Life on the Run by Bill Bradley

became well known throughout Montana during their seven years of constant travel. Once, it is said, Betty Funk, the blond, blue-eyed proselytizer, even performed a miracle on a boy born without eyes.
    When Joe Jackson met Betty Funk, they fell in love and married. Phil Jackson was their third child. The Jacksons were a ministerial couple “living for the Lord.” Their first parish was in Haver, Montana, followed by churches in towns of the Northwest such as Hamilton, Anaconda, Miles City, Great Falls, Williston, and Fairfield. Betty preached Sunday night. Joe preached Sunday morning and took care of the church finances. “My father was compassionate and thorough,” Phil says. “My mother was competitive and brilliant—a prophetic evangelist who dealt with the books of the Bible like Revelations and Isaiah and the concept of the world’s end. Every Sunday since I was born the apocalypse has been coming next year. My parents saw it as their job to get everyone ready.”
    Phil didn’t see a doctor until he was six, and he did not receive a penicillin shot until age fourteen. When he was injured, the first act, in accordance with Biblical tradition, was the laying on of hands and the rubbing on of olive oil. Other than eyewash, Mercurochrome, and band-aids, the only treatments for illness were the herbal remedies of the old West. For example, a staph infection was treated by a poultice of old bread crusts, onion, oatmeal, and milk wrapped in a hot towel. Every fall for one week each Jackson child had to take a cold preventative made of sulphur, honey, and deer lard.
    At age sixteen, when Phil stood six feet five inches, he abandoned his first love, baseball, and chose basketball as his favorite sport. He acquired keys to the Williston, North Dakota, town armory. Alone, he sneaked past the stage that stood at one end of the hall to the tile basketball court, where for hours he worked on his hook shot.
    Phil’s high school team became known statewide. Their nearest opponent was a hundred and twenty miles away and some games involved round-trip journeys of six hundred miles. The team traveled in the cars of the coach and assistant coach, driving along Highway 2 through the butte country and the Badlands of North Dakota. Slowly, they crossed into the north central part of the state, where the land became flat, and grazing land gave way to farms and trees. The high school gyms held 1,500, with bleachers on the stage. At many games, fans stood three deep along the sidelines and under the basket. Outside, the temperature was ten degrees below, and the wind made it feel like forty below. If the windows had to be opened to cool the crowd, condensation formed on the playing surface and occasionally it froze, leaving a thin layer of ice on the court. Win or lose, the memory of a game passed quickly, for the team spent most nights of away games in the motels of North Dakota. One might feel down about losing, but sleeping four players to a room, two to a bed, made any prolonged depression difficult.
    Jackson’s style as a player developed in accordance with his build, which reminds me of a clothes hanger turned upside down. Tall and thin, with long arms (42-inch sleeve), he seemed to be off balance constantly. When he ran or jumped or shot he seemed to be caroming off unseen opponents, able to right himself with just enough time to make the necessary move. It was as if his arms served as separate sides of a scale which never achieved equilibrium but constantly fluctuated from side to side. He surprised big men by his defensive skills and made them feel they were being guarded by a man with three sets of arms. He shot his hook with great accuracy while coming across the middle. In high school he led his team to a second-place finish one year and a first the next in the North Dakota State Schoolboy Tournament. A center from a rival school surpassed Phil in individual statistics, but together they were easily the two best players ever