Hollywood Ending Eludes Jackson--for Now

Another book is inevitable, Phil Jackson’s third, from a basketball lifer who reads more than he writes.

Devout literacy may be a more amazing achievement than nine souvenir rings, harder than coaching NBA championships from altogether separate franchises.

All of this awaits the Lakers’ overdue dismissal of the persistent Pacers, 120-87 winners of Game 5 Friday night.

The Lakers evidently missed Jackson’s lesson on closing out, or assumed it was meant for dealers of tires, shoes and oriental rugs, not the next great thing in the NBA.

Still, the championship will come and the final story will be retold more loudly than it was in Chicago because one championship in Hollywood is, of course, worth six in the Midwest. I see a title in the mist: “Laker Love Triangle, or How I Left My Wife for Shaq and Kobe and Found More Jewelry.”

Remember how Jackson left Chicago? On a motorcycle. Off he went to the rest of his life, gone without a wave or a regret, his leaving costing us Michael Jordan and Chicago’s place among NBA royalty. No one ever had a softer landing than old Swift Eagle, while we are stuck with fading scrapbooks and Jerry Krause’s bunk.

Jackson is no longer ours, nor is he June’s, his longtime wife and partner. She gave him the choice of basketball or life with her and he picked basketball. Not that he ever was really ours, not like Mike Ditka will be ours forever, alas.

Yet Jackson’s legend was fertilized among us, when his hair was thicker and darker, his beard an oversight and not a pretension. We have an obligation to keep him as he was.

Jackson is no longer, as he pointed out the other day, the same person who “stepped into the coaching waters in Chicago” and is currently presently “bathing in the ocean, for sure.”

Jackson has gone all West Coast now, dating the boss’ daughter, living at the beach, driving foreign sports cars. He’s again at the dawn of a basketball dynasty, for which he is due considerable credit. Anyone can coach Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, but so far only Jackson has been able to coach them at the same time.

He got Michael Jordan to play well with others too, Jackson’s greatest contribution to the Bulls. All the rest was smoke from a campfire consecrated by holistic hokum and complex sentence structure.

“Make the goal the path and the path the goal,” Jackson told the Lakers, and they nodded as if they understood what he was talking about, not that you could tell in Conseco Fieldhouse, where they submitted listlessly to the Pacers. The path they took was to the outhouse.

Jackson not only makes gibberish into wisdom, he manages to keep the players who must buy it from rolling their eyes and turning up the volume on their Discmans.

“He’s got the rings,” O’Neal said, using his famous Short Answer Method. “You listen to the man with the rings.”

Now they’ll all get rings, all the Lakers who listened and even the ones who didn’t, with a parade down Figueroa, a banner in the fresh rafters of the Staples Center and the same bull’s-eye on the back the Bulls used to wear.

The old rolling carnival and road show that was the Bulls of Jordan, Pippen and Rodman will belong to Shaq, Kobe and Phil.