NEW YORK—Three months before he ambled away from theLos Angeles Lakers for good, Phil Jackson was already pondering his next endeavor.
It would not be in politics, despite his acute interest in the subject.
It would not be a speaking tour, a surely lucrative but empty pursuit.
It would not be in coaching. Jackson seemed certain of that much, too. His mind was willing, but his body was uncooperative. Several surgeries lay ahead.
One idea, broad and undefined, held the most appeal.
“I think mentoring is something that I’d be very comfortable doing,” Jackson told me over lunch in February 2011.
Mentor who? Coaches, preferably, though coaches can be famously headstrong, Jackson noted.
The seeds of a broader vision were evident, even then. Jackson wanted to share the wisdom he had accumulated over four decades in basketball. What form that might take, he wasn’t yet sure.
Now we know. Jackson, 68, is close to joining the New York Knicks as their top basketball executive, according to an NBA source. The terms are still being negotiated, but a deal “is likely to happen,” the source said. An announcement is expected soon.
This is the ultimate evolution of Jackson’s mentoring impulse: to teach an entire franchise—indeed, the league’s most dysfunctional franchise – how to win. To impart all that he knows about team building, trust, strategy, training, preparation, work habits and, yes, Eastern philosophy. If any team needs a lesson in Zen, it’s the Knicks.
And no building needs a karmic cleansing more badly than Madison Square Garden, the world’s most toxic arena.
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