Breaking: Phil Jackson is still candid as ever.
So candid, it sometimes makes Kobe Bryant angry.
Charley Rosen’s fifth installment of “The Phil Files” dropped on Monday over at ESPN.com, and much like the first four editions, it featured an honest Zen Master riffing on everything from current New York Knicks to past New York Knicks to Jerry Krause to Kobe intermittently hating him.
Here’s how the Kobe stuff came to head:
[Rosen:] In an interview in GQ, Kobe didn’t have anything nice to say about you. In fact, he said that he disliked you. Your reaction?
Jackson: “Ah, my good friend Kobe Bryant. … Yes, quite often I could feel his hatred. I’m sure Kobe was pissed when I wrote in “The Last Season” that he was uncoachable. And, yes, we were often at loggerheads. He wanted more freedom and I wanted him to be more disciplined. This is a normal source of friction thing between coaches and players on just about every level of competition. But when I came back for my second stint with the Lakers, Kobe and I worked it all out. I gave him more of a license to do his thing, as long as it stayed within the overall context of the triangle. And we did win two more championships. Anyway, I’ve always seen Kobe as a truly great player, an intelligent guy and a remarkable person.”
This should probably seem weird, but instead it feels par for the course. Kobe has never gotten along with anyone 100 percent of the time. He barely gets along with anyone period. To know that he clashed with Jackson, or that he was unhappy that Jackson showered him with anything other than flattery, isn’t really a surprise.
Nor is this tale especially damning or, truthfully, informative. Jackson puts a nice spin on it with the “quite often I could feel his hatred” line, but these words mean less knowing that he and Kobe are totally cool.
In addition to Jackson closing out with an obligatory “I’ve always seen Kobe as a truly great player, an intelligent guy and a remarkable person,” the Zen Master has long been Kobe’s first choice to help reinvent the Los Angeles Lakers. He outwardly supported Jackson when the Lakers hired Mike D’Antoni over him, and he was overtly pissed when the Knicks scooped him up as team president; he didn’t understand why the Lakers had not done the same.
That much became a apparent during a presser in which he berated the Lakers’ direction midway through 2013-14. All appears to be good now between the team and Kobe, but the fact that Jackson joining another organization rattled the Black Mamba is telling.
It means that his apparent “hatred” for Jackson is trounced by some level of love.
