Phil Jackson: Hippie Guru or Just Another Racist Old White Man?
By Garth Iorgy
Sports has a very long and storied history of racism. From baseball segregation to Donald Sterling to Marge Schott to Colin Kaepernick’s obvious black balling. Its nothing new and far from shocking. These types of stories are so common that its only of note when it becomes so egregious that leagues feel the need to react. There is rarely any accountability for the rich and powerful when racial issues come to light. This past weekend, a very rich and very powerful white man who made his career off the work and talent of black men and at the time of this publication, we are still waiting to see if accountability is around the corner or if he will continue to have a place in his sport’s history.
Phil Jackson is the most successful basketball player/ coach ever. In the early 1970s he won two rings with the New York Knicks as an average bench player. Immediately after retiring he went into coaching in lesser leagues like the Continental Basketball League and Puerto Rico’s National Superior Basketball. He applied for a few NBA positions but was turned down because he was seen as being too closely aligned with what the billionaire owners saw as the “Counter Culture.” Phil was a big fan of the Grateful Dead, said he dabbled in LSD and that Robert Pirsig’s book “Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” as a guiding force in his life. As someone who supposedly was part of this loving culture he was seen as the enemy of the corporate machine and was not offered jobs in the biggest basketball league.
Then in 1987 the greatest job in basketball opened up and Jackson was hired to fill it. He got to coach phenom Michael Jordan. He hired Tex Winter as an assistant, stole his Triangle Offense system and called it his own. Within 4 years, the Chicago Bulls were World Champions, Jordan was an icon and Jackson was being viewed as some sort of Zen Master who just so happened to coach basketball. He wound up winning six rings on the backs of Hall of Fame talent like Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman, all black men. He then moved on to the Los Angeles Lakers and won 5 more rings with two more all-time great players in Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, also black men. His legacy as the NBA’s greatest coach was secure with 11 championships.
The Zen Master was at the top of the mountain. Many people viewed him as someone who did more ego managing than actual coaching because of the insane talent he had on the floor every night. Was he a great coach or was he just the luckiest guy in the world to have 2 dynasties dropped into his lap? His move to the New York Knicks to be their team president, the man in charge of building a team, proved that he might not have been the “guru” millions thought him to be. His only record in New York turned out to be when the team he built lost a team record 13 straight in 2015. Three years into a five year contract, Jackson was fired.
Phil then effectively retired from basketball. Apart from a few media appearances, he remained quiet and just enjoyed the tens of millions of dollars he had earned by “coaching” guys like Jordan and Shaq. His legacy was so secure that only a few dared to even mention his disastrous tenure with the Knicks. That was until he appeared on the April 5 episode of the “Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin” podcast. On this episode, Jackson revealed that he hasn’t watched NBA basketball since the 2020 playoff bubble in Orlando. When asked why Jackson said “it was trying to cater to an audience or trying to bring a certain audience to the game. They didn’t know it was turning other people off. People want to see sports as non-political. Politics stays out of the game. It doesn’t need to be there.”
He continued, “They had things on their back like ‘Justice’ and a funny thing happened like, ‘Justice’ just went to the basket and ‘Equal Opportunity’ knocked him down. Some of my grandkids thought it was pretty funny to play up those names; I couldn’t watch that.”
Phil Jackson, a white man who grew up in a Christian family in Montana who crafted this façade as a spiritual and enlightened being, spend five decades around black men. He earned his entire fortune off the sweat and injuries and heart break of black men. This guru reputation was about as valid as any other entitled white guy who tries acid once, grows dreadlocks and follows Phish around the country in his parent’s $300,000 RV. It was simply an act to further is image and fill his bank account. These comments show exactly how he viewed the young men he oversaw as a figurehead in the NBA. But why are we shocked by these comments when Jackson has shown for decades that he’s about as open minded and enlightened as any other GOP donor?
In 1999, Phil didn’t like what young black men were wearing and said “I don’t mean to say [that] as a snide remark toward a certain population in our society but they have a limitation of their attention span, a lot of it probably due to too much rap music going in their ears and coming out their being.”
Six years later as the NBA was shaking in their boots because they felt guys like Allen Iverson (a black man) were making the league look too black, Jackson said “I think it’s important that the players take their end of it, get out of the prison garb and the thuggery aspect of basketball that has come along with hip-hop music in the last seven or eight years.” This came from a man who posed NUDE for a publication in the 1970s. I am not against posing nude. Do whatever the hell you like but try to remember that when you start throwing stones and calling black men “thugs” for wearing clothing.
Even in 2010 Jackson was supporting racists like Joe Arpaio from Arizona. After the Phoenix Suns players protested his racist policing tactics, Jackson was right there to tell black men how to protest properly. In 1968, it was fine to move into the streets and fight for their rights but in 2010, you shouldn’t delay a basketball game because that was offensive. The Zen Master HAS SPOKEN!
Even when minorities feel like they have allies on the other side of their fight, guys like Phil Jackson prove them wrong. Rich white guys cannot be allies simply because they are rich white guys. They never have to deal with police brutality. They never have to deal with the economic policies made to keep minorities in their place. They can say things like Phil Jackson and still make tens of millions of dollars. Phil Jackson has acted like a right wing racist all along but a few acid trips and a cliché book shelf let corporate media push the story that he gave a shit about the black players who built his fortune. He is not the only one. The sports landscape is filled with Phil Jacksons and we all need to be aware of this. Every time a minority is overlooked for a job in coaching, management, ownership and sports media, another mediocre guy like Phil gets to make a fortune off their loss.
Phil Jackson is no Zen Master.
Phil Jackson is just another racist asshole.