A REAL REACH

When college basketball recruiters visited Phil Jackson in Williston, N.D., in the early ‘60s, his high school coach would sit him in the back seat of a car and ask him to reach out with his long arms and open both doors simultaneously.

This exhibition of the 6-foot-5, 160-pound high school junior’s wing span was particularly impressive to the young coach at the University of North Dakota, Bill Fitch. Three years after Jackson, by then taller and heavier but still gangly, arrived on the Grand Forks, N.D., campus, Fitch was asking him to repeat the trick for pro scouts.

Among them was Jerry Krause, who believed his team, the Baltimore Bullets, could steal Jackson in the third round. He was wrong. The New York Knicks took him in the second round and won a bidding war for him with the ABA’s Minnesota Pipers. The Knicks’ offer was $26,000 for two seasons plus a $5,000 signing bonus.

Thus began one of the most successful--and unconventional--careers in NBA history, the latest chapter of which began Tuesday when the Lakers announced him as their seventh coach of the ‘90s, eighth if you count the two-game stint in 1994 of Bill Bertka. Jackson agreed to a five-year, $30-million deal.

One reason some Lakers didn’t respect Del Harris, who coached them for more than four seasons until he was fired after 12 games in the most recent one, was because he hadn’t been an NBA player. One reason some Lakers didn’t respect Kurt Rambis, Harris’ successor, was because he hadn’t been an NBA head coach.

If Jackson doesn’t command their attention, it will have to be for another reason. He has had more success on the bench, winning six championship in nine seasons with the Chicago Bulls, but his coaching philosophy developed largely through 12 seasons as an NBA player, 10 with the Knicks and two with the New Jersey Nets.

His experience with the Knicks of the early ‘70s, who boasted outstanding players such as Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Dave DeBusschere, Earl Monroe, Jerry Lucas and Bill Bradley but are still celebrated today for their unselfishness, taught him that a team belongs to no one player. That lesson would serve him well in his tutelage of Michael Jordan and, Laker management believes, of Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant.

Jackson was a student in particular of the Knicks’ 1970 championship team. Recovering from spinal fusion surgery, he worked as a $75-a-game photographer for the New York Post when the team played at Madison Square Garden. Between games, he served as an unofficial assistant to coach Red Holzman.

“I learned how to look at the game from the perspective of what the whole team was doing and to conceptualize ways to disrupt an opponent’s game plan,” he wrote in his 1995 book, “Sacred Hoops.”

“In short, I began to think like a coach.”

When he returned to uniform the next season, his game had been altered not only mentally but physically. He was a four-sport athlete in high school, excelling in basketball, football, baseball and track. Fitch knew of Jackson even before becoming basketball coach at North Dakota, hearing raves during one of his summers as an Atlanta Brave scout about the lanky fastball pitcher in Williston. At North Dakota, Jackson averaged 21.8 points as a junior and was a two-time NCAA Division II All-American.

The back surgery, however, robbed Jackson of much of his agility and, except for an occasionally effective hook shot, his scoring ability.

According to a history of the Knicks written by George Kalinsky in 1996, Jackson “unnerved Knicks fans with his roughshod style. When he would dribble for a shot or hoist up a jumper, the Garden throng would murmur uneasily.”

So did Holzman, who placed a two-dribble limit on Jackson.

To prolong his career, he heeded the teaching of Holzman, who, like Fitch, stressed defense. That aspect of his game was considered crucial to the Knicks’ championship in 1973.

“Jackson’s style as a player developed in accordance with his build, which reminds me of a clothes hanger turned upside down,” Bradley wrote in his 1976 book, “Life on the Run.”

“He surprised big men by his defensive skill and made them feel they were being guarded by a man with three sets of arms.”

Despite their anxiety when he touched the ball, Knick fans liked Jackson. He milled among them as he walked from his Manhattan apartment to the Garden for games and often was seen riding around the city on his bicycle.

They also didn’t seem to be put off by his involvement in the counterculture. In the autobiographical “Maverick,” a book the son of Pentecostal preachers sometimes regrets writing because much in it has been taken out of context, he wrote about his experimentation with drugs, including LSD. He grew a beard and became chairman of “Athletes for McGovern.”

“I remember visiting him in New York in those days,” Fitch told author David Halberstam for a 1999 book about Jordan, “Playing for Keeps.”

“I think we spent all our time together in Greenwich Village, and he had hair down to his shoulders, not just a hippie but a superhippie. So I left him that night and the last thing I ever thought he’d be was a coach.”