LeBron James’ management team, led by his former teammate Maverick Carter, has officially announced that his decision on which team he picks as a free agent this summer will be based entirely on the opportunity to win championships.

Money will not be an issue for LeBron James. Repeat, money will not be an issue.

That should be great news for the Los Angeles Lakers, because no team has had success over the past decade like the guys in Forum Blue and Gold and their coach, Phil Jackson.

Nothing more dramatically points out just how badly team owner Jerry Buss needs to dispense with all this drama about Jackson’s status.

Not only does James badly want to join a winning organization, but he sorely needs a coach who will not hesitate to coach him.

PJ will not hesitate to coach him. Only a person like “ten rings,” as he is called in Lakers online circles, can truly stand up to James and coach him like any supremely talented player needs to be coached.

Critics have long crowed that the main reason Jackson has always won is that he has always coached the best.

Well, here’s the bare and harsh truth. There are so many ass kissers and uncertain creatures populating the ranks of coaching and management today in the NBA that it’s hard to find someone who can do what needs to be done and say what needs to be said.

Jackson is that rare guy who can coach a superstar. It is the bedrock of Jackson’s rare and special ability.

Tex Winter was a retired college coach with a great career record when he came to the Chicago Bulls in 1985 to help coach a young Michael Jordan. Winter, who has never backed down from aggressively coaching stars and role players alike, once told me how intimidated he felt the first time he watched Jordan in practice.

Once he got over that sense of intimidation, Winter was the kind of guy who wouldn’t hesitate to get on Jordan about any little detail, from fundamentals like his chest passing to team things like ball movement. Winter often spoke of how he admired Jackson’s ability to work with and coach the game’s very best. In that sense, Jackson and Winter used to feed off each other. That’s what made them so special. They actually coached the superstars.

But the NBA is a players’ league and its best players, especially the elite players like James,  have long intimidated those around them. That’s why their coaching staffs become coddlers and their personal managers become Yes Men.

LeBron James is on just such an island right now. He’s 25 and has just come off the most disastrous season of his career. He must make an excellent choice as a free agent. Very much is as stake. He and Carter know that they face wasting his immense talent if they have many more seasons like 2010.

All of which means Lakers owner Jerry Buss needs to drop the mind games he is playing with Jackson and offer the coach the contract he deserves. If he can’t offer a contract immediately, Buss could still quell all the media speculation by reassuring Jackson and Lakers fans that the coach will be welcomed and rewarded for his work.

There has been talk that Buss wants Jackson to take a substantial pay cut from his humongous $12 million a year salary. Jackson has already indicated he’ll make concessions.

These two giant egos — coach and owner — need to settle their differences so that the Lakers can compete for James. Signing such a player would obviously secure the franchise’s future.

Yes, the Lakers are about to return to the NBA Finals for a highly challenging series against the Boston Celtics.

But the future is now for Buss as well as it is for LeBron James. Lakers fans can only hope the owner is too smart to let his cool relationship with Jackson get in the way of securing a once-in-a-lifetime player like James.

Buss already has a once-in-a-lifetime coach. Perhaps the team owner will wake up during these playoffs and realize that.

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

Yet when he does make a mistake, it’s often a real lulu, a stupendous boner.

For example, there was the time late in his tenure with the Chicago Bulls that ole PJ decided to send a special lady friend some of that fancy Victoria Secret style underwear. The only problem was, according to team employees who laughed themselves silly over the incident, he allegedly put the wrong address on the package. When the carrier couldn’t deliver the underwear and returned it to his office, Jackson’s secretary assumed it was something he had purchased for his wife and directed the package to her.

A hard rain fell after that one.

Those same Bulls employees swore that the wayward underwear had originally been sent to a lady in Arizona.

You’d think that would have been enough to teach Big Chief Triangle a lesson. Leave the state alone, son.

But Jackson likes to get into those tweak-the-opponent modes during the play-offs, so now we have the great immigration caper. Jackson apparently forgot his bad karma with the desert and committed one of the silliest mistakes of his venerable career when he opened his mouth about Arizona’s controversial new approach to enforcing  immigration laws.

Worst of all, Jackson decided to address the issue just as his Lakers were about to take on the Phoenix Suns in the Western Conference finals. Strangest of all, Jackson, who has a progressive, liberal image dating back to his hippie days playing for the New York Knicks, seemed to support the hard-line approach of Arizona’s Republican governor, who has pushed the crackdown.

All of a sudden here’s PJ coming across like one of those angry tea-bagger militants, and like that he’s driven a wedge into a Lakers fan base that once worshiped the Zen Master. Instead, Jackson was greeted for Game 1 of the Western Conference finals by Lakers fans protesting his political posturing.

And that doesn’t even touch the miffed and hurt co-workers in the Lakers organization and on the roster (see Kobe Bryant’s wife) offended by his statements.

How bad is it?

Well, Jackson girlfriend Jeanie Buss and her sidekicks — I’ll call them the Jackson inner core — went to work soon after his blunder with a major damage control effort that included contacting all the media and spinning the situation as best they could. They employed that old Lakers PR flack John Black in getting the word out and phoned all their personal media connections.

Heck, they even contacted me, which suggests how desperate they are. They knew I’d probably do something like drag up the silly underwear episode, but, hey, they needed to control the damage with Jackson’s all-important base — Lakers fans.

Fortunately, Jeanie Buss is absolutely fantastic at damage control because all of the Los Angeles media are sweet on her, not to mention the fans themselves. Even I admit to falling under her lure.

“She’s some kind of gal,” Tex Winter once told me after he met Jeanie for the first time. If she can snare Tex’s affection, she can have mine any day.

So here I go helping the PJ cause with a bit of spin mixed in with my own observations.

One of the issues is that Jackson and Jeanie’s father, team owner Jerry Buss, have a stand-offish relationship that has left to question whether Jackson will return to coach the Lakers next year. His contract is up, and Jerry Buss doesn’t seem overly fond of Jackson, who has something of a history stirring up the shit with owners and organizations.

Jackson’s only true power against Jerry Buss is Jackson’s own popularity with Lakers fans. He and Jeanie used that popularity to help him get rehired in 2005 after Jerry Buss fired him in 2004.

So it’s not smart that Jackson offended his base with his stance on immigration. And it’s not smart that he would do so during the playoffs when the team is trying to build the tremendous championship focus that Jackson’s great teams have been known for.

Does all of this give Jerry Buss more leeway in cutting Jackson loose after the season? It sure seems like it could. If Jackson pisses off the fans, well, he’s in trouble.

However, that’s not entirely the case. To get a breakdown on the Jeanie spin and other inside dope, we’ll turn to my usual reliable source. He’s tight with Jeanie and Phil and always knows exactly what’s going on. They rely on him to get the inside word out, and he does. We’ll call him The Pernicious Phil Insider. Maybe this will make Mark Heisler of the L.A. Times happier. Heisler gets so frustrated that all the inside poop escapes him. Heisler runs around trying to throw water on all the Internet stories, which leaves him hardly any time at all for doing any real reporting. But I digress…

“I think he made a rookie mistake,” the Pernicious Phil Insider said of Jackson. “It’s a no-win situation all over the place. He misread the crowd and he misread the politics and he got outside of his game.”

Then the Insider started talking about Phil’s “nuanced” language being misunderstood.

Plus, the Insider said, Phil was just searching for something to tweak the Suns, because their organization had come out strong against the new immigration enforcement.

I told him I thought that was a silly defense for Phil. Why spin it?

Personally, I think that Phil should just come out and say, “Look, I’m a dope. I’m not really as smart as I try to act all the time. I did something really stupid by opening my mouth about this immigration thing. I have no idea what I’m talking about, so if it’s OK with everyone I’ll get back to what I do know, and that’s basketball.”

Yes, it would require Jackson humbling himself, which may be physically impossible with the size of his ego. But if he did that, people would forget all this in about three hours, less than a single news cycle.

Jackson, though, has been so goofy and coy in his news conferences that reporters seem intent on asking him lots about it and holding his feet to the fire.

As for the whole thing providing Jerry Buss with ample reason not to bring Phil back next year at his exorbitant salary of $12 million per season, the Insider did point out some things that make sense.

Jerry Buss has been reminded during these playoffs of just how good a coach Phil Jackson is. “With any other coach, they don’t survive that first round against Oklahoma City,” the Insider says.

After all, Phil uses Tex Winter’s triangle offense to get such a high degree of efficiency out of the team’s role players that he’s worth every penny of his big bucks.

Will Jerry Buss really want to gamble on another coach next season? That, of course, is the question.

Jackson himself seemed to be pouting a bit in the wake of the uproar over his comments and suggested to one radio interviewer that he just might retire after the season.

The Insider reminds us all that Jackson is cranky this time of year and it’ll take only a week back in Montana during the off-season before he’s bored and wants to coach again.

If that’s the case, Phil, do yourself a favor and leave immigration policy to people who understand the full range of human issues involved. While you’re at it, don’t send off any more fancy underwear either. And most important of all, look out for those Celtics. They got something nasty coming for ya.

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

Take, for example, the use of the word “facilitator.”

In Winter’s complex triangle offense, you have to have someone who sort of pilots the machine, who gets the group into the offense, makes the key passes, helps the group through its reads and changes.

Someone who sets things up.

That’s the “facilitator.”

I first heard Winter use the word in explaining Scottie Pippen’s role with the Chicago Bulls back in the 1990s. Pippen had become the facilitator for that team. He played forward, but he ran their offense like a point guard.

Winter’s triangle offense was based on six principles of team play until Winter started working with Michael Jordan and the Bulls in the 1980s. Then Winter added principle no. 7, which basically says that sometimes there are players with such overwhelming offensive talent that you have to have a rule that allows him to override all the other rules.

That was Jordan. Principle no. 7.

As a young player developing in the NBA and in Winter’s offense, Kobe Bryant became a child of those two fathers—Pippen, the facilitator, and Jordan, No. 7, what I’ll call The Weapon.

Bryant has regularly flirted with facilitation during certain moments in his Lakers career, but it has been a process. Obviously his facilitation role developed gingerly during his days with Shaquille O’Neal in the post.

Bryant has long hungered to be The Weapon, of course. But it says much about his skill level and his mind that Bryant can be whatever he wants to be at any given moment.

He’s been called a ball hog by a lot of people over the years. Winter would get frustrated with him, but he never looked at Bryant in those terms. Having worked so closely with Jordan, Winter had gained an understanding of supremely talented players.

Like Jordan before him, Bryant could be overwhelmed by his own competitive nature, by his drive, by his “urges” to dominate.

Winter understood those. He could become frustrated by them. But he understood them.

Winter always considered the tension between No. 7 and the rest of the team to be that key area that made the triangle so special. After all, supremely talented players could often take off and leave the team behind at another level.

Also an extremely keen mind, Jordan himself understood this principle and the tension between the team and No. 7. He was often quoted as saying, “The triangle gave me a way to relate to my teammates.”

When he became an assistant to coach Phil Jackson with the Lakers, Winter’s offense offered the same tension—the same ultimate liberation—for Bryant as well.

We’re witnessing this long journey come to fruition during the Lakers’ current first-round series with the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Faced with a young, athletic team, able to get out in transition and run the Lakers out of the building on a given night, Phil Jackson has asked Bryant to become more of a facilitator in this fascinating first-round battle.

That request that Bryant do more by doing less seemed a miserable failure in Game 4 as the Thunder whipped the Lakers and evened the series at two games apiece.

Many observers figured that Game 4, where Bryant took just 10 shots and scored 12 points, was evidence of some highly questionable snit by Bryant who was again trying to prove a point to his coach and the team, that he needed to be No. 7, not the facilitator.

There were predictions that Bryant would revert to being No. 7 and throw down a huge offensive performance in Game 5. Instead, Bryant again played as a facilitator, allowing the Lakers to work the advantage of their superior frontcourt. For Game 5, Bryant took just nine shots, and the Lakers won in a blow-out.

Faced with carrying less of a burden on the offensive end, Bryant was freed up to make his superstar contribution on the defensive end, just as it had in the 2008 Olympics when he used energy and athleticism to set the tone for Team USA’s run to the gold. His play also reminded me of the tremendous tenacity that Pippen could bring on the defensive end.

Bryant also brought to mind his own play in the Lakers’ run to the 2001 NBA title, when he was young and struggling to find an identity between the two roles.

A long-time mentor and assistant to Jackson, Winter continues to deal with the effects of a debilitating stroke he suffered last April. But the 88-year-old had to be delighted with what he saw last night.

Once again, Winter was turned down for election to the Basketball Hall of Fame this spring. But Winter’s touch is all over the game, all over Bryant’s game.

When Bryant was a teen-ager, frustrated in the Lakers’ offense under coach Del Harris, he told me one day after practice that he’d always dreamed he would play for Tex Winter, who was then an assistant coach with the Bulls.

I told Bryant I would get Winter to phone him to talk basketball. It was a highly unusual move, for the assistant coach of one team to phone a frustrated and lonely young player on another.

As I watched Bryant play last night, I thought of that phone call, and how Winter’s assuring voice was a light in the darkness for Bryant, how Winter became Bryant’s mentor over the ensuing years, how he helped Bryant learn to deal with his own immense talent.

I could only think of how proud Winter would be of Bryant’s performance as a facilitator in a key moment for his team, how Bryant’s play summed up his greatness, a talent that all the fans and observers can catch thrilling glimpses of, but a talent we can never understand.

That, too, is part of Winter’s greatness, and part of Phil Jackson’s as well. Both coaches gained the genius to understand such rare talent. They know how to coax and cajole and encourage Bryant between those two roles, No. 7 and the facilitator.

Everyone knows Bryant has been a superb No. 7 over the years. But he’s one hell of a facilitator when the situation demands it.

It leaves me with full confidence that Bryant will accomplish another giant feat one of these days. By the tremendous force of his great nature, Kobe Bryant will put Tex Winter in the Hall of Fame.

Tex, you can rest easy on that one. Kobe wants you there and he will not be denied. In a big way, he’s making that statement with his play. He always has.

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

After all, it’s going to take time and patience for Walton to work his way back in. He’s only played two dozen games this season and has been out since just before the All Star Game.

But when he resumes playing next week and if he’s able to round into form, Walton should improve a lot of things for Phil Jackson’s team.

The Lakers’ bench was decidedly exposed against the New Orleans Hornets in last night’s loss, and Walton should add considerable strength there. He’s had his highlight moments defensively, but it’s the execution of the triangle offense that should improve substantially with Walton on the floor.

Improving that execution should help the bench keep better control of tempo, which means they have a better chance of holding their ground, of not losing leads.

Walton’s presence should also help in forward Ron Artest’s adjustment to the triangle’s nuances and challenges. Walton will give Jackson more options in terms of lineups, particularly in the second half.

With Artest in the lineup, Bryant has gotten far less time on the wing himself, and as Bryant explained to me earlier in the season that has changed his relationship with the offense itself.

Bryant added that he doesn’t mind this. In fact, he said the addition of Artest has made things more interesting for him, given him fresh and different challenges this season.

Mainly, it has meant that Bryant gets the ball in different places than he did last year. That can be good and bad. Getting the ball as a guard means he’s operating higher and further way from the basket. It can mean there are fewer opportunities for him to work “behind the defense” because he is not on the wing.

With Walton on the floor with Bryant, perhaps that means the star will be able to return to some of his comfortable spots in the offensive execution.

Bryant has long shown an ability to turn all kinds of things that could be negatives into positives, and that appears to be his mental approach this season as well.

Bryant pointed out for reporters that because of the addition of Artest this year, the Lakers have changed substantially as a team, simply because it takes time for any player to learn and adjust to the triangle. The classic example of this is Ron Harper, who struggled for most of two seasons with the Chicago Bulls trying to learn the triangle. When he finally did, Harper became a key component of the Bulls, as he later was for Jackson’s first two championship teams with the Lakers.

So it’s only fair to allow Artest his time to learn and adjust, thus the help that Walton can bring in his return is key.

If the Lakers win the title again this year, they’ll win it differently than they did last year, Bryant recently observed.

That’s because last year they won the championship with some elevated execution of their offense.

This year Artest means the Lakers have a chance to develop as a good defensive team in the playoffs, although that obviously still remains a work in progress.

With Walton back, the execution of the triangle also should improve. Make no mistake, if the Lakers are going to win the title in June, they’ll have to improve dramatically, as they did over the course of last year’s playoffs. Walton’s personal improvement was a big part of the team’s progress.

There’s also the enthusiasm Walton brings to the task. He’s an upbeat person. His teammates like him. He’ll bring those tremendous mental positives to the team’s relationship with the offense, just as he always has.

In fact, even during his time on the injured list Walton found a way to emulate triangle offense guru Tex Winter, who has been sidelined himself for almost a year while recovering from a stroke.

Walton has donned a suit and sat amongst the coaching staff, furiously scribbling notes during the course of the game, then communicating what he sees to teammates during pauses in the action.

That, of course, has long been a role filled by the tenacious Winter. Obviously, Walton has been more diplomatic in delivering his observations to teammates than Winter, who was known for his brutally frank corrections of players.

As a player, Walton will confine his contributions to all the subtle things — the reads and passes and cuts — that make Jackson’s triangle teams so special, and secondary players such as Walton so crucial to the big picture.

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

The big guy is giving in. He’s not going to go tit for tat with team owner Jerry Buss over his coaching contract for next season and beyond.

Speaking to the media this week, Jackson acknowledged that he has a chance to come back next season. The only way of assuring that, he pointed out, is for the Los Angeles Lakers to win this year’s NBA title. And the odds of that are long, Jackson added.

“Odds wise, I serve at the behest of the Buss family,” Jackson said, then quipped that he serves Buss’ daughter Jeanie “all the time … ”

(Jackson can never resist a little dig at Jerry Buss, who has long disliked the fact that his coach dates his daughter, who also handles marketing duties for the team.)

Then Jackson added, “But (right now) I’m serving this basketball club as a coach. I think it’s the best way to approach it right now. Where this team is, the way it’s built, the way we’ve been going along this season, the direction the NBA is going right now.

“A lot of these things fit together,” he said. “If we win it’s almost imperative that (I) give it another shot, but that’s a lot of ‘if’s’ in there. Winning is a really big (challenge). There are four playoff (series) that you have to get through before you can say that ‘We won’ and then have a chance to do something special again, unique.

“So, that’s a long shot.”

Earlier in the season, Jackson had begun publicly nudging Jerry Buss about his contract for next season. The coach began the effort in front of the New York media with comments implying that the team was making an effort to get him to take a cut from his $12 million salary each season.

Jackson, of course, saw a scenario shaping up and wanted to change the direction that things were going. It was obvious he faced a scenario that forced him to win the NBA title this year to keep his job.

Jackson was really concerned about next year in that it provided him a window to win another championship. Jackson reasoned that if the Lakers didn’t win the title this year, then Jerry Buss and son Jim might decline to give him a new contract (they made a similar move in 2004 and fired him).

Jackson would prefer to have next season under contract, because it would still give him an opportunity to win one more title next year. Jackson believes the NBA is headed for contract troubles with its players union that could easily force a cancelation of the 2012 season due to an owner lock out.

Title opportunities this season and next are huge for the highly competitive Jackson, who has already won 10 titles.

First Jeanie Buss and now Lakers owner Jerry Buss have come forward to address my observations about the organization’s inner conflicts, particularly the job status of coach Phil Jackson (Jeanie’s boyfriend who used to wear a soul patch).

At least Jeanie addressed me by name. Jerry chose longtime Lakers writer Steve Springer to put together a story answering a tough column I did on this blog about Jerry’s poker face. In Springer’s story for ESPN Los Angeles, he addressed me only as an “Internet report.”

Hey, guys, if you want this to go away, don’t look at me. You gotta get Phil to quit talking about it.

That’s your cold, hard truth here.

It’s obvious he doesn’t feel entirely appreciated. And, puh-leeze, spare me Phil’s breathless response to this that everything is just fine.

It was Jackson who first launched this issue when he chose the team’s trip to the New York market earlier in the season to air his complaints that  Jerry Buss and his boy Jim, who is trying to establish himself as the guy running the Lakers basketball operations, were trying to get Jackson to take a pay cut.

“So they may not even want to hire me,” Jackson said at the time. “They may want to save some money.”

This started with Phil’s indignation over the money, folks. By the way, that’s what really got Phil rolling against Bulls GM Krause back in Chicago. Krause was pinching Phil’s money.

Most recently, I tried to soft shoe Jackson’s remarks about Jerry Buss by calling them “tender.”

But what the heck, let’s be frank about what Jackson did. He used one of his old tricks. Back in his battles with the Chicago Bulls front office, when Jackson wanted to tweak Jerry Krause, he would say something positive about him and then act like he was defending him against critics. In that manner, Jackson could introduce a negative idea to the media and still not get blamed for “seeding” it.

Very crafty.

For example, there are the frequent complaints by fans that Buss — who was not with the team for last year’s championship and was not there to accept the NBA trophy as the owner traditionally does — is detached from the team.

“I think he admires this team, I think he likes his athletes,” Jackson told reporters last week. “He has an ability to stay removed and yet attached to them.”

What does that mean? I think Jerry’s interested in this team?

I think?

C’mon. Let’s face it. Jackson’s trying to coach the team to a championship and he basically says the owner isn’t all that interested.

There’s the fact that Jerry Buss dislikes the triangle offense, which I have pointed out in my columns, because of his great love for his “Showtime” teams that ran with the basketball.

Here’s what Jackson had to say on the subject:

“I think Jerry was very close to his teams in the ’80s, the Showtime teams,” Jackson said of Buss. “And I think he learned something from that. He learned that you can be friends with these guys, but time passes, a generation passes. There’s some heartache involved in that. There’s some pain involved in it the closer you get to the guys.”

So Jackson’s pointing out that Jerry’s teams with Magic Johnson broke his heart. And because his heart is broken he can’t seem to muster any public interest in the current Lakers?

Is that it?

But it is good that Buss at least spoke up. He didn’t say anything much about Jackson’s contract status except what I had already pointed out in my columns: He said the organization will wait until the season is over to renegotiate with Jackson.

Buss pointed out that Jackson waited until the end of the 2008 season before signing with the club for three years on his last contract.

“If I were to go to him right now and said, ‘Phil, will you coach next year?’ He would say let’s wait until the end of the year and see how I feel,” Buss told Springer (not ESPN who bought the freelance piece). “So, I don’t think it causes any tension, I just have to wait until then before a discussion begins.”

No where in any of Springer’s report does it mention that Buss fired Jackson at the end of another contract talk, in 2004. You think that’s an important detail? (On the other hand, I should point out the piece is a hell of a fine interview with the owner, who provides all kinds of insight into his life and family and team issues.)

“I think from the Lakers’ perspective we really want to get through the year, then take a deep breath and see where we are,” Buss said.

Too bad Jackson and Buss didn’t appear together in a press conference, where they could take open questions and assure fans that there’s no problem. But that’s not going to happen, not in LA, where Buss has craftily used his public relations staff over the years to discipline the media.

I don’t want to belabor the point any further. Get on with the season. Just don’t try to blame it on me.

Phil’s the one doing the talking.

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

Lakers coach Phil Jackson confirmed as much recently when he opened up about Jerry Buss, the team’s 77-year-old owner.

“He’s a gambler,” Jackson told reporters before a recent game in Los Angeles. “He knows the odds, he knows when to take the risks. I think he carries that sense of this is a risk/reward type of game, and what are the rewards with the risk I’ve thrown out there in each situation.”

Jackson, of course, is echoing something he learned from another owner — Chicago Bulls chairman Jerry Reinsdorf — who first taught him about risks and rewards years ago. Jackson also had his unpleasant moments with Reinsdorf yet was able to maintain a strong respect for him even through their nastiest showdown in 1998.

In his years on the bench in the NBA, Jackson has learned some difficult lessons about the mind-set of team owners. You could see those lessons reflected in his recent comments. Jackson has long been known for his masterful use of the media, for planting ideas with reporters and stirring the pot if it needs stirring. Jackson himself calls this “seeding” ideas with the media.

But as he’s aged Jackson has also learned to employ a more direct approach. You might argue that with his recent comments, Jackson was reaching out to Buss, telling him through the media that he understands the pressures the owner faces. (Thanks to the great Kurt Helin at http://probasketballtalk.nbcsports.com/2010/03/phil-jackson-says-jerry-buss-knows-when-to-hold-them.php )

“This year he took the big risk and brought Lamar (Odom) back, so we could get back to where we are the championship, that we could have a shot at that championship again,” Jackson said of Buss signing Odom in the off-season. “But that was a big pill to chew for an organization that has never lost money in the however many years he has owned the team, 30 years (31, actually). I know that was something he had to convince himself of. I had to convince him of, and stay after it that it was imperative for us to stay with this crew, this group of guys.

“I think Jerry was very close to his teams in the ’80s, the Showtime teams,” Jackson continued. “And I think he learned something from that. He learned that you can be friends with these guys, but time passes, a generation passes. There’s some heartache involved in that. There’s some pain involved in it the closer you get to the guys.

“I think he admires this team, I think he likes his athletes. He has an ability to stay removed and yet attached to them.”

These are somewhat difficult circumstances. Buss pays Jackson the exorbitant sum of $12 million a year to coach the Lakers. Jackson, in turn, has rewarded Buss by leading the team to last year’s NBA title, his fourth championship in nine seasons with the team. Yet Jackson’s contract is up after this season, and Buss has not offered him a new one.

In place of an offer, Jackson and his girlfriend — the owner’s daughter, Jeanie Buss — are left reading the master poker face of Jerry Buss. What is he thinking? What cards is he holding? What will he do?

These are serious questions, because Buss has already fired Jackson once in their time together in 2004. So it’s understandable that this poker face would privately unnerve Jeanie Buss and to some degree Jackson (and the team itself). After all, he is trying to coach his team to another championship.

Jerry Buss has been a tremendous owner in Los Angeles in terms of his success over the past three decades. But it’s not right. Jackson shouldn’t have to play this poker game and try to win a championship too.

Yes, Jerry Buss is a sly, tough owner who plays a sly, tough hand of poker. But passionate Lakers fans know this isn’t the time or place for a hand of poker. The Lakers have an opportunity to do something special here if they can win a title in 2010.

Then again, Jackson has won in tough circumstances before. That’s why he reached out to Buss with those almost tender comments.

Buss has indicated in the past that he doesn’t love the triangle offense that Jackson runs. Truth be known, he prefers the Showtime days of Magic Johnson. Well, who the hell doesn’t? As the recent HBO documentary on Johnson and Boston’s Larry Bird made so perfectly clear, the two players gave the NBA a truly wonderful era. But here’s a news flash: We will never see another Magic and Larry because you don’t turn out special players like that on demand. They were not the product of a system. They were magical players, once-in-a lifetime gifts from God.

In the absence of that, Jackson has helped create the next great era of pro basketball. The era of the triangle offense, if you will. Like the era of Larry and Magic, when this era is gone, it won’t be duplicated.

So Jerry Buss should think twice about hurrying to usher the Triangle Era out the door so that he can get back to Showtime. These eras themselves are special things. They come our way once in a lifetime. We get players like Kobe and Magic and Bird and Jordan and coaches like Jackson and his longtime assistant Tex Winter once in a lifetime.

So with all due respect, Dr. Buss — and I sincerely mean with all respect for you have been a great owner — please leave the fucking poker games for Vegas.

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

Those teams coached by Jackson and his longtime mentor and assistant coach, Tex Winter, also lost once in the conference finals. In the calculus of college coaching, that would mean that teams coached by Winter and Jackson made it to the “Final Four” 13 out of 18 years.

Then there are his other totals. Coming into this season, he had coached 1,476 regular-season games and won 1,041, a daunting .705 winning percentage. He’s coached another 303 playoff games and won 209 of them (just at 70 percent). His 1996 team owns the all-time high of 72 wins in a season. Not bad.

As for his role as part of coaching’s odd couple, the 88-year-old Winter has never gotten the sort of respect he’s deserved from the snobbish and persnickety Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, and these days he’s in a senior facility in Oregon after suffering a stroke this past spring. But the fiery Winter took Jackson from a guy who didn’t know a basic flex offense and forged him into the superior coach who has mastered Winter’s triangle system and dominated the game.

It’s hard to believe that it was just 22 years ago that Chicago Bulls GM Jerry Krause insisted on hiring an assistant coach that nobody wanted and then directed Winter to teach him how to be a great one. “I wanted Tex to be the coach’s coach,” Krause explained.

In an interview with Lindy’s Sports last season before his stroke, Winter recalled that Jackson, who looked and acted nothing like an NBA coach, was soon put to work doing advance scouting for the Bulls. He returned from the road with scouting reports that were brilliant in their detail.

The quality of Jackson’s work quickly made Winter realize that what Krause was saying was true: Jackson was truly exceptional. Then, first as Winter began tutoring Jackson and later as they coached together over the ensuing seasons, Winter was nothing short of stunned by the power and scope of Jackson’s memory. He seemed to have a total recall of every game he had ever played, scouted, or coached, Winter said. That mental power, and his tremendous competitiveness, made for Jackson’s great success as a coach (that and the fact that the Chicago Bulls and Lakers rosters he coached included Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant and Scottie Pippen, among others), Winter said. Jackson’s memory allowed him powerful access to an array of options every time he coached a game, explained Winter, who became known as the sidekick who would fuss with and challenge Jackson during the course of many of those games.

“I don’t think there was anything that he couldn’t recall,” Winter said. “Phil remembers just about everything about every game.”

That mental power also allowed him to challenge and engage players like Jordan and Bryant on a different level. “With Phil, there are always mind games,” Jordan once marveled.

THE HARD LOOK BACK

Despite Jerry Krause’s role in advancing Jackson’s career, the two men share a bitter past. “I haven’t spoken to Phil since the last day he was with us in 1998,” recalled Krause, who was eventually let go by the Bulls and later went to work as a baseball scout. He and Jackson had engaged in a well-publicized break-up as the Bulls were winning their sixth championship that season.

Their differences are enough to make you wonder how Krause and Jackson ever came to work together, but that in itself is the bittersweet heart of this story. Krause had knocked around the games of baseball and basketball for years as a scout, taking bad flights, eating bad food, hanging out at practice, always looking for the hidden truth. Even before that, when he was a student assistant charting plays at Bradley University, Krause caught his first glimpse of Winter, then the coach of college basketball’s top-ranked team at Kansas State.

Krause was intrigued by the Winter’s unusual triangle offense and his intelligence and integrity. “I liked what Tex did. I thought, ‘Boy, if he ever got good players that offense would be something.’” Over the years, Krause kept an eye on Winter and his teams. When Winter became coach at Northwestern, “we became better friends,” Krause said.

Winter recalled that he spent a lot of time with a projector, going over film, showing Krause a lot about the triangle. “I wanted to learn about it,” Krause said. He also had hopes of becoming an NBA general manager someday and he offered promises that as soon as he did, he would hire Winter. “I want you with me,” Krause told Winter. “I want you to teach the big people and to coach the coaches.”

“I always said, ‘I’m gonna hire him as an assistant coach, and I’m not gonna worry who the head coach is going to be,” Krause recalled.

In 1985, Krause’s labor came to fruition. He was hired as GM of the Bulls as Jordan was entering his second season. Sure enough, one of the first calls he made was to Winter. First, Krause hired Stan Albeck as head coach. But Albeck didn’t want to listen to Winter and didn’t want to use the offense. Krause also wanted him to hire a goofy young assistant named Phil Jackson. Krause had discovered Jackson, a lanky big guy at the University of North Dakota, while scouting small college ball. Krause had quickly come to believe that Jackson had a bright future. But Albeck absolutely refused to hire Jackson, who was viewed as something of an oddball back in the 1980s.

Krause fired Albeck and promoted a bright young coach, Doug Collins. Krause wanted Collins to hire Jackson, but the new coach was reluctant. “I went around some things with Doug, but I finally got Phil on his staff,” Krause said.

Once there, Jackson soon began working with Winter and learning from him. But like Albeck, Collins didn’t want to listen to Winter. He even barred Winter from Bulls practices at one point. Finally, Krause grew fed up, fired Collins and hired Jackson as his head coach.

At last, Krause had the two people he had dreamed of putting in charge. It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. “Phil was the first person to understand how good Tex was,” Krause said. “I give Phil a lot of credit. Phil is the best brain picker I have ever known. Phil has picked Tex’s mind for years. I’m a great brain picker myself. I’ve picked Tex’s mind for years. But Phil is by far the best I’ve ever seen because he took a genius and picked his brain. I hired Phil because he was a brilliant defensive coach. When Phil said he wanted to use Tex’s triangle, I said, ‘That’s great.’”

The two would become the core of a great coaching staff that included Johnny Bach, Jimmy Rodgers, Frank Hamblen and Jimmy Cleamons (Cleamons and Hamblen remain with Jackson today in Los Angeles). “I do believe the coaching staff we had in Chicago is the best staff in the history of the game,” Krause said. “They were a tremendous complement to Phil.”

Jackson and his staff proved the perfect match for Jordan and the assemblage of talent. However, Krause’s strong personality wore on Jackson season after season.

Winter became a moderating factor between the two. He said Jackson spent several years bending over backward to please Krause, but by late 1995, Jackson had grown weary and began to rebel. That rebellion grew into open warfare by 1996. Some accuse Jackson of using Jordan’s and Pippen’s dislike of Krause to motivate the team and drive the Bulls along a bitter road to their last three championships.

Krause soon found himself caught up in the web of Jackson’s mind games and the coach’s ability to use the media to achieve his goals. “He’s always operated that way,” Krause said of Jackson. “Believe me, he’s stirred the pot with me a number of times. That’s the way he does things. I know the act, believe me.”

Observers watched Krause’s own hubris feed into the end game when the team and coaching staff broke apart after the sixth title. Krause’s vision of Jackson and Winter had been special, then it turned into his nightmare.

Jackson “rode off into the sunset;”  that was how the media termed the parting.

In his late 60s and still living in the Chicago area, Krause offered a matter-of-fact view of his days with Jackson. “I’ve got tapes of every game that was played in that era,” he says. “I’ve never looked at ‘em.”

Jackson was voted into the Hall of Fame in 2007, which served to remind Krause of his frustration at not getting the Hall to recognize Winter as an all-time great coach. Winter is one of the game’s ultimate “geniuses,” he says. Krause himself was on the selection committee for the Hall several years ago and resigned in protest over the issue. “I did everything I could do,” Krause said, adding that the politics of selection has made Winter’s recognition an impossibility. “It ain’t gonna happen.”

He has grown to accept that reality as he has everything else that came to pass. In an interview last year, Krause said he has moved back to baseball found enjoyment there.

Just don’t expect any warm reunions of that Bulls club, one of pro basketball’s greatest , he said. “It’s past history. It’s done. Phil is a great coach. For a long time, he was very easy to work with. Then he was not so easy. That’s life. Things change. Phil is Phil. I’m proud I hired him.”

With the hiring of top Lakers assistant Kurt Rambis as the head coach in Minnesota, obvious questions have arisen about the future of the 64-year-old Jackson, who has had both hips replaced in recent seasons.

Jackson is fulfilling the last year of his contract (which pays him $12 million per season), but he is said to keep a heavy heart over Winter’s condition. Jackson’s intelligence has long intimidated all of those around him, players and assistant coaches alike, except for Winter, who while working as a Lakers special assistant in recent seasons could still vehemently challenge Jackson. Winter was pleased when ounger assistant Brian Shaw would show some willingness to stand up to Jackson and actually differ with him. As one inside observer of the Lakers explained, those challenges are important to Jackson, especially now that Winter is incapacitated.

“They keep him from getting bored.”

Roland Lazenby is the author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon, a biography set to be released this winter by Random House/ESPN.

Tex wore the truth as a natural, everyday part of his attire. Like an old pair of basketball shoes. And he delivered the truth dead on, at eye level.
The truth was the essence of who he was. He was aware that what he had to say could be hurtful to players and associates. He never went out of his way to hurt someone. But he never held back too much either. He usually just said what he thought. And he delivered what he thought in self-deprecating manner.
He didn’t use the truth to adorn himself, to make himself look better. He simply provided feedback. He told people what he thought. The truth is always gold for any of us, but in a fantasy world like the NBA it proved a wealth beyond any other. The players are immensely wealthy, which means that about all they hear are lies from the people around them.
They never got that from Tex. Whether the player was Michael Jordan of the Bulls or Luke Walton or Kobe Bryant of the Lakers, he got the hard stuff right from Tex’s mouth. MJ, you see, could never throw a really competent chest pass, and it was Tex who told him so, just as it was Tex who believed in Kobe when so many others wanted to take him down.
As Tex lies in a Kansas hospital fighting for his life after a stroke, I hope NBA people stop and contemplate just what he has meant to them, meant to the game. I hope all the players who ever played for him stop and think about what his honesty did for the game itself.
Ditto for the coaches who gained so much from association with him.
I hope they stop and think today about Tex’s honesty.
And while I’m offering that advice for everyone else, I’m going to try and take a bit of it myself. Tex spent a lot of time trying to educate me. I’m sure he often thought I was a lost cause, but he never lost patience with me.
The things he told me often got him into trouble. And team “officials” were always trying to get him not to tell me the things he did. But he never wavered in the face of that pressure.
The truth has a sting to it, a deeply burning sting. Tex knew that. He knew that when he said certain things, it was going to cost him.
The great irony of his life is that if he hadn’t told the truth, he might have played the political games that made it much easier to get into the Hall of Fame. But if he hadn’t been such a truth-teller, Tex wouldn’t have been so deserving of Hall of Fame recognition. And, boy, is he ever deserving.
Yes, he was a great coach, and his old-school triangle offense has defined success in the modern game of hoops.
But his primary product was the truth.
And so, Tex Winter is simply too good for the Hall of Fame. It’s a place populated with frauds and credit-takers.
Tex is in another Hall of Fame, one a million times more exclusive and far more important. He’s in the truth-tellers Hall of Fame, where the population is only the very few truly good ones.
The rest of us, we can’t even walk through that hall. We have to admire it from afar.
If there’s one thing I could say to Tex today it would be, “Rest easy. You will always be remembered, always be treasured.” For if there’s one thing about the truth, it’s just like Tex himself. It never gets old. It’s always vital.
I want to close with some observations from Chip Schaefer, trainer for the Bulls and consultant for the Lakers and Phil Jackson. Schaefer always has great perspective on the many treasures in life, such as Tex. He made these comments to me some years ago in an interview.
Chip Schaefer: “Tex is a few years younger than my parents and a product of that Depression era. To say that he is frugal would be an understatement. Johnny Bach used to call him penurious. I think that’s a very apt description of him. But I think Tex in a lot of ways is the way we all should be. He doesn’t like to see things get wasted. He takes that attitude at the dinner table, too. If there’s a little bit of meat on your bone, he may just pick up your steak bone and finish it off for you… Basketball is his absolute passion in life. He’s 73 years old (87 now), and that’s what keeps him going. There’s times when he’ll look tired, and I’ll wonder if he has the energy for it. Then all of a sudden practice will start, and he’s out here barking at these guys like he’s coaching the K-State freshman team and it’s 1948. Tex has three or four real passions in life. One of them’s basketball. Certainly one of them’s food. He really enjoys his finances. He pores over the business section of the paper as intensely as he does the sports section. He’s a real joy. I hope he keeps on going.”