Address him as Dr. Phil

Whatever darkness lurks inside Phil Jackson is difficult to see. The Lakers’ coach, who has guided teams to nine championships in Los Angeles and Chicago, is a strong believer in light and reason, as evidenced by his new-age spiritualism. He meditates. He studies the teachings of Eastern religions and Native American cultures. He sounds a call to team meetings by chanting and drumming, and waves smoke in the air to dispel unwanted spirits.

Even after hard losses, Jackson projects an air of calm – a level gaze and a steady baritone voice that candidly assesses his team’s failings. With his formidable presence – he is a former player himself – and gray hair, glasses and trim mustache, he has a look befitting his nickname, “The Zen Master.”

Yet there are clues that the rigors of coaching are becoming too much in today’s NBA, a league dominated by multimillionaire athletes who have the will and political pull to challenge any coach’s authority. At 58, with one of the winningest resumes in all of professional sports, Jackson openly hints of retirement – and might not have a choice about returning to the Lakers. His five-year, $30-million contract is running out, and negotiations to extend it were put on hold in February, a sign, some insiders think, that management might discard Jackson in an effort to retain Kobe Bryant. Even with the Lakers one victory away from reaching the Western Conference finals, it’s been a season marred by internal feuding and the cloud of a pending sexual-assault trial against Bryant. Jackson has commented only obliquely about the strains, saying he cannot remember a year like it, but there is a gathering sense that he is unlikely to be back. His suddenly shaky tenure provides an unusual window on leadership in the modern age – and the forces that undermine a coach’s ability to impose discipline and mold a cohesive group.

“What happens a lot of times is that your superstars don’t fall in line with the coach,” said Rick Fox, a Laker co-captain who has played 13 years in the league. “They’ll go to the general manager, they’ll go to the owner. They’ll say, ‘You know what? I’m not playing for this guy.’ You know who goes? The coach. The coach gets fired.”

It is almost a humdrum occurrence. All 15 teams in the NBA’s Eastern Conference have fired or replaced their coaches at least once since last season ended, and in two years there have been 24 coaching changes in a league of 29 franchises.

Jackson’s elite status has kept him above the carnage, but the challenge of coaching the Lakers has forced changes in how he deals with athletes. He has had to bend his high idealism. He is not the authoritarian taskmaster he was in Chicago, where he guided Michael Jordan’s Bulls to six NBA titles in the 1990s. Jackson listens more now. He tolerates a Lakers team that seems to coast through parts of a season, believing it can “turn it on” during the playoffs, as it has in the last three games against the San Antonio Spurs.

Part of those changes have come from Jackson’s adoption of “positive coaching” philosophies, and his conviction that his teams need to be physically fresh late in the year. But he also has had to tailor his methods to his two temperamental stars, Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal – perhaps the single telling difference between his handling of the Bulls and the Lakers.

Jordan, as strong-willed as anyone, nonetheless saw the merit of Jackson’s schemes. The Bulls’ other superstar, Scottie Pippen, accepted it because Jordan did, and their teammates got in line.

“It took Phil a year or two to convince Michael to buy into that triangle offense, but once he did the rest is history,” said Laker forward Horace Grant, who played for those Chicago teams. “It was all about Michael being our leader. If he had bumped heads with Phil, we’d have probably been a little more insubordinate. But Michael respected Phil, and it just carried over to the team.”

Grant is one of many who suspect that someone less accomplished and self-assured than Jackson might not have lasted through this Laker season. “I think 70 percent of the other coaches in the league would have folded by (now) with the different personalities, with Shaq and Kobe and the things they’ve gone through over their careers with each other,” Grant said earlier this spring.

Amid their personal bickering, neither Bryant nor O’Neal commands the full following of their teammates, and Jackson concedes he has had to tread carefully to avoid wholesale rebellion.

“It is a very tricky thing,” he said at his office overlooking the Lakers’ practice court in El Segundo, during a March winning streak. “You can’t be direct. You have to be subtle. Some people take direct criticism as a weapon.” His diplomacy had just been evident in dealing with O’Neal. The 7-foot-1, 340-pound center – the fourth-leading scorer, by average, in NBA history, at about 27 points per game – had finished practice, flopped onto a training table and held a goofy-looking, stare-at-the-ceiling interview session in which he told a crowd of reporters that he was content to be primarily a defender and rebounder. The comments were startling from someone who had complained about not getting enough shots, and the media quickly sought Jackson’s comment.

Smiling, Jackson avoided seizing upon the pronouncements as a sudden about-face in O’Neal’s approach to basketball. He also took pains to convey that he was responding to O’Neal’s statements, not suggesting that O’Neal should concentrate on defense and rebounding.

“If that came out in the paper and Shaq saw it, he’d say, I’m the fourth-leading scorer in the NBA … ‘ ” Jackson explained later, as if anticipating the backlash. “That’s terrific if he feels that way, because we’ve had disagreements or arguments about this in the past. I’ve often said, ‘You can see yourself as a total player; you don’t have to see yourself as a scorer.’

“He sees himself as a scorer.”

To learn to better communicate with his athletes, Jackson has studied the science of how they respond. He found that one player in Chicago could absorb his lessons only when Jackson put a hand on his arm or shoulder.

“I had another guy on my team that, I couldn’t tell him anything,” Jackson said. “I had to tell him to tell himself, because if I told him he resisted it. … They have different receptors, a different ability to be receptive to the spoken word. Some of them can’t even pull in (verbal instructions); they need a visual, or they need a demonstrative act. I do a lot of that through videotape.”

In dealing with this season’s recurring crises, Jackson meets with Mitch Kupchak, the Lakers’ general manager, whose office is next door. They decide whether an issue is serious enough to talk to the player, a step that might have its own repercussions, because of the egos involved.

“You can’t force anything,” Kupchak said. “Making a decision not to do anything today is a proactive decision. We talk everything through. Sometimes our decision is not to do anything this week let’s handle it a week from now. Or let’s see how it plays out.”

Jackson uses a psychologist, George Mumford, who was with him in Chicago, and he enlists a willing young player to be a “whipping boy” at practice, so he can yell without offending his big stars. He calls it a “cheap practice” that many coaches employ. Grant and Toni Kukoc filled the role in Chicago; Devean George and Slava Medvedenko now take the brunt of Jackson’s instruction in Los Angeles.

During intrasquad scrimmages, Jackson prowls the practice floor in baggy sweats, a whistle dangling from his neck. Amid the screech of sneakers on hardwood, he conducts a staccato critique: “Better rotate on that, Karl, all right? … Chase the ball, Slava! … Good, you got back to basics there. It didn’t work, and you went back to basics.”

Born in Deer Lodge, Mont., the fourth child of two Pentecostal ministers, Jackson grew up without a television in a zealous religious environment of “fire-and-brimstone” sermons and people who spoke in tongues. He was forbidden from drinking, smoking, dancing or going to movies. Those influences never quite disappeared, despite an ever-expanding worldliness.

At the University of North Dakota and afterward, he studied religion, philosophy and psychology, and during his journeyman career – he was mostly a backup forward for the New York Knicks and New Jersey Nets – he explored other realms, as well. He smoked, he drank, he dated women, he rode motorcycles, he grew his hair long. He called his own 1975 memoir “Maverick,” but it was not nearly so well-received as his 1995 examination of the game and his early years in Chicago, “Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior.”

In a narrative spiced with Zen musings and proverbs (“It is not the same to talk of bulls as to be in the bullring”), he reflected about basketball and life from a clearly more evolved perspective. A recent ESPN profile called him a “6-foot-8 shaman.”

“You can sit down for an entire dinner with Phil and not talk about basketball once,” said Joel Meyers, the Lakers’ radio play-by-play announcer.

When Jackson left the Bulls, after the 1997-98 season, he took a year off and spent part of it meditating at a Zen Buddhist monastery. He broke up with his second wife, June, before coming to Los Angeles, and has been involved with Jeanie Buss, the Lakers’ 42-year-old executive vice president. She is the daughter of team owner Jerry Buss and admits to feeling uncomfortable as Lakers management now tries to assess the team’s priorities.

“He’s the most competitive person I’ve ever met, to the point where, when we play Scrabble … not only does he have to beat me, but he has to double my score,” she said.

Jackson’s long hours meditating are an attempt to release that inner pressure. Otherwise, he thinks about basketball constantly.

Last season, he was treated for kidney stones and felled by fatigue and chest pains during the playoffs – the result of a blocked coronary artery that required an emergency angioplasty. Jackson missed Game 4 of the series with the Spurs because of it, but was back on the bench to see San Antonio end the run of three consecutive championships.

“Last year almost killed him,” Jeanie Buss said. “I could see if he decided not to continue being a coach in the NBA, because it’s a lot of wear and tear – the traveling, not eating right, not getting a chance to exercise, the stress, the expectation, the pressure.

“I don’t know how he deals with some of the stuff he has to deal with.”

Chicago Tribune columnist Sam Smith, who chronicled the ascendant Bulls in his book, “The Jordan Rules,” disagrees with the critics who say Jackson has won only because of the superstars playing for him. Jordan never won until Jackson took over in Chicago, and Bryant and O’Neal floundered under previous regimes in Los Angeles.

“I think he’s the best coach ever in basketball,” Smith said.

If Jackson leaves, he added, the Lakers probably will stop winning – and Smith expects the drought to begin soon.

“You sense that whole thing is going to be broken up,” he said. “It’s like they’ve run their course – just like the Bulls. It was over, and everybody knew it was over.”