Before he was thought as the Zen master of coaches, Phil Jackson was one tough S.O.B. He was, like all of us, largely the product of his experience. One of his high school coaches was a hard-driving Iwo Jima Marine. His college coach at Dakota, Bill Fitch, believed practice should be a survival exercise. His first job as an NBA assistant coach was under Kevin Loughery, who never met a play or player he couldn't break down.

The rugged ethic of Chicago, where Jackson took over the Bulls in 1988, only reinforced his beliefs.

	Phil Jackson says he has nine championship rings because he can get more from his players through positive coaching.

"I mean, the reality was that Bobby Knight was camped on one side of the town and Mike Ditka was camped on the other side and both were held in esteem by people of the town," Jackson says now. "You know, 'If daddy says no and you do yes, I'm going to get the big stick and whack you.' "

Jackson even pre-selected certain targets for abuse, based on little more than his need to vent. In Chicago, he and assistant Johnny Bach decided that one of those players would be Horace Grant, the millionaire power forward who always wanted to be a Marine.

"Horace, what are you?" Bach would say to Grant.

"I'm a good soldier, Johnny."

"What does that mean to you?"

"It means I can take anything you dish out and go back to war."

"That's good, Horace," Bach said. "If Coach Jackson here wanted to make you an example in front of your teammates, how would you feel about that?"

"I'd still go about my business. I'd still work harder than anybody else."

Guess what. Sports aren't war.

One could argue sports are the inverse of war. They are so genetically incompatible that, as institutions of human behavior, sports leagues typically atrophy during times of military conflict, as happened in World War II. War drains not just capital from the industry of sports, but relevance, for sports at its core is a full-body exercise in civilization, a mandate to subdue one's opponent through physical and mental force -- without killing them. War is, of course, body bags.

Still, that sense of mortal urgency infuses the coaching ranks, from the pros down to the high school level. Coaches who never spent a day in (military) uniform often talk to their players in ways that would get them fired if they were math teachers working with students, or middle managers handling employees. The rules of regular society are suspended, like the civil rights laws of a nation during wartime, because ... what, lives are at stake?

	Heat coach Pat Riley doesn't look like he's practicing the Positive Coaching Philosophy with referee Michael Smith.

"I scream like crazy," Pat Riley said recently. "I scream. I scream at officials and I scream at my players."

The story of the coach who whips his players into champions with oral lashings is beyond cliché. It's the accepted standard. Bobby Knight, the General, may have his critics, but he still has a job -- and more than 800 wins. And those critics don't usually include other college coaches, many of whom, like Duke's Mike Kryzewski, defend Knight's in-your-face methods as common, even proper.

When analyzing the success of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Super Bowl media dutifully noted the first word that snarlin' Jon Gruden uttered to his new team last year was an expletive. Gruden, as history will reflect, injected some fire into a talented team that needed some discipline, taking it to heights that could not be reached under alleged softie Tony Dungy.

Nevermind the capriciousness of it all. There's a good chance no one writes that story if Warren Sapp or another key player gets injured and is lost for the season.

And nevermind that players transfer out of Knight's program with regularity.

"There are some individuals who are so mentally tough that they can excel regardless of the kind of coaching they get," said Jim Thompson, founder of the Positive Coaching Alliance. "But I think the sports world is littered with people who had great potential but got into a relationship with a coach that was just negative, so they got down on themselves and never reached that potential."

Given the prevailing ethic, Thompson may as well be a revolutionary. The Ché Guevara - or Thomas Paine, depending on your perspective -- of the coaching community, defined as it is by the ghosts of such icons as Vince Lombardi and Red Auerbach.

They said it

Rick Pitino Louisville coach "I don't know if it's 5-to-1, if that's the number. ... I do believe young people today need a building of self-esteem. But you can't confuse criticizing with coaching. A lot of young people today think, 'You're criticizing me.' 'No, I'm not. I'm coaching you, telling you what you're doing wrong, what you need to get better.' " Jerry Sloan Utah Jazz coach "I wouldn't rate very well in that I don't think because basketball is a game of mistakes and if you're going to allow people to continue to make mistakes over and over again, and compliment them on it, I think you'd suffer trouble, in coaching. I think they'd come out there on the floor and it'd just be a bunch of mashed potatoes trying to play. Phil Jackson Los Angeles Lakers coach "To win championships, you have to develop something that's beyond just having great talent. You have to have chemistry. And when players and coaches really resound with each other, respond to each other, that's when you win championships." Roy Williams Kansas coach "It's a lot easier to do when you have Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Shaq and Kobe, you know that kind of thing. I don't know that the guy that coaches at Cleveland, Toronto, someplace like that, can win nine championships just because he's more positive with them. I do believe in being more positive, there's no question, but I think that's over-simplifying." Kirk Hinrich Kansas guard "That's a great number. I think a lot of times player's confidence can be shaken. I think it's kind of his job as a coach to try to make sure his players have as much confidence as possible. But on the other hand, if you're not performing, the coach sometimes has to get after you." Rick Barnes Texas coach "If I could go back and change some things that I did years ago, it would be to (be more supportive of) some players. But I think the worst thing a coach can do is let a player live a lie, and not be honest. We know what negative means, but being brutally honest, I don't think is being negative." T.J. Ford Texas guard "You gotta have criticism. I have to respect my coach a lot because even though people say that I am one of the top-ranked point guards in the country, my coach doesn't look at it that way. Because there's times when you feel you're too good, and you just settle." Errick Craven USC guard "I don't think anybody plays better with fear because they're always looking behind their back. Basketball is an instinctive game and if you play with a coach (on) your back you always gotta look at him if you make a mistake. You're not going to play well."

That's because his organization preaches the gospel of praise, a concept seen as downright wimpy by some coaches. Specifically, the PCA, a growing non-profit organization based out of Stanford University, encourages coaches to offer their teams a "Magic Ratio" of five times as many supportive comments -- or non-verbal gestures -- as critical remarks.

"If the gas tank of your car is empty you can't drive very far," Thompson said, using an analogy out of the PCA training manual. "If your emotional tank is empty, you're not going to play your best. So we teach coaches how to fill emotional tanks. And it's called the 'Magic Ratio' because when coaches, teachers and parents get close to that ratio of 5 positives to 1 criticism, great things happen. Kids perform in ways they didn't ever think they could."

Thompson's organization, which has trained 25,000 coaches since 1998, is focused on changing the culture of youth and high school sports, where few of the nation's four million coaches have had any formal training in how to motivate players. But sports at the lower levels do not operate in a vacuum, as many coaches take their cues from coaches they watch on TV.

"Even when you go to some of the youth rec leagues and you're watching bitty ball -- bitty basketball! -- you have these youth coaches that are screaming and hollering and going crazy," said Rhea Taylor, a high school basketball coach in Santa Monica, Calif. "It's like 'Wow, they obviously got that from someone else.' "

Taylor played in college at "pre-Steve Nash" Santa Clara under Dick Davey. Then an assistant, now the head coach, Davey is known for his intensity. Taylor believes Davey made him a better player, so he brought those methods with him to New Roads High school when he became coach at the small, private school three years ago.

He threw locker room tirades. Whipped the water bottle around. Hit a blackboard, nearly breaking his hand. Ordered his players into a lineup format and, like a drill sergeant, went down the line with unvarnished critiques of each player.

His teams were bad. He made matters worse.

"The main reason people play basketball is because it's fun -- it's a game," said Matt Landes, a 6-foot-6 center and frequent target of Taylor's abuse. "And when you're getting yelled at like if you killed someone, I don't know how much fun it is."

With considerable skepticism, Taylor, at the urging of his athletic director, attended a PCA training session before last season where he learned about the "Magic Ratio."

"I thought it was impossible," Taylor said, a wry smile coming over his long face. "I thought it was a great concept. I listened to it, I took it in, but I thought, 'How in the world am I possibly going to find five positives for every correction or criticism?' " He still considers it a largely impossible ideal, "but that doesn't mean that I'm going to give up or stop trying, because I have seen the benefits of being positive with them."

This year, New Roads made the playoffs for the first time in five years, winning 17 games, up from six last season. It's a veteran team, but to a man, the players say their improved play is due to the changed style of Taylor, who is no less intense but now works harder to create an environment in which players are open to suggestions for improvement.

Instead of telling players what they did wrong, he's more apt to ask them -- forcing them to think, not just absorb. He mixes his criticism with compliments. He tries to avoid lecturing players at the moment they messed up, when they often already know how they goofed. And where possible, he tries to deliver his more challenging messages in private, away from teammates and fans.

Taylor even developed what the PCA calls a "mistake ritual" to encourage players not to dwell on errors, and get their heads back into the game.

"Brush it off," Taylor says, brushing his shoulder after making eye contact with Landes, who had just put up an air ball for a free throw during a late-season game.

Common sense stuff to some. But to others, a recipe for anarchy.

"I'm old school," Henry Bibby declares. "I'm a little tougher than that."

Bibby is the men's basketball coach at USC. He's led the Trojans to the NCAA Tournament three times since his arrival in 1996, not bad for a football school. If he's bruised the feelings of some players along the way, he says, it's only because he loves them.

	USC coach Henry Bibby, right, didn't need the Positive Coaching philosophy to lead the Trojans and Sam Clancy to the Elite Eight of the 2001 NCAA Tournament.

"At this stage, you're looking at kids 18 and 19 years old so I try to go back to the times when I was 18 or 19 years old, and something that was important to me was fear," he says. "I had a fear factor of authority, I had a fear factor of not being successful. And I kind of coach that way at times.

"I try to shape and mold the young men into the reality of the world. And there are not five positive things that you can get when you go out into the world. You're going to get more negative things."

Kansas coach Roy Williams is similarly dismissive of the "Magic Ratio."

"I don't think you can take five guys who can't play and tell them how pretty they are and how great they are and (expect to) win just because of that," Williams said. "If that's the case, we won't ever lose another game because I'll make it more than 5-to-1. I'll make it 25-to-1."

Or why not, say, 1000-to-0? Thompson gets that all the time.

"Again, we're not at all anti-criticism," he says. "Kids do need criticism. But criticism tends to be tank-draining."

A former business school lecturer at Stanford, Thompson says he got the idea of the Magic Ratio from a previous boss at an Oregon energy company who actually charted his comments to subordinates. He later found academic foundation for the theory in a University of Washington study of couples, in which researchers found a correlation between the 5-to-1 ratio and successful marriages. The further from that mark, the more likely they were to divorce.

The link between feedback styles and won-loss records in sports has largely gone unstudied, said Wade Gilbert, a Fresno State professor who has compiled a bibliography on coaching studies. But he said several studies in youth sports confirm that athletes who play for "positive" coaches are more likely to enjoy the experience, and more likely to continue playing -- no insignificant consideration when, nationally, 70 percent of kids quit sports before the age of 13.

One of the few studies that examined the interactions of college coaches was done on John Wooden, during the 1974-75 season. UCLA researchers charted the comments made by the legendary coach during practices, grouping the remarks into general categories. As with most coaches at that level, pure instruction was his bread and butter -- 50.3 percent of his behaviors. He was notably spare with his praise, but also his criticisms, each at 7 percent.

"There is no scientific evidence to support a 'criticism'(-heavy) coaching style," Gilbert said.

Phil Jackson no longer needs convincing.

The Lakers coach became the PCA's national spokesman last year after winning his ninth NBA title. He is not paid by the group.

"Everyone's got to coach within their own personality, make no mistake about it," Jackson says. "But I think we don't need to have that militaristic image ahead of us to think that's the style we have to have as coaches. That's not the only style that wins."

	Horace Grant won three NBA titles while playing for Jackson in Chicago, then reunited with his coach in Los Angeles to win another in 2001.

Jackson learned about Thompson's tools a year after taking over the Bulls, when he read a manuscript for his book, "Positive Coaching: Builing Character and Self-Esteem Through Sports," that had been passed to him by former NBA player Rich Kelly. That was about the same time that Horace Grant began to tire of his coach's frequent, cutting remarks. Apparently, even good soldiers have their limits when the enemy's no more menacing than the New York Knicks.

The notion of the "Magic Ratio," Jackson believes, helped him better manage his relationship with Grant and other players, and win championships.

"As a professional coach where it's your job to do this (for a living), as opposed to (coaching) a kid who's an amateur at a junior high or teenage level, I thought if I could screw it up to 3-to-1 or just 1-to-1, I'd be doing a really good job just to balance out the positive with the critical," he says. "Because these guys are very, very good."

He knows what you're thinking. Anyone could win with Kobe and Shaq, Michael and Scottie. But he also knows what he knows.

"Deep within the NBA heart, there are still some insecurities where they still need to have a lot of compliments about how much they mean to the team, how their energy is important, how much they're doing for us, and what they can do better," Jackson said.

Sometimes it's just a matter of knowing when not to say something. This season, the Lakers started slowly. Even smart, reasonable veterans like Brian Shaw wanted Jackson to get tougher with the team. But Jackson suppressed the urge to hammer his players, who now appear headed to the playoffs again.

Kobe Bryant, who has been on fire lately, shares the credit for the team's turnaround with Jackson for his artful handling of the crisis.

"It's almost like the force," Bryant said. "He's like a Jedi and he can sense his way through things, and that's had a major impact. I mean, you don't know what could have happened if he would have pushed the panic button. Maybe we would have gone the opposite direction. Who knows? But the fact that he stepped back and let us work through it has paid off."

Some coaches might call Jackson's approach soft.

Thompson calls it a paradigm for the future, especially at the youth and high school level.

"This stuff works," he says.

Tom Farrey is a senior writer with ESPN.com. He can be reached at tom.farrey@espn3.com.