Free Life on the Run by Bill Bradley Page B

am smaller than the Chicago forward I play against so I try to overplay him. He takes me low, near the basket, and simply shoots over me. I draw three quick fouls. I also miss four open jump shots. Holzman replaces me with Phil Jackson, the Knicks’ third forward, who at 6′7″ and with extremely long arms, is a better defender.
    Phil envelops opponents. His specialty is the “double team” in which, flailing his arms, he drives the man with the ball toward one of the corners, preferably where the half-court line meets the out-of-bounds line. Once there, a second defender leaves his man and plugs the only outlet, thus trapping the man with the ball. A bad pass or a steal often results. When Phil makes his move, you can see panic on the face of an inexperienced player. Generating pressure and threatening contact are at the core of Phil’s defensive game.
    John Jackson, a shipbuilder from Bristol, England, came to America in the 1660s with his brother, Jay. They settled in what is now Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the family practiced its trade until the American Revolution. At that point John’s grandson sided with the English and, as a loyal Tory, chose to leave the newly formed United States of America. King George III of England deeded 50,000 acres to him on the Ottawa River in Pembroke, Ontario. There, the offspring of John Jackson farmed the fertile river valley soil, and intermarried with neighboring O’Briens and Clemonses. To this day, Joe Jackson, Jr., Phil’s older brother, retains the deed to the Jackson home in Portsmouth which they held throughout their years in Canada. It has been preserved as the oldest frame house in the state.
    Joe Jackson, Phil’s father, is part of the John Jackson branch of the family. He quit school in Ontario at fourteen and worked on the farm, which, after generations of split inheritances, had dwindled to 200 acres. Winters, he traveled north to the lumber camps at Hudson Bay, where he labored first as a cook’s assistant and later as a lumberjack. He devoted more and more time to his work as a lay preacher in the Lutheran Church. He married and had one girl. During a second pregnancy, both mother and child died. Simultaneously, the Great Depression hit the farm, bankrupting him. Mr. Jackson took these events as signs from God. He headed west to become a lay preacher in Montana. There he met an evangelist named Elizabeth Funk.
    She was the daughter of Peter Funk, who came to Montana from Weyruth, Saskatchewan, when strong anti-German sentiment during World War I had forced him and his family to leave. Mr. Funk set up a stable and boarding house business for Indians at Wolfpoint, Montana. He worked as a wrangler of wild horses. After breaking them he would sell them to individuals for riding or to the U.S. Army for meat. “My gramps was out to make his fortune,” says Phil, “which he never did. It was a tough land to make money in.”
    Elizabeth Funk was valedictorian of her high school class and captain of the girls’ basketball team. She received a teacher’s certificate and worked in a one-room schoolhouse for two years. At 22 she went to a Pentecostal seminary in Winnipeg, Manitoba. After leaving there, she joined her brother Peter and sister Nell, and formed a team of traveling evangelists. Nell would later become a missionary in China, be placed in a concentration camp by the Japanese, and, after World War II, teach on rooftop schools in Hong Kong, but now she was busy telling the people of Montana about Pentecostalism. The procedure for the Funk family was the same in every prairie town. They stood on street corners playing the accordion, proclaiming the imminent arrival of Christ, and asking people to come to a service that night. In the upper room they had rented for the occasion, they sang. They played the piano, the guitar, the accordion; they encouraged the “spirit of the Lord” to move among the congregation. Sometimes they spoke in tongues. The Funks