Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. You ever sit down with someone, start talking, and suddenly hours have passed because the stories are just that good?
Chapter 2: What stories did Phil Jackson and Sam Smith share about NBA legends?
That's what happened during the pandemic when longtime sports writer Sam Smith drove up to see Phil Jackson at his place in Montana. They talked players they'd known, games they'd lived through, the legends, the troublemakers, and the geniuses. Phil Jackson, of course, is the coach with 11 NBA championships, more than anyone in history. He coached Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, Kobe and Shaq.
And before all that, he played 13 seasons in the league, making him one of the few living bridges between what the NBA used to be and what it's become. And as a longtime sports writer, Sam Smith has been watching almost as long, from the smoky balcony of the Madison Square Garden on a 75-cent student pass to four decades on press row.
He wrote The Jordan Rules, an inside account of the Chicago Bulls' first championship season that examined the team's dynamics on and off the court.
Their new book together is called Masters of the Game, which is less of a rankings book than it is a preservation project, an attempt to capture what made certain players unforgettable, the kind of greatness Phil saw up close and Sam chronicled for years. And Phil Jackson and Sam Smith, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you. Looking forward to it.
It's a list of the masters of the game, but it's also a real history lesson on the NBA in general, taking us all the way back to the 40s, to the beginnings. I mean, some really funny stories, like smoking inside of the locker room. There used to be smoke boys who would have cigarettes waiting for the players. Also, the game was a small man's game, which...
today just seems unbelievable because, I mean, it is definitely a big man's game, you know?
These guys were proficient at the game and what they did. And the era that they played in didn't have the same amount of high percentage shooting or even the access to the quality of material. I mean, they played in
gyms that were hockey arenas and were converted and you know basically were still just coming out of the cage area when you know players played in cages and local churches and ethnic groups had their own teams and there were barnstormers that went around like the original Celtics and you know the various people that played that were predecessors of the NBA era.
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Chapter 3: How did Phil Jackson's coaching style influence players like Jordan and Kobe?
Their size was limited, and obviously the court was limiting because of its depth and the actual lane size and the variety of rules that have changed the game, that have made it accessible to the modern player. So that's why it's hard to put a judgment on a modern player versus...
You know, somebody from an era like Oscar Robertson or Jerry West or people from the 60s and late 50s and 60s, Elgin Baylor. that everybody knows talent-wise they could have been playing the game today.
You know, Phil mentioned before the word cagers. When I was growing up in the New York City, seven daily newspapers, two of which I delivered every day basically, but one of the shorthands for basketball was cagers. That's what they called basketball players were cagers. And the reason they called them cagers is
is that the game was so physical and so rough in its early years that they literally played in cages to keep the fans and the players separated because there was so much violence in the game. And so you talk about evolution of the game. These guys were literally playing in cages, and that's why they called them cages in the 50s and the 60s.
When I told people I was talking to you guys, I mean, like immediately, and again, I want to say like this is people of a certain age, like 40s and up. Immediately, people just said right away, the NBA just isn't the same. I mean, they love to complain. More recently, I just hear that more and more often that the NBA just isn't the same. And you guys don't exactly shy away from that in the book.
There are like little snippets where that comes out. Were you all worried at all about coming across, though, as like two old heads just reminiscing about the good old days?
We didn't care. We really didn't care. Right. That's kind of maybe our brusque nature, but... The idea that this game is a competition that's played in narrow parameters and has used television to make it a spectacle has grown the game to great proportions where it's become an international game. And particularly, the three-point shot has brought another sense of this game in
into play where the idea of shooting a layup or shooting a close shot is not valued as much as shooting a 25-foot shot, which has a much lower percentage because obviously there's a point differential. So the idea is take advantage of this, and it has become the overwhelming feature in the NBA game today.
However, all the lax rules that have contributed to this has kind of spiked this concept that this is what's the most important thing. It's not about how to set a pick or how do you dribble a basketball or what's your footwork or what kind of passes can you make. It's about getting the ball to the guy who's standing open in the corner for a three-point shot.
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Chapter 4: What historical context does 'Masters of the Game' provide about the NBA?
And I think that's what still made the game attractive to the people who love it now, is that people pass and people set it up and there's teamwork that's going on in the competition.
Phil, as players became multi-millionaires, did they get harder to coach?
No. I think they... I think it is a natural instinct in players to want to be coached. They want to know if you're going to help them be better at what they do and how they can survive and succeed along with their group or their teammates. I think the younger players... that are striving to reach that maximum contract have been difficult to coach. And that's a small group.
That's a group of maybe five, 10 young players in each draft class that is sitting in a a hope scenario where they're going to be credited to be a max player at the end of a contract. And those, you know, those tries to become a max player involve not being able to sit on the bench, having to be a starter, getting, You know, a lot of things that coincide with what's best for the team.
And I think that youthful 19, 18, 19-year-old drive can be too selfish for a team to overcome. I see that the Golden State Warriors are going through something similar to that right now. with one of their players that's a highly talented kid, but yet can't quite adjust to being a teammate.
You all did kind of give alternate perspectives on certain people, especially... I don't know if this is a correct observation, but I saw it the most when you talked about contemporary players, like... LeBron James, the self-proclaimed king. Phil, you say he's not in your top five of the greatest, although he's a master of the game in the book.
And you draw this real distinction between his game and his mentality. Can you talk about what you meant there when you say that?
Well, I think, you know, over the years we've watched the physical nature of this player who has dominated the game for 20 years and came in as a high school kid and stepped right into, really within three years was, in a situation where he was making a difference in the basketball games. definitely a master of the game.
The thing that were disappointing about LeBron were things that turned him into self-reflection, I would call it, or you could see him fold a little bit in the course of a game or in the course of a series. And the number of series in the finals that he has been losing part of are painful because I know what that's like to have lost in the finals as a player and as a coach.
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Chapter 5: How did the NBA evolve from a small man's game to a big man's game?
The Detroit Bad Boys were at their prime. And maybe there wasn't as much fighting as there had been in the 70s and 60s, but... there was still a lot of physicality that went on that was, you know, targeted players. So this is one of the things that I admired about Michael was his ability to play.
When players were playing four games in five nights at that time, which they don't do anymore, that he could play that fourth game in the fifth night as hard as he played the first game in that series of games in that week.
You made a point to say that you never asked him for anything. And that was important for you to note, that you never asked him for anything like autographs or to join anything. And this was deliberate, almost like a way of building trust.
Yeah, you know, I'd witnessed that with my own group of teammates, you know. That intense feeling is of being surrounded and being, you know, assailed with, you know, requests. But this came when we were not at that time on exclusive floors in hotel rooms and we're still staying in Holiday Inns and Ramadas and so forth.
I came out of my room, which was on the top floor, and there were five people outside of Michael's door. They were all either baggage people, chefs, cleaning room people, people that were literally looking for this autograph from someone that they admired. that were their own generation, their own family type of situation. And Michael took the time to do that.
But when it came to going in airports that were still flying commercially at that time, It was almost like he had to go into a private room to stay out of the public view until the actual gate was opened and the team could go on so that it wasn't overwhelmed by this dramatic appeal for his autograph or to touch him or to be part of it or take a picture.
But you as his coach, I mean, you identify that for you to have that trust, to build that trust with him, to have that coach-player relationship, this component, this thing of asking him for something, even if it was anything, you made a choice to say, I'm not going to be the one to ask him for anything.
How did you know that was really important in building that coach-player relationship, that trust?
I don't know. I think it puts you on a different level when you start asking for things. It puts you on a beneficial or receivership. And when you want to be in an influential space with someone, You want not to have that detrimus, that little garbage, that little layer between you, you know, that just makes a difference.
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Chapter 6: What challenges do modern players face compared to past NBA legends?
gave him much more latitude in the game as we became adapted to using a guy named Lamar Odom, a guard, a 6-9 forward that became a lead guard or an off guard. We had a two-guard front. So, yeah, there was room for him to grow and for me to accommodate.
Yeah. One of the things you discovered, well, unlike Jordan, you discovered that he was a big reader, Harry Potter and fantasy and wizards. How did that change things as far as your relationship when you discovered that?
Well, I'd curried him about the statement that he wanted to be captain of the team. He was 22. And I was like, well, you don't go out with the players. The players tell me you stay in the room all the time. You watch tape of the game last night that you played. You're not interested in the conversations that they're having.
If you want to be a leader, you need to really rub shoulders with your teammates. And he was like, well, they're into hubcaps and their cars and the girls and clubs and rap music. Those aren't the passions that I have right now. Basketball is my focus. So I could see that.
So I started giving him books like the leadership books, the leadership of Winnie the Pooh and the Tao of Leadership and some books that were kind of like just talking about growing into the role that he was going to play.
And one of the things about basketball that's happened is in the days when players matriculated out of college or their college class matriculated into the NBA, players played three, four years in NCAA in college. And as they went through their college years, they grew into a leadership role.
And suddenly the NBA started getting players that were either before they went to college as a result of Kobe Bryant and Kevin Garnett and some other players that came in the game prior to even going to college. And so they never assumed or grew into a role of leadership. And that was one of the things I was concerned about with Kobe. But he became a really good leader and took it to heart.
Is it right that you went to see Kobe at his office in Orange County a week before he died? Yeah. What did you guys talk about?
We talked about the good times. We talked about some of the things about basketball. Talked about his kids that he was coaching, coaching a girls' team in basketball where Gigi was part and really a dominant player in that world of that league. Talked about his traversing from Orange County up into the Valley, into Westlake, and...
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