Masters of the Game: A Conversational History of the NBA in 75 Legendary Players

by Sam Smith, Phil Jackson

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Legendary sports writer Sam Smith and NBA champion Phil Jackson team up for an in-depth analysis of the all-time greats and their lasting impact on the sport.

The legendary sportswriter and the Hall of Fame, eleven-time NBA champion coach separate the music from the noise in the stories of the greatest who ever played and their impact on the game

Sam Smith and Phil Jackson grew to know and respect each other in the late 1980s, when Smith was a Chicago Tribune sportswriter and Jackson was an assistant coach for the Chicago Bulls. Forty years later, the two remain close friends. In 2021, Smith helped the NBA arrive at a list of the seventy-five greatest players of all time in celebration of its seventy-fifth anniversary. Phil Jackson was asked to participate too, but he’s not a big fan of ranking greatness. They’ve been enjoying the argument ever since.

In Masters of the Game, Smith and Jackson chop it up about the basketball life, the sport, and the genius and the shadow side of the all-time greats: Jordan, Kobe, Shaq, Magic, Bill Russell, Wilt, Jerry West, Bird, LeBron, KD, Steph Curry, Bill Walton, and more. In a conversation full of high-grade analysis and high-grade gossip, we meet the stars of long-ago eras of basketball and see the mark race left on players and the business of the game—and we get a master class on character and the alchemy of a good team. And of course, inevitably, these two old heads get into the GOAT debate.

There are so many huge characters here, and Smith and Jackson can hold their own with any of them. Their spirit—sharp, wise, irreverent, honest, respectful of the lore and legacy of the game but never pious—and the clash of their different perspectives combine to make this book a joyous ride, a short course in greatness open to all students.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798217060702
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/04/2025
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 5.90(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Sam Smith is the author of five books on basketball, including the New York Times bestseller The Jordan Rules. Smith received the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame’s 2012 Curt Gowdy Media Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Professional Basketball Writers Association. He wrote for the Chicago Tribune for twenty-nine years and currently writes for Bulls.com.


Phil Jackson is the coauthor of the number one New York Times bestseller Eleven Rings, The Last Season, and Sacred Hoops. He’s arguably the greatest coach in the history of the NBA. His reputation was established as head coach of the Chicago Bulls from 1989 to 1998; during his tenure, Chicago won six NBA titles. His next team, the Los Angeles Lakers, won five NBA titles, from 2000 to 2010. He holds the record for the most championships in NBA history as a player and a head coach. Jackson was a player on the 1970 and 1973 NBA champion New York Knicks. In 2007 he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Read an Excerpt

Preface by Sam Smith

John Havlicek was talking about his brief stint in the NFL. He was blocking from his receiver position on a sweep and laid out a linebacker, enabling Jim Brown to go forty- eight yards to the two. The Boston Celtics legend had also been an all- state quarterback and had been drafted by his home- state Cleveland Browns. On the next play, from the two, John was lined up as the tight end against “Big Daddy” Lipscomb, then the NFL’s only three- pounder. “Big Daddy grabbed people and sorted them out and then grabbed the runner,” Havlicek recalled. “I ended up on the bottom of the pile, my helmet knocked half off.” The Browns passed for a touchdown on the next play in that preseason game, which also pretty much ended John’s football career. He was cut— the Browns decided to keep his buddy Gary Collins instead. Collins would go on to be a three-time all-pro multiple years, but he always said Havlicek had better hands. It all worked out OK, Havlicek told me with a laugh.


Averaging more than forty- five minutes per game in one year stretch during his Hall of Fame career didn’t seem too rough in comparison to Big Daddy Lipscomb. Havlicek once said that you’re only tired when you think you are, and how could anyone really be tired playing basketball? Like Forrest Gump, John Havlicek kept running from his small-town Ohio upbringing into a life of celebrity as part of the greatest team in the game’s history, alongside Russell and Cousy and the Jones guys and against Oscar and Wilt and even Kareem. The rugged, square-​jawed “country boy,” as teammate Bill Russell occasionally called him, was the man who took the baton from the greatest dynasty ever, the first leg of the Celtics’ great sprint through NBA history, raised two more banners, and handed it off to Larry and Kevin and Chief.


Havlicek once came into Red Auerbach’s office when he was making $20,000. He was scoring 20 points off the bench in the great Celtics sixth-​man tradition, and he asked for a raise to $25,000. The coach / general manager said he’d jump out the window first before giving Havlicek a $5,000 raise. “I settled for $21,000,” John said to me during a stretch of conversations not long before he died, talks that were the inspiration for this book.


The NBA’s history needs to be told and remembered and told again. These days it’s often papered over and forgotten, like one of those old houses from the fixer-​upper TV shows.


I was writing a book a few years back about the players, led by Bob Cousy, Tom Heinsohn, and Oscar Robertson, who sued the NBA and finally established the right to free agency and eventually the level financial playing field that has carried the NBA to the colossal global success it now enjoys. I couldn’t get through to Havlicek while preparing the interviews for the book. It seemed strange, many Celtics friends and organization members told me. That wasn’t John. Finally, I arranged to meet him at his place in Florida. That day as I arrived, he said sorry, it couldn’t be that day. We never did connect in person, but we eventually had multiple phone calls to talk about the case and the old times. It was a similar story with the only other player among the thirteen of the suit’s fourteen original plaintiffs still living whom I didn’t meet face‑to‑face, Wes Unseld. We set a time and I drove to his farm in far northwest Maryland, but as I drove up he was heading back to the hospital after having recently spent nine weeks there for heart problems he never mentioned to anyone. We also had several phone conversations; he died not long after Havlicek. I wondered if those were the last interviews either man did.


What I didn’t understand during my courtship of Havlicek was that he was suffering from Parkinson’s, and there were good days and bad ones. On the bad ones he just didn’t want to be seen that way. He was once perhaps the fittest man in the league, the marathon runner turned wing mismatch. It can be difficult to find oneself hitting the wall in life’s marathon, especially for the men who spent their lives being first and fittest.


I was thinking about my conversations with John and Wes and how all the stories were going to be lost to history. I know, it’s just sports, as we’re often told. But it’s also often the passion play of our times, and the rare inspiration that can transcend generations. Like Martin Luther King Jr. said, we are made by our history.



When the NBA continued its tradition of adding, every quarter century, twenty- five more names to its roster of all- time greatest play­ers, this time bringing the tally up to seventy-five for the league’s seventy-fifth birthday— was one of the voters among many— read through the list and realized that, between seeing games live starting as a kid in Madison Square Garden in the late 1950s and reporting on the NBA for the Chicago Tribune and the website of the Chicago Bulls from the early 1980s into the 2020s, I’d seen in person every one of the players on that list except George Mikan. And I did have a few inter­views with Mikan in his final years. Through my reporting and the books I’d written, I’d gotten to know and interview most of the players on the list.


I thought I should write down my experiences with those players and the stories I know and make one more contribution to the book­shelf of NBA history. Then I asked Phil, who basically played or coached against every one of those all- timers— also except Mikan— if he wanted to join me for a basketball history version of My Dinner with Andre. I didn’t think he would be interested. He was.


I’ve never enjoyed writing the books as much as I loved researching them, sitting with the players and coaches and everyone else around basketball and listening to their stories, and now I could do so with Phil. Phil spends the winters in Los Angeles at his home in Playa del Rey, facing the setting sun. Every sundown brings out people hoping for a sight of that famous kaleidoscope of light, a mystical blue or pur‑ plish glow that Phil told me his kids said they’d seen. He said he hadn’t yet but was still looking. Life is about never looking away. He delights in the Pacific of it all, the lady in the pink sweatsuit jogging by every day, the gulls chasing the fishing boats for a snack. Phil’s a cook; it’s a hobby. He makes a lot of soups. We went down to the store one day and he examined the ham hocks. He makes a sweet paella.


Summers for Phil are spent south of Kalispell, Montana, on the massive Flathead Lake, where he and his brother built an A‑frame de‑ cades ago and have since had a partner home built. His former wife June also has a place in the cozy lake compound where they welcome their dozen or so grandkids in a summerlong baton exchange of weeks of swimming and boating and Phil’s lessons on life for the little ones.


Oh, Gramps!


After the kids depart back to school following Labor Day, I stop by for a few days. We sit down to reminisce. I’ve also dropped by his LA place a few times to fill in the blanks. It’s been the best part of the project for me, including wading through digressions about esoteric books and ancillary events. It reminded me of when I was writing my first book, The Jordan Rules. The big- shot New York publishing house editor kept sending the first- time author notes that the book wasn’t linear enough. Be more linear! Sorry, life, and basketball, are just not that way.


I first got to know Phil Jackson, in person anyway, in the early 1980s. I’d watched him as a Knicks fan for many years, the wild stork of basketball, the guy we all noted from the balcony in the old Madi‑ son Square Garden with the clothes‑hanger physique, all flapping arms and legs off the Knicks bench during that magical early‑seventies run of two championships. Our gold ticket as kids was the GO card, the bonus ID that New York City public school kids got, at least in my view, as recompense because we were subjected to triple sessions in the overcrowded schools—some years you started at seven and were done by eleven, and sometimes it was noon till five. In classes with fifty kids the teachers never bothered to learn your name if you weren’t raising your hand all the time. I can’t recall ever having done so, though an English teacher once told me before giving me a D on a paper that I shouldn’t worry because in a hundred years we’d all be dead and who would really care? It might have been the most vital lesson I learned in Brooklyn public schools.


Anyway—see a digression here?—that GO card was our entry to the magic world of the NBA. It enabled you for seventy‑five cents to get a ticket on Tuesday nights, NBA doubleheader nights established to try to draw fans for the pathetic Knicks. And so, remarkably, it was Oscar and Elgin and West and Russell and Chamberlain and, OK, they were kicking the crap out of our home team just about every game, but what a basketball education. So fifteen cents for the subway and for a slice of pizza—the subway and pizza costs were always the same and, no, I don’t know why but they were—and ten cents for a drink and seventy‑five cents to get in. It wasn’t always easy to see through the haze of cigarette smoke wafting upward by the second game from behind the basket where the sharpies were wagering on point spreads, but for about $1.50 it was dinner and four hours of NBA basketball.


My family never understood.


My mother, Betty Pritzker, was from five generations of mostly Or‑ thodox rabbis in Ukraine, south of Kyiv. She should have been Yentl, the woman in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story living in a Polish shtetl who dresses like a man so she can secretly receive a rabbinical education, the way she always read and told us to get our own supper. We were strict Orthodox, which I abandoned pretty quickly when they never gave me a good reason why I couldn’t use electricity on Saturday, the Sabbath, after I explained there was no electricity five thou‑ sand years before. The family name was Pritzker, and while I’ve done well and don’t need a Hyatt hotel, I’ve wondered about being a relative. We were the only Pritzkers in the New York City phone book, nine million people at the time.


When you live in New York, it is depicted as the center of the universe, so I’d never heard of those Pritzkers. We weren’t even sure where Chicago was. But in 1979 when I was hired by the Chicago Tribune, I began reading about the squabbling billionaire family. And what do you know, their patriarch was an Orthodox rabbi from near Kyiv just like mine. C’mon, that can’t be coincidence. So I wrote to Jay Pritzker, then the dean of the family, explaining my curiosity. He wrote me back a brief note that I was probably related to the Pritzkers of Baltimore. No hotel for you!


My family was from a place called Golovanevsk, where the anti‑Jewish pogroms were in full swing after World War I when we left. Golovanevsk organized a militia unit after a 1917 incident, like the Fiddler on the Roof scene in the marketplace. Without the dancing. That self‑defense unit was defeated in 1919. My mother was born there in 1920 and, after more pogroms, the family finally fled in 1925. My father’s family was from Lithuania. They fled to England, where my great‑grandfather, Pincus Amran, changed his name to Smith.


Phil’s roots are on the other side of the American revolution. He comes from Loyalists who received a land grant in Canada when the victorious colonists were kicking out the British. Phil’s father, Charles, was a dairy farmer and lumberjack. When his first wife died, he went to Central Bible College and met Elizabeth Funk, from a family of German Mennonites who were farmers. They embraced the evangelical Assemblies of God and faith healing, which actually seemed to
work when Phil contracted polio when he was five years old; despite a lack of professional medical care, he recovered. There was no turning back then.


As traveling preachers/ evangelists, Phil’s family moved around, and Phil was in Great Falls, Montana, in fifth grade when he began to play basketball seriously. He was also always the quarterback in football and the pitcher in baseball. Phil was about six five and a bony 150 in high school, and determined to succeed in baseball, still the national sport. In the summers he was playing semipro baseball and seeing pos­sibilities. He hit a double off a barnstorming team featuring Satchel Paige. Of course, Paige was about sixty at the time. But in the end it had to be basketball.


I never had the growth spurt. In fifth grade, I was third tallest and winning all the medals at Field Day. In seventh grade, I was third shortest. Still, I had my moments on the mound, a pitching win in a city-title semifinal game at the fields next to the old Yankee Stadium. It got me an invite to a tryout with the Yankees when I was a high school sophomore. Not ready, they said. I was five eight and about 120. They said, Gain 30 pounds. That winter I ate spaghetti and bread for every meal, and the next spring I weighed . . . 120.


I still harbored those fantasies of a professional sports contract. Hey, maybe D‑ball and I could at least say I was there. My tipping point came during preseason for my Division II team at Pace Univer­sity. I was the number one starting pitcher as a sophomore, though on a historically bad team. My junior year, Bruce Hildebrandt, six two, 185, shows up with ninety- mile‑an‑hour splitters and the coach asks me if I’m keeping up with my grades. Yes, time to pay attention in class, son. I finished my business degree. But maybe there was something to this sports writing I was doing to pick up a few bucks in college.


So after two years with the New York City office of Arthur Young & Co. as a staff auditor, I was off to graduate school to take journal­ism classes for the first time. And if you were keeping score in journal­ism in the 1970s, it was Watergate and DC. So I got myself there, covering Congress and the White House, and it really was cool. I was with a regional wire, States News Service, but I went to the same places and covered the same stories as the big guys: the Camp David Accords, the White House press conferences, though with the local angle for New Haven, Connecticut, or Brockton, Massachusetts, or Allentown, Pennsylvania. I even got in a question once for President Carter. I was at the Show. And there’s James Reston from the Times and Bob Wood­ward from the Post and Sam Donaldson and Dan Rather from the TV networks, and they’re asking questions and it’s occurring to me, “Hey, I was going to ask that. They don’t know more than I do. It’s not about going to Harvard; it’s opportunity.” Which I came to understand is also what sports is often about.


Because being famous doesn’t make you smarter or more entitled. The truly great players loved the challenge more than the acclaim. It was always a big part of what separated them. It’s why you can see their eyes glazing over with the “How’s it feel” postgame questions. Michael Jordan, for example, much preferred when you pointed out a miss or mistake. Because those sorts of things drove him. Similarly with Kobe Bryant and Larry Bird. They loved the trash talk, which effec­tively was challenges to them and their play. Jordan loved when you bet against him, like that scene I talked about in the Last Dance doc­umentary from the 1989 first- round playoff series with the superior Cleveland Cavaliers (6– against the Bulls that season) that effectively began the Bulls’ rise to immortality. Each of the three traveling Chi­cago beat writers picked the Cavs to win in our previews, though I had the most faith in the Bulls, predicting the Cavs in five. So there was Jordan after he was the goat (small letters to mean the cause of the loss) in the Game 4 overtime, which was supposed to be the clincher. So it’s the Game 5 decider back in Cleveland and, pregame, Jordan goes down the then-cozy media table and points to my colleagues who picked Cleveland in three or four and then comes to me and says, “We take care of you today.” C’mon, who does that starting an elimination game as an underdog? That is how you become the GOAT. We all know how it ended. Jordan always delighted in the last word. In the locker room later he grabbed me and said, “See, I told you.”


As Michael’s father, James, would say, Michael has a competition problem. He needed something on the line. It got me in trouble with him when I was invited one time to join a golf foursome with him. So we get to the first tee. It’s maybe 1987 or 1988 and I’m probably mak­ing $25,000 at the Chicago Tribune. He’s agreed to his new deal, which was the then- groundbreaking eight- year, $25 million contract that upended the sports world. Jordan wants to play for $100 a hole, and I know the price is only going up. Being a former accountant, I’m doing the math and I’m wondering how I’m going to explain that I lost a quarter of my annual salary playing golf with Michael Jordan. So I explain I’d do it by a ratio of my $25,000 to his $3 million. The next time he spoke to me was about the eighth hole.


You didn’t get anywhere sucking up to them, unless you wanted a place as a sycophant. It often paid well, but it lacked respect. Having grown up in Brooklyn, whose motto is So What Are You Looking At?, turned out to be an advantage.


When I first got my foot in the door at the Chicago Tribune in 1979, I ended up with one of those Sunday magazine feature-writing assignments, a story about basketball’s bush leagues with a team from Gary, Indiana, following Carl Nicks, Larry Bird’s best Indiana State teammate. The road trip was to play the Albany Patroons, coached by that old, wily stork of a Knick, Phil Jackson.


As with the triangle offense, which eschews set and specific plays to react to circumstances and the defense— he basketball tai chi, as Phil has said— life’s best choices often are made in reaction to circumstance. Once Phil became so successful, his Knicks teammates were often
quoted saying they never expected him, the hippie, to be a coach: the facial hair, the leather jacket and T‑shirt wardrobe and all that. But at his core Phil is a coach’s coach. He studied under Red Holzman, oper­ating essentially as his lone assistant when Phil sat out the 1970 sea­son after back surgery. Holzman often had Phil lead a film session or do advance scouting. With the Bulls, Phil would have discussions with assistant Johnny Bach about Horst Pinholster’s Pinwheel Offense and Tex Winter’s role in formulating the rules of basketball as a pioneering college coach.


When his playing career ended, Phil tried some TV with Marv Al­bert but felt disconnected. Phil went back to Montana to finish that A‑frame and invest in a health club business, Second Wind. He thought about maybe a side job coaching Flathead Valley Community College in Kalispell, which was reviving its basketball program. But that never materialized. It looked like basketball was a “what ever happened to” for Phil.


Bulls general manager Jerry Krause had scouted Phil when he was playing in college for Bill Fitch and kept in touch, asking about CBA players. Phil asked if he could do some regional scouting for the Bulls. Krause said nothing was available but got Phil an interview with Stan Albeck for an assistant’s job. It famously didn’t work out. The Albany CBA job was getting him nowhere and Phil resigned. Driving home to Montana, Phil stopped at the NBA predraft camp in 1987, chatted with Krause, and moved on, still thinking about running the health club, only to get a surprise call a month later: Did Phil want to join Doug Collins’s staff as an assistant? Gene Littles was leaving for Charlotte.


So having had introductions, when I had a basketball story assign­ment at the Tribune, I’d call Phil for some perspective and background. And then the Bulls’ beat opened. I’d helped out on Bulls coverage and even spent a day writing a feature with this Bulls rookie, Michael Jor­dan, a few days after he arrived in Chicago. He had an ironing board set up. Nice prop for the story, I said. Nah, he insisted. He had taken home economics courses because he was ashamed of his looks and doubted girls would be interested. Yes, a rare air ball.


So there I was, traveling with the team, and there was Phil, sitting in coach. Back then, all NBA teams traveled commercial. They ar­ranged for planes with twelve first- class seats for the twelve active- roster players. Coaches in the back. My little trick was to book an aisle seat and then trade with Phil, who couldn’t get his legs under the mid­dle and window seats. And thus began my basketball education. Sit­ting with Tex Winter on a few flights, he walked me through all the diagrams in his triple- post offense (triangle) book. There were Johnny Bach’s war stories, in the NBA, as bullpen catcher for the Yankees, and in the navy with a landing party headed for Okinawa and eventu­ally Tokyo. Krause had a good eye for young coaching talent, and Doug Collins has gone on to the Hall of Fame. Doug got the Bulls back on the rails, like when you were adjusting an old Lionel set. But the Bulls didn’t think Doug was ready to finish the race. Phil had grown up in Red Holzman’s passing and movement game with the Knicks. Then he got a crash course in the triangle from Tex and suddenly Phil had found his coaching destiny, the triangle offense. Phil was hired as Doug’s replacement in 1989.


So before games we’d often sit in his office talking basketball. John Paxson told me later he always was fuming because everyone was sit­ting around waiting for the pregame talk and Phil was still in there chatting with me. Not every game, and I wasn’t exactly the person he’d go to with problems, hopes, and dreams. But we liked talking basketball. And all these years later, when I told him what I was doing and why, he said sure, “Come on up to Montana and we’ll talk.”


November 2024


Preface by Phil Jackson

I’m intrigued by the NBA’s “75 for 75,” the choices for the best play­ers in the seventy- five- year history of the National Basketball Associ­ation. I was asked to be a part of the group that made the decisions on which players were chosen, but I declined. I remember the fiftieth an­niversary and the fifty who made the cut. I remember Red Holzman, my New York Knicks coach, talking about two guards he played with in Rochester with the Royals, Bobby Wanzer and Bobby Davies. If my memory serves me right, Wanzer was left off the list. Red remarked on it: As a backup guard to those two, he really saw their game. The Royals were a championship team after the Minneapolis Lakers’ dom­inance and before the Boston Celtics reeled off their string of champi­onships. He asserted that Davies was better than Bob Cousy.


Anyway, my friend Sam, over lunch on his annual trip to LA, sug­gested that we join forces and talk/ write about the seventy- five chosen players. Sam was on the panel for the “75 for 75.” I avoided being among the choosers of the chosen because the decision about who is the “best” is always hard. Every era of the game of basketball has re­markable players who stand out, but I think the last twenty- five years are the most difficult.


The initial group from the 1940s was composed of only a few teams, some of which are gone, like Syracuse, St. Louis, and the Rochester/ Cincinnati Royals. When I broke into the game in 1967, the league had expanded from ten to twelve teams. At our opening game in ’67, the original New York Knicks team was introduced before the tip- off. They played the first NBA game in Toronto thirty years prior to my rookie season: The first basket was scored by Ossie Schectman. Since that year the league has expanded to thirty teams, so picking “the greatest” of each new era is really not as simple as it was in the forties and fifties. From under 100 players in the league per year to 450 play­ers on the NBA rosters now, just the increase in volume makes choos­ing the best difficult. Add to this the fact that the court has changed from having a six- foot lane to a twelve- foot lane to the present sixteen- foot lane, to say nothing of the advent of the three- point shot. Basket­ball has changed from a game dominated by big men to a game of guards and forwards playing from the outside in. Now they don’t nec­essarily even choose a center for our All-Star games. They have been left off the list of All- Stars, but they’re not forgotten.


So Sam and I have labored the past few years to talk about the cho­sen players over LA visits, emails, and summer visits in Montana. Sam was one of the many guys I got to know in New York who had student tickets or passes that allowed “kids” to see the Knicks games for seventy- five cents. Match that with the Knicks playing three or four doubleheaders each season, and New York kids had a chance to see NBA players from the fifties and sixties in their prime. Sam has had a seat at many arenas, from the old Madison Square Garden on Forty-Ninth Street and Eighth Avenue to the United Center in Chicago. He has seen more games than I have. But I’ve played or coached players from my era as an NBA player from 1967 to 1980 on through my coaching and GM years. As I said, I found ranking the players from this era the most difficult. A great career in the NBA is a marathon; some players who shined brightly at first faded down the stretch, often through no fault of their own. Dwight Howard was a dominant center in the first decade of the 2000s but became almost irrelevant the last ten years of his career as the game and the rules changed for the big men of the NBA. As the game continues to evolve, we wonder what the “100 for 100” years of the NBA are going to look like a generation from now. I’m hoping the NBA continues to evolve and change with the advent of more athletic players and finds a way to keep the game relevant and not let money be the sole rationale for how the game is played.

November 2024