Phil’s Close ... With No Cigar

Now it’s the NBA according to Phil.

This is Phil Jackson’s league and has been since 1991, when he won his first title, through today, when he can secure his ninth, tying Red Auerbach, who won nine as Boston Celtic coach before tacking on seven more as team president.

Not that Auerbach can’t still zing Jackson in the papers, but Red puffed his last cloud of cigar smoke on the bench in 1966, which is practically NBA pre-history, well before it emerged from what Wilt Chamberlain famously, and others routinely, called “a bush league,” into the age of $100-million contracts and billion-dollar network deals.

Jackson and Auerbach are as different as their eras. Auerbach was out there for all to see, exuberant, gloating, firing up his cigars after wins, which would start a riot now.

Jackson is an enigma hiding in plain sight, a man of startling contradictions, starting with his love-hate relationship with the fame that comes with his job.

Auerbach was loathed outside Boston but considered a genius. In the ‘70s, the network TV package included a weekly feature called “Red on Roundball,” with Auerbach explaining basics, like the pick-and-roll, as if he’d invented them.

Jackson isn’t universally beloved, although he’s really only loathed in Sacramento, which he once called “a cowtown.” But, almost nine titles later, people still ask if he’s the greatest coach since Auerbach and John Wooden or the luckiest.

It’s true, Jackson can be, or come off as, condescending. And he embodies a double standard or two. However, if he hadn’t already proven it, his Laker tenure has made one thing clear:

He’s really good at this.

This is no longer Auerbach’s eight-team league. There are 29 teams and none, since Red in the ‘60s, had won three consecutive titles before Jackson’s Chicago Bulls did it twice in the ‘90s.

Players are now more powerful than coaches, whose authority is no longer automatic. If a coach retains any power at all, he’ll have to earn it, even Phil Jackson.

When Jackson arrived in Los Angeles three seasons ago, the Lakers were like squabbling children, having been eliminated from the playoffs the three previous seasons, 4-1, 4-0 and 4-0.

Shaquille O’Neal thought he was running the franchise and, in fact, had as much to do with hiring Jackson as anyone except owner Jerry Buss. Kobe Bryant was on his own planet and he and O’Neal had just begun to butt their hard heads.

Three seasons later, the Lakers are closing in on their third title. O’Neal, who has had several run-ins with his hand-picked mentor, the worst last month during the San Antonio series, is considered the dominant big man of all time.

Bryant, who discovered he has teammates and got over his own problems with Jackson last spring, is considered the heir apparent to Michael Jordan. Kobe and Shaq are now friends.

All that didn’t just happen.

“Even I was wondering,” Mitch Richmond said of Jackson, who has kept him on the bench all season.

“Just watching the NBA Finals whenever Chicago played or the Lakers played, they always showed that little glimpse of Phil, just sitting back, looking into the sky ...

“Down six or seven [points], he’s over there, about to fall asleep. You’re like, damn, I mean, what is he doing? He’s not even upset! It’s like, what in the heck is he thinking about?

“I’ve been in places where we’re watching the game and we’re like, geez, why is he so calm? You know, his team is in trouble, they just went on a 10-0 run and he doesn’t call a timeout!”

Apparently, timeouts are overrated, although the rest of the world is catching on slowly.

Easy Rider, Revisited

Phil Jackson may be a pretty good coach, I don’t know. It’s hard for me to tell. The guy never gets up. I’m surprised he gets up at timeouts. He just sits there with his legs crossed. I’ve listened to Phil. He’s got a lot of answers. But I’m not sure if Tim Floyd [Jackson’s successor in Chicago] wouldn’t have been a good coach if he’d have had Michael Jordan.... .

He used to go off in the woods and eat berries and stuff like that. And then he just happens to get a job with Kobe Bryant and Shaq.

--Bob Huggins, University of Cincinnati coach

Indeed, Auerbach was a living legend, although his coaching was the least of it. The Celtics ran a few basic plays and everyone in the league knew them.

Red was a leader who yelled at his players but cared for them too. Obnoxious as he could be with outsiders, he was a warm paterfamilias among his own. The Celtic family was real and exists today, with all the greats such as Bob Cousy, Tom Heinsohn, Satch Sanders and even the prickly Bill Russell still involved.

Auerbach’s real gift was seeing the big picture, which made him a minority of one in those hand-to-mouth days.

He didn’t have first crack at any of the players he built his dynasty on--Russell, Cousy, John Havlicek, Dave Cowens, Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish--but he outsmarted his competitors to land them, anyway.

He got Rochester to pass on Russell in the ’56 draft for a small fee. (The Royals took Sihugo Green, instead.) He got St. Louis to trade Russell’s rights (for Easy Ed MacAuley and Cliff Hagan.) Auerbach, alone, figured out that this unusual player--Russell was a great defender but a klutz on offense--could get his team over the top.

When the main dynasty that won 11 times from 1957-69--nine under Auerbach, two under Russell--expired, Auerbach rebuilt fast enough to win in 1974 and 1976. Then, when that nucleus went, he did it again and won three more in the ‘80s.

In 1978, he drafted Bird as a junior-eligible--with the No. 6 pick, after other teams had taken such notables as Rick Robey--knowing Bird was staying at Indiana State for his senior year. This provided no help for the 1978-79 season, when the Celtics went 29-53, but set them up for the ‘80s.

Jackson, on the other hand, is no builder of franchises. He’s pure coach.

He now squirms if someone brings up his hippie days, which he once advertised in his first book, “Maverick,” but he remains just that. He’s no longer a hippie--not after promoting Cadillac and TD Waterhouse, he isn’t--but he’s still a maverick.

He spurns timeouts on purpose, to let his players learn to trust themselves, rather than looking to him. And he doesn’t mind mocking convention.

His system, based on the triangle offense he learned from Tex Winter, is self-regulating. He doesn’t have to make a lot of adjustments, because his players are taught to read the defense and go to built-in counters.

Modern coaches watch videotape into the early hours of the morning. Jackson dates the boss’ daughter, rides his motorcycle, walks on the beach, goes to rock concerts and plays.

Modern coaches are control freaks and the more successful, the more controlling. Jackson runs a tight ship, himself--no outsiders on the charter, the press is a necessary evil or, some days, just evil, etc.--except during games. He prepares his players beforehand, then lets them play.

Other aces, such as Miami’s Pat Riley or Philadelphia’s Larry Brown, wear themselves and/or their players out. Jackson’s sail through the season. Jackson explains away any negative developments, suggesting, as always, he has it covered, so what do they have to worry about?

At his first Laker media day, he announced that his new players were going to “remedial school,” and said he wouldn’t know how good they were before Christmas, at which point he expected to tell team President Jerry West what he needed.

Had Jackson’s predecessor, Del Harris, said anything like it, he might have been fired on the spot. But this was Jackson, so everyone just nodded.

“Every year, they used to say Del Harris was in trouble if he didn’t win a championship,” noted a Western Conference general manager, incredulously. “Now Phil gets a $30-million contract and no one cares if they win a championship?”

Precisely.

Of course, the Lakers won a title that season, anyway, which surprised even Jackson.

“I think it was really sort of unexpected, as far as Phil was concerned, as far as I was concerned,” says Winter. “ ... I don’t feel like Phil would have taken the job unless he had a chance to win, at least eventually. But to win as quickly as we did that very first year was a little unexpected, I think.”

In the end, Jackson makes coaching look so easy, even other players and coaches don’t know what he’s doing, if anything.

Then there are times it becomes crystal clear, as in this spring’s series against the San Antonio Spurs, when a gimpy O’Neal, pacing himself, took seven rebounds in the Game 2 loss. Heading to San Antonio for Games 3 and 4, Jackson told the press he needed more than that, adding he’d told Shaq that in “a heated” conversation.

Indeed, O’Neal was upset and stayed upset, even waving Jackson off in disgust during a Game 3 timeout, but he scored 22 points and took down 12 rebounds as the Lakers won.

Then they won Game 4 after O’Neal had taken a key offensive rebound. Shaq noted later he did it because, “I didn’t feel like hearing Phil’s mouth.”

Up 3-0 in the Finals, of course, who can stay mad?

“If Phil would have been my coach in Orlando ... I probably would have been working on [championship] No. 5 or 6 by now,” O’Neal said.

“Because at that time, I was young and energetic and had everything. I needed someone like Phil to keep me straight and keep me in line. I never had that.”

Well, he does now.

Mr. Lucky

My parents dedicated me to being a minister. And I tell my mother, who’s still alive, “I became a minister. I’ve got 12 disciples and they go on these great jaunts.”

--Jackson

Wooden called his book, “They Call Me Coach.” Jackson could call his next one, “They Call Me Lots of Things.”

He was “Zen Master” in Chicago for his devotion to meditation, and “Big Chief Triangle,” according to then-Knick Coach Jeff Van Gundy, who apparently tired of hearing about Jackson’s love of Native American lore.

Jackson irritated the press, making it clear he considered reporters’ work an intrusion, seeming to forget the connection between publicity and his high salary--now $6 million a year--and that writing books, with tidbits he had withheld, made him not only a journalist, himself, but a competitor.

Lampooning him before this spring’s Finals, the New York Times’ Harvey Araton, pretending he was Jackson, wrote:

“You may have momentarily forgotten that this incredible run of coaching genius had its genesis in New Jersey, back in the late 1970s, when the Nets were grooving at the Rutgers Athletic Center in Piscataway. As I mentioned in my latest book, “More Than a Game” (“A feast for the true fan.” --Bill Bradley), I was paid the sum of $25,000 one season to serve as Kevin Loughery’s assistant on a team that taught me the guiding principle of my Zen coaching life.

“To wit: Always follow your spirit but, whenever possible, try to first find out if it intends to hook on with a team that already has at least two superstars.”

This is Jackson’s quandary. Although he’s actually shy and needs his space--now, as when he worked in Chicago, he retreats to his Deer Lake, Mont., home over the summer--there’s something he likes about the spotlight.

A voracious reader, he takes considerable pride in his own authorship. The son of Pentecostal ministers, he likes standing behind the lectern, which is hauled into the hall in front of the Laker dressing room at Staples before games, answering questions like a preacher advising his flock.

His mixed feelings result in a peculiar dialogue, in which Jackson often gives a rat-a-tat answer, which can be informative or colorful, then breaks off abruptly and without expression. When he has answered all the questions, or feels he has been at it long enough, he strides off swiftly.

In interviews, he parries questions about himself. But private as he is, he also tells heart-rending stories about himself, even if they seem to come out of nowhere, presented matter-of-factly in the middle of a book about basketball.

In “Sacred Hoops,” he describes the toll his parents’ fervor took on him as a child:

“We were taught to believe that the apocalyptic version in the Book of Revelation was about to be fulfilled any minute and if we weren’t prepared, we’d be left out when Christ returned and gathered up his saints. As a little boy, I was terrified of being excluded from the ‘rapture of the saints,’ as it was called, and losing my parents. One day, my mother wasn’t home when I returned from school and I got so frightened the rapture had started without me that I ran all over town looking for her. I was shaking when I finally tracked her down at a local radio station, taping a religious program with my dad.”

In “More than a Game,” he writes of driving to Los Angeles to take over the Lakers just after separating from his wife, June, playing a tape that his daughters had made, wishing him well, pulling his car to the side of the road and weeping.

To be sure, Jackson took the Laker job because he knew that with O’Neal and Bryant, he could win more titles.

Of course, as Jackson noted--gently--when Net Coach Byron Scott said last week that Memphis could make the Finals with Shaq, Shaq hadn’t actually won any titles before Phil got there.

Nor, for that matter, had Bryant, Jordan and Scottie Pippen.

These days, Jackson seems more sensitive to being perceived as arrogant. He has only kidded reporters in these playoffs, rather than complaining to them about them. He went through the hotly contested series against the Kings without making a single joke about Sacramento.

Nevertheless, for better and worse, he’s going to be Phil Jackson for as long as he remains a Laker.

At the start of his five-year deal in 2000, he said it seemed like an eternity, seeming to doubt that he’d last that long. Now he muses about finishing out the last two seasons, and perhaps even one after that.

“Every year seems like a long, hard grind,” he said Tuesday. “I’m just trying go one year at a time and not push it beyond that.

“The only thing I’ve mentioned before is that if Shaquille is thinking of retiring at the point that I would retire, I would certainly stay another year just to see him play on....

“I don’t think he should be a guy who gives up his career as early as he’s thinking about it. He thinks that two years is going to be the end of his career. He certainly needs to play longer than that. He’s got too much talent.”

Like O’Neal, there will come a day when Jackson is gone and people will measure every other coach against him.

One thing is sure, we never saw anyone quite like Jackson and we never will again.

In his first Finals in 1991, his Bulls lost Game 1 to the Lakers, and home-court advantage, on Sam Perkins’ last-second three-pointer. As Jackson and June walked out, they encountered the Chicago Tribune’s Sam Smith. June, who was animated, was worried. Phil, who was Phil, marveled at what a great game it had been.

Fear never entered into the equation, for Jackson, and consequently, his team, which won the next four games. It wasn’t only Jackson, of course, but it wasn’t an accident, either.

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*--* Phil-Up Time Laker Coach Phil Jackson can become the NBA’s all-time leader in postseason coaching victories if the Lakers beat the Nets tonight. A look: Coach W-L Pct Phil Jackson 155-54 742 Pat Riley 155-100 608 Red Auerbach 99-69 589 K.C. Jones 81-57 587 Lenny Wilkens 80-94 460 Jerry Sloan 77-76 503 Chuck Daly 75-51 595 Billy Cunningham 66-39 629 Larry Brown 63-66 488 John Kundla 60-35 632

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