For 1,042 days, from 2011 to 2014, Phil Jackson was an unemployed basketball legend, living by the beach in Playa del Rey, California. With no players to coach, and no championships to chase, he channeled his energy into other interests.
"I would come home from work, and he'd be reading cookbooks," Jeanie Buss, the Los Angeles Lakers president, said of Jackson, her fiance. "He became fascinated with the chemical [reaction], like how food plays off each other and the different ways that you prepared food, whether it's in the oven or over a fire.