Bryant, Jackson Have Ceased Hostilities

By Tim Brown

Dec. 5, 2003 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

DALLAS — The four-year association of Phil Jackson and Kobe Bryant, splattered with NBA championships and episodes of stubbornness, has changed.

Everything in Bryant’s life has; the rape accusation against him has taken all he’d touched with it.

So, it followed that Bryant might alter his game and relationships, just as Jackson might change his management style, believed to be pliable, but not pliable enough for the young or headstrong.

The Lakers’ superstar quotient rose from two to four, the drumbeat of media attention and public opinion thumped, the season arrived and, when Jackson reassessed it all, he noticed something different.

“I’ve been kind of ... difficult for Kobe,” Jackson said Thursday afternoon. “I’ve always been a person that has tried to create confidence for players. But with Kobe, we’ve been combative with each other and we’ve been challenging of each other. This year is different. I haven’t had to challenge him a lot about his game, about fitting into a team game, about incorporating his teammates. He’s been doing that. In the process, my relationship with him has a softer edge.”

For the most part, Bryant has allowed the momentum of the Big Four to carry him through the season’s first six weeks. His shots and points are down, just like everyone else’s. They began to win games with defense and attitude, some of it his, even on the days he arrives at the arena looking gray and beaten, and plays on.

Jackson’s day-to-day public analysis of Bryant is rarely pointed. When teammates barely kept their tongues after Bryant’s runaway fourth quarter in Memphis, Jackson was more forgiving. Indeed, he praised Bryant for his aggressiveness, left it there, for the group to decide.

Jackson said he’s decided there is enough judgment in Bryant’s life. “I can’t hold him to the kind of accountability I have in the past,” he said, “because everybody else is.”

While Bryant’s situation remains suffocating on some levels -- “We don’t know when it’s going to end, that’s our problem. That’s his problem,” Jackson said -- Bryant has been as steady as Jackson could have hoped.

“One thing we’ve always known about Kobe, he’s got the great ability to focus,” Jackson said. “Players that have that strength of character he shows, to put things aside and get on with basketball, the business of basketball ... that’s been put under extreme duress by his outside situation.... November rolled around, he’s played a few games, gotten with his teammates, found a solace in their camaraderie for him here.”

On Sunday night at Staples Center, Karl Malone will play against the Utah Jazz, an opponent he never figured to see. But the seasons passed, the championship never came, and sometime late last season he made up his mind to go west to the Lakers. The San Antonio Spurs tried, the Dallas Mavericks called, and on back-to-back nights he showed up in their arenas in purple.

By Thursday night, two reporters from Utah were in Dallas standing in front of Malone and asking about playing against Jerry Sloan and the Jazz for the first time. Malone admitted it would be strange, at the least.

“He’s going to want to beat us,” Malone said of Sloan, “and we sure as [heck] are going to want to beat him.”

That, eventually, would lead to the first time back in Salt Lake City.

“The way the season’s flying by,” Malone said, “Jan. 24 will be here before long.”