Part 19 (1/2)
CHAPTER 14
ONE BREATH, ONE MIND
Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.
THICH NHAT HANH
I was in the middle of nowhere-a small village on Iliamna Lake in Alaska-when I heard the news. My sons, Ben and Charlie, were with me. We were on a fly-fis.h.i.+ng trip in a secluded wilderness area, and the fis.h.i.+ng wasn't going very well. So that afternoon we knocked off early and boated up the Iliamna River to see the falls. When we arrived back at the village, a throng of children surrounded us.
”Are you Phil Jackson?” one of the boys asked.
”Yes,” I replied. ”Why?”
”I hear you got the job with the Lakers.”
”What? How do you know that?”
”We got a dish. It's on ESPN.”
That's how my adventure began. Actually, it didn't come as a total surprise. My agent, Todd, and I had discussed the deal before I left for Alaska. I'd given him the go-ahead to negotiate with the Lakers since I would be unreachable by phone. Still, it was a bit of a shock to get the news from an Inuit boy in a place as far away in spirit from the glitzy, high-stakes culture of Los Angeles as any I could imagine.
This was not a simple move for me. After the 199798 season, June and I had relocated to Woodstock, New York, a town where we'd lived before. Our hope was to revitalize our marriage, which had suffered during the past stressful year with the Bulls. What's more, June had grown weary of her role as an NBA wife. Now that all of our children were out of the house, she was looking forward to creating a new, more fulfilling life. So was I-or so I thought. I explored other interests, including giving speeches on leaders.h.i.+p and working on my friend Bill Bradley's presidential campaign. But in the end, I couldn't find anything that captured my imagination as much as leading young men to victory on the basketball court.
Toward the end of the 199899 season, I started getting calls from teams interested in talking to me and I had meetings with the New Jersey Nets and the New York Knicks. Neither of these conversations went anywhere, but they whetted my appet.i.te to get back in the game. Needless to say, this was not the kind of reaction June was expecting. She thought I was ready to put basketball behind me and move into a field with a less demanding travel schedule. But that was not to be, and over the summer we decided to separate.
Soon after, as I moved back to Montana-my true place of refuge-the Lakers called. The team was loaded with talent, including rising stars Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant, and two of the best outside shooters in the league, Glen Rice and Robert Horry. But the Lakers had struggled in the playoffs because of weak group chemistry, and the players lacked the mental toughness to finish off big games.
Mulling over whether or not to accept the job, I remembered sitting in my hotel room during my cross-country trek and watching the Lakers get swept by the San Antonio Spurs in the Western Conference semifinals. It had been painful to watch. The Spurs' big men, Tim Duncan and Dave Robinson, were forcing Shaq to take off-balance fadeaway jump shots instead of his power move to the middle and then beating Shaq downcourt to break through the Lakers' defense. Watching those games, I'd found myself visualizing ways to counter the Spurs' strategy and transform the Lakers into the team they were destined to be.
That's the message I wanted to deliver in late June at my first news conference as the newly appointed head coach of the team. The event was held at the Beverly Hills Hilton, and while I was preparing my remarks, Kobe dropped by my room, carrying a copy of my book, Sacred Hoops. He asked me to sign the book and said he was really excited about working with me because he was a big Bulls fan. It was a good sign.
”This is a team that is talented, young, and on the verge,” I told reporters that day. ”It's been on the verge, and it hasn't gotten over the top. It's a similar situation that happened ten years ago in Chicago, and we hope to have the same type of success.”
The key, I said, was to get the Lakers to trust one another enough to work together effectively and make the transition from a me team to a we team, the way the Bulls had in the early 1990s. ”When you have a system of offense, you can't be a person that just is taking the basketball and trying to score,” I explained. ”You have to move the basketball, because you have to share the basketball with everybody. And when you do that, you're sharing the game, and that makes a big difference.”
After the news conference, Jerry West drove me out to Westchester to visit Jerry Buss at his new Spanish-style palazzo on the bluffs overlooking the ocean. Dr. Buss, who has a Ph.D. in physical chemistry but made his fortune in real estate during the 1970s, had the good luck to buy the Lakers (plus the Forum and the Los Angeles Kings) in 1979, the year Magic Johnson arrived and led the team to five champions.h.i.+ps over the next decade. Since then, the team had not lived up to its promise.
Dr. Buss was smart but very low-key, dressed in jeans, a plain s.h.i.+rt, and his trademark sneakers. He said he was proud of the great success the Lakers had enjoyed in the past, but he wanted to win one more champions.h.i.+p.
”I think you can win three, maybe four champions.h.i.+ps,” I said.
”Really?” he replied, stunned.
He was impressed by my chutzpah. He said later that he'd never heard a coach set such a high bar for himself at the start of the season. But the truth is, I wasn't bluffing.
It was a strange summer. Not long after I returned to Montana after my meetings with the Lakers' organization, my daughter Chelsea came to visit with her boyfriend and shattered her ankle in an off-road motorcycle accident that put her in a cast for eight weeks. Since getting around was difficult, she decided to take a leave from her job in New York and recuperate in Montana, where my son Ben and I could take care of her. June also came out for several weeks to lend a hand.