raised in a fundamentalist religious atmosphere, then finding a different world through basketball. Fox said he longed to talk with Jackson about the book, but he knew training camp wasn’t the place.
Later, toward the middle of the season, Jackson and Fox would sit down for a deep conversation about life and basketball. “I was so astonished at how much his life kind of paralleled my life in some respects. I had always wanted to talk to him about it,” Fox explained. Jackson then gave Fox another book to read, The Poisonwood Bible, about a missionary family.
Jackson had used his coaching acumen and his personal approach to win over his players one by one. “I’ve always had great coaches up until I reached the pros,” Fox said as the Lakers moved in on the league title. “I had a great high school coach and a great college coach.”
He had played for Dean Smith at the University of North Carolina, another man with a special approach to the game. “To me, my coaches were always guys that I looked to,” Fox said. “I looked to them for more than basketball, not emulating, but trying to take what pieces they had as men and trying to see what wisdom I could impart from their lives to mine.”
Jackson often used examples from his own life to talk to the players about theirs, and as the season wore on, the players realized that Jackson was going through great difficulty in his personal life, the breakup of his twenty-five-year marriage. In their own way, the players wanted to help Jackson through these difficulties the way he had helped them.
“He’s been going through some things in his life,” Fox said. “Things get stressful … He’s meant so much to us as a team, taking us to another level on and off the court. Just as he protects us as players, you kind of want to come around and protect him. He’s developed a community here, he really has. He’s developed a little family setting. It’s what you have to have. You develop it in high school a little easier than you do in college. Sometimes in college you get it. I was fortunate to have it in both of those places.
“For a lot of years I didn’t have it here,” Fox said of his disappointment with other pro coaches. “As soon as he came aboard and I saw the changes that he was starting to present to our team, I said, ‘Man, this is basketball again. This is what it’s supposed to be about.’”
The other Lakers also came to understand what was special about their coach’s approach. Brian Shaw recalled that Jackson beat his drum with a persistence on the morning of Game 6 of the Finals. “Everybody on the team seemed to perk up at the sound of it,” Shaw said. Despite their differences with each other, the Lakers had found something in Jackson that they could all accept. Even Jackson’s strange chanting, and the infernal tom-tom—they could embrace it all. The only hard part, they would discover, was repressing smiles in their moment of rapture.