NBA FINALS : LAKERS vs. CHICAGO BULLS : It’s a New Trip for Bull Coach : Jackson Has Been in Finals Before, but This Is Different

Phil Jackson in the NBA finals again?

Phil Jackson in the finals.

Los Angeles again?

Los Angeles again.

Eighteen years later, Jackson is back, against the same opponent but from a different perspective. He was a player then; he’s the coach now.

It’s a pretty safe bet that won’t turn out to be the only change. He probably won’t write a book some day and compare being in the championship series, maybe even winning it, with an actual LSD trip he took, as he did when he was with the Knicks in the 1970s.

“I went to bed last night at 11:30 and got up around 6,” Jackson said the day after the Lakers had taken a 1-0 lead over his Chicago Bulls. “It would have been the other way around as a player.”

Imagine Timothy Leary, updated with suspenders, an expensive suit and tie, coaching in the NBA and you have a pretty good idea what’s going on here.

Jackson was a flower child in the ‘60s. He was a Dead Head, the term used for followers of the Grateful Dead. He smoked marijuana as a player and wrote about it in “Maverick,” published in 1975, about the midpoint of a 13-year career with the New York Knicks and New Jersey Nets.

“I was smoking a lot of grass, primarily as a form of escapism, and I spent a lot of time spaced out,” he chronicled of his third season, all of which was spent sidelined with a back injury. “ . . . I was using some of the popular head drugs at the time. . . . I was involved with trying to deal with my own emotions and inadequacies.”

If the Establishment was reeling over that, its adherents should have strapped themselves in tighter. His LSD experience a few days after New York had won the title in 1973, the season Jackson contributed 8.1 points and 4.2 rebounds, was “at least as dramatic as the Knicks winning the championship” and “one of the peak experiences of my life,” he wrote.

While coaching the Albany Patroons of the Continental Basketball Assn. from 1982-87, he lived 50 miles away--in Woodstock. Jackson called it a community of very conscious people, saying that he was living in a town that shared his values for the first time, that he needed to live there to complete all the feelings he had only been able to intellectualize during the ‘60s and ‘70s. His daughter was in a class in which five of the 25 students came from families with married parents.

He was for McGovern in ’72. His vocabulary is full of “isms.” He calls basketball games “the great exercise in competitive war games.” He won’t spend much time relating his finals experiences to the Bulls, all of whom are making their first trip, because the experience itself is the best teacher.

Fast-forward to 1991, his second season as coach of the Bulls. The look has changed. He wears a neatly trimmed gravel-colored mustache instead of the Grizzly Adams full beard. But the man hasn’t changed much beyond the normal changes that come with being 45. Jackson still is his existentialist self.

Instead of having the Bulls fly from Portland to Seattle last November, he chose bus travel so the players could get a feel for the greenness of the Pacific Northwest. Same thing from San Antonio to Houston in February, with Jackson telling his players this is a part of the country they should see.

Before the first Western Conference trip of 1990-91, a seven-game tour of six states, none of which was supposed to be confusion, he handed out books designed to fit each player’s personality.

“For some, even the title was enough to read,” Jackson said.

No kidding. John Paxson got “Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Others, like Bill Cartwright, got the more familiar, though equally adventurous “Bonfire of the Vanities.”

When someone asked what epic he would give himself, Jackson was ready.

“I did get a book recently,” he said. “ ‘Tao of Pooh.’ ”

“Tao of Pooh?”

As in “Winnie the . . . “?

You bet your sweet Eyeore. An optimistic outlook, reliance on friends and family to keep a sunny outlook. You can eat too much honey, but still get out of the hole.

“If you know anything about it, and look at it, you would understand that it is tongue in cheek yet philosophical,” Jackson said, smiling a bit as he watched his explanation flying over the heads of the assembled reporters.

Players, though, follow this man’s instructions--when they can understand them. The stranger part to some, Jackson among them, is that he is in this position in the first place, coaching, and has been in the game long enough that he may become the eighth person to win an NBA championship as a player and a coach. Walt Frazier, a former teammate with the Knicks, had him pegged as a guy who would be on a farm somewhere growing his own food by now.

Jackson mildly disputed that. He said that among those former Knicks, he would have been first or second on the list to become a coach.

“I was the guy who went to the boards and I was the guy going up and writing up plays,” Jackson said. “But as far as how I looked, I was one of the freakiest. So about 10th.”

What a long, strange trip it has been.

It was never meant to be a normal journey.

The son of two Pentecostal ministers who preached across Big Sky country, Jackson, so legend has it, didn’t see a doctor until he was 6. He was treated for whatever ailed him with home remedies--potions made from onions, oatmeal, bread crusts and milk--wrapped in towels.

He attended the University of North Dakota and had a combination major in philosophy, psychology and religion, and played basketball for current Net Coach Bill Fitch, who impressed professional scouts by having Jackson sit in the back seat of a Ford and reach over to open both front doors at the same time.

As an NBA coach, he is just as impressive. In his first season in charge of the Bulls, they went 55-27, the best record for a rookie coach in franchise history. In this, the second go-round, they won a franchise-record 61 games and swept nemesis Detroit in the Eastern Conference finals. He is 21-8 in the playoffs.

Winning has only made more people interested in Jackson, especially his personality, but he has never much cared for the simplistic descriptions that follow him, though he doesn’t deny them, either. Dead Head. Flower child. Eclectic.

“You can’t take a person apart that easily,” he said. “It’s the Gestalt theory. The sum of the parts of a person are less than the whole.”

So then, Jackson was asked, could he give a brief self-description he would be comfortable with?

“I’d hate to do that,” he said.

He paused for a few seconds and looked to the ceiling inside Chicago Stadium, maybe even beyond it to the skies, as if to find the right answer. Finally, he begged off.

“We’ll save that for another time.”