Lakernoise

Tags: Chicago Bulls, Jerry Krause, Jerry West, Los Angeles Lakers, New York Knickerbockers, Phil Jackson, Roland Lazenby, William James

Phil Jackson’s heading into what may be his final season coaching the Los Angeles Lakers. After more than a decade with the guy, do Lakers fans really know him? To aid in answering that question, I’ve included an excerpt here from my Jackson biography, Mindgames, published first in hardcover by McGraw-Hill in 2000. An updated version has been released in paperback by the University of Nebraska Press as part of its series of classic sports books.

EPIPHANIES

He ate the LSD for breakfast. It was one of those seamless Malibu mornings in mid May 1973, just days after the New York Knickerbockers had defeated the Los Angeles Lakers, four games to one, for the National Basketball Association championship.

Phil Jackson was 27 years old, and although the ‘73 Knicks were the first pro championship team that he had actually played on, he was hardly in the mood to celebrate. First, there was a philosophical problem. He viewed the journey itself as the real celebration. Just getting to the championship round and winning it was the joyous thing. Not all that whooping and hollering and hugging with people you hardly knew or didn’t know at all. He wanted no part of that, thank you.

Then there were the injuries. He had performed well over the season, the best so far in his six years as a pro. He had averaged 17 minutes of playing time per game, as well as 8.1 points, with better than four rebounds and an assist each outing, a superior contribution for a frontcourt reserve. Then he had upped his scoring average to 8.7 points per game during the Knicks’ title run, the second straight year he done so. During New York’s drive to the 1972 NBA Finals Jackson had averaged 9.8 points and better than five rebounds. The Knicks had lost that ‘72 series to the Lakers and had returned to the championship round the next seson with the idea of completing unfinished business. But during Game 3 of the 1973 championship series he had suffered a leg injury, and his mood had darkened. He craved being an essential part of the team, and in his mind the injury served to remove him from that essence.

His pro career had brought a series of physical challenges, and this was yet another. In 1969, he had undergone spinal fusion surgery after a serious disk injury. The recovery had been long and painful and had caused him to miss the Knicks’ 1969-70 championship season. Instead of contributing to the most fascinating, magical moment in the franchise’s history, he was left hanging at the edge of the group, dressed in street clothes, watching games from the stands or snapping photographs for a purported book. All in all, it was quite a miserable experience that left him feeling as if he had done nothing to contribute. It was no wonder that he felt an odd detachment from the euphoria that engulfed the team and its fans during that 1970 championship.

Beyond that separation from the group, the injury had increased his already substantial discomfort with his unusual body, one that as an adolescent had left him tagged with the unwanted nickname “Bones.” The coat-hanger shoulders sat atop a six-eight frame, and his 40-inch sleeves included an absolutely deadly set of elbows. Even Jackson himself didn’t know when and where those elbows would strike next. This seemingly uncontrollable factor kept his Knicks teammates full of fear at practices.

“He seemed to be off-balance constantly. He seemed to be caroming off unseen opponents,” teammate Bill Bradley wrote in his book, Life on the Run, adding that it was as if Jackson’s arms “served as separate sides of a scale which never achieved equilibrium. . .”

As might be imagined this imbalance would lead to frequent foul whistles and complaints from opponents that he was dirty player. Jackson would contend that he was not, but those sorts of helpless arguments only walled him further into the stereotype.

Despite this liability, Jackson had worked physically and mentally to get into the flow of this very good Knicks team. Somehow he had managed to help the team without ever really finding a comfort zone with his body. He had learned to fit himself into the changing pro game, a task that wasn’t easy for a white player from a small college. But he had done that, and he was immensely proud of it. He could defend, he possessed a nice shot, he knew how to move the ball and how to move himself without it. As a result, Knicks coach Red Holzman liked to introduce Jackson to the proceedings whenever New York needed to change the game’s pace, to step up the pressure in hopes of producing turnovers. Jackson played well in the open court and usually helped produce the desired results.

His ballhandling, however, was more than suspect. Holzman jokingly told his players that everyone on the team but Jackson was allowed to dribble. Regardless, he had willed himself to be a valuable part of the team. It wasn’t easy for Jackson to be a defensive forward in the NBA, but that was his job. He wasn’t strong enough to defend the power players, and he was too much of a roamer to stay glued to the shooters. But he had survived, then thrived by learning to rely on his assets, his long arms, his mind and his intensely competitive spirit. The long arms he used to deny his man the ball and to flick into the passing lanes for quick steals or even blocked shots. The mind he used to figure a means of adapting. The competitive nature provided the gumption. Little by little his teammates began to trust him, then respect him, defensively. And little by little Jackson had worked himself into the Knicks’ offensive equation, finding the places where he could fit in and use his jumper effectively.

The whole package had begun working nicely for him in 1972 and ‘73. Until, once again on the eve of a championship, injury had separated him from the group. More than anything the fiercely independent, individualistic Jackson seemed to crave being a part of the group, just one of many ironies in his curious makeup.

On the other hand, Jackson’s need for the group was logical. Like other young inhabitants of that tumultuous time, he was in a search for identity. What would set him apart was the deeply complex nature of his search and the circuitious route he would take, finding and losing himself again and again over the years to come.

Large in his annoyance that May of 1973 was the fact that his personal life was a mess. He was in the process of coming to terms with the idea that he had a closeness problem with women. He suspected that it had something to do with his fundamentalist upbringing on the plains of Montana and North Dakota. His father, Charles, was a kind, bible-believing Pentecostal preacher and church superintendent, a man large enough to live his life for the meager $100 weekly wages earned at the foot of cross. Beyond his church life, Charles Jackson relished the earthy pursuits of an outdoorsman, the hunting and fishing, the things that defined his manhood.

At key moments, the elder Jackson could be stirred from his warmth to correct his children with a fiery discipline, but the real spark came from Phil’s mother. Elisabeth “Betty” Funk Jackson was herself a Pentecostal preacher whose life was governed by the sure belief that the second coming of Christ was impending, that she, her family, and everyone she met should be prepared for that second coming. Of German heritage, with striking blonde hair and deep blue eyes, she was a proud, determined woman, a missionary brimming with integrity and toughness and commitment, as comfortable chopping wood as she was citing scripture or speaking in tongues. She was also competitive, had captained her high school basketball squad, and loved to win, whether the competition was a theological argument or a game of Scrabble, a characteristic inherited by Phil, the youngest of her three sons.

Betty Jackson possessed a strong manipulative nature, which she had used for a variety of purposes, mainly to ensure that her children observed the strict tenets of her religion. In time, that same bent for manipulation would become her youngest son’s strongest and most unusual talent. In 1973, however, Jackson was more concerned with his problems than his promise. He had become increasingly aware of his fear of closeness. He certainly enjoyed the variety of women available to pro basketball players, particularly members of the New York Knicks in the early ‘70s, but even as he engaged in them he considered those brief encounters mostly expressions of physical prowess and male ego. His problem manifested itself in his relationship with his young wife, Maxine. He found himself alternately pushing her away from him, then pulling her back. Over the six years of their marriage, this process had proved emotionally exhausting for the couple and their young daughter, Elizabeth.

Jackson would later acknowledge that the couple’s problems were clouded by his own insecurities and by his identity crisis, which he had sought to resolve with extramarital relationships, including an affair with a flight attendant and what he described as a desire for “a variety of sexual partners.”

It seems little wonder then that during the 1972 offseason the young couple had decided to end their marriage, and by the spring of 1973, Phil Jackson found himself in divorce proceedings with Maxine. At the same time, he was pursuing a relationship with the woman who would become his second wife. He had met June at a pinochle game in 1972. She was enchanting, earthy in her own way, a strong personality with a penchant for astrology. She had just graduated from the University of Connecticut and was working a difficult job at New York’s Bellvue Hospital. They traveled and camped together for a time and she later moved into his loft in Chelsea on the lower West Side of Manhattan. This, too, added to his anxiety because he was legally separated from Maxine but technically still married to her.

All of this only brought more turbulence to his private spiritual journey. In that sense, Phil Jacksonwas very much a man of his time. The late 60s and early 70s found American youth dabbling in alternative approaches to living, exemplified by hippie communes, a growing astrology industry and a fascination with philosophies radically different from the Anglo/Saxon Protestanism that had dominated popular culture for centuries. Jackson’s searching  was hardly a dabbling effort, however. If nothing else, his mother’s passion for God had ensured that her children would spend their lives in an earnest pursuit of spiritual questions.

Since his first days in high school and later, in college at the University of North Dakota, he had begun the long process of rejecting his fundamentalist upbringing, an exercise frought with guilt, anxiety and confusion. With his 30th birthday on the horizon, with his relationships in tangles, Phil Jackson recognized that he was more than a little lost that spring of 1973. He was far from alone in those feelings. It was a time of posers, populated by millions of young people moving from one pretension to another in their search for new identities.

The strains of sixties counterculture had somehow moved mainstream by the early seventies, except that the idealism had burned away, leaving mostly confusion. Kids in high schools and colleges across the country smoked pot, dropped acid, ate mushrooms, snorted coke without really being sure why, except that it was something new and different. For many, the move toward recreational drugs was an answer to despair. The Vietnam War seemed to have the country caught in an inexhaustible pit of ugliness. Rocked by the National Guard’s killing of four students at Kent State University in 1970, the antiwar protest movement had already lost much of its steam as the Baby Boom generation turned its focus to partying and redefining the essence of hip. At the University of California-Berkley, a young editorialist complained that students were moving away from the activist mode in favor of a junkie lifestyle. The detachment of being strung out on drugs offered a strange allure, a freedom from the hassles of caring.

“God Isn’t Dead—He Just Doesn’t Want To Get Involved” read a pin popular among college students at the time.

Wearing a medallion and sporting long curly hair and a beard, Jackson fit right in with the times, at least in the eyes of Knicks fans. He was portrayed as the team hippie, and in that context he was clearly more radical than his teammates. But June Jackson actually found him to be on the conservative side, as opposed to the real freaks and radicals she had encountered in her undergraduate life. Jackson was “not nearly as radical as the people I knew in S.D.S. at the University of Connecticut,” she recalled later. “He never dropped out, he always had money.”

Still, even she acknowledged how very different he was. His early years in the austere household of Christian mystics left him yearning for answers. After so many years of fundamentalist life, he was also searching for a little fun. In those days before the fear of AIDS settled upon the population, there were plenty of good times to be had. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll dominated the early postmodern menu, and Phil Jackson was a man of the times.

“I think the myopic way I grew up — and that’s the best word to describe it — led to my experimentation,” he would say later, trying to explain his drug usage. “Everything that happened to me in the 1960s was in tune with my background. The whole psychedelic experience or an LSD trip was, as Timothy Leary said, ‘a religious experience.’”

For many, many others, the drug was a brain burner, a synapse-popping dance with psychosis. Jackson might well have been one of these victims had he not been so earnest about defining his relationship with God. Although he had moved past the fundamentalism of his parents, he retained their leanings toward mysticism. Part of his liberation in college had come with the reading of  William James’ The Varities of Religious Experience. That comfort with mysticism left him free to sift through the many new religious and spiritual offerings that bubbled up in the rapidly evolving popular culture of the period. Jackson embraced a host of alternative thinkers, including the writings of Carlos Casteneda and Joseph Chilton Pearce’s “The Crack in the Cosmic Egg.”

His pursuit left his teammates with the notion that he loved the knowledge more than he loved the game. “He could have been a better player if he had applied himself to it more, as much as he applied himself to his books,” Walt Frazier would later observe. “He’d read those weird books. They were weird to us anyway. No one else ever read them.”

Jackson, however, was consumed by these new ideas, and they in turn fed his awareness of his own unfolding intuitive nature. In time, his substantial intuition would become a key factor in his success as a basketball coach. But in his twenties, Jackson was discovering his intuition as a child discovers walking. Shortly after coming to the Knickerbockers out of college in 1968 he had learned that one sure way to explore this intuition and his mystical nature was smoking marijuana. In time, friends and associates would caution him against smoking too much pot. And he would agree with them that the drug could be damaging. But he loved its effect on his mind, how it would allow him to see events and relationships in new and different ways. How the buzz lifted and pushed his intuition to places he had never imagined.

He greedily explored his mind, unrepentently slipping into its recesses, which helps explain his foray into the popular recreational head drugs of that period. At the time, drug experimentation still offered a relative innocence, based on the Sixties idealism that marijuana, mushrooms, peyote, mescaline and stronger shades of hallucinogens could help man experience alternate realities and discover his kinder, gentler nature. Within five short years, those notions would quickly dissolve leaving in their place a hard-edged drug culture adorned with guns and street gangs and a burgeoning human toll.

Jackson, though, in 1973 approached the drug culture with the innocence and idealism of a hippie, like millions of other baby boomers. He was on the road to find out, eager to be cool, to get high, to confront whatever God tossed in his path.

On that May morning in 1973, it was LSD.

Jackson later described it as the window-pane variety. He also noted that it was “good acid,” which at least suggests more than a casual familiarity with the subject. If so, he was hardly alone in fancying himself a connoiseur of the hallucinogen. Young hipsters of the period faced an array of LSD consumer options. Purple haze. Sunshine. Orange barrel. Purple microdots. Many preferred the purity of “blotter” acid, dabbed on creatively decorated snips of paper. One definition of poor quality was the amount of strychnine, or rat poison, used in the LSD homebrew. High amounts of strychnine could leave the user wracked with nasty stomach cramps and possessed by particularly hard-edged hallucinations. Considering that even the mildest acid trips consumed the best part of a day, a bad trip could leave one seemingly lost in an eternity of confusion and pain, with all sorts of demons jumping in and out of one’s consciousness.

Jackson, though, had good windowpane, and he took it in beautiful surroundings with a beautiful stranger, which helps explain why he would later call it one of the peak experiences of his life. In fact, that one single day of tripping joyously on the beach would go far in determining the person he would become. Spiritual Being. Father. Teacher. Coach. Warrior. Illusionist. Minister. Manipulator. Master of Mind Games. Riddler. Recuser. Filmmaker. Artist. Counselor. Psychologist. Salesman. Shaman. Leader. Champion.

Even to those close to him, who watched him do it, it seemed strange, even mysterious, that he could combine all these facets of his very remarkable personality into the package of a basketball coach. Not just a coach but a truly great one, a coach who would reshape and redefine the nature of the job, broadening the position’s parameters to a point that he managed in some ways to liberate the game.

He would prove himself as a psychologist, a master at group dynamics, an enhancer of athletic performance. One of the many things that separated him from other coaches is that he preferred to heap pressure on opponents as opposed to his own players. For them, he sought a million different ways to lessen the anxiety of performance, from meditation to mindfulness to yoga.

In retrospect, it should have seemed no surprise that other coaches would find him threatening. His approach proved to be a paradox, a mystery that few others could hope to match. He coached pro players with the control and discipline of a high school mentor (and like one made no assumptions about their fundamental competence), yet he provided those same men with frightening levels of freedom, building their individual sense of responsibility, all the while shaping them into a group, tightening the bonds, pulling even the players on the fringes tighter than ever before.

It is safe to say that, after Phil Jackson, coaching would never be the same again.

Strangest of all, perhaps, was the fact that the seed of his success was a clarity of vision. A clarity of vision that he began to achieve on an LSD trip. It wasn’t the kind of thing that one could address frankly, especially not an athlete or would-be coach. Regardless, Phil Jackson in a show of character would attempt to do just that, and it would cause him and his family great pain.

The stranger that came into his life that May had actually phoned his hotel room the night the Knicks won the championship. She wanted to come up for a visit, but Jackson told her he was busy with friends. Early the next morning she phoned again. Jackson was packing up to check out and head back to New York with the team. But she persuaded him to give her a chance. He was met in the lobby by a stunning woman, a former child actress, a New Yorker. She made it clear just how badly she wanted to be with him. He explained that he had to return to New York, but the idea took hold that he should see her again.

Struck by the possibilities, he returned to New York and abruptly ended his relationship with June, dropping her off at a bus station to send her back home to Connecticut. At the time he explained that his action was the product of a Christian upbringing that left him uncomfortable with the idea of living with one woman while still being married to another.

Considering that June would eventually become his second wife and the mother of four of his children, it seems now like a particularly cold move, his detailing of the situation in his 1975 book Maverick, More Than A Game. But at the time, his frankness in the book was merely an attempt to be honest, to hold himself accountable for his actions. The volume, published by Playboy Press, would cause a stir around the NBA for Jackson’s brutal candor about his drug use and details of his personal life.

In many ways it was a brilliant book about basketball, about a personal spiritual search, and it provided fascinating inside detail about NBA players and their insular world. But Jackson would come to regret the book, because reporters seemed to ignore all the other things to focus on his drug use. June Jackson would hate it for other reasons, for the revelation of painful details of their relationship. For years, it would serve as a reminder to Jackson that his openness could be disastrous and painful.

Even more challenging, this book would also leave him with the lingering image of a marginally compromised hippie. Years later, not long after he had become coach of the Bulls, he surprised his players one day by lighting a stick of sage in his office. Intrigued by the smell, his players would jokingly accuse him of  toking a little reefer. By the fall of 1995, when Dennis Rodman joined the team and was immediately infatuated with Jackson’s laid-back approach, the eccentric forward would tell reporters, “You know Phil. He likes to kick back and smoke a joint, drink a beer, chill out.”

Even as a pro coach, he was known to frequent head shops on his trips to New York, browsing for incense and other knicknacks. That and his past led to rumors and speculation that he continued to enjoy smoking pot long after he came to the Bulls. But the team’s employees who worked closest with him said that if Jackson pursued such a lifestyle he must have done so in the tighest of vaults locked away from the world, because in their daily association with him there was never a whiff of evidence.

“I had always heard the rumors, too,” said one longtime Bulls employee who worked with Jackson. “But if he did it, he kept it well away from us.”

To counter that image from his reckless youth, Jackson and wife June in later years would point out that many young people in their generation had innocently dabbled in the newness of recreational drugs, then moved on to evolve in their adult lives.

“The only thing in that book that’s an embarrassment for me today,” Jackson said in 1995, “is that people have picked out one or two phrases and said, ‘This is who Phil Jackson is.’ Sportswriters in the past have seized on one experience with psychedelic drugs or some comments I’ve made about the type of lifestyle I had as a kid growing up in the ’60s and ’70s. I’ve tried to make sure people don’t just grab a sentence or phrase to build a context for someone’s personality.”

Yet, having said all that, Jackson himself acknowledged that his LSD trip that May of 1973 helped clear the way for who he was to become. Just hours after dropping June off at the bus station that May Jackson was back on a plane to LA headed for a psychedelic tryst with the beautiful stranger. She had apparently disarmed Jackson with her intuitive sense about some of his deepest feelings, so much so that the unnamed woman served as his guide for the LSD trip on the beach at Malibu.

According to Jackson, it proved to be a day of epiphanies.  Like many psychedelic experiences, this one began with Jackson and the woman waiting with anticipation to “get off,” to begin feeling the drug’s first effects. They sat in the morning sun at Malibu, washed by the sound of the sea and the ocean air. They talked. They listened to music. As the drug took effect, he found himself running up and down a two-mile stretch of the beach like “a  lion.” Known for producing deeply emotional and sometimes confusing revelations, the LSD brought Jackson face to face with issues about his body. He had learned over the years to trust his mind, but his relationship with his body was entirely different. The back pain and difficulties had pushed him to the conclusion that his body had somehow let him down.

However, under the influence of the drug, Jackson began to see the fallacy of his contempt. He felt a oneness between mind and body and with it a surge of power and strength like he hadn’t felt in years.

Besides this physical rejuvenation, the day brought a host of other revelations, that he had to learn to love himself before he could love others, that he had to confront and subjugate his substantial ego, which in turn would lead to greater understanding about team basketball and his role in it. He saw that he had to rid himself of indecisiveness, that he had to begin taking responsibility for his actions.

Most important in the day was a “spiritual flash,” the awe he gained at recognizing the Creator’s power, a development that would send him on an intense search over the ensuing months for the best means of honoring and worshipping God. Jackson also saw that day the equality of people in God’s eyes, the vast importance of every single person. And more important, he saw the bonds that connect people.

Out of this LSD trip came an enhanced love for the game of basketball and a new appreciation of team play, an appreciation that would be evidenced that next fall when he rejoined the Knicks. “I had to rediscover my ego in order to lose it. . . . I was able to become a totally team-oriented player for the first time,” he would later write.

Not surprisingly, the 1973-74 campaign would become his most productive professional season. He would average a career-high 11.1 points per game and almost six rebounds per outing. Better yet, he experienced a newfound understanding of his teammates. When he looked at them, he felt that he saw all the forces and pressures pulling at them and affecting them. It was as if his team intuition had flowered into a sixth sense about the connectedness of basketball, a sixth sense that he would trust again and again over the years.

The experience in Malibu also opened his eyes to his personal life. He returned to New York, phoned June at her parents home in Connecticut and informed her that he was finally capable of love, a decision that would lead to their reunion and subsequent marriage and the birth of their four children.

In the months following the event, he would conduct a spirited investigation of his relationship with God, a move that would lead to his shunning of drugs and a change in friends and associates. During this period, he began reviewing Buddhist writings that he had discovered in college and struck up a friendship with a neighbor who was a practicing Muslim. That, in turn, would lead to his throwing coins and doing the I Ching. He even opened his mind to June’s beloved astrology. As much as he took to these influences, he would decide finally that summer of 1973 that essentially he was a Christian, although he rejected St. Paul’s denial of the flesh.

Later, Phil and his brother Charlie, who had also experienced divorce, would meet with their parents, especially their mother, to assure them that they still believed in God, that their spiritual search would remain active.

Jackson gained great pleasure from rereading William James “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” a book that had been so meaningful in college. In his work, James recounted in first person the mystic experiences of a range of Christain sects, including Quakers and other intensely religious people. The mystic experience, James reported, wasn’t an intellectual one, rather a state of knowledge in the sense that it brings sudden revelation and insight into deeply fundamental truths.

James also discussed at length those mystical experiences induced by an intoxicant or drug, including alcohol, nitrous oxide, chloroform, ether, and anaesthetics. That James gave these induced experiences “some metaphysical significance” was of comfort to Jackson, and the book itself left him eager to have another mystic experience, although this time in a natural state. Having felt the power of God, Phil Jackson wanted to feel it again.

That, in turn, inspired his move into meditation, an exercise that would become an increasingly important part of his personal growth. The practice would help him to complete parts of six more seasons as an NBA player, a remarkable run for a longshot out of North Dakota.

Later, meditation would become an important element in his coaching. He knew that it was his nature to be tight, precise, dogmatic, dictatorial. He also came to understand that such rigidity didn’t work because “a dictatorial coach can frighten his team.”

His daily meditation became his means of freeing himself from those dictatorial tendencies.

Before he could move into coaching, though, he would have to outlive the reaction to his publishing of Maverick in 1975, and that would take some time. At the end of his playing career he moved to the New Jersey Nets and was able to assist coach Kevin Loughery with some duties as a player/coach. But from there, his only coaching opportunities would come in the Continental Basketball Association, where he won a league championship and was  named coach of the year with the Albany Patroons, and in summer work in Puerto Rico.

Despite those successes and experiences, Jackson came to realize that the NBA distrusted him, largely in part because of his opennes and honesty in Maverick about his drug experiences. At one point the New York Knicks mentioned him as a candidate for an assistant coaching position. But that proved to be merely a courtesy.

“I thought I was ready to be an NBA coach at age 35,” Jackson recalled in 1995. “I had served two years as an NBA assistant in New Jersey. But I really didn’t have a clue then, and I know that now. So I went to the CBA and had some success, but still nothing came in my direction. I had no mentor in the NBA. My coach when I played with the Knicks, Red Holzman, had retired and was out of the game. Although Dave DeBusschere, my former Knicks teammate, was a general manager, he had no control over my destiny as a coach.”

That control, as it turned out, would come in the form of one Jerry Krause, a longtime scout who had admired Jackson’s talents for many years. Krause had knocked around professional baseball and basketball for decades, and had been knocked around as well. A deeply secretive man, Krause held great enthusiam for identifying talented people. Something in Jackson had led Krause to believe that he would make an outstanding coach. A closely guarded man, Krause confided to one of his few friends that if he ever became an NBA general manager he would eventually like to have Jackson as his head coach. That, in itself, was remarkable, that an outsider like Krause would want an outsider like Jackson as his coach.

Just when Jackson became frustrated with his inability to get a coaching job in the NBA, when he was thinking about giving up the profession and going to law school, it was Krause who stepped in as what Jackson would later call a “mentor.”

“Jerry Krause was like the only person that really stayed in touch with me from the NBA world,” Jackson recalled in 1995. “That was my connection. Jerry had seen me play in college, and we had a relationship that spanned 20 years.”

Meticulous though he was in his conventions, Krause had heard the tales about Jackson’s wild youth and discounted them. What mattered were Jackson’s intelligence and his talent, Krause figured.

“I’ve never read the book,” Krause would later say when asked about Maverick. “I didn’t need to. I knew about Phil’s character.”

And so he did. It would be Krause who would introduce this strange, intuitive duck of a coach to the NBA, setting in motion all that would follow, the high times and heartaches, the special passages and vagaries of Phil Jackson’s very different curriculum vitae.

Roland Lazenby is the author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon, recently released by ESPN Books.