Feud Processors

So much for the hype. It took only a week of camp for the furor over Phil Jackson’s return to coach Kobe Bryant to die away. The problem wasn’t that the Lakers kept insisting that they were fine, because they’d said that before ...

Is it only two falls since Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal exchanged shots, and newly arrived Gary Payton said that everyone was blowing it out of proportion, and newly arrived Karl Malone rumbled ominously that it was definitely over -- “Trust me” -- before Bryant sent Jim Gray out to call O’Neal fat and unprofessional?

Those were the days, my friends, but they’re over. This time, everyone said the right thing and then came ... nothing. Not so much as an eye roll.

Unbeknownst to a breathless media, the feud ended months ago. Jackson thought Bryant would demand some kind of accounting for calling him “uncoachable,” but the first time they saw each other after Jackson was hired, Bryant hugged him. They never had the talk, and Jackson isn’t planning one.

For the Lakers, the good news is, it’s not like it was. Of course, that’s the bad news too.

Bryant and Jackson aren’t likely to feud, or come anywhere near a title. With O’Neal, the three of them teetered constantly on the brink of dysfunction ... into the Finals for four of their five seasons together.

The present configuration is an alliance, not a triangle -- and isn’t expected back in the Finals for four or five seasons, if then.

Jerry Buss may believe they’re playoff-bound, but then, he’s merely the owner. “He said that?” said Jackson, smiling. “Wow, we didn’t talk about that.”

This is the netherworld between the Lakers’ last dynasty and their next one, assuming there is a next one, and it’s only a year since O’Neal left.

It was five years from Magic Johnson’s 1991 retirement to the arrival of O’Neal and Bryant in 1996. If you date the end of Showtime from their last title in 1988 and the start of their next dynasty as the 2000 title in Jackson’s first season, it took 12 years.

Nevertheless, the sky isn’t falling. It already has fallen. That was last season despite a giddy optimism that was more like a mass delusion and, with courtside seats at $2,000 and Rudy Tomjanovich at $30 million, an expensive one.

The organization now has a discernible plan, and Buss has decreed the necessary policy -- no commitments past 2007 to save cap space -- to execute it. It’s a very long-range plan, but it’s remarkable that they’re even this far along.

A year ago Jackson had had it with Bryant, thinking he had cost him his job. Bryant had had it with Jackson for turning on him and kicking off a league-wide pile-on.

Buss was gambling his franchise on Bryant, which made Jackson as useful as a termite and a tad pricey, besides, at his asking price of $25 million for two seasons.

Buss, whose first move as owner in 1979 had been to draft Johnson and decree the first Showtime, had just decreed another. Jackson wasn’t thinking about coaching again, much less here, even if he was asked -- which he couldn’t be because Buss was committed to Tomjanovich at $6 million a year through the 2008-09 season.

Now, they’re back together. It’s not quite a rebirth yet, but it is a little miracle all its own.

Nice Knowing You, Your Holiness

Jackson, who arrived as if escorted by angels in 1999, left without fanfare five years later, which was a surprise to all concerned except Buss, who decreed that too.

Jackson hadn’t expected to last the five years on his contract. Indeed, by Year 3 he was hanging on with back and heart issues, wondering aloud each spring if his players (read: Shaq and Kobe) were tired of listening to him.

By Jackson’s last season, he wasn’t sure he wanted to stay or that there would be anything to stay for. With Bryant roiling in disgrace and lashing out, Jackson gave the Lakers his me-or-Kobe ultimatum, but that was nothing new.

For all his Yoda-like sense of assurance, Jackson has a hard time making decisions, even agonizing to the bitter end in Chicago. Instead, he prefers to pose difficult demands and let events deliver him to his destiny.

Amazingly, his Lakers, who were like a bad day in divorce court with teammates pointing fingers at Bryant after his passive day in Sacramento and Bryant railing at the entire group, rallied to reach the Finals before injuries, age and the Detroit Pistons ambushed them.

Had the Lakers won, Buss might have brought everyone back. After they fell, with everyone exhausted from years of diva behavior and long-term commitments at hand worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Buss decided this had lasted as long as it could.

Jackson went to see Buss, expecting to talk about whether he wanted to stay. Instead, Jackson got 10 minutes in which Buss, who was wrapping up loose ends before his annual trip to Italy, politely thanked him for his contributions.

Jackson had never expected to coach after leaving the Lakers, but then, he thought that leaving would be up to him. Reserved and even shy, cast into retirement at 59, he found he missed having something to do that involved him with other people.

As fate would have it, he would soon be looking at his choice of jobs: New York, Cleveland, Sacramento, Denver, just to name the teams that actually called.

Incredibly, the Lakers joined the list when Tomjanovich bolted Feb. 2. Jackson’s name was on every Laker fan’s lips -- assuming that he was willing to return to the team in its new estate. Jackson was not a builder of champions. What he was, as longtime assistant Frank Hamblen put it, was “the greatest closer in NBA history.”

Of course, if Jackson would forgo his old standards, he was the answer to the Lakers’ prayers. They already were starting to save cap space for the summer of 2007, but that was only the second part of a two-part problem.

The first was the immediate future. If they crashed and burned after O’Neal left, Bryant would be blamed, teammates might turn on him and he wouldn’t be too happy with them. It might not be long before he wanted out and the organization was ready to accommodate him.

Sure enough, they had crashed and burned after O’Neal left and teammates had turned on Bryant.

Nevertheless, it had been only a year since Buss had convinced himself that Jackson had become stale on the job. Besides, Buss had no inclination whatsoever to pay a coach $10 million with no chance of winning a title.

Larry Brown, Bryant’s favored candidate, had been a non-starter for the same reason. “Dr. Buss won’t pay that kind of money if he knows he can’t win a title,” a team official said.

So began the twilight courtship, with fans and Jeanie Buss praying for Jackson’s return while Jeanie’s dad tried to think of something else. Clipper Coach Mike Dunleavy’s name even came up, but he was under contract for two more seasons. When Jackson sat in Buss’ box at a game against Houston on April 7, he said that Buss talked to him for two minutes.

Buss was similarly cavalier in scheduling a postseason meeting, which drove Jackson’s people, sitting by their phones, crazy.

If Jackson had needed to be recruited, it wouldn’t have happened, but he wanted badly to coach and to coach the Lakers. Jackson has distinct comfort levels and is drawn to places he has been and people he knows. In five years he had gone from bemused detachment to being at home on the beach in Playa del Rey and happy in a relationship with Jeanie.

Finally it became clear to Jeanie’s father that nothing else would fly. Laker fans were so dismayed, General Manager Mitch Kupchak was sent out to hold a town meeting for season-ticket holders, during which one asked him to resign. Renewals were down even after Jackson was hired; before that, the pace of renewals had to have been even more alarming.

Even at $30 million for three seasons, Jackson’s mere presence works for the Lakers. The question is how they work for him.

He’s not likely to return them to greatness in three seasons. With ’07 free agents Yao Ming and Amare Stoudemire re-signing, they may have to wait until 2008 -- when Jackson’s deal runs out. He may have to last that long to see his No. 1 draft choice, prep center Andrew Bynum, start.

However, Jackson is enjoying it. Before the first exhibition in Staples Center, he reprised his “asterisk” jibe for the San Antonio Spurs’ title in the lockout-shortened 1998-99 season, sounding as if he had been saving up for the year he was gone. If anyone had asked, he might have reprised “red-necked, semi-civilized barbarians” for Sacramento and “plastic city” for Orlando.

Don’t lose that sense of humor.

The Golden Child as 10-Year Man

Bryant was grown up enough to play a man’s game at 17 but an innocent otherwise. If people said, “Don’t ever change,” no one was guaranteed to change more.

At 27, he’s marketed as a new, edgier Kobe. Nike, which signed him to a $40-million deal just before his arrest, finally put out a signature shoe last summer with a stark ad that suggested the struggle Bryant now faces against perceptions that he’s “selfish ... not a leader ... uncoachable ... outcast ... ball hog ... garbage ... cold ... mental.”

With partners like that, maybe he’d be better off out of the marketplace?

If Bryant’s 2003 arrest, which preceded his being charged with sexual assault, tarnished his image, he actually finished the 2003-04 season at the pinnacle of his NBA career. The postseason was a triumph in which the Lakers became his team as O’Neal faded and Bryant turned in one dramatic performance after another in the epic second-round series against the Spurs, requiring intravenous fluids after Derek Fisher’s shot won Game 5.

It continued through Game 2 of the Finals, the only one the Lakers won, after Bryant squeezed off that long three-pointer in Richard Hamilton’s face at the end of regulation to send it into overtime.

However, Brown, the Piston coach, was getting by with one defender on O’Neal with everyone else helping on Bryant. Bryant turned mortal, and the Lakers as the world had known them perished.

To quote Rafiki in “The Lion King,” it was time. Bryant was thinking about going to the Clippers. O’Neal was so upset, a Laker source said he questioned Bryant’s effort in the Finals, suspecting Kobe didn’t mind losing because he knew Shaq would take the fall. Jackson was hurt at being shown the door and singled out Bryant as the Laker problem in his book.

Bryant didn’t know it, but when he re-signed, he also signed up to take the blame for the breakup. In fact, Bryant had been ready to go but so had Jackson and O’Neal.

Nevertheless, Bryant was still seen around the league as the old Kobe, headstrong but great. It was the events of the 2004-05 season that would undo his reputation within the league.

Jackson’s book came out in the off-season. That was followed by the leak of the tape that Eagle, Colo., police had secretly made, with Bryant saying that O’Neal had had similar problems with women alleging sexual assaults.

In real life, a scared young man might say anything to the police, assuming that no one could possibly hear of it. However, in a league in which Al Pacino’s “Scarface” character Tony Montana is a cult hero, it was seen as a wanton betrayal of the code.

O’Neal knew about it, having been informed by police when they asked to talk to him. However, when it became public a year later, he blasted Bryant.

Feeling the pressure build, frantic to make his new team work, Bryant jumped all over Seattle’s Ray Allen in the exhibition opener. Bryant didn’t mean anything by it, hugging Allen afterward, but Allen went back to Seattle and ripped him too.

Then in December, Bryant acknowledged the argument with Karl Malone over Malone’s attentions to Bryant’s wife, Vanessa, which ended the possibility that Malone would rejoin the team. In the spring, with the Lakers in free fall, Chucky Atkins fingered Bryant (“the GM”), then claimed the press had misrepresented him.

A year before Bryant had participated in the selection process for the new coach. Now he was out of the loop; management didn’t ask if he wanted Brown or didn’t want Jackson.

Bryant’s coolness suggested he didn’t want Jackson, but it didn’t take long to figure out it could work for him. With Bryant’s image tied to his team’s fortunes and without a great supporting cast, a great coach came in handy.

Bryant’s old poise has returned. He’ll never be the same and he didn’t trust many people before his misadventure, but his anger no longer shows. Back to his old stand-up persona, he says the right things and may even believe them, or come to believe them.

“Do I hold any hard feelings?” he said when asked about Jackson. “None whatsoever. None whatsoever. You forgive and move on. We’re all human beings; who am I to sit up here and judge somebody? Life is too short to sit around and hold grudges. It doesn’t make any sense to do it.

“I matured a great deal. Two, three years ago, would I have had the same response? Probably not. But you know, you kind of just grow, kind of take your bumps and bruises as you get older, you realize that life is too short to be holding grudges and I don’t hold any whatsoever.”

At 27, going into his 10th season, he has had enough triumphs and falls for a lifetime but there was never one like his, or a franchise like this. That much remains the same.