WBRS Sports Blog

I'm sure the Zen Master thought he was being pretty clever when he deviously had his team's bus driver take the Lakers team on a 45-minute tour of Washington D.C., rather than just going straight to the Verizon Center for their planned Saturday morning shoot around. But it seems that the tour didn't quite have the effect Jackson had desired as the team was pretty exhausted from arriving in the nation's capital at 3 AM that morning...

"This was the first time we've ever done anything like that," center Andrew Bynum said. "I was kind of asleep."

Jackson goofed again when he kept the tour a secret from everyone except himself and the bus driver. As a result there was no available tour leader on board to narrate and educate the players on what exactly they were seeing (most for the first time) and well the tour appears to have somewhat fallen apart...

The team bus driver wasn't much of a talker as he passed the Capitol and the Washington and Lincoln memorials.

"Our bus driver couldn't narrate," Jackson said, "because he isn't licensed."

But not even the great Zen Master could salvage the tour...

The driver offered Jackson the microphone, but the coach demurred.

"Just tell them what the five-sided building is," Jackson told him as they passed the Pentagon.

That must have been 45 minutes of pain for those tired Lakers. Maybe they should have asked Wizard Gilbert Arenas to give a tour of his city. That would be a fun tour. That tour would have been "Hibachi"!