Jackson Has Learned His Lessons Well

It’s good to be Mark Jackson again, walking the corridors of Madison Square Garden, his infant son in his arms, his wife and his parents at his side. The sound of the crowd is still in his ears.

It is New York, isn’t it? It is his hometown and the team of his life. It’s a life distant from the first time around. In between, the booing hurt more than his ears. It hurt more than he’d let on.

“Every day I step on the basketball court and get cheers, it means more and more,” he said this week. “I don’t take it for granted.”

He has earned his second life. “I think you have to be humbled to be a humble person, and humility is a big part of this game,” was the way Pat Riley, the Knicks’ resident psychologist, put it. “Mark went through some big-time humility.”

In the first life Jackson was golden. He came from New York’s Bishop Loughlin through St. John’s. He was Rookie of the Year. The sound of his hometown thrilled him. He was an All-Star the second year. He got a big contract before that year was over.

As great as the rise, the fall was faster and more profound. Basketball is the macho, in-your-face game and suddenly it was in his face. He was all wrong. Stu Jackson told him; John MacLeod told him. Al Bianchi told him. Worst of all, New York told him. Over and over and over. Perhaps he felt the contract gave him the key to the building, but Bianchi negotiated the contract. It gagged the salary structure and Jackson got the blame.

Mercifully few people have to endure the devastation of being booed, reviled by people whose hearts they thought they had captured. “I don’t think anybody ever has been through what I have so quickly, had life turn so quickly,” Jackson said.

He wasn’t unique. Bud Harrelson felt betrayed as a New York hero. Jackson was in a small category, and he was 24 and 25 years old. He’d face the crowd and the critics, press his lips together and lie that he wasn’t bothered.

“It hurt,” he conceded now. “I never said it when it was going on. I spent a lot of long nights driving home and then thinking about it.”

In this new life Jackson has started 42 of 43 games this season. He is again an efficient, productive point guard, an essential part of a winning team and a leader where leadership is in short supply. He is a better player than ever.

He started 21 games last season, none in the playoffs. He took three shots in the three playoff games. And worse. “I was Rookie of the Year, an All-Star; I was 12th man on a 12-man roster,” he said. “I was set down.”

On Feb. 22, he was suspended for two games for essentially mouthing off to the coach about not playing. Try as he did, Bianchi couldn’t find a taker for Jackson and Jackson didn’t know whether that was a blessing or a curse. The Knicks were a shambles in the front office and on the court. Jackson, his career in the pits, clashed with MacLeod, who is not a hard-hearted man.

“It was a bad situation,” Jackson said. Where he thrived in Rick Pitino’s helter-skelter, his defensive weaknesses obscured by the system, the Bianchi-Stu Jackson-MacLeod halfcourt fixation exposed him. He is not a sprinter-leaper-deadeye.

Some of his problem he brought on himself. It is a rare coach who’ll close out a player who might help win. “I’d be less of a man to not accept some of the blame,” Jackson said, however reluctantly. Being a man is important to his self-image.

This was the young player who once thought he could throw Magic Johnson passes, who swooped his airplane and pointed his pistol when he made a shot, and who inspired the foolish sweeping broom in Philadelphia when the team won its first playoff series in five years. He got fat and he pouted.

Last March Dave Checketts replaced Bianchi at the top and promptly told Jackson he had an open mind. “Mark took responsibility on himself instead of pointing fingers,” the president of the team said. “That’s the hardest lesson in life -- especially for athletes.”

If Checketts’ mind was open, Riley’s lineup was open. Mo Cheeks’ age was traded and Greg Anthony’s youth wasn’t ready. Perhaps Riley had no choice, but never mind. Riley did have his own stature that commands attention. He says his impact on Jackson is overstated, but never mind.

Riley said he knew what Mark Jackson could do, whether Riley knew or not. And Jackson says Riley must have had people telling him Mark Jackson would never do. “I had to look at myself,” Jackson said. “I wasn’t going to give the opportunity for that other Mark Jackson to be reconsidered or not reconsidered. I was going to be better.”

He trained 15 pounds off, got down to a lean 187. He worked on improving his speed and his defense and his shot; they will never be his gifts. He learned that sometimes a pass behind the back is the only way to get the ball from here to there, but most often a straight line is the shortest distance. He got smarter, which is appreciated on all fronts.

For one thing, Riley often uses him with young Anthony or explosive John Starks because Jackson has poise and some good sense, which can be translated as humility.

For another thing, when Checketts asked, Jackson was willing to defer enough money to enable Xavier McDaniel to fit under the salary cap. “I’ve had players tell me,” Checketts said, “that the cap was my problem, not theirs.”

Jackson likes to say with some satisfaction about the other scene, “I was the bad guy.” And “I’m still here.” He’s playing well and the team is winning and winning is the point guard’s first responsibility. The slang of the game calls him “the 1.”

The one game he’s missed was when his wife, Desiree, gave birth to Mark A. Jackson II. “I’m a better player and a better person,” Jackson said. “I’ll be a better father because of what I went through.”

For now he’s a smarter player. He will learn too, as all fathers do, that a man carrying an infant does not wear suede.