When the bidding process was done with and Chicago was selected as the city in which LockerRoom would be spending a year of his fabulously glamorous life, two consolations suggested themselves (not for the city, but for LockerRoom).
First, the winter would be so spectacularly harsh as to provide fodder for yarns and anecdotes for years to come. A series of books on the hardships of life and the lessons of living in the Little Apartment on the Prairie were envisaged. Second, as a major league sports city, Chicago would provide LockerRoom with a pulpit from which to lecture the gombeens back home as to precisely how things should be done. Chicago was home not just to great teams, but to Phil Jackson, perhaps the most fascinating coach in all major league sports in America.
Naturally, Mr Midas has struck out again. Chicago is enjoying a winter of almost sinful mildness and the big-time sport reputation of the city has disappeared down the toilet. You'd catch more good action during a VD outbreak in Ballydehob.
How sad have things got? Well, media people still obsess about Mike Ditka, who coached the last Chicago Bears team to win a Superbowl. Every time Michael Jordan goes to the bathroom there is still a news-flash. People go to Blackhawks ice hockey games to see the stirring spectacle of the crowd raucously singing the national anthem. Then they leave. The Chicago Bulls, of course, are the crowning glory of the city's new-found mediocrity. Despite a freakish remission period last week in which they won three games on the trot, they still own basketball's most sickly record and look determined to hold on to it.
The fall of the Bulls wounds the city's pride greatly, but the news bulletins about Michael Jordan and Phil Jackson, the Bulls old coach, merely rub in the salt.
Jordan is reputedly in negotiations to take an ownership share of the Washington Wizards (a team so decrepit that the Bulls have beaten them twice this year), and when Jackson comes back to Chicago he must have the slightly guilty feeling of a man who left the scene of a bad accident. Chicago would still be an interesting sports city if Jackson had stayed around. Jackson is one of the wonders of modern sport, proof that when it comes to managing sports stars there is no such thing as exact science.
When he led the Bulls to six NBA titles everyone said that Daffy Duck could lead the Bulls to six NBA titles if he had Michael Jordan playing for him.
This ignored all the pre-Jackson years in which Jordan was the high-scoring star on a low-achieving team, and it discounted the unique aura which Jackson radiates. Now, for good measure, Jackson has moved on to Los Angeles and turned the perennially under-achieving Lakers into the best team in basketball. Some coaches reign through fear. Other through politics. Jock Stein once said that the trick was keeping the six players who don't mind you away from the five who hate you. How Jackson rules is a mystery.
Through all the NBA mayhem Jackson walks with the serenity of a monk. The irony of him winding up as the $6 million-a-year coach of Jack Nicholson's favourite team is never lost on Jackson, whose parents were evangelical preachers who swore vows of poverty.
As a child, Jackson was steered away from materialism the way other kids are steered away from electrical outlets. This is a man who never saw a movie before he was 17, never visited a doctor until he was six, disliked meat from childhood and, as he grew up in Montana and North Dakota, was steered towards music, spirituality and sport.
In the minds of the spoiled, bored minds of the pampered NBA superstars he is the supreme enigma. Big guys with too much money and too much time, who have seen every coaching trick in the book, who have heard every table-thumping speech, every desperate threat and every panicky effort to pump up the intensity, prick up their ears and open their eyes when Jackson walks into a room.
This is a man who, when he played for the New York Knicks, used to cycle to Madison Square Garden and then spend the summers working on Indian reservations. Once, when he was unemployed, he turned up for a job interview with the Chicago Bulls wearing a feathered Panama hat he'd picked up in Puerto Rico. He didn't get the job.
When he coached minor league basketball in Canada he stuck himself with a massive daily drive just so he could live near Woodstock in upstate New York. He is a prominent sports figure who cheerily admits to having experimented with mind-altering drugs working among men who have no such excuse. A sports figure whose other offer when he took the Lakers job was running former room-mate Bill Bradley's presidential campaign in Iowa.
By existing in a different orbit he keeps his players guessing. The players are watching game films when suddenly a scene from a movie crackles onto the screen. Jackson has spliced it in there. He speaks of the Tai Chi of basketball, called his autobiography Sacred Hoop. He encourages meditation, yoga, Zen, prescribes reading lists for his players and often personally distributes the books.
He taught Jordan how to score fewer points and become a better player. He took the untameable eccentricity of Dennis Rodman and turned him into a valuable asset for three NBA championships.
In Los Angeles, he persuaded the big man-child Shaquille O'Neal to lose weight, stop bickering with the team's other stars and shape up. These are no small things. O'Neal has been sensational this season. Rodman can't play for anyone else. Jordan retired rather than play for anyone else.
While the Bulls were getting beaten on Saturday night, under the banner in the United Centre which commemorates Jackson's time here Jackson's Lakers were winning their 17th game in an 18-game stretch.
Jordan brought great times to Chicago, but it was Jackson who made them interesting times. Right now the city would settle for interesting times again.
Tom Humphries can be contacted at thumphries@irish-times.ie
