With all the attention Phil Jackson has received since Sunday for his comment about Stephen Curry on Twitter, it is worth recalling how he first announced his participation in the world of social media.
On March 27, 2013, a year before becoming president of the New York Knicks, Jackson sent out a succinct tweet, the first he had ever issued: “11 champ;ipnsikp[ ringhs,” it read.
The message elated the masses on Twitter, where slip-ups and miscues are gobbled up like manna from heaven and where every opportunity to belittle is pounced upon. The message, which has been retweeted more than 27,000 times, was spread around for its apparent folly.
But it was too good to be true. The typos, it turned out, were a shrewd marketing prank. The following afternoon, Jackson sent out his second Twitter message, which included a link to a video that purported to show the real reason he made the typing errors: He was wearing championship rings on all his fingers.
Over that 24-hour span, Jackson, who had a new book and content partnership with AOL to promote at the time, displayed subtle mastery over a medium that has perplexed many others. Yet he has never quite shown that digital dexterity again. Instead, he has appeared like that character from his first tweet, a person believably capable of typing “11 champ;ipnsikp[ ringhs” in earnest.
Jackson’s latest perceived howler occurred the morning after Curry produced one of the most remarkable individual performances of the season — a 46-point outing in the Golden State Warriors’ victory over the Oklahoma City Thunder on Saturday night, with his winning shot in overtime spurring widespread, hyperbolic praise. Jackson compared Curry to Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, who had a solid but unspectacular NBA career in the 1990s.
“Never seen anything like SCurry?” Jackson wrote. “Remind you of Chris Jackson/ Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, who had a short but brilliant run in NBA?”
The answer to Jackson’s question, for most people, was no. Curry has reached a rarefied air where he can do no wrong in the eyes of many fans and where any controversies he has inspired — is it possible that he celebrates too much? — might have seemed halfhearted or contrived.
So Jackson’s tweet, even if it seemed to contain kernels of truth, inspired countless jokes, insults, serious rebuttals and news stories. It became his second-most disseminated Twitter communiqué, shared more than 3,500 times. The next day, he felt the need to defend himself.
“How does commenting on Rauf mean I’m comparing him to Curry?” Jackson wrote. “Remind, yes, quick release, cross over, Yep, MVP, nope. Get a grip!”
Jackson, 70, has written eight books. During his coaching days, he gave handpicked tomes to his players as gifts. He is a voracious reader who studies Buddhism.
Yet it is clear that Twitter is not his optimal communication channel. He is a Zen koan guy fumbling around in a 140-character world.
Jackson has rarely chosen to engage the news media this season (and did not comment for this article), and his Twitter posts have had an outsize weight in shaping his image. The New York Post ran a column this week responding to his tweets titled, “What the Hell Is Phil Jackson Thinking?”
Laura Olin, who handled social media strategy for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, said Twitter could be a powerful image-shaping tool. She described how Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., raised his national profile a few years ago, when he was the mayor of Newark, simply by being, in her words, “good at Twitter.”
“For someone who’s already established, the best use for that person might be image polishing and management,” Olin said. “Usually, people of that level of that influence and power tend to have people who do the stuff for them.”
Jackson has done his own tweeting with mixed results. In May, he raised eyebrows during the playoffs when he posted an apparent criticism of the Warriors’ 3-point-centric playing style, writing, “NBA analysts give me some diagnostics on how 3pt oriented teams are faring this playoffs... seriously, how’s it goink?”
The Warriors went on to win the title, subjecting Jackson to further ridicule online. The Internet has a long memory, and to this day people invoke that typo — or some variation — when talking about Jackson or messaging him on Twitter.
It makes sense, then, that Olin’s simplest advice to clients — besides “don’t be boring” — is to spell words correctly.
“For people in professional life, I really think that, basically, sound grammar and spelling matter,” Olin said. “I’m thinking of a couple accounts, people in influential positions; their images are different now because they seemed insane on Twitter.”
She mentioned Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, whose sometimes nonsensical tweets — one, about hitting a deer on the highway, has particularly endured as a work of poetic nonsense — perplexed and enchanted onlookers and, more important, affected the way he was perceived in real life. Jackson’s biography on his Twitter page looks askew because there is a space missing between a word and a comma. He once posed the question “Do NBA know a travel call?”
These are minor miscues. But little things like this matter, Olin said. “It’s a fundamental part of being an adult online,” she said.
Jackson has a huge reach on Twitter, with 898,000 followers. He follows 63 accounts. For all the attention he gets for his stumbles on Twitter, the majority of his messages are banal and unremarkable.
He posts selfies with friends. He denounced the nickname of Washington’s NFL franchise (suggesting, as an alternative, the Whigs). He mourned the death of the poet Seamus Heaney. He questioned the historical accuracy of costume design in “Inside Llewyn Davis,” which he called a “mighty good film in all.”
Working against Jackson is the notion that the speed of social media and its sometimes-inscrutable vernacular suit the young. One could perceive symbolism in the fact that Jackson once retweeted an excerpt from a Paris Review interview with the French author Michel Houellebecq, in which Houellebecq mused about society’s unspoken “hatred for old people” and asserted humanity was “trapped in a world of kids.”
According to an analysis last year by the Pew Research Center, 30 percent of online adults under 50 used Twitter. Of online adults 50 and over, only 11 percent were Twitter users. And for those 65 and up, the figure fell to 6 percent.
But any anxiety within the Knicks’ fan base over Jackson’s dispatches on Twitter seems to have little to do with the image of a septuagenarian fumbling over technology, misusing a medium and thus failing to express himself. The distress seems rooted more in the idea that the medium might actually be conveying precisely what he thinks and feels about Curry, about 3-point shooting and about whatever else in the realm of basketball.
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