The legendary sportswriter and the Hall of Fame, 11-Time NBA Champion coach separate the music from the noise in the stories of the greatest who ever played and their impact on the game. Sam Smith and Phil Jackson grew to respect each other in the late 1980’s, when Smith was a popular Four years of conversations later, the result is this wonderful book, There are so many huge characters here, and Smith and Jackson can hold their own with any of them. Their spirit--sharp, wise, irreverent, honest, respectful of the lore and legacy of the game but never pious-- and the clash of their different perspectives combine to make this book a joyous ride, a short course in greatness open to all students....

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Sam Smith and Phil Jackson

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The legendary sportswriter and the Hall of Fame, eleven-time NBA champion coach separate the music from the noise in the stories of the greatest who ever played and their impact on the game

Sam Smith and Phil Jackson grew to know and respect each other in the late 1980s, when Smith was a Chicago Tribune sportswriter and Jackson was an assistant coach for the Chicago Bulls. Forty years later, the two remain close friends. In 2021, Smith helped the NBA arrive at a list of the seventy-five greatest players of all time in celebration of its seventy-fifth anniversary. Phil Jackson was asked to participate too, but he’s not a big fan of ranking greatness. They’ve been enjoying the argument ever since.

In Masters of the Game, Smith and Jackson chop it up about the basketball life, the sport, and the genius and the shadow side of the all-time greats: Jordan, Kobe, Shaq, Magic, Bill Russell, Wilt, Jerry West, Bird, LeBron, KD, Steph Curry, Bill Walton, and more. In a conversation full of high-grade analysis and high-grade gossip, we meet the stars of long-ago eras of basketball and see the mark race left on players and the business of the game—and we get a master class on character and the alchemy of a good team. And of course, inevitably, these two old heads get into the GOAT debate.

There are so many huge characters here, and Smith and Jackson can hold their own with any of them. Their spirit—sharp, wise, irreverent, honest, respectful of the lore and legacy of the game but never pious—and the clash of their different perspectives combine to make this book a joyous ride, a short course in greatness open to all students.

Leseprobe
Preface by Sam Smith

John Havlicek was talking about his brief stint in the NFL. He was blocking from his receiver position on a sweep and laid out a linebacker, enabling Jim Brown to go forty- eight yards to the two. The Boston Celtics legend had also been an all- state quarterback and had been drafted by his home- state Cleveland Browns. On the next play, from the two, John was lined up as the tight end against “Big Daddy” Lipscomb, then the NFL’s only three- pounder. “Big Daddy grabbed people and sorted them out and then grabbed the runner,” Havlicek recalled. “I ended up on the bottom of the pile, my helmet knocked half off.” The Browns passed for a touchdown on the next play in that preseason game, which also pretty much ended John’s football career. He was cut— the Browns decided to keep his buddy Gary Collins instead. Collins would go on to be a three-time all-pro multiple years, but he always said Havlicek had better hands. It all worked out OK, Havlicek told me with a laugh.

Averaging more than forty- five minutes per game in one year stretch during his Hall of Fame career didn’t seem too rough in comparison to Big Daddy Lipscomb. Havlicek once said that you’re only tired when you think you are, and how could anyone really be tired playing basketball? Like Forrest Gump, John Havlicek kept running from his small-town Ohio upbringing into a life of celebrity as part of the greatest team in the game’s history, alongside Russell and Cousy and the Jones guys and against Oscar and Wilt and even Kareem. The rugged, square-​jawed “country boy,” as teammate Bill Russell occasionally called him, was the man who took the baton from the greatest dynasty ever, the first leg of the Celtics’ great sprint through NBA history, raised two more banners, and handed it off to Larry and Kevin and Chief.

Havlicek once came into Red Auerbach’s office when he was making $20,000. He was scoring 20 points off the bench in the great Celtics sixth-​man tradition, and he asked for a raise to $25,000. The coach / general manager said he’d jump out the window first before giving Havlicek a $5,000 raise. “I settled for $21,000,” John said to me during a stretch of conversations not long before he died, talks that were the inspiration for this book.

The NBA’s history needs to be told and remembered and told again. These days it’s often papered over and forgotten, like one of those old houses from the fixer-​upper TV shows.

I was writing a book a few years back about the players, led by Bob Cousy, Tom Heinsohn, and Oscar Robertson, who sued the NBA and finally established the right to free agency and eventually the level financial playing field that has carried the NBA to the colossal global success it now enjoys. I couldn’t get through to Havlicek while preparing the interviews for the book. It seemed strange, many Celtics friends and organization members told me. That wasn’t John. Finally, I arranged to meet him at his place in Florida. That day as I arrived, he said sorry, it couldn’t be that day. We never did connect in person, but we eventually had multiple phone calls to talk about the case and the old times. It was a similar story with the only other player among the thirteen of the suit’s fourteen original plaintiffs still living whom I didn’t meet face‑to‑face, Wes Unseld. We set a time and I drove to his farm in far northwest Maryland, but as I drove up he was heading back to the hospital after having recently spent nine weeks there for heart problems he never mentioned to anyone. We also had several phone conversations; he died not long after Havlicek. I wondered if those were the last interviews either man did.

What I didn’t understand during my courtship of Havlicek was that he was suffering from Parkinson’s, and there were good days and bad ones. On the bad ones he just didn’t want to be seen that way. He was once perhaps the fittest man in the league, the marathon runner turned wing mismatch. It can be difficult to find oneself hitting the wall in life’s marathon, especially for the men who spent their lives being first and fittest.

I was thinking about my conversations with John and Wes and how all the stories were going to be lost to history. I know, it’s just sports, as we’re often told. But it’s also often the passion play of our times, and the rare inspiration that can transcend generations. Like Martin Luther King Jr. said, we are made by our history.

When the NBA continued its tradition of adding, every quarter century, twenty- five more names to its roster of all- time greatest play­ers, this time bringing the tally up to seventy-five for the league’s seventy-fifth birthday— was one of the voters among many— read through the list and realized that, between seeing games live starting as a kid in Madison Square Garden in the late 1950s and reporting on the NBA for the Chicago Tribune and the website of the Chicago Bulls from the early 1980s into the 2020s, I’d seen in person every one of the players on that list except George Mikan. And I did have a few inter­views with Mikan in his final years. Through my reporting and the books I’d written, I’d gotten to kno…