Shadowboxing with a ghost

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Phil Jackson came to this rivalry late, like most of the others participating in this 2008 NBA Finals dripping of history and rancor.

He was 54 before he had logged a single minute in anything to do with Lakers vs. Celtics. The last time these teams faced each other for a championship, Jackson was working the pro basketball's Borscht Belt circuit, figuratively and geographically, coaching the Albany Patroons of the Continental Basketball Association in his first official head coaching job. The Patroons played their home games in the Washington Avenue Armory downtown, a medieval fortress of a building and a real munitions depot with "tanks in the basement,'' Jackson once said. The Lakers beat the Celtics in six games in that spring of 1987, a few weeks after the Patroons got swept from the CBA semifinals by the Rapid City Thrillers.

By the time Jackson joined this particular party of green and gold, he already had carved out a memorable NBA career in blue and red, first as a 6-foot-8 angular "energy guy'' for the Knicks, then as head coach of the Michael Jordan-fueled Bulls. He already had seven championship rings -- one in New York, six in Chicago -- with an asterisk on an eighth (he missed the 1970 Knicks' title after undergoing spinal fusion surgery), still more than anyone in league history not employed by either the Celtics or the Lakers.

Jackson signed on in 1999 after the first of his Montana sabbaticals, taking over as the Lakers' coach and winning three more titles right out of the chute with Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant. Those triumphs, though, came against the Pacers, Sixers and Nets, as impressive as anticlimaxes can be, nothing to apologize for, after more formidable Western Conference playoff runs. Still, there was something missing in the matchups, something big and green and scary. It was a feud interrupted, the Hatfields diverting their buckshot toward the Kowalskis for a spell because the McCoys, dang it, were plumb out of ammo.

Now the Celtics are back and the Lakers, after another high-plains hiatus for their coach in 2004-05, are in Boston, ready for Game 1 on Thursday night. For players on both sides who only know John Havlicek with gray hair and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with none, the young guys who maybe never heard Johnny Most or Chick Hearn call the action, this is Hoops History 101, a crash course taught by all the present and future Hall of Famers who will be hovering courtside or a few rows back.

While the L.A. and Boston players dance with the legends, though, Jackson will have it tougher. He will be shadowboxing with a ghost. With nine championships each as a head coach, Jackson and the late Red Auerbach are tied for the most in NBA history.

Should the Lakers win this series, their Zen master coach with the twinkle in his eye and the verbal needle in his bag of tricks would surpass the crafty curmudgeon whose famous prop, the victory cigar, remains the most outrageous in sports history. It wouldn't be unthinkable, in fact, for Jackson to light up a stogie of his own if his team wins four more, part-homage to and part-wink at the old man. (As far as the tobacco involved, Jackson's long-ago admissions about recreational drug use might draw a closer look from Sen. Arlen Specter. And Josh Howard.)

Breaking a tie with Auerbach, however, wouldn't necessarily mean eclipsing or outranking the esteemed Celtics boss. In a world that thrives on shorthand, the claim to "greatest NBA coach of all time'' might still be up for grabs.

Mostly, because of the way we think about those things.

Auerbach, who died in October 2006, has nostalgia on his side. And all those wonderful black & white film clips. And Bill Russell, the rock of the Celtics' decade-plus dynasty. He is to the NBA what John Wooden is to NCAA men's basketball, what Vince Lombardi is to the NFL -- all in present tense, by the way, because their accomplishments still live and breathe as the context that makes us care about what happens now. Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski and Bob Knight have no more chance of swiping Wooden's crown than Don Shula, Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick have of elbowing out Lombardi in reverence or lore as their game's coaching icon. The mists of time carry weight, especially when John Facenda's divine tones narrate your epitaph.