Path of Much Resistance

It happened at USC when Sam Barry ran a triple post offense while an undersized guard, Tex Winter, memorized every nuance.

It happened in Williston, N.D., where Bill Pederson, a small-town high school coach, drew up plays that intrigued a smart, scrawny center into finding beauty in the running of a pick-and-roll.

It happened when Winter, always tinkering and tweaking what he’d learned from Barry, gave clinics and Bill Fitch, an inquisitive young coach at the state university, took notes on a strange offense and made a still scrawny center run it in practice.

It happened at Madison Square Garden, where Red Holzman, a fiery authoritarian, preached that five men are better than one, that no one basketball player can win a game by himself.

And it happened in Albany, N.Y., where a young man still searching for his calling in life would drive the van to Continental Basketball Assn. towns throughout the East, make his players listen to the Grateful Dead and argue deep into the night with his point guard, Lowes Moore, who was a minister and a basketball player.

“Me and Phil, we’d talk about how basketball was spiritual and how you could make what happened on the court make things meaningful in the rest of your life,” Moore said of his conversations with Phil Jackson.

Moore is a volunteer coach in Mount Vernon, N.Y., at the high school and the local Boys and Girls Club. He teaches young men and women the flex offense, which is what Jackson coached with the Albany Patroons. He lectures sternly on the values of teamwork and all for one.

Jackson is on the cusp of history. If the Lakers win the 2004 championship, he will become the first coach in NBA history to produce 10 title-winning teams. No one in American professional sports has won more than nine.

Jackson said he was humbled by this prospect.

“It’s great fortune to be going after something like this,” Jackson said Thursday. “It’s almost ridiculous at some level to have this kind of opportunity. I value that. Yet I know that it’s whimsy in many ways, a matter of happenstance and luck.”

Jackson’s whimsical journey began in Montana and North Dakota, where he grew up, and included a best-friend-philosopher-hippie named Charley Rosen, a man who became his unpaid assistant coach in Albany, and his co-author. It also included a guru in Winter, then a 60-something NBA assistant who stubbornly preached an offense called the triangle and who still has an office and a role with the Lakers and who still tutors Jackson in the intricacies of that triangle.

“Phil didn’t take the traditional path to coaching greatness,” Rosen said last week. “Phil wasn’t the guy who came out of college, or even the NBA, with that burning desire to be a head coach. It was a process Phil went through to get to that point with the [Chicago] Bulls and with the triangle. He was always searching for a system he could believe in. Then he found the triangle and he had his ‘wow’ moment.”

That moment had its roots at the University of North Dakota when Jackson was playing for Fitch. Fitch had learned from many people, but he had listened hardest to Winter.

In the book “More Than a Game,” which he co-wrote with Rosen, Jackson recalled his playing days under Fitch:

“I know I enjoyed playing the offense because there always seemed to be a lot of usable spaces and because most of the movement was toward either the basket or the unguarded areas.

“Anyway, the offense was definitely intriguing. Twenty years later I happened to see a tape of one of our games and I was astounded to see that we were running the triangle!”

When Jackson was a hard-working player at North Dakota, he didn’t think about coaching. He wasn’t even certain he would play professional basketball. But Holzman, coach of the New York Knicks, had scouted Jackson at an NCAA tournament and signed the small-town Western boy to a big-city contract. From Holzman, Jackson learned about dealing with the mind of a player as well as the strategy of the NBA game.

“Above all else,” Jackson wrote, “Red was a master at managing people. He could accurately gauge the intelligence and temperament of his players and determine how each of them should be treated.... [During timeouts], Red would ask the players what we wanted to run. This is something I still use. ‘OK, guys. What’s going on out there? Tell me what you think will work.’ ”

So what looks to some as detachment or, worse, laziness, is actually one of the first coaching lessons Jackson gathered from a mentor he admired.

“We would talk often and in-depth about Red Holzman and his way with people,” Rosen said. “Phil found Red someone to emulate in many ways.”

Still, Jackson would spend the last few years of his playing career dabbling in coaching. He served as a player/coach under Kevin Loughery with the New Jersey Nets.

“At that time,” Jackson wrote, “and despite Kevin’s inducements, I had no desire ever to become a head coach.”

Jackson took the job because he still wanted to play and he wanted to stay in New York. The experience was not totally rewarding. “He was still searching for his niche and his system,” Rosen said.

When Loughery quit in midseason in 1980, top assistant Bob MacKinnon became the interim head man and Jackson inherited the No. 1 assistant job. And when MacKinnon was fired, Larry Brown was chosen head coach.

Brown offered the job as his top assistant to Mike Schuler. Brown also told Jackson that if Schuler turned down the job, Jackson would have it. Schuler took the job. Jackson moved to Montana. Happily ever after, he thought.

“Phil was pretty sure he was done with basketball,” Rosen said. “And that would have been fine.”

Except basketball came calling again. Jackson had turned down one CBA coaching offer, but Jim Coyne, president of the Albany Patroons and fan of anything having to do with the Knicks, had come to the conclusion, in midseason, that the ex-Knick he had coaching the Patroons, Dean Meminger, was the wrong person.

“I called Phil in Montana,” Coyne said. “I told him, ‘Listen, I’m having a problem with Dean, would you be interested in coaching again, just finish out the year, test it out, if you don’t like it, leave.’

“I knew he was really down and out about basketball after he left the Nets and he was telling people basketball was like the end of the Earth right now and that he didn’t have any interest in it. So I told him to think about it and call me back. He called back in an hour. He took the job.”

Jackson brought his buddy, Rosen, along for the CBA ride. “We’d talk all night about the philosophy of the game, the beauty of the game,” Rosen said. “Phil was still searching for that perfect system.”

What Jackson did, though, was run Holzman’s offense, which Meminger had installed. “Some high- and low-post stuff,” Jackson wrote, “some stuff with screen/rolls and weak-side screens.”

“It was the flex offense,” Moore said. “A lot of it was like the triangle. It was about thinking. It was inclusive, all five players were passing the ball, even the big people. All five players were shooting the jump shot. It was more of a team concept, and it was hard for some guys to get it.” Jackson spent 4 1/2 years at Albany. He won a league title. He was happy enough. Until he wasn’t.

“After he won the [CBA] championship,” Rosen said, “I think Phil realized he could coach professionally. But he quit without having an NBA job. He just woke up and said, ‘I’m not doing this anymore.’

“He did go to Chicago after he quit, to the NBA pre-draft camp. He felt kind of embarrassed. Every unemployed coach in the world was there schmoozing. He didn’t schmooze. He called me and said he felt like a fool. He was going to go back to Montana and finish building a health club he had started. Phil just did not have that burning desire to be a head coach.”

Jackson, though, had spoken occasionally with Jerry Krause, who was in charge of the Bulls. After Jackson quit the Patroons, he called Krause and asked whether the Bulls needed a scout in the Northeast. Krause said no, but a few months later, he called Jackson and offered him a job as an assistant to Coach Doug Collins.

It was 1988, Jackson had a growing family and the appeal of the good money NBA assistants earned was enticing. Winter was already on the Bulls’ payroll, and after his first season under Collins, Jackson and Winter were sent to Los Angeles to run the Bulls’ summer league team.

Winter had spent most of his basketball life forming the principles of the triangle. He wrote a book about it.

“Krause wanted Phil with me as much as possible to learn the triple post offense, the triangle offense,” Winter said, “because that’s what Krause eventually wanted to install. Phil worked with me, and he picks things up rapidly. Phil grasped the triangle pretty quickly. He embraced it. Phil’s explanation to me was that he was looking for a system of basketball. As far as Phil was concerned, the triangle fitted him to a T.”

It was more than that.

“When Doug sent Phil and Tex to California, he told Tex to do whatever he wanted. So Tex put in the triangle,” Rosen said. “Phil saw it, his brain lit up. He’d call me and say the triangle was the way basketball should be played. You move, fill spots, you keep your spacing. You trust one another. You have to trust one another. Five fingers on one hand, Phil would say. The thumb is stronger than the pinkie, but you need the pinkie. There’s a place for everybody in the triangle. It’s a communion, and Phil had been searching for a communion.”

Krause fired Collins and gave Jackson the job. Jackson, with Winter at his side, installed the triangle. Michael Jordan learned to love the offense. The Bulls won six NBA titles under Jackson. Then Jackson quit, rested a year and came to the Lakers to teach the triangle. The Lakers, with Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, won three more titles for Jackson.

Moore remembered a year with the Patroons when Jackson dealt with two stubborn scorers. “Frankie J. Sanders and John Sweitz,” Moore said. “They hated each other, they were both shooters, they both wanted to shoot all the time. You needed four balls with those guys.

“Yet Phil was able to help them understand what a team could do. Phil just talked them to death. He had that low voice, he’d kind of whisper in our ears. That’s the way he coached. Sometimes you’d just want him to scream at you, cuss you out. Everything had to be a dialogue. But he wanted us to figure things out. He got Frankie J. Sanders and John Sweitz to figure things out. If he got those guys to figure things out, it didn’t surprise me he got Michael Jordan to figure things. Or Shaq and Kobe.”

For now. For history.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Phil Jackson’s NBA Coaching Record

*--* Season Team W-L Playoff W-L Finish 1989-90 Chicago Bulls 55-27 10-6 Lost to Detroit in Eastern Conf finals, 4-3 1990-91 Chicago Bulls 61-21 15-2 Beat Lakers in NBA Finals, 4-1 1991-92 Chicago Bulls 67-15 15-7 Beat Portland in NBA Finals, 4-2 1992-93 Chicago Bulls 57-25 15-4 Beat Phoenix in NBA Finals, 4-2 1993-94 Chicago Bulls 55-27 6-4 Lost to NY in Eastern Conf semifinals, 4-3 1994-95 Chicago Bulls 47-35 5-5 Lost to Orlando in East Conf semifinals, 4-2 1995-96 Chicago Bulls 72-10 15-3 Beat Seattle in NBA Finals, 4-2 1996-97 Chicago Bulls 69-13 15-4 Beat Utah in NBA Finals, 4-2 1997-98 Chicago Bulls 62-20 15-6 Beat Utah in NBA Finals, 4-2 1999-00 LAKERS 67-15 15-8 Beat Indiana in NBA Finals, 4-2 2000-01 LAKERS 56-26 15-1 Beat 76ers in NBA Finals, 4-1 2001-02 LAKERS 58-24 15-4 Beat Nets in NBA Finals, 4-0 2002-03 LAKERS 50-32 6-6 Lost to Spurs in West Conf semifinals, 4-2 2003-04 LAKERS 56-26 12-5 Reached NBA Finals vs. Pistons TOTALS: 14 Seasons 832-316 174-65 Nine NBA championships

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