My plan was to write a portrait of Phil Jackson after basketball: to capture the full mundanity of his post-N.B.A. existence. It became clear very quickly, however, that such a thing was impossible. There is no Phil Jackson after basketball. Our first meeting was at his favorite diner, an unpretentious, inexpensive place decorated with framed jigsaw puzzles of Norman Rockwell paintings. We chatted for a while about upstate New York, where Jackson used to live, and the rumors about his current job prospects, but before long he was giving me detailed scouting reports of current N.B.A. players, then borrowing my pen so he could diagram a play on his place mat. At our second meal, at the little cafe attached to the upscale grocery store, I asked Jackson — innocently enough, I thought — how the N.B.A. has evolved since he first joined it as a player 46 years ago. He started unfolding his napkin to draw another diagram — whereupon I stopped him, went out to my car and brought back a stack of fresh paper. I expected him to sketch maybe three or four representative schemes: the motion offense of his 1970s Knicks, the running game of the 1980s Showtime Lakers, his 1990s Bulls’ signature triangle offense, the screen-roll plays popular today. Instead, Jackson spent more than an hour and a half drawing, in great and sometimes bewildering detail, what turned out to be more than 20 sketches — a mess of circles and arrows and hash marks that represented, no doubt, an infinitesimal fraction of his total basketball knowledge. He worked, the whole time, with the joyful absorption of someone solving a particularly excellent crossword puzzle. The drawings included the offensive sets of some of his biggest rivals — Jerry Sloan’s Jazz, Rick Adelman’s Kings, Mike D’Antoni’s Suns — as well as such novelties as the Horst Pinholster Pinwheel Offense, an elegant but obscure remnant of the 1950s in which everyone without the ball is sucked into a continuous vortex of motion. Jackson taught me how to get Shaquille O’Neal open in the post when the defense wants to double-team him. He drew Michael Jordan’s final two plays against the Jazz in 1998, including the iconic jump shot that won the Bulls their sixth trophy. In response to a sloppy playoff game he saw on TV the night before, Jackson showed me how to eliminate the possibility of a turnover on an inbounds pass.

This educational sketching went on for so long that the woman at the next table assumed that I was a coach myself, probably a Lakers assistant studying at the feet of the master. “Sounds like you learned a lot,” she said, after Jackson ambled away to use the bathroom. Before I could correct her, she offered up the twin babies sitting in high chairs at her table as future Laker girls.

All the rumors about Phil Jackson, and all the rumors that will inevitably replace those rumors, are consequences of one large and indisputable fact: almost every professional basketball team in the world would be happy to hire him, right this second, in almost any capacity he would like — coach, general manager, equipment manager, backup power forward. Jackson has a particular talent for stepping in where others have failed, imposing his personality and shamanistic enthusiasms, and transforming already-good teams into champions. His new book is called “Eleven Rings,” after the number of titles he has won as a coach — the most by anyone. (The title omits the two rings he won in the 1970s as a scrappy role player for the New York Knicks.) Even if Jackson never returned to basketball, he would still go down as one of the greatest winners in sports history.

But Jackson will almost certainly return to basketball. One of his other great talents is coming out of retirement. He quit for the first time in 1987, when he stepped down as coach of the Albany Patroons, of the Continental Basketball Association, and decided to go to graduate school. Before he could enroll, however, the Chicago Bulls called. He went there as an assistant and eventually, as the head coach, led Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen to six championships. After that historic run, Jackson quit again, only to join the Lakers a year later, where he led Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal to three titles in a row. In 2004, after the Lakers lost in the finals, just before Shaq left for Miami, Jackson found himself suddenly out of a job. (He had tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the team to keep Shaq.) This time, as if to show that he was really done, he published a tell-all book called “The Last Season.” But that, too, turned out not to be his last season. Although the book portrayed Bryant as a petulant villain, Jackson reunited with him one year later, and together they won two more championships. The next year they were blown out of the playoffs and Jackson retired again, this time presumably for good.

Image Jackson through the ages: at North Dakota in 1967; with the Knicks in 1968; embracing Michael Jordan after title No. 6 with the Bulls in 1998; and as a Laker with Kobe Bryant in 2004. Credit... From second from top: Larry Morris/The New York Times; Walter Looss Jr./Sports Illustrated/Getty Images; Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE/Getty Images.

Except, of course, probably not.

After we talked for a while, I told Jackson that it was hard to imagine him not returning to basketball in some capacity.

“Can you think of anything else for me to do?” he asked.

I told him I couldn’t; basketball seemed too deeply ingrained.