Attention fellow Chicago Bulls fanatics! A pair of Hall of Famers, longtime Bulls beat reporter Sam Smith and six-time Chicago champion head coach Phil Jackson, have a new collaboration off the court. The dynamic duo has penned a fascinating new basketball book covering their perspectives on the league’s biggest luminaries, Masters of the Game: A Conversational History of the NBA in 75 Legendary Players.
Masters of the Game uses the framework of the NBA’s 75th Anniversary Team to spark a series of winding riffs pertaining to Smith and Jackson’s years spent around each player mentioned in that 2022 list — and several others.
But the book takes an unorthodox approach to the topic. It’s essentially a series of dialogues inspired by everyone from Michael Jordan to Damian Lillard, designed to feel like the kinds of chats people have over a long dinner with friend. In this case, those friends just happen to be one of the best basketball writers ever and the greatest men’s coach in the history of the game.
Smith recently sat down with Bleacher Nation to explain the genesis of the project.
“I had written a book about five or six years ago, kind of with Oscar Robertson [2017’s Hard Labor: The Battle That Birthed The Billion-Dollar NBA], on the ABA, the Robertson suit that led to free agency, the mergers of the leagues, it was kind of an NBA history book of the ’60s and ’70s. It was great fun to do, because I’m interviewing all those guys who were playing as the best players on their team,” Smith observes. “No connection, but guys are dying. I’d done the last interviews with Havlicek and Wes Unseld. I got to thinking, ‘These interviews are going to disappear. Maybe I’ll start collecting interviews, give me an excuse to hang around all these players I grew up watching.’
“Skip ahead, when I would go to L.A. with the Bulls, I still had kept a relationship with Phil, but we weren’t really that close. So I’d see him for lunch. We’re having lunch. It’s the pandemic, or right before, it’s right about that time. It’s, ‘What are you doing?’ So I tell him this. I said, ‘I’m gonna go around, collect these stories, maybe it’ll be a book. Who knows?’ We had a good sort of social relationship, but I never thought about working with him. Sort of off the top of my head, I just said, ‘Well, would you want to do that with me?’ And he says, ‘Yeah.’ I think maybe he was bored, pandemic, couldn’t get out, who knows? And so I think, ‘Wow, I don’t know if this is a book, but it’ll give me a good excuse to talk to Phil.'”
© Anne Ryan, USA TODAY, USA TODAY via Imagn Content Services, LLCJackson and Smith’s Deep NBA Ties
Smith’s relationship with Jackson dates back to his Albany Patroons days.
Imagine the hours upon hours (days, perhaps?) or amazing hoops conversations we’ll never be privy to. Happily, Masters of the Game serves as a nice consolation prize.
“So I thought, ‘Hey, I’ll go up to Montana a couple of times, hang out with Phil, even if it’s not a book,'” Smith relays. “There’s no sporting memorabilia on the walls. Any famous athletic person I’ve ever been around has all sorts of sporting [stuff on display]. He had a picture of one of the teams, but almost, you’d never know it was the house of somebody as accomplished in sports as Phil has been.”
Jackson’s humility regarding a career that includes 11 NBA titles as a coach and two as a (role) player would be surprising for any other coach. But this is the Zen Master.
“I use the top 75 as a way to talk about NBA history. Now I have a focus, because I knew talking with Phil, when we started talking about a guy, we could have been talking about anything else,” Smith explains. “You know, there’s a lot of these books, and they go over, ‘Who’s No. 1? Who’s No. 2? Who’s the best point guard?’ It wasn’t going to be that way talking with Phil. But even beyond that, I wanted it to be kind of different… It’s more like a little nugget of something on each guy.”
Bleacher Nation also spoke with Smith about his bestselling first foray into long-form storytelling, The Jordan Rules, plus many more hoops topics. Keep an eye out for more from our conversation with Smith in the coming days!
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