Phil Jackson had a lot of traits that made him one of the greatest coaches in NBA history. He was a great tactician and was brilliant when it came to man management, which was especially crucial considering the kind of players he was coaching.
One needs to understand the kind of buttons to push when dealing with the likes of Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Shaquille O’Neal and Jackson excelled at that. It helped win a record 11 NBA championships, but Jackson wasn’t just about doing things the conventional way.
Kobe Bryant Spoke On The Time Phil Jackson Had A Tai Chi Master Come To Practice
Jackson had his own innovative methods of helping his team get better, but that didn’t mean his players always bought into it immediately. In fact, they were a bit bewildered by it and Kobe Bryant was asked what was the weirdest thing Jackson had them do in practice during an interview in 2019.
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“He had a Tai Chi master come to practice. We walk out there, and the Tai Chi master standing center court and tells us to take our shoes off, (we) take our shoes off, and I’m pissed because I’m ready to play basketball, he’s standing up there and says everybody closes their eyes and stuff. And he does stuff like monk gazing at moon and talks about the fingertips and barely touching and the spirituality of all that, and I’m peaking around like is everybody doing this s**t? What the hell is going on? And then big ass Phil, Phil’s there doing it himself. He’s doing all this stuff and I’m like damn, okay imma try it. But honestly I bought into it, I bought into the meditation, I bought into the deeper connection that exists within the game.”
It would have been quite an experience for the players that day and while Bryant found it to be absurd earlier, he realized later that it was actually helpful. He incorporated all that into his own training and it was quite beneficial for him.
During this interview, Bryant also revealed that he trolled Jackson when he was getting criticized for the terrible job he was doing as president of the New York Knicks. He jokingly told Jackson that it was karma for the 3 books that Phil wrote on Bryant, where he didn’t paint him in a positive light, to say the least.
