He’s lost a step. Maybe a step and a half.

He’s not even close to the pressure defender he used to be. And even back in the day there were those moments when he could be exposed. And not just a little. Sometimes he could be exposed badly by really quick young guards. And the league today is nothing but quick young guards.

Derek Fisher guard Rajon Rondo? John Wall? Derrick Rose? You can hear the chops slurping at nearly every stop around the league. These young people want a piece of that old man.

And finishing with the basketball? Fisher’s mix ups at the basket used to keep Lakers assistant and triangle offense guru Tex Winter grumbling, except when it came time to think about replacing him. Then Tex, like most everyone else on the coaching staff, turned strangely silent.

They knew.

No one else can do all the things that Fisher does for the Lakers. And absolutely no one can do them in the heat of the biggest battles, which is what Fisher has done time and again. He has proved himself every single day of his career, ever since he came out of the University of Arkansas/Little Rock as a late first round draft pick back in 1996.

Fisher has delivered so many big moments in so many games that … Oh, why go on? We could spend all day adding them up here.

Let’s just turn it over to Phil Jackson. Here’s what he had to say after Fisher hit the big shots to deliver the Lakers their 2009 championship:

“Well, it’s character,” Big Chief Triangle replied when asked about Fisher. “We’ve always said the character has got to be in players if they’re going to be great players.  You can’t just draft it.  It’s not just about talent, it’s about character, and he’s a person of high character, brings that to play, not only in just his gamesmanship but also his intestinal fortitude.”

But who cares about that stuff in these smart-ass days of pro hoops?

Yeah, it’s true. Fisher’s market value is no where near $5 mil a year. That’s a joke.

So, yes, for all the stat geeks out there with their calculators and formulas, Fisher is obviously past his prime and not worth the money. They say, “Don’t pay that guy, Dr. Jerry. He’s not worth it.”

Some of these jerks send me messages too. Fish doesn’t fit the XYZ, they say, and if Phil Jackson really knew anything about basketball he’d bench the guy.

Never mind that Fisher just delivered the most amazing performance of his career to secure the 2010 NBA title for Los Angles.

To the stat geek naysayers, Fisher is the joke who’s time has passed.

The Lakers seem to subscribe to that XYZ geek talk because they’re reluctant to bring him back unless he cuts his $5 mil salary in half.

Besides, the Lakers need to save money this year. Things have just gotten too tight financially.

Yes, Mitch and Jerry, you can certainly buy that line of thinking. You can start to believe that Fisher is a luxury for this very talented team.

But that’s sadly narrow thinking. Fisher is an essential. Remember when you brought him back to the Lakers in the 2007 off-season? People said he then he was washed up, a joke.

All he did was play a giant role in three straight trips to the NBA championship series and two titles.

Derek Fisher is a proud, determined man. That pride and determination are the bedrock of his heart. Pay him for that.

Screw these ignorant people who want you to get rid of him. Screw ‘em. They’re just a bunch of booger eaters in my book.

Really it’s very simple, Mitch and Jerry. You must make the smart play. You must reward that pride and determination. Do it, and you will look very smart.

Just Pay Derek Fisher. Please.

Do yourselves, do all of us, that favor. Don’t buy that conventional thinking about market value. The market doesn’t know shit.

Pay Derek Fisher. Please. He’s earned every penny. And he’ll keep earning.

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

Don’t hold your breath.

Although Buss could have lauded Jackson any time over the past two years as the Lakers won back-to-back NBA titles, the owner’s silence on the matter has been deafening.

I’ve been pointing this out for months, by the way. And Mark Heisler of the L.A. Times, who just this week has offered a ringing endorsement of Byron Scott as a Jackson replacement, has repeatedly taken me to task for it.

But the truth that insiders have been telling me for months is clear.

If Jackson’s going to return as coach, he’s going to have to do it to despite the stony silence of the owner. And he’ll likely have to take a pay cut despite his success.

If Buss doesn’t want to pay Jackson the unheard of price of $12 million per season to coach the team, then he should never have agreed to such a deal when he gave Jackson a pay raise two years ago. You wanted and needed a championship so badly back then that you agreed to boost his money, Dr. Buss?

And now you don’t need a title very badly? That’s what you’re saying with this silence.

To complain about money now that Jackson has delivered two championship teams is unheard of. Win titles and take a pay cut? That’s a low blow, Dr. Jerry. And it’s not just me saying that. It’s your remarkable team captain, Derek Fisher, who discussed the issue in an interview with Ramona Shelbourne.

“As much as it is about his quality of life and how he’s feeling, his energy levels,” Fisher said, “I think his decision could be easier if he wasn’t maybe feeling as though he’s not being fully appreciated, which is how it ultimately makes you feel.

“It’s sad to me,” Fisher told Shelbourne recently, “when you think about what he’s accomplished in his career, that he still always has to deal with these type of scenarios where there’s a question of whether or not he’s the best person for the job, or he’s not really coaching because of the players that he’s had. He’s just a remarkable human being in terms of his approach to managing and coaching the team.

“I think not even just the Lakers, but the NBA as a whole, would lose a big part of what this game has been about the last 20 years if he’s not back. If he’s not back, it changes the whole landscape.”

Fisher, of course, is a free agent guard and will turn 36 in August. Has there ever been a braver, more forthright NBA player? The guy not only laid his heart on the line for the franchise’s 17th title (yes, Lakers won one in 1948 in the old National League), but Fisher is speaking up right now, even though it could cost him dearly.

Teammates Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol have also spoken up, although their contracts are secure and in place. They’ve made it clear where they stand.

Some Lakers fans may let you off the hook for this one, Jerry. It’s obvious you’re gambling that your season ticket holders won’t protest if you let Jackson and Fisher slip away.

I’m not asking you to pay Jackson. I’m just calling for you to speak up and declare publicly how important he has been to the franchise.

I know that you don’t like that Phil’s an odd, distant kind of guy.

I know you don’t like the triangle offense he runs.

I know you don’t like paying him so much money.

I know you’re eager to prove that you can win one without Phil.

I know you’re not elated that he shacks up with your daughter and sometimes offers his disrespect in all those subtle little ways.

I know you like showing that it’s you, not Jackson, who is in control of the franchise.

I know you think your reputation and image are secure with all those championships you have in your pocket.

I know you’re a proud, stubborn man, but does this have to come down to ego and pride?

Yes, it’s a poker game. Lakers assistant Brian Shaw, one of two top candidates to replace Phil, is “close to accepting” the Cleveland Cavaliers job, according to his agent. What’s the last time an agent made such an announcement? And Byron Scott declared that he’s not waiting around on anyone, another obvious bluff. Are Phil, Scott and Shaw all trying to out-bluff Jerry Buss?

Does it all come down to yet more tiresome games?

Is that what you want as your legacy?

You have a chance to eclipse the Boston Celtics as the team with the most NBA titles, and you’re going to let ego and pride get in the way?

Say it ain’t so. Speak up and ask Phil to return. Show us you’re bigger than these silly games.

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

It’s been 10 years since Bryant and Phil Jackson embarked on a remarkable run that would net seven trips to the NBA Finals and five league championships.

In the wake of the Lakers’ 17^th title in 2010 (the franchise won one in 1948 in the National Basketball League, which was far superior to the early NBA), I’m publishing excerpts of a private conversation I had with Kobe Bryant right after the 2000 title, his first with the Lakers. Portions of this interview were later used in the paperback edition of my book about a young Bryant’s hard adjustment to pro hoops, “Mad Game, The NBA Education of Kobe Bryant.”

In that key Game 4 in 2000, Phil Jackson and Tex Winter ordered the Lakers to spread the floor wide to confuse the Indiana Pacers defense. This , and the Lakers’ surprise use of the screen and roll, freed up Bryant to score down the stretch of the key games in the series.

When they coached the Bulls, Winter and Jackson would always wait for key moments in the playoffs to use their spread floor or “open court” look. The Bulls soundly beat the Miami Heat in the 1997 playoffs by spreading the floor and later did the same thing to the Utah Jazz in the championship series that year. Spreading the floor is one of the subtleties in Tex Winter’s triangle offense, just one of the reasons that  Bryant fell in love with it.

Q: Phil Jackson often had long, deep conversations with Shaquille O’Neal. But Phil never had such conversations with you. You kept expecting to talk with him the whole season, but you never got that opportunity to sit down and talk about life with him?

Bryant: No, not to that extent. But I’m sure we’ll have one before next season starts.

Q: Tex Winter’s offensive system has some surprises that worked well for you in the playoffs.

Bryant: The system worked out well for us. In the fourth quarter, the triangle offense sometimes kind of goes out the window a little bit. The system in itself allows us to spread the floor toward the end of the game and penetrate. That works because with the triangle offense everybody is a threat throughout the ball game. So the defense is scared to leave off of guys to try to stop me. They’re scared to leave off of Robert (Horry) and they’re scared to leave Rick (Fox) alone to try to stop me, because they know those guys will make shots.”

Q: In Game 4 against Indiana at the end, that spread floor worked well?

Bryant: “In Game 4 it worked really well. We were able to spread the floor, and I hit a couple of jump shots for us and took us to the brink. Now we are champions.

During the season, I wanted to use the spread floor. I told him, ‘Phil, man, why don’t you open the court?’ He said, ‘We’re not ready for that. We’ll get to that.’ I say open it up. That’s when I can go to work. But I’m glad that we waited till the playoffs to use it.

Q: On the night you won the championship, in Game 6, you also went to a different look at the end of the game. That time you went to screen and roll action, which is something the Lakers hadn’t done all year until the playoffs. It surprised the Pacers?

Bryant: “Yeah, we went back to the same thing that worked for us in Game 4, spreading the floor and penetrating, and then attacking them. I was able to get to the free throw line and knock down some free throws.”

Q: Have you ever had a more emotional day than the day you guys won the championship?

Bryant: The whole day was just emotionally draining. You know what though? It was fun. Emotionally draining, but a lot of fun. Just going through it. Stepping up to the challenge and responding to it mentally. It was a lot of fun.”

Q: What was the main thing you learned? I know it was a long season with a lot of lessons, but what was the most important?

Bryant: The biggest thing, from a basketball standpoint, was learning when to attack.

Q: From a personal standpoint, was your main lesson about sacrifice?

Bryant: Not really. Other people had to sacrifice on this team. I think my teammates did a good job of sacrificing, allowing me to be myself and allowing me to grow. I really didn’t have to make that many individual sacrifices on this team. I just continued to play my game, and my teammates understood that and they played around me.”

Q: How important has Ron Harper been to you in learning to be a better defender?

Bryant: I learn more from Harp about position defense, because he doesn’t really have the ability to move like he used to. He plays position defense very well. Ron helps me out a lot, though.

Q: During games if you started doing too much, Harper would get in your ear and tell you to slow down. How important was that?

Bryant: It was important because we’re communicating. He’s been there before. He knows what to do in certain situations. A lot of times we just talk strategy. He’s like a player/coach. He’s been there with Phil before. He knows what Phil likes to do. He knows what to run when the shot clock is going down,, whether it’s a three pass or a four pass or whatever. Harp has been instrumental in my growth. He’s helped me this year as a basketball player figuring out my teammates, understanding them better.

Q: Harper has been greater for you than any other player you’ve ever played with?

Bryant: Absolutely. Harper has definitely been more of a mentor for me than other players I’ve played with in the past. No question about it.

Q: How was your relationship with Shaq this year?

Bryant: We’ve always had a mutual understanding. Shaq is more vocal than I am, and he knows that. Me, I lead by example. We just do it our separate ways. That’s all we did all season long. It just depended on what we needed in certain situations. So even though we go our separate ways, it all linked up in the end.

Q: Did you guys have a better chemistry this year than in the past?

Bryant: Oh, hell yes. Now we understand one another. We grew up together. We came here together, grew up in the spotlight together, took our knocks together.

Q: What was the problem with other Laker coaches in the past? Did they seem to doubt themselves?

Bryant: I don’t think they were as sharp and had as much confidence as Phil has with his coaching staff. Phil and Tex Winter have been real demanding of me, because they wanted me to figure out about this game. It’s important for somebody to give you the direction. And the coaching staff we have now makes it a lot easier. You can go to them for advice, for game film, anything for improvement. It’s good to have that information from them. You don’t have to seek it out.

Q: Why did the triangle work for you guys?

Bryant: The concept is a team game. Hit the first man that’s open. That makes it harder for teams to guard you, because they can’t key on one man. There’s constant movement of the ball. When you have players with the athletic ability of myself and Shaq, it makes it easier for the other guys on  our team. It’s cool, man. It makes it very difficult for defenses because they cannot relax. As soon as they relax, boom, we’re gone. We’re moving with a purpose.

Q: When you decide to drop out of your offense, to move without using the triangle, do you have to explain that to the coaches later?

Bryant: (laughs) With Tex Winter, yeah. Tex is so pure with the game. ‘Move the ball! Swing the ball!’ We’re like, ‘Tex, man, chill.’ It’s hilarious. But Phil’s assistant coaches are as sharp as Phil is. They don’t play around. They know what needs to be done and they do it. They sit there watching the game like hound dogs, making sure you do everything fundamentally correct. Especially Tex. Look at Tex. He’s always the only one with a worried look on his face. He’s got that look 24 hours a day. He’s a perfectionist.

Q: You had said that you hoped to be coached by Tex before that ever happened. It was strange that you sensed Tex Winter would coach you long before it ever happened. That was almost a mystical thing with you.

Bryant: It’s kind of weird. I had always had this feeling that I was going to play in this system, with the triangle. I had a feeling I would. I told Eddie Jones that when we played together here. I told him, it would be nice to get this triangle here.

Q: When you first met Phil in his hotel room after he was hired as coach of the Lakers, what was it like?

Bryant: I was like, ‘Let’s go.’ I don’t want to talk. Let’s do something!’

Q: What did you think of adding Brian Shaw to the team last year? What did you think when he arrived? Did you know him?

Bryant: I knew he owed me a pizza. I shot his lights out when I was like 12. He played for an Italian team in Rome back then (1989-90), and my father played for another Italian team. We got to shoot, and I shot his lights out. That was the first thing I said when I saw him with the Lakers. Because I didn’t know he was coming to our team. Then I saw him at the gym, and I was like, ‘Yo, Brian, where’s my pizza, man?’ He started laughing.”

Q: Kobe, who plays you the toughest, makes you play your best game?

Bryant: Eric Snow in Philly, he makes me play tough. He pressures me a little bit, has quick hands. The Sixers in general play me solid defensively. He won’t this next year, though.

Q: When you came back from injury last fall, a lot of people figured Phil was going to jump in and try to tell you what to do. But he didn’t do that?

Bryant: He let me do my own thing. It was important because he understood that’s how I am. I  like to do my own thing. He knows and has the trust in me that I’m gonna be prepared.

Q: Some players on the team said he was allowing you to change yourself?

Bryant: I didn’t even think about it. I just went with it.

Q; Phil brought in George Mumford, the sports psychologist, the Zen teacher and tai chi expert, to work with you guys. How was that?

Bryant: It was good because it gave people a chance to talk about things that might be on their mind, the hype, the pressure. I think it’s good for them to talk about those things. It increased our performance a lot. It really has. I’m surprised other teams don’t do that kKind of stuff. Working with George helps us to get issues out of the way before they even start.

Q: The pressure of performance, of the playoffs, can be destructive to players and to teams?

Bryant: Yeah, once it creeps into your team and your teammates, it can be destructive. Some people know how to handle it, some people don’t. The pressure can get to you. You got to know how to suck it up.

Q: Most NBA players don’t want to even acknowledge pressure. It’s a macho thing.

Bryant: The pressure is there, the pressure is there. But it’s how you deal with it. When you feel it, it’s how you deal with it.

Q: NBA players have tremendous pressure on them during the playoffs. If they play well, their futures will be successful. If they don’t, their stars will fall.

Bryant: You just give it your best. You prepare yourself as well as you can. You go out there and execute as well as you can. Then you sleep at night. That’s all. Then you get up the next day and do the same thing. Keep it simple.

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

Take Game 2 of L.A.’s title bout with the Boston Celtics, for example. After the Lakers took it in the shorts, she started telling friends that she was worried her father, team owner Jerry Buss, already had a deal with assistant coach Brian Shaw to coach the Lakers next season.

“She was worried there was already a deal in place,” explains my impeccable source deep, deep, deep within the Lakers’ inner sanctum, wherever that cave is.

“Everybody is circling like vultures,” said the source, referring to hopefuls Shaw and former NBA coach Byron Scott.

It’s been that way all season, of course. What can you expect if your boyfriend — Lakers coach Phil Jackson — and your father — Southern California’s playboy owner Buss — are the ultimate control freaks?

The two of them have been engaging all year in a tit for tat about whether Jackson will return to coach the team next year.

Buss could have cleared up the situation at any time, but the owner really didn’t want to, as my source explained. “He wants us to remember who’s in control.”

Jackson’s former aides say the same thing about him: The guy is a bitch of a control freak, eager to jump your ass just to show he’s in charge. And while those tendencies were already large for Jackson during his days coaching in Chicago, his ego has ballooned to Thanksgiving Day Macy’s proportions with all the worship and money (better than $12 mil a year) he gets in California.

So all the poor Lakers fans and media have been caught up in a tug of war between these two giant narcissists.

The sign that it might be coming to an end came just this week. No, not at the Lakers evening their series with the Celtics at three games apiece, but in the fact that the Lakers have decided to again raise ticket prices.

A serious Depression has settled up the entertainment industry in L.A., so there’s no way Buss would raise prices with only Brian Shaw as his hole card. “I don’t know how Jerry Buss could raise ticket prices and get everybody (season ticket holders) back next year if he doesn’t have Phil as a coach,” offered the big source, who studies the Lakers’ parlor games and internal divisions up close.

Jackson will try to get the last little twist in their control game by taking as much as a month to announce he’s coming back for another shot. He’ll have a hard time, though, because Buss is determined to get him to take a pay cut, right after supposedly paying him yet an additional $2 million bonus if Jackson wins the title.

That remains a decent-sized IF heading into tonight’s Game 7.

Jackson hasn’t had much fun goosing Buss lately because the Zen Master has had his hands full coaching against these Celtics in the playoffs. “Phil has been resolutely focused on getting through this series,” says the deep insider.

The inner circle can’t think of a more out-of-whack series since 2000 when Rasheed Wallace led Portland in coughing up a huge lead against L.A. in Game 7 of the Western Finals. There’s substantial delight in Jackson’s group in contemplating the fact that Rasheed’s tank job in that game was the thing that jump-started his Lakers dynasty.

They all say, thank you, Sheed. And they won’t mind at all if you go ahead and play a role in assuring a Lakers’ win this Game 7 too.

As for Brian Shaw, everyone in and around the inner sanctum is used to his incessant self-promotion, so nobody sees this thing as horrific disloyalty to Phil, the insider explained. “Brian Shaw has been out for Brian Shaw ever since he joined the staff… He’s always looking to improve his position.”

Excuse me, but that describes just about all assistant coaches in the entire realm. The NBA pays its head coaches millions while its assistants get plumber’s wages. So who can blame BS?

Even without Jeanie’s Shaw assumption, there’s abundant drama in this Game 7, with both Jackson and Boston coach Doc Rivers potentially coaching their last games for their respective teams.

The even money says that Jackson returns in L.A., that Jerry Buss, long a skeptic about Jackson’s approach, has been made a believer this season, watching him make things work.

Perhaps, perhaps. But let’s not forget how crazy things have gotten this season every time the Lakers lose. And, hey, these are the Celtics. They lead the world in making the Lakers loony.

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

On the good side for the Lakers, they’re older and wiser. They now have Ron Artest to help them defend Boston’s Paul Pierce, who is a major load.

And James Posey, Leon Powe and Eddie House no longer anchor Boston’s bench. They’ve been replaced by Tony Allen, Rasheed Wallace and little Nate Robinson.

More important for Boston is the growth of Rajon Rondo as a point guard. He’s fantastic and should cause Los Angeles plenty of trouble. Then again, the Lakers have played against an array of talented point guards in the Western playoffs and should have some confidence that they can at least stay in the gym with Rondo as Kobe Bryant will slip over and help teammate Derek Fisher deal with that headache.

But the things that worried Tex Winter then still play on my mind. Boston’s half-court defense is excellent, and their frontcourt still has the muscle to intimidate the Lakers.

Back in 2008, Tex told me that the Lakers couldn’t play well against the Celtics in the half court, that they needed to run, to get into the open court to have a chance to score more before Boston’s defense set up and smothered them. Some folks might think that’s funny, coming from Winter, the architect of the triangle offense.

Winter’s favorite method of attack is largely his controlled, half-court offense that stresses floor balance, spacing and team play. But he had always allowed for a break in his system, and he liked to use it when circumstances called for it.

Against the Celtics, circumstances scream for it.

He told me in 2008 that he thought Lakers coach Phil Jackson waited too long to try to get the break going. The Celtics got control of the series and the Lakers never recovered.

Of course, there was this other little problem. To run, you’ve got to be able to rebound, to get the ball and get it out and go.

The Lakers couldn’t win the battle against Boston’s frontcourt. The Celtics kept them bottled up for the series and wound up humiliating them.

Lakers forward Pau Gasol has stated many times this season the importance of rebounding. He knows what it means now. If the Lakers can win the rebound game with the Celtics, they should win the series in six or seven games. If they can’t win it, they’re going to have to come down the floor each time and play against that impressive Boston defense.

The Lakers do not want to do that.

Thus, the battle for the boards will be fierce and could well determine the champion this year. It’s obvious that Phil Jackson wants to do everything he can with his commentary to get Kevin Garnett and Kendrick Perkins to back off their physical play.

If the Celtics can control the boards and the tempo, they have a chance to win even though the matchups elsewhere are a mixed bag. Of course, rebounding is a team issue. The guards will have to do their part on both sides. Bryant and Rondo, in particular, have gotten to the ball a lot in these playoffs. They will join in the battle for the boards.

So it’s down to Pat Riley’s adage from the days of Showtime: No rebounds, no rings. Lamar Odom must be aggressive for the Lakers. And Jackson has to hope that Andrew Bynum can play through his injured knee to have an impact.

Bryant obviously is another huge factor. He is playing the best basketball of his life, less athletic, wiser. In a way, his knee injury and other ailments have been a blessing for the Lakers. Those things mean he usually hasn’t tried to do too much. If he gets impatient and tries to win it all and attack the Celtic defense off the dribble, he’ll play right into Boston’s hands this time around.

Obviously, Game 1 and 2 are huge. The Lakers were humiliated by Boston in 2008, and if they fail to hold home court in the first two games, their doubts will grow through the series. On the other hand, that humiliation could steel the Lakers’ resolve.

Either way, hopes are high for a classic series, one that folks will remember for years to come.

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

Can Rondo prolong the careers of the Big Three? Garnett just turned 34, Pierce 33 in Oct, + Allen 35 in July. Prolly not much past this year.

Note: Question should include Doc Rivers? Can the rewards of coaching Rondo keep him in the job?

Dwight Howard has gotten better in the post, but the truth? He’s still a year or two away, and that’s if he works insanely hard.

But his post play has been one of the glaring weaknesses for the Magic. Hell, post play has been a glaring weakness for the league. Teams that have it fare well. Teams that don’t ultimately get embarrassed. Want to win, LeBron? Get yo ass in the posts. Don’t believe me? Ask MJ.

Watching Celts/ORL is like watching 1 of those horror flicks where the monsters pull out the victims’ hearts and eat ‘em raw. It’s bloody.

This offseason is the grandest game of pickup basketball in the history of hoops. Who knows how to pick a side? Gonna take mucho smarts.

Now’s the time for young free agents. It’s pickup. Get your team together and u can play Bill Russell for a decade. Hesitate + lose. Pickup.

I don’t think Jerry Buss will sit with a pat hand after the season, but you have to wonder because he isn’t rushing to sign up Phil Jackson. That’s letting personal get in the way of business.

Celts’ message to LeBron + others: Don’t waste time; band together; build a force. It’s pickup. Get your team together. Can’t do it alone.

Truth: If Michael Jordan had been a free agent with the power to pick his own team, he’d have Joe Wolf + other UNC blood. Gotta be careful in pickup.

Truth: MJ is lucky he had Jerry Krause helping him play pickup, even though Krause was far from perfect and pretty whack a lot of times.

Some years the playoffs go on and on like a bad joke. This feels like one of those years, but we’re all hoping for a great punch line June 1

Jerry Sloan says it’s a simple game if you lay your heart on the line every night. What happens when a team like Boston takes your heart?

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

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.

I reported more than two months ago that there was some conflict within the Los Angeles Lakers, that Phil Jackson (Jeanie’s boyfriend) might not come back to coach the team next year because her father (Lakers owner Jerry Buss) might not want him back.

Jackson himself confirmed as much during the season by offering obtuse comments to reporters about the Lakers asking him to take a cut from his $12 million annual salary, the highest in the league or any other league for that matter.

I had reported that Jeanie Buss had privately expressed concern about the idea that her father and her brother Jim Buss, who runs the basketball side of the family business, might fire Jackson as they had in 2004. “I just know they’re gonna do it,” Jeanie told friends back in February.

When I reported the inside conflict, she went public in refuting me, saying that there were no problems, that things were fine.

So now, as the Lakers prepare for Game 6 of their first round series with Oklahoma City, why would she bring up the topic and tell the L.A. media that Jackson will probably coach somewhere next season? Why raise that distraction for the team?

The simple answer is that she’s nervous, explained one of the insiders in this murky world of Buss palace games. “She respects and fears her father,” said one particularly good source inside the Buss menagerie. “She’s a fragile person in that way.”

Jackson saw the issue with his pay/tenure coming early in the season. That’s why he spoke up about it in front of the New York media at the time.

He indicated then that the Busses wanted him to take a pay cut, and months later he confirmed that notion by musing about it again for reporters.

Earlier in the season, he had defiantly indicated he would take no pay cut. Why would you, he asked reporters rhetorically.

Then, later in the season, he seemed to give in a bit, by acknowledging in another press session that Jerry Buss was laying out a lot of money for the team, that the owner’s situation was tight.

Jackson, meanwhile, isn’t giving the issue a thought at the moment.

He’s locked in, as he always is this time of year, on one thing — the business of coaching in the playoffs. He brooks few distractions in the midst of the kind of challenge the young Thunder team has thrown his way.

Yet, if you think about it — and nobody thinks things through like Jerry Buss — Buss has presented Jackson with the ultimate challenge. The owner has implied a pay cut is in the offing (rumored to be a drop to $8-9 million, which in itself is a strange way of rewarding a coach for taking your team to the championship).

But Buss has set it up so that Jackson is literally coaching for his check. If the Lakers win, it seems highly unlikely that Buss would cut his pay, let alone dismiss Jackson.

In other words, Buss has the coach hustling for a $4 million bonus that won’t cost Buss a cent. Best of all, the $4 mil is coming from money that Jackson is already earning.

Pretty good stuff, Jer.

Meanwhile, the essence of Jeanie’s statement has been true since I first reported it in February. Jackson feels good physically and wants to coach next year. So if he doesn’t coach the Lakers, Jackson’s inclined to coach somewhere else, which sets up all sorts of intrigue around the league.

One of the big incentives is that the following year, 2011-12, figures to be a lock-out year of labor troubles in the NBA, and Buss knows that Jackson wants to win another title before the league shuts down in a dispute over money.

Of course, that door swings both ways. It means that Buss isn’t real eager to start over with a new coaching change only to have to shut the operation down with labor troubles. No, it’s in Buss’s interest to keep Jackson. The owner knows it. Jackson knows it. They are the two brightest bulbs in the entire NBA, facing off against each other in a bluff-fest.

Question is, is Buss just playing a little poker for the chips Jackson has sitting on the table? Or is Buss really ready to be free of Big Chief Triangle, as they used to derisively call Jackson, and his control offense?

We won’t really know until the season plays out. So sweet Jeanie should be in a real tizzy by the time that happens.

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