Jackson called to enter elite shack

SPRINGFIELD - It was longtime Spanish coach and 2007 enshrinee Pedro Ferrandiz who offered an eloquent description of where he had started and where he was yesterday, in the Basketball Hall of Fame. "When a coach starts his career, he dreams of something impossible," Ferrandiz said.

What else can one expect from someone from the land of Cervantes?

That one word - impossible - pretty much sums up Phil Jackson's situation as well, despite the lengthy list of achievements that made him a no-brainer for the Class of 2007. Getting inducted into the Hall of Fame was Jackson's own impossible dream when he entered coaching, taking over a minor league team in Albany, N.Y., commuting from a farm in Woodstock (of course!). The team was the Patroons, the venue was an old armory, and the job was all-encompassing in more ways than one.

"When I first saw the armory, I said, 'Is this where we play basketball? Could this possibly be the place?' " Jackson said yesterday, hours before he was inducted into the Hall of Fame, escorted by former Knicks teammate Bill Bradley. "But it was where basketball was in those days. Those are places people went to watch the game, 3,000, 4,000, maybe in an oval or with a running track above. It represented something.

"Where we played, it was not heated," he went on. "We had to keep the basketballs warm in the ticket office. We had to sweep the floors ourselves as a coaching staff, Charley Rosen and myself, and drive the van and do these trips of over 450 miles. We had to do the work to get the roster together, get the players to try and play together on teams that were nine men at home and eight men on the road. It was strange."

It's hard to reconcile that Jackson with the miniconglomerate Jackson of today - the $10 million man with the house in Pacific Palisades, the ranch in Montana, the boss's daughter at his side. But while things have changed for Jackson in a dramatic way over the last 25 years, from his cachet to his wardrobe to his back account, one thing remains inviolate - his views on how the game should be played. When it's all said and done, he's still basically preaching the gospel of Red Holzman, tweaking it along the way with contributions from Tex Winter and others.

The gospel goes something like this: Handle players the same, but also recognize they are individuals. Run a system that keeps everyone involved. Understand what's important and what is not. And, in Jackson's case, hop on the train well after it has left the station but needs a new conductor to reach its final destination.

"I've heard people say that I'm the luckiest man in the NBA," Jackson said, referring to having coached Michael Jordan and Shaquille O'Neal in their hungry-for-a-championship primes. "I'd have to agree with them."

Those two future Hall of Famers gave this current Hall of Famer nine championships, ensuring Jackson's presence here at some time. But Jackson, in return, gave those two (and other future Hall of Famers Kobe Bryant and Scottie Pippen) a system in which they could thrive and prosper. That should count for something. Jackson didn't just roll out the ball and take a seat on the bench.

From brainstorming with Winter, a fellow assistant in Chicago under Doug Collins, Jackson said he came to understand and appreciate the famed triangle offense, which stresses ball movement and player movement, not to mention timing. (It also helps if you have a bail-out guy like Jordan or Bryant when the ball and/or players don't move like they should.) Before his second season with the Bulls, he broke the news to Jordan that things were going to be different.

"I brought him in and suggested that we were going back to a system game of basketball rather than individual sets," Jackson said. "He called it an equal-opportunity offense. I said, 'Yeah, but we're going to make sure the guys know when to get you the basketball.' He was able to live with that, even though we started at 0-3 and there was some grumbling going on. He stuck with it. I had no doubts we were on the right path."

Jackson has always been an iconoclast in terms of handling players, whether it's dispensing reading material (as in novels and history books) to his players for long road trips or refusing to rise from the bench to call a timeout while his team is getting whacked with a 15-0 run. He learned from Holzman what he called "the middle path" in terms of keeping an even keel throughout the long season. He referenced a famous Holzman line when a reporter asked the Knicks coach what he was going to do following a loss that snapped an 18-game winning streak: "I'm going to go home and have someone make me a steak. And if we had won, I would be going home to have someone make me steak."

Jackson was the NBA's only representative in this year's class. It's the second time in three years that the Hall has not inducted at least one NBA player. This is the Year of the Coach, for joining Jackson in the Class of 2007 were longtime women's coach Van Chancellor (now at Louisiana State), North Carolina's Roy Williams, and two international coaches, Ferrandiz and Mirko Novosel, who led the great Yugoslavian teams. The other two inductees were Mendy Rudolph, a longtime NBA referee who died in 1979, and the 1965-66 Texas Western team, which won the NCAA title, stunning an all-white Kentucky team with a starting lineup that featured five African-Americans.

Class of 2007

This year's inductees into the Basketball Hall of Fame:

Van Chancellor - Won first four WNBA titles with Houston as coach.

Phil Jackson - Coach of nine NBA champions (Bulls 6, Lakers 3).

Mendy Rudolph - First NBA referee to call more than 2,000 games.

Roy Williams - Third coach to lead two schools (Kansas, North Carolina) to Final Four.

Texas Western - 1966 team that won NCAA title and first to start five African-American players.

Mirko Novosel - Coached Yugoslavia to two Olympic medals.

Pedro Ferrandiz - Playing for Spain, brought fast-paced style to European basketball.

Peter May can be reached at p_may@globe.com.