Alpha Coach

Photo by Anne Fishbein

Up the hall at Lakers headquarters, emerging from a closed-door meeting, here comes Phil Jackson, in a rolling cloud of three stiffly collegial, broadcast-booth- generation men. And though at 6'8" he is not even the tallest in the group, or the most famous for once, or officially the highest in command, still, in some failed word-portrait way, he is the Alpha. (Words always fail, “because the essence of the person is the persona, which is spiritual,” reads one Jacksonesque e-mail.) By instinct the others seem to lag, or unconsciously find their slot within his dominant concept of Time.

My first failed-portrait impression being that the whole mystery is in his stride — which, broken down to its parts (spinal fusion, inability to toe-up on his right side, long arms sewn on charnel-house backward, with palms curled behind, like Joe Cocker), is a mutant horror, but in motion adds up somehow to swagger, and preen, and a sense of playful, wily threat. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (who’s being considered for a tutorial position — a job he would get) is the outsider in a blazer, hopeful voice lingering; Mitch Kupchak, the team's general manager, ushers from the rear in his own chesty hobble. But Jackson is out front, and he is pointing, and with each step spearing his finger toward the next in a gallery of framed Laker photos that line the wall. One. Two. Three. Four.

Until he gets to the photo of Vlade Divac. There he halts, wincing, pondering — and the others halt too, just like Phil. Phil and the Jacksonaires. Vlade, he worries, out loud.

So the others worry out loud, too, pronounce the koan after him — Vlade — mirroring precisely Jackson’s charismatic shtick (lightness, or profundity?), before the leader and his flock marvel and nod and move onward.

When Phil Jackson is coaching, he dreams about basketball. During the 2003 playoffs, he dreamed that all his team’s three-point attempts were off the rim (it was “really disturbing”); more recently, he dreamed that someone had strayed from position on offense, he can’t remember who, but it was more than a matter of degree. “It was someone completely out of position.” Now, in summer, the dreams have renewed. They may even have intensified, because three weeks before signing point guard Aaron McKie, Jackson dreamed that someone entirely new was trying to take the ball upcourt, trying to orient the triangle offense — a player whom he gradually recognized to be Oprah Winfrey.

Jackson does not take long to interpret this dream as his imagination’s ode to the difficulty of finding roster spots for possibly mismatched talents. Also, it was about “trying to coach basketball skills to someone who was completely not a basketball player.” Arguably, of course, that is coaching at its purest. But neither Jackson nor his audience is used to seeing him in so ultimate a test. (Jackson owns the NBA record for lifetime winning percentage, .725, and is the only man to coach teams to championships in both the Continental Basketball Association and the NBA.)

For that reason, you get the sense this year that Phil Jackson may finally be voyaging toward his doom, if doom can touch a man whose legend has so often been written. Think of the risk — offering failure the last word in a career that’s recorded nine world titles. Until you remember that Jackson gave failure the last word already, losing in five games to Detroit in 2004, then retiring. And such was the Jackson mystique that when he looked up at the expired game clock, skeptical amusement at his lip — that look of his that makes you wonder if maybe P.J. stands for Private Joke — you actually felt the network cameras tempted to train on Jackson’s exit rather than on rival coach Larry Brown’s ascension, scene-thievery duplicated exactly 12 months later: when it was Phil’s re-hiring, rather than Brown’s return to the finals, that merited saturation coverage in the Los Angeles Times. (“Twelve stories on the hiring of an NBA coach?” marveled one Arizona columnist.)

No one on Earth is as smart as people want to believe Jackson is — I stopped counting after the third article that mentioned him loaning Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo to Shaquille O’Neal. But he does love his Zen, and he does know how to stay out of a Moment’s way, until nearly everyone around him feels it — feels enough faith in Jackson’s faith to be the beneficiary of his winning aura, or at least not to fear losing. That aura, and the white-whiskered seasoning, and an awful lot of money ($30 million over three years, a salary more than 10 times that of Dodger manager Jim Tracy in what purports to be the national pastime), have given Jackson the Clintonian credibility at 60 to be both hip and unridiculous; to shake off sin and failure; to preach, figuratively, from both black and white pulpits. “He has this amazing presence,” begins one working acquaintance, who could be every working acquaintance. Rookie players, quoted in the press, have said thoroughly addled things like, “I think he’s supposed to be using all kinds of psychology on me.”