“Welcome home, coach. Welcome home to Montana.”

And with that introduction from Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, Flathead Valley’s famous resident, Phil Jackson, stood up slowly and walked to the podium in the Whitefish Performing Arts Center on Sunday amid a standing ovation.

The gray-haired, 6-foot-8 coaching legend, after another long journey from the bright lights and big city of Los Angeles, has made his way back to the place he calls home.

“This is really the place where I’ve always been it seems like,” he told an audience that included governors from across the West.

“My first memories at 4 and 5 years of age are on the Middle Fork of the Flathead River.”

The 64-year-old Montana native and part-time Lakeside resident gave the keynote speech at the 100th annual Western Governors’ Association meeting.

Never one to fly during the offseasons, Jackson met his two sons Thursday and drove the highways north toward the Flathead on a two-day pilgrimage of sorts that he makes every summer “to recharge.”

Back among the backdrop of Glacier National Park and the shine of Flathead Lake, Jackson reminisced about his love for the western land where he grew up with a poetic sentiment that John Steinbeck and Norman Maclean would appreciate.

“As a child I can remember the first fish I caught at 7 years of age was on that Middle Fork of the Flathead River with a bamboo pole, chasing down a rainbow trout trying to get him in the pool and to take that worm I had on the end of that hook,” he said. “The memories I have of that particular spot are that space, the mountain that’s behind it called Tea Kettle, the trains that ran across the face of that mountain, and the times that I skipped rocks across that river to see how many I could get and if I could get across that river skipping a rock.”

After winning his record 11th NBA championship as a coach earlier this month, Jackson has been entangled in the news lately regarding his plans to either retire from coaching or return to the Los Angeles Lakers and make a run at winning a third-straight NBA title. Jackson, who has retired twice before, has said his decision to return hinges on his health.

On Sunday, he perhaps dropped a hint of which direction he’s leaning when he remarked at the number of titles he’s won, clarifying the exact number.

“Actually I have a couple more rings as a player, so 13 I guess is the natural number, which is a hard number to stop at when you think about it,” he said before smiling. The crowd burst into applause.

Jackson won two championships as a player for the New York Knicks, in 1970 and 1973. He has won more rings than any other NBA coach, winning six titles with the Chicago Bulls from 1989 to 1998 and five with the Los Angeles Lakers from 2000 to 2010.

But it wasn’t about basketball on Sunday. With a horseshoe table of influential men and women surrounding him, including New Mexico governor and former presidential candidate Bill Richardson and Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, Jackson emphasized the importance of preserving “The Last Best Place.”

“I want my children’s children to have the same experience that they’ve had on Flathead Lake, in this world, in this western life that we have that we so graciously think we are entitled to,” Jackson said. “We call this place ‘The Last Best Place on Earth,’ but we don’t know how long it’s going to last. It’s changed so much in my lifetime, I’m a little bit afraid of what it’s going to be like for my children’s children.”

Known for his Eastern philosophy beliefs, Jackson voiced his support for funding locally driven organizations and taking a heartfelt look at the environment.

“Things beyond our control are changing our environment, but we have to make the changes that can help it along,” he said. “Somewhere the people that are in power have to see that it’s not what we are doing now that’s going to change the way our life is. We’re global but we have to start thinking local, don’t we?

“Our government has to take away the money from corporate farming and put it back into the local,” he added. “We have to be able to feed ourselves here, not have to go and have all these headquarters that are shipping food out to places.”

Philip Douglas Jackson was born Sept. 17, 1945, in Deer Lodge. His father Charles was a minister and traveled across the state in the 1950s with the family in tow.

“He was a man who believed in moving from church to church,” Jackson said. “He never spent any time in one place too long. He felt his message ran dry.”

The Jacksons moved to North Dakota when Phil was 12. Growing up, Jackson’s parents didn’t allow television in the home, even though there wasn’t reception for it anyhow in small Williston. He read books and, among other things, played basketball, which eventually led to a 14-year professional playing career after graduating from the University of North Dakota.

There was always a road to be traveled for Jackson but somehow he always ended back in the same place, the place he held fondly in his mind and heart, the Flathead Valley.

Jackson “chased the Western states” first in a van and then on a motorcycle in the early ’70s and ended up at the West Shore Campground south of Kalispell.

“I thought, you know this is a great spot here,” he said.

“I bought this property [in Lakeside] and I’ve been coming back for almost 40 years. It was my idea that as I raised a family that my children should know what the West was like, what it meant to me, what it meant to be out of a metropolitan area and what it meant to be part of the land.

“I felt that you had to be there, you had to be on the ground.”

After retiring from playing, Jackson tried his hand in business and opened a sporting recreation company in Kalispell. But with the difficult economy in the ’80s, Jackson’s hopes were diminished, and he took a small summer coaching job in the Continental Basketball Association in Puerto Rico.

Eventually he bought the lot next to his in Lakeside for his parents to live on, which further established his Flathead roots.

After becoming a coach in the NBA, Jackson used his offseason summers to return to Lakeside as a way to get back to those roots.

“This has been a recharging thing for me over the years,” Jackson told reporters after his keynote address. “I think it’s totally what’s been able to sustain the energy I’ve had for the coming years to come up here, grow a beard, let my hair down and sit around and not have to do anything, not have to put a suit on, not put a tie on, a choking tie, and just enjoy life.

“It’s a connected world, and one of the great things about living up here is cutting it off and disconnecting from all those things.”

Jackson read one of his son Benjamin’s poems about Glacier Park and ended his keynote address with a segment from W.H. Auden’s poem “Vespers.”

Several times he touched on the idea of coming to appreciate the land and its natural beauty.

“Stop and look at what’s here and what about this nature that’s so fragile and yet so harsh and so beautiful,” said Jackson, who was nicknamed the “Zen Master” for bringing Buddhist and Eastern philosophies into his coaching regime.

His “spiritual journey” he said, runs through Montana — always has.

“There were times where you would stop and get off the bike, take your helmet off and sit and wonder,” he said. “This is what this part of the country means to me.”

Reporter Dillon Tabish can be reached at 758-4463 or by e-mail at dtabish@dailyinterlake.com.