Dynasty: Beginning Or Ending?

Buss, who is collaborating on a book appropriately titled Laker Girl, was professionally obligated to observe Jackson's behavior in the hours leading up to the game. She caught him the night before scribbling plays on the back of a piece of junk mail. She asked him an innocuous strategic question and was subjected to a 30-minute lecture on the seven principles of basketball. She brought up Charley's upcoming summer wedding and he refused to discuss it.

On Thursday morning Jackson awoke at 6 a.m. and made his signature pancakes, a dish with no fewer than 10 ingredients that he prepares to help him relax. Before shootaround at the Lakers' practice facility he led the players through a nearly 15-minute meditation in the dark, their longest session of the season, the only sound in the room the hum of the air conditioner. Courtside seats were fetching more than $50,000. Ratings would be the highest since Game 6 of the 1998 Finals. The word legacy was tossed around like purple confetti. Jackson just wanted his guys to block out the noise.

Jackson thought he could count on Bryant, the toughest-minded player in the sport. But Game 7 even got to him. Bryant missed 16 of his first 21 shots. He dropped passes, dribbled off sneakers, clanked one shot off the side of the backboard. Jackson spent timeouts just to slow his star's pulse. After three quarters the Lakers trailed by only four points, and guard Derek Fisher gathered them on the bench.

"Take a breath," Fisher said, and if ever there was a moment when a team adopted the personality of its coach, this was it. When the Lakers meditate, Jackson instructs them to breathe the same way—up from the abdomen, out through the nose, back again. "That's how we control our chi," says guard Sasha Vujacic.

Bryant did not allow his anxiety to diminish his effort. He grabbed 15 rebounds and drove the lane relentlessly in the last period, making nine free throws. Bryant was MVP, but he turned over the closer role to forward Ron Artest, whose three-pointer with 1:01 remaining pushed the Lakers' lead to 79--73.

As the clock ticked down on the 83--79 win, every Laker stood except Jackson. Finally, he rose and ambled toward midcourt, exchanging a few embraces. Usually when a coach wins a title he can't get an inch of personal space. But the 64-year-old Jackson stood alone for a solid 10 seconds, staring into the upper bowl, savoring what he had wrought. He recognizes, even after 11 of these things, that each one could be his last. Jackson has said that he'll decide this week whether to return to the Lakers. "I think this is it," Chelsea says. "I think he's done now."

Really, what is the difference between 11 championships and 12, between three threepeats and a fourth? Jackson eclipsed Red Auerbach's record of nine titles last year. He could walk away on his two artificial hips and his bum left knee and be thankful the damage from a career spent in the gym was not worse. This seems like the time, with his contract up and owner Jerry Buss threatening to slice his $12 million salary.

"If you asked me last February if I was going to continue to coach, I'd have given you a long look and said, 'Probably not.'" Those were Jackson's words, to this magazine, more than 14 years ago, before his second threepeat with the Bulls. He claimed then that he would retire within two seasons, and go off to another career, possibly in politics. Growing up, he assumed he would be a minister. Friends in college pegged him for a philosophy professor.

"From his countenance," says Paul Pederson, Jackson's close friend and former teammate at North Dakota, "you'd never know how competitive he really is." How his assistants find his dress shirts drenched with sweat even in the regular season; how it is not enough to beat Jeanie at Scrabble every time they play, he has to double her score. These are the kinds of stories people tell about Bryant and Michael Jordan, not the mild-mannered Zen Master, but there is a reason he has always been able to relate to the game's killers. If you want to get Jackson going, ask him about the time in high school that a barnstorming team of former Negro league players swung through his hometown of Williston, N.D., and he hit a double off Satchel Paige. That will lead to a demonstration of how he blocked a shot by Wilt Chamberlain as a rookie with the Knicks.

When Jackson left the Lakers after the 2003--04 season, he rode his motorcycle through Australia and Fiji, gave speeches to CEOs and pondered how he would spend the next phase of his life. "Nothing else appealed to his competitive drive," says Charley Rosen, Jackson's biographer and former Albany Patroons assistant. That's why many in the Lakers' organization believe he will be on the bench again. When Bryant signed his three-year contract extension in April, he told Jackson, "Don't go nowhere." Kobe reiterated that sentiment last Thursday after winning his fifth title with Jackson. "I'm reticent to use this analysis," Jackson says, "but you talk to guys who come back from the war and they miss being in the war. They go back and reenlist because they miss that total immersion of life."