Sacred Hoops_Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior

by Phil Jackson

  That wasn’t surprising. After all, Michael only practiced with the team four times before his first game on March 19, and once he was back in action, his teammates had to compete with the rest of the world for his attention. Everywhere he went, he was surrounded by a squadron of bodyguards and “a personal entourage,” who formed a cocoon around him that was difficult to penetrate. In the past Michael sometimes invited friends along on road trips to keep him company and fend off intrusive fans. But now he had the retinue of a small potentate, and when he entered a room, a sea of onlookers gathered around. After a game in Orlando, Toni Kukoc found himself trailing behind the Jordan caravan as it headed from the stadium to the parking lot. Reporters were buzzing around Michael, not even noticing that Toni was there. Parodying Jordan, Kukoc announced to the air, “I’m not giving any interviews.”

  The first game—at Market Square Arena in Indianapolis—was a three-ring circus, which was broadcast worldwide and attracted the largest TV audience of any regular season NBA game in history. Larry Brown captured the mood perfectly, declaring, “The Beatles and Elvis are back.” There were so many cameramen on the floor during warmups, vying for position near Michael, the only thing the other players could do was get out of the way. At one point, observing a TV crew taking footage of Michael’s famed Nikes, Corie Blount said, “Now they’re interviewing his shoes.”

  To shake things up, I considered starting Pete Myers at shooting guard instead of Michael, and, in retrospect, I probably should have. Michael’s shooting rhythm was off that day: he went 7 for 28 from the field and scored only 19 points in a 103–96 overtime loss. But it wasn’t long before he found his stroke. The next weekend he hit a 16-foot jumper to beat Atlanta at the buzzer, then three days later scored 55 points—the highest total in a game to that point in the season—to lead the Bulls past the Knicks at Madison Square Garden. There could be no doubt in anyone’s mind that the “real” Michael Jordan was back.

  THE SOUL OF TEAMWORK

  But there were glitches that bothered me. Many of the players seemed listless and confused when Michael was on the floor. This reminded me of the way the team played when I first joined the Bulls as an assistant coach in 1987. That year Michael had an unprecedented season, winning every honor imaginable, including Most Valuable Player, All-NBA first team, Defensive Player of the Year, All-Star Game MVP, and even Slam Dunk champion, but the members of his “supporting cast,” as he called it, were so enthralled by what he could do with a basketball that they never learned to work with him successfully.

  After the Knicks game, Michael asked to see me in my office.

  “I’ve decided to quit,” he said straightfaced. “What else can I do?”

  I made a face.

  “No, I’m just kidding,” he said, breaking into a smile. But you’ve got to tell the players they can’t expect me to do what I did in New York every night. In our next game I want them to get up and going—to play as a team.”

  I flashed back to 1989 when I took over as head coach and had talked to Michael about how I wanted him to share the spotlight with his teammates so the team could grow and flourish. In those days he was a gifted young athlete with enormous confidence in his own abilities who had to be cajoled into making sacrifices for the team. Now he was an older, wiser player who understood that it wasn’t brilliant individual performances that made great teams, but the energy that’s unleashed when players put their egos aside and work toward a common goal.

  Good teams become great ones when the members trust each other enough to surrender the “me” for the “we.” This is the lesson Michael and his teammates learned en route to winning three consecutive NBA championships. As Bill Cartwright puts it: “A great basketball team will have trust. I’ve seen teams in this league where the players won’t pass to a guy because they don’t think he is going to catch the ball. But a great basketball team will throw the ball to everyone. If a guy drops it or bobbles it out of bounds, the next time they’ll throw it to him again. And because of their confidence in him, he will have confidence. That’s how you grow.”

  When I was starting out, I, too—like the young, brash Jordan—thought I could conquer the world with the force of my ego, even though my jump shot needed some work. Back then I would have scoffed at anyone who suggested that selflessness and compassion were the secrets to success. Those were qualities that counted in church, not muscling under the boards with Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. But after searching long and hard for meaning everywhere else, I discovered that the game itself operated according to laws far more profound than anything that might be found in a coach’s playbook. Inside the lines of the court, the mystery of life gets played out night after night.

  The first glimpse I had of this came, surprisingly, not on a basketball court, but on a pitcher’s mound in Williston, North Dakota.

  Two

  A JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND MILES STARTS WITH ONE BREATH

  For the raindrop, joy is entering the river.

  —GHALIB

  First I heard a pop, then I felt searing pain in my shoulder, and I knew I was in trouble. Is this it? I said to myself, as I walked off the mound, clutching my arm. Is this the last game I’ll ever pitch? I had been virtually untouchable—if a tad wild—that summer pitching for the Williston American Legion team, often fanning 15 or more batters a game with my blinding “80 mph” fastball. Though I had just completed my freshman year at the University of North Dakota on a basketball scholarship, I still harbored fantasies of becoming a major league pitcher. Now I had torn my shoulder, and the future looked bleak.

  My brother Joe, who was getting a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Texas, suggested self-hypnosis to get my rhythm back once the injury had healed. The very idea seemed like blasphemy because of my fundamentalist religious training. I was wary of giving up control of my mind, even if it was just an experiment. But my brother, who had been raised in the same tradition, found a way to break down my resistance. Eventually my shoulder improved, and the night before my return game, I agreed to let Joe show me some auto-suggestion techniques, which, in my case, involved repeating phrases such as “I will be relaxed” or “I won’t throw too hard,” to reprogram my subconscious.

  The next day I pitched one of my best games ever. Normally I tried to overpower hitters with my heater, but the more determined I was to blow the ball by a batter, the more reckless I would become, giving up almost as many walks as strikeouts. This time, however, I didn’t try to force anything—I focused on the act of throwing the ball and letting the motion flow naturally. Not only did the nagging pain in my shoulder miraculously disappear, but I also experienced something new for me—near perfect control. This was my introduction to the hidden power of the mind and what I could accomplish if I could turn down the chattering in my head and simply trust my body’s innate wisdom.

  THE BATTLEGROUND OF THE MIND

  For me, this was a radical idea. It flew in the face of everything I had been taught as a child about the nature of the mind. I was trained to keep my mind busy at all times, filling it with passages from the Bible to prevent evil thoughts from creeping in. When I was four, my mother hung a large brown paper sign in my bedroom with a quotation from John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.” From then on I started being concerned with keeping the faith so that I, too, could find eternal life. My mother truly believed that an idle mind was the devil’s playground. She gave me hundreds of quotations from the King James Bible to memorize, to keep me armed and ready for the trials and temptations of life. Words and more words—they never stopped.

  My mother, Elisabeth, is as passionate about spirituality as anyone I’ve ever met. She got her calling to become an evangelist when she was a teenager living on a small farm in eastern Montana. One day in the late 1920s, a Pentecostal preacher came to town and won her over. As one of six children from a poor family of German Me
nnonite homesteaders who had emigrated to Montana from Canada during World War I, she found the idea of being saved by Christ very appealing. After finishing high school, she became a country schoolteacher and then went to Winnipeg Bible College to prepare for her ministry. She traveled all over Montana spreading the Pentecostal message and forming new congregations. She had a voluminous memory and loved to argue theology with anyone foolish enough to take her on. For her, the Bible was a prophetic book, the Word of God, and it predicted that time was running out. The world was headed toward chaos and the Antichrist. It was the midnight hour.

  My father, Charles, was a warm, compassionate man with a view of life based on a literal translation of the King James version of the Bible. Once a runaway pickup truck smashed into his car and sent him flying through a window, breaking his arm and putting him in traction for six weeks. The driver of the truck, which was unlicensed, uninsured, and brakeless, was stunned when my father didn’t sue. But it didn’t surprise any of us. As far as Dad was concerned, litigation was out of the question. It wasn’t the Christian thing to do.

  Dad was a man of God, pure and simple. He did everything by the Book, and expected me and my brothers, Charles and Joe, to do the same. When we broke one of his many rules, my father would dispense justice swiftly, usually with his razor strap in the cellar of the parsonage. I can remember getting hit only once, and Dad broke into tears while he was doing it. But Joe was not so lucky. He was the rebel in the family. The two of them were always at odds. Once when Joe was ten, he gave my father a Bronx cheer in front of the church after being scolded for some minor indiscretion. Even though he was dressed in a business suit and freshly laundered white shirt, Dad chased Joe down with the rage of Moses, circling the church several times until he caught him. A handful of parishioners looked on, dumbfounded.

  My father’s first wife died from complications during pregnancy with her second child. Not long afterwards he reconnected with my mother, whom he had met at Bible college, and moved from Ontario with his daughter, Joan, to get married. He was the first member of the Jackson clan to settle in the United States since before the Revolutionary War, when our ancestors, who were English loyalists, had emigrated to Canada. Together, my parents formed a powerful team, working for humble wages at various parishes in Montana and North Dakota. My father was the pastor, making home visitations and delivering sermons on Sundays, while my mother taught Bible classes, played the organ, and gave fire-and-brimstone talks in the evening.

  Our lives were dictated by the rhythms of church life. In fact, in my first four years, we actually lived in the basement of the church until the parish could afford a parsonage. Sundays were devoted almost entirely to church activities, and we also had to attend services on Wednesday and Friday evenings. Some weeks we’d spend up to twenty hours in the pews, trying to sit perfectly still under the hawklike gaze of Mom and Dad. The rules in our house were strict. We didn’t have a TV, and we were discouraged from going to movies and listening to rock and roll, not to mention experimenting with smoking, drinking, or sex. The point was to be not just an average Christian, but an exceptional one, so when the “end of times” came, we would be chosen. We were taught to believe that the apocalyptic vision in the Book of Revelations was about to be fulfilled any minute, and if we weren’t prepared, we’d be left out when Christ returned and gathered up his saints. As a little boy I was terrified of being excluded from the “rapture of saints,” as it was called, and losing my parents. One day my mother wasn’t home when I returned from school and I got so frightened the rapture had started without me that I ran all over town looking for her. I was shaking when I finally tracked her down at a local radio station, taping a religious program with my dad.

  That fear made me a devoted student of the Bible, and my parents had high hopes that I might someday join the ministry. But in my teens, my faith was shaken. The heart of Pentecostal religion is being able to experience the presence of the Holy Spirit physically. This involves “speaking in tongues,” a form of ecstatic, highly emotional discourse that sounds like gibberish to the untrained ear. As a boy I had seen thousands “give utterance,” as it was called, including my brothers, though I later learned that Joe had doubts about whether his experience was the real thing. But when my turn came, around age twelve or thirteen, nothing happened. It was agonizing. I worked hard for the next two or three years, praying long hours, asking forgiveness for my sins and “tarrying for the Spirit” after services. Still nothing. It began to make me skeptical. Why were some people able to do it so easily while others who were far more diligent—namely me—were left speechless? Were all those people making it up? Was it a manufactured experience?

  By the time I was fifteen, I realized that, for whatever reason, it wasn’t going to happen for me. I began ducking out early at services. My mother didn’t hide her disappointment.

  “Phil, I noticed you skipped the prayer service,” she would say. “You know you’ve really got to tarry if you want to find the Holy Spirit.”

  “Well, Mom, I don’t know if it’s for me.”

  “Don’t say that, Phil. You hurt my spirit when you say things like that. It’s for everybody.”

  What could I do? The act of being filled by the Holy Spirit was the central tenet of the Pentecostal faith; it was what separated our sect from other Protestant denominations. I felt like a failure, and yet I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. Was it my sinful nature? If so, I didn’t feel like a sinner. Was it my lack of faith? Perhaps, but I was no less committed than my brothers. So rather than reject the faith outright, I avoided the issue. I dodged services and started working on my jump shot.

  MY SAVIOR: BASKETBALL

  Fortunately, I had an outlet for my energy in which success came easily—basketball. I was 6'6" in high school—and would grow to 6'8" in college—with square shoulders and arms so long I could sit in the back seat of a car and open both front doors at the same time. My classmates poked fun at my gangling physique and nicknamed me “Bones,” but I didn’t mind because I loved the game. In 1963, my senior year, I led Williston High to the state championship, scoring 48 points in the tournament final. The next thing I knew, I was being hotly pursued by the new coach at the University of North Dakota, Bill Fitch.

  One reason for my early success was my fierce competitive drive, honed over the years by battling two older brothers at everything from checkers to one-on-one hoops. Charles and Joe, six and four years older, respectively, made fun of me when I tried to compete with them, and their laughter drove me to try even harder. No doubt I inherited some of that spirit from my mother, who was a basketball player in high school and turned every activity—ironing shirts, playing Scrabble, hiking with her Sunday school class—into an Olympic sport. For me, winning was a matter of life and death. As a kid, I often threw temper tantrums when I lost, especially if I was competing against my brothers. Losing made me feel humiliated and worthless, as if I didn’t exist. Once during a high school baseball tournament, I was called in as a reliever and pitched nearly perfect ball for several innings. But I was inconsolable when we lost, even though it was probably my best performance that year. I just sat in the dugout after the game and wept.

  My obsession with winning was often my undoing. I would push so hard to succeed when things weren’t going my way that it would hurt my performance. That’s the lesson I learned after my self-hypnosis session with Joe. I was trying to force my body to cooperate, and, when it didn’t respond, my mind became even more insistent. But on the pitcher’s mound that day I discovered that I could be effective, even overcome pain, by letting go and not thinking. It was an important turning point for me. Though I soon gave up baseball to pursue a basketball career, the feeling of freedom I experienced during that game stayed with me and made me curious about finding a way to re-create it consistently.

  That weekend Joe also introduced me to Zen Buddhism, which he had been experiencing with one of his professors at the University of Texas. His
description of Zen baffled me. How could you have a religion that didn’t involve belief in God—or at least the personalized idea of God I was familiar with? What did Zen practitioners do? Joe said they simply tried to clear their minds and be in the present. To someone raised in a Pentecostal household—where attention was focused more on the hereafter than the here and now—this was a mind-boggling concept.

  Inspired by those discussions, I signed up for a combined major of psychology, philosophy, and religion when I returned for my sophomore year at UND and began to expand my intellectual horizons. Sensing, no doubt, that I could use some worldly wisdom, coach Bill Fitch had me room with Paul Pederson, one of the stars of the team. Pederson had been raised as a Lutheran and had a healthy skepticism about institutionalized religion. He encouraged me to take a detached look at the belief system I had been spoon-fed since childhood and explore life more freely. It was a heady feeling. The sixties were in full swing, and I immersed myself in the counterculture—or at least the version that had made its way to North Dakota. I hung out with some rather dissident friends on campus and started catching up on rock and roll, Fellini movies, and other fine points of contemporary life that I’d missed out on in high school. I also began dating my first wife, Maxine, a political science major and student leader who inspired me to become more active politically. In 1967, my senior year, we got married, and had a daughter, Elizabeth.

  What appealed to me about the sixties—and what I carried away with me when it was over—was the emphasis on compassion and brotherhood, getting together and loving one another right now, to paraphrase The Youngbloods. Many people were on the same path, trying to escape from their parents’ archaic views and reinvent the world. I no longer felt so isolated from my peers. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t an outsider looking in.