He’s Had His Phil

The season that began with a player choking his coach is ending with the greatest player ever holding his coach close, openly expressing the kind of respect and admiration that is totally out of fashion in professional sports. In this season-long, melodramatic examination of Michael Jordan’s future with the Chicago Bulls, there’s something important we’ve all overlooked: Jordan’s relationship with his coach, Phil Jackson.

“It’s the thing people have missed in all this,” Jordan said recently, elaborating on what has become far more than a player-coach relationship. And while it didn’t begin all that well, it’s grown to the point where Jackson became not just the strategist who has helped Jordan and the Bulls win multiple championships, but a man who followed Jordan’s late father, James, and Coach Dean Smith as a major influence in his life.

Over and over, Jordan has said he doesn’t plan to play for the Bulls--who opened the playoffs Friday night against the New Jersey Nets--if Jackson isn’t here. And this isn’t, not even for one second, a case of a modern athlete making a ridiculous or misguided demand.

“If people looked at the situation closer,” Jordan said, “they’d see the value Phil Jackson brings to the game. It’s too bad all the young players don’t get to play for a coach like Phil. He enhances their dedication to the game, their knowledge of the game, their ability to be better teammates. And he’s able to do that without taking away from your individuality. I’m not suggesting Phil’s the only coach in the NBA who does that. But I’ve got one who does. I’ve got that. All of us here, we’ve got that. Why would I want to change that? This is the thing that’s being missed in the whole discussion about me not wanting to be here if Phil isn’t here. I’m not just saying this to be a pain. This guy is good.”

The thing that not many folks know, because Jordan hasn’t really talked about it publicly, is how instrumental Jackson was in helping Jordan during the most difficult time of his life, in the weeks following his father’s death, which preceded his decision to retire in October 1993.

“The time he gave me to deal with my problems was significant,” Jordan said. “He contributed a lot of thought and wisdom to help me. And while he’s doing that he doesn’t really intervene, he complements. I have so much gratitude for what he did.

“When I had to make the big decision on whether to retire, Phil didn’t try to to talk me out of it. He said, and I’ll never forget this, ‘Look at the whole spectrum.’ He said things my father would have said. He said, ‘Do you want people to see the God-given talent you have? Or can you give that much at this point in your life?’ It was a very objective view. He asked the kinds of hard questions your father would ask. And he never was selfish about it, even though he had to know his chances of winning another championship would be diminished if I retired. He recognized the pain in me and the personal conflicts I was going through. He demonstrated so much compassion, I can’t even tell you how much. It was way beyond the call of duty, or the business of basketball. You don’t do that because you get paid to. He had a great fatherly touch.”

Jordan realized, as the words were leaving his mouth, that he was also describing another great influence in his life: Smith, his coach at North Carolina. “Dean Smith did the same kinds of things,” he said. “He wanted to know what your life was about, how you were making major decisions. The first time he came to my home to recruit me, those were the kinds of things he asked about. I didn’t know Phil was like Dean. The first year Phil was here, with Doug Collins [1987-88], I didn’t know him that well. I knew he knew the game inside out, but I was skeptical when he took over [1989] and wanted to implement this new offensive system that nobody had really used in years and years.

“But Phil felt we needed the structure and he was going to stick by his decision no matter what I said. He said we’d been living off each other’s natural abilities and that more structure would help us maximize what we had. He forced me to learn the game within his system. And Dean Smith was the same way. He forced me to learn the game within a system before my individuality had developed. Dean’s system was bigger than any player. And Phil wanted the system here to be bigger than Michael Jordan, which would be the only way we’d be able to win a championship.”

The men at the core of that “system” are Jackson, 75-year-old assistant Tex Winters, who Jordan also supports with great enthusiasm, Jordan and Scottie Pippen. It’s safe to say no other team in the NBA maintains itself in such a way. Sometimes, as during a recent game against the Washington Wizards, Jordan or Pippen will see fit to call and conduct an entire timeout while Jackson listens, totally absorbed, his ego no place to be found.

“Sometimes, Phil passes messages through me to the team,” Jordan said. “He may want to practice long the next morning, but I may know the team is hurting and I can go to him and say, ‘Phil, how about just weights and therapy today?’ On the other hand Phil can say something to me and I can go back to the players and say, ‘Hey, listen, we need to work extra long in the morning.’ ”

While Jordan has been the most vocal Bulls player about leaving such a successful system intact, all the players feel pretty much the same way. “We don’t need Jerry Krause to manage what we have here,” Jordan said, referring to the much-disliked general manager who wants to bag Jackson to handpick a new coach more beholden to him. “We can monitor ourselves,” Jordan said. Dealing so successfully with Dennis Rodman would support Jordan’s assertion 100%, but whether chairman Jerry Reinsdorf can be influenced to see this the same way Jordan does is the big issue.

Jordan and I had this conversation the morning after a night game. It was 10 a.m., and the best player ever was the first player on the Berto Center practice court, which wasn’t yet lit. But it was light enough to see something in Jordan’s face I hadn’t seen before. Concern.

Look, don’t believe anybody who says he knows what’s going to happen to the Bulls--and therefore Jordan--because at this very moment nobody knows. Not Jordan. Not Reinsdorf. But it wasn’t until this conversation about Jordan’s relationship with Jackson that I sensed the curtain could very well come down on this production, even though Jordan absolutely wants to continue playing.

But there’s time for Jordan to cajole and convince and influence. The kind of magic he has isn’t confined to the basketball court. The playoffs are just starting. Maybe Reinsdorf and Krause need to be reminded, up close, of how rare all of this is.

“Phil has such a rapport with his players,” Jordan said. “Why change that? Why not keep that for as long as you can. At least as long as it works? You can’t replace it. You just can’t. And even if you could, why would you?”