HE was here right from the start, from the moment they opened the doors of the place we still call “The New Garden,” even if it’s days away from celebrating its 35th birthday. So there is a part of Phil Jackson that still feels like he’s coming home whenever he brings a team into Madison Square Garden.
“This is the floor where those great Knicks teams I was on learned how to be great,” Jackson said yesterday, a few hours before his Lakers took on the Knicks at the Garden. “And in a lot of ways, this is the place where I learned the things I would need to know later on.”
He smiled an impish smile.
“I have 11 rings,” he said. “But you never forget the ones you win as a player, so those have special meaning to me. That, and the things I learned here. It’s why, I think if Red [Holzman] were still alive, he might be most proud of the job I’ve done with this team. Being a good coach means being patient once in a while. He knew that better than anyone.”
Eleven rings later, there are still times when Jackson feels like a wide-eyed country kid as he snakes his way through the circular corridors surrounding the basketball floor. He still remembers the names of some old-time custodians and floor sweepers, and of long-time, long-suffering Knicks fans who used to cheer him a long time ago.
“A long time ago,” he said with a grin. “I’ve been booed in here a lot longer than I was ever cheered in here. But that’s good. That’s the best. There’s nothing better than bringing a team in here when the Knicks are going good, too. Nothing.”
The Jackson who leaned against the scorer’s table in an empty Garden seemed much closer to the Jackson New Yorkers have loved to revile than the one that showed up at the Meadowlands nearly two months ago.
Back then, on Dec. 19, the Lakers who arrived for a 98-71 slaughter served up by the Nets were limping and lumbering, spinning out of control. That loss dropped them to 10-17, on the way to an 11-19 start capped by a Christmas Day drubbing, at home, by Sacramento.
“That seems like a long time ago,” Jackson said, smiling that wry half-smile that drives his enemies absolutely crazy.
In many ways, it does. The Lakers came into last night’s game with the Knicks on their greatest roll of the season, 12-4 in their last 16 games, clinging to .500 for the first time all year. Even though they actually entered the night needing to gain more ground on the No. 8 seed in the West than the Knicks did to catch No. 8 in the East, there isn’t a soul alive who thinks the Lakers aren’t making the playoffs now.
Starting with their boss.
“Put it this way,” Jackson said. “I wouldn’t want to play us in the playoffs, especially if you work hard all year to get a No. 2 or 3 seed and then you wind up seeing us in the first round. It’s a lot like when Houston won their second title, coming out of the No. 6 hole and having to win every playoff series on the road.”
The impish smile grew a little here.
“And they pulled that off,” he said. “Didn’t they?”
Jackson peeked around the Garden. He was asked about that first game played almost exactly 35 years ago, which was actually the second game of one of those doubleheaders they used to schedule in the old days. The Knicks beat the San Diego Rockets, 114-102. Dave DeBusschere, playing with the Pistons, scored the building’s first bucket, against the Celtics. Clyde Frazier scored the Knicks’ first basket on a layup.
“Let’s see if my memory is as good as I think it is,” Jackson said. “I want to say the date was Feb. 15, 1968. I do remember that they didn’t even have shower rooms ready for us, just these little shower stalls. It’s funny, but it was almost like the moment they opened the doors here there was, I don’t know, like an instant history.”
Jackson was off one day; it was really Feb. 14, 1968. But he was dead-on in his appraisal of the arena. And for the building’s first seven years, he was as much a part of crafting that new history as anyone – flailing elbows under the boards, setting picks, acting iconoclastic in the locker room, shooting roll after roll of film while he sat out the first championship season, in 1969-70.
“You know,” he said, laughing, “before I took my act out of town.”