Jackson to Get a New Hip

By Mike Bresnahan

Sept. 30, 2006 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

The Lakers will assemble for training camp Tuesday without a familiar and important piece.

Coach Phil Jackson will undergo surgery to replace his right hip Tuesday and will be away from the sidelines indefinitely. Lakers officials declined to give a specific timetable for his return, but a team spokesman said Jackson would be back in time for the season opener Oct. 31 against Phoenix.

Kurt Rambis, who is entering his ninth season as a Lakers assistant, will temporarily take charge.

Jackson, 61, was not available for comment. He is scheduled to talk to the media Monday.

Jackson, who played 12 seasons with the New York Knicks as a rough-hewn forward, has walked with a limp for years. He felt he would have trouble coaching this season unless he underwent surgery, a team official said.

“It was something that got progressively worse,” Lakers spokesman John Black said. “He was hopeful it would get better. He simply can’t function. He has a hard time sitting in a chair.

“There were things that were making it clear to him that it would be impossible to go through a season. He was hoping it wouldn’t come to surgery by doing therapy and what not. As of a week ago, it came clear to him that he would have to have it done.”

The procedure will be performed by Lawrence Dorr at the Centinela Freeman Regional Medical Center in Inglewood. Jackson is expected to be released from the hospital a day after the surgery. Most hip-replacement patients are able to walk with the help of a cane or crutches within a week or two of their procedures and return to work within a month or two.

Jackson, who is starting the second year of a three-year, $30-million contract, has chronic pain in his back and hips. He often takes anti-inflammatory medication and sits on a specially designed chair on the Lakers bench that props him up an extra six or seven inches during games.

During practices, he sits on giant rubber workout balls to rest his back and sometimes uses an electric scooter to maneuver around the court. He often works on his sore spots after practice with Lakers athletic performance coordinator Alex McKechnie.

Jackson has acknowledged that stress, fatigue and sleepless nights in unfamiliar hotel beds exacerbate the toll that 12 seasons as an NBA player take on the body. The start of last season was “real tough,” Jackson said in February.

“It’s like getting back on the bicycle and riding, but you don’t know how stiff you’re going to be after you start riding,” he added. “It was physically difficult.”

Rambis, a close friend of Jackson’s, went 24-13 as the Lakers’ interim coach after taking over 12 games into the strike-shortened 1998-99 season. He tied an NBA record at the time by winning his first nine games.

“We’ve already talked as a coaching staff about what we’d like to accomplish the first few days of training camp,” Rambis said. “There’s enough guys on the team that have run the offense for a year or longer. It’s a matter of getting our guys to understand what we’d like them to do defensively, getting guys re-acclimated with the offense and teaching the new guys the offense.”

Although Lakers officials downplayed the similarity, Jackson’s decision to have surgery before the regular season was reminiscent of Shaquille O’Neal’s decision to have surgery on an arthritic big toe in September 2002. O’Neal drew the wrath of Lakers fans, and the organization, when he said he waited so long to have surgery because he sustained the injury while playing for the Lakers.

“Since I suffered the injury on company time, why shouldn’t I also be able to get surgery and do recovery on company time?” O’Neal said.

O’Neal missed the first 12 games of the season and was criticized for the Lakers’ slow start that ultimately saw the end of their three-championship run.

On Friday, Black declined to discuss any parallels between O’Neal and Jackson.

“It’s irrelevant,” Black said. “They’re two completely different situations.”

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