The Unasked Phil Jackson Question

We here at True Greatness have long assumed that Phil Jackson is a master spinner of basketball reporters, fans, players, managers, refs, and even other coaches (although his ability to "spin" everyone is painfully obvious to anyone who has ever watched any politician and his actual PR skills are around the Christine O'Donnell, Sharon Angle level of sophistication). He says Durant gets a lot of foul calls he doesn't deserve right before the Lakers play the Thunder (he's fined but the refs call less fouls than they might of). He says Steve Nash carries the basketball before the Lakers play the Suns (this didn't necessarily change anything, but it could have gotten into Nash's head or the heads of the refs; whatever the effect, the Lakers won the series). These tactics don't always work, but they frequently do. And everyone else in the basketball world, commentators and the members of other teams alike, seems to agree with us, or go even further, viewing him as a sorcerer; someone who can magically and mysteriously bend reality in the Lakers' favor. While the rest of us may notice his magical abilities, we are powerless to stop them. Everything he does seems to feed into the elusive notion of genius. If it seems a little weird that he makes players perform zen meditations before games, or gives his dudes a book to read that will spark their basketball understanding, well... Einstein wore the same suit every day. So are the bizarre trappings of Genius and you can't argue with the man's results.

There is, however, another interpretation of Phil Jackson's success. It's roughly analogous to the way that many governors in the late nineties were considered by the establishment to be total bureaucratic wiz-kids and brilliant administrators. What made these governors so brilliant? They were able, through what many conjectured to be their brilliant understanding of government and budgeting, to cut taxes and raise spending. Of course, in retrospect it's obvious that what allowed these governors to do these things was the rising economic tide of the nineties which increased capital so much (and by extension government revenue) that some of it could be given back and there would still be more to spend than there had been a few years before. These governors, however, were not only lauded, they actually began to believe the hype. Thinking themselves some of the best and brightest ever to serve in public office.

One could argue that the same thing has happened with Jackson. A man who has been given unprecedented wealth (instead of the internet boom, his involves the luck in having MJ, Kobe, Shaq, Gasol, and Pippen, not to mention several other ridiculously amazing players, on his team) and has begun to think, as all inheritors of fortunes inevitably must, that he is uniquely deserving of all those assets. Under this interpretation, Jackson is less a genius with a fealty to Zen, then a man who is smugly using whatever random facts apply to him to justify his unbelievable good luck. A man who ex post facto explains his record number of titles to himself thusly:

P1: I'm a great coach, but what sets me apart from other coaches?
P2: Obviously, Zen. None of those idiots are into that.
C: Therefore all my players should learn Zen meditation, which is by definition a great coaching technique.

Under this interpretation Jackson is emphatically not a genius and, moreover, has become, due to his good fortune, a buffoon. An idiot whose vision has been so distorted by his blessings that he can not help but see his own brilliance wherever he looks.

I'm not sure which of these two narratives to adhere to. I would guess the truth lies somewhere in the middle. When I read things like this, however, I get the feeling that the buffoon argument gained another data point.

"If we weren't always looking to benefit our team, we wouldn't be doing our business," Jackson said after shootaround Tuesday afternoon in preparation for a game against the Rockets. "So, it was a good calling card that Mitch threw out there."

When asked to clarify what he meant by the phrase "calling card," Jackson said, "The door's open for business."

Open for business? That sounds like the kind of smug, unintelligent statement Sarah Palin would make (see what I'm saying about comparable political figures?). It sounds like Jackson not only didn't understand the reporter, but dismissed him as if he were a total idiot. Those things, dismissal of your interlocutor's intelligence while simultaneously displaying how weak your own is, sure seem like the markings of a buffoon to me.

Before I go, I'd like to add another thing I've long considered strange. On the book reading list I linked to above, he told Gasol to read 2666, a challenging book about European intellectualism, the simultaneous interconnectiveness and distance between people, unsolved murders in Mexico, journalism, insanity, and an almost un-listable number of other things. It's a big, dense book filled with good literary themes and I wouldn't disparage the smarts of anyone who fully grappled with it. But one has to wonder, what does it have to do with Gasol? How exactly will reading this help Gasol's basketball game? Are global interconnectedness and questions of modern literary authorship and critique areas that interest Gasol? Would hearing Bolano's take on these topics help Gasol offensively toughen up against Garnett? Or did he just give it to him because both Bolano and Gasol lived in Spain and 2666 was celebrated that year by the literary world? Did the Zen master even read it himself? Just asking.