Sacred Hoops_Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior

by Phil Jackson

  If I was going to have any success realizing my vision for the team, I knew my first challenge was to win over Michael Jordan. He was the team leader, and the other players would follow if he went along with the program. Michael and I had a good rapport, but I wasn’t certain how he would respond to the idea of giving up the ball and taking fewer shots. Usually coaches have to coax their star to produce more; in a way, I was asking Michael to produce less. How much less, I wasn’t sure. Perhaps enough to prevent him from winning his fourth straight scoring title. Scoring champions rarely play for championship teams because during the playoffs the best teams tighten their defenses and can shut down a great shooter, as Detroit had done with Michael, by double- and triple-teaming him. The last player to win the scoring crown and a championship in the same year had been Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1971.

  Michael was more receptive than I thought he would be. Right after Labor Day we had a private meeting in my office, and I told him, “You’ve got to share the spotlight with your teammates because if you don’t, they won’t grow.”

  “Does that mean we’re going to use Tex’s equal opportunity offense?” he asked.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Well, I think we’re going to have trouble when the ball gets to certain people,” he said, “because they can’t pass and they can’t make decisions with the ball.” In particular, he was concerned about Horace Grant, who had trouble thinking on his feet, and Bill Cartwright, who was so unsure with his hands that Michael jokingly accused him of eating Butterfinger candy bars before practice.

  “I understand that,” I replied. “But I think if you give the system a chance, they’ll learn to be playmakers. The important thing is to let everybody touch the ball, so they won’t feel like spectators. You can’t beat a good defensive team with one man. It’s got to be a team effort.”

  “Okay, you know me. I’ve always been a coachable player. Whatever you want to do, I’m behind you.”

  That was it. From then on, Michael devoted himself to learning the system and finding a way to make it work for him. He was never a total convert, but he liked the fact that defenses would have a harder time double- and triple-teaming him. Once we started using the triangle offense in games, what surprised me was how much havoc Michael could create moving without the ball. Defenders couldn’t take their minds off him, as he wove his way around the floor. Just the thought that he might get the ball at any moment was enough to spook opponents into giving up easy shots.

  One of the obstacles we had to overcome was the players’ dependency on Michael. It was almost an addiction. In pressure situations, they kept looking to him to bail them out. I kept telling them that if they learned to fake to Michael and go the other way, shots would open up and it would take pressure off him to always make the big plays. Every now and then Michael would break loose and take over a game. But that didn’t bother me as long as it didn’t become a habit. I knew he needed bursts of creativity to keep from getting bored, and that his solo performances would strike terror in the hearts of our enemies, not to mention help win some key games.

  At first, Michael had doubts that the triangle offense was suitable for the pros, primarily because it took so long to learn and practice time was limited. As it was, a year and half went by before the team was entirely comfortable with it, and Michael estimates it was another two and a half years before everyone mastered its many nuances. “To this day, I still make mistakes with it,” he says. When Michael returned to the team in 1995, he had a deeper appreciation of the system. It allowed him to fit smoothly into the flow of the offense, though some of his teammates had trouble adjusting to his presence on the floor. They’d either stop in their tracks when he got the ball, expecting him to make one of his creative moves, or get so caught up in cutting to their spots they’d block his path to the basket.

  In Michael’s mind, the system is basically a three-quarter offense. “The triangle gets us to the fourth quarter,” he says. “Then it’s a whole different game.” But, he adds, thinking back to the championship team, “in the fourth quarter Bill was in the post; Scottie and I were in open court; B.J. Armstrong or Paxson was on the wing; and Horace was on the boards. With the talent and think power we had, we were able to open up the court and let one or two guys penetrate, then feed off of them. In the fourth quarter your leadership, your unity, your understanding of personnel, your fulfillment of roles—all those things come out. And I think that’s the way we won.”

  I wouldn’t disagree with him. In fact, that was part of my vision, for the players to expand the strategy and make it their own. The system was the starting point. Without it, they would never have developed the “think power” Michael talks about or learned to create something as a group that transcended the limits of their own singular imaginations.

  BUILDING CONSENSUS

  Another important step I took to consolidate the team was to name Cartwright cocaptain. I had played against Bill in the late seventies and knew he had natural leadership abilities. Jordan was a good on-court leader and handled the media skillfully, but I sensed that Bill would be a better leader in the locker room, helping players cope with frustration and disappointment. He was a master at listening without judgment. An NBA team is a highly charged environment, and players are always grumbling about something, no matter how compassionate the coach is or how well the team is doing. Bill was adept at deflecting that anger by giving his teammates a chance to air their complaints. When Cartwright was starting out with the Knicks, he injured his foot and was so depressed he came close to quitting. But veteran Louis Orr listened patiently, then persuaded him to stick it out. Bill had never forgotten that lesson.

  Naming Cartwright cocaptain made the team less Jordan-centric. Bill and Michael weren’t best friends. In fact, Michael wasn’t convinced, at first, that trading Charles Oakley, his best friend on the team, for Cartwright was such a smart idea. But Bill wasn’t intimidated by Jordan and, in his low-key, dignified way, he showed the younger players that they didn’t have to kowtow to Michael all the time. Jordan changed his opinion of Bill when he saw how strong he was on defense. Cartwright wasn’t afraid to put his 7'1", 245-lb. body on the line, day in and day out, no matter how injured he was or who he was guarding. Once I ran a drill in practice that pitted the guards against the centers. When Michael went one-on-one against Cartwright, Bill had such a fierce look in his eyes a silence fell over the room. Cartwright bumped Michael as he went up and sent him flying horizontally through the air. It was a chilling experience for Jordan, even though Bill cushioned his fall. Needless to say, I didn’t use that drill again that year.

  We call Bill the “Protector” because he is our last line of defense. Other players could take chances going for steals and blocking shots because they could count on Cartwright to cover for them and keep them from being embarrassed. “If a guy beat me,” said Jordan, “he knew he’d have to get by Bill to reach the basket. So more than likely he’d pull back and try to make a jump shot. When that’s in the back of your mind, it really helps your defense.”

  At thirty-two, Bill was the oldest player on the team, and his soft whispery voice and salt-and-pepper goatee gave him a quiet professorial demeanor. The players nicknamed him Teach and marveled at his ability to dominate bigger, stronger, quicker centers. “Bill would meet each center at the three-point line and start banging them,” remembers guard Craig Hodges. “By the time they got to what they thought was the post, they would still be way outside, and that’s where we wanted them. He would make Patrick Ewing work so hard for every shot; it was truly an art form. He took all the centers out of their games. It was like the teacher’s in the house. ‘Teach’ is holding class.”

  Cartwright knew exactly what I was trying to do, sometimes even better than I did, and could explain it to the younger players in a non-threatening way. He helped me turn them into dreamers, to expand their vision of what they could become.

  EMPOWERING THE TEAM

  At the core of
my vision was getting the players to think more for themselves. Doug Collins had kept the younger players, especially Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant, on a tight rein, frequently yelling at them when they made mistakes. Throughout the game they’d look over at the bench, nervously trying to read his mind. When they started doing that with me, I immediately cut them off. “Why are you looking at me?” I’d ask. “You already know you made a mistake.”

  If the players were going to learn the offense, they would have to have the confidence to make decisions on their own. That would never happen if they were constantly searching for direction from me. I wanted them to disconnect themselves from me, so they could connect with their teammates—and the game.

  Having Jordan on the floor helped. He’d often call the team together for a few seconds in the middle of a game to give the younger players an impromptu tutorial. That kind of on-the-job problem-solving was invaluable not only because it speeded up the learning process, but also because it strengthened the group mind. Some coaches feel threatened when their players start asserting their independence, but I think it’s much more effective to open up the decision-making process to everybody. Each game is a riddle that must be solved, and there are no textbook answers. The players often have a better handle on the problem than the coaching staff because they’re right in the thick of the action and can pick up intuitively the opposition’s strengths and weaknesses.

  To reach that point I had to give the players the freedom to find out what worked and what didn’t. That meant putting them out on the floor together in unusual combinations and letting them deal with treacherous situations without bailing them out. Some players found this to be a maddening ordeal. B. J. Armstrong, a rookie point guard from the University of Iowa in 1989–90, was perplexed when I left him in games for long stretches even though none of his shots were going in. I wanted to teach him that shooting wasn’t the only thing that mattered. Defense was far more important. Eventually he got the message and developed a broader view of what he could do for the team.

  B.J. had trouble adapting to the system at first because, like most young players, his personal agenda was clouding his mind. Every time he got the ball he wanted to show the world what he could do—to score, to make a spectacular assist, to get back at his man for humiliating him on the last play. A 6'2" veteran of Detroit’s inner-city playgrounds, he was fixated on attacking the hoop like his boyhood idol, Isiah Thomas. That kind of thinking was counterproductive because it took him out of the moment and diminished his awareness of what the team was doing as a whole. It also telegraphed to the defense what he was going to do. When B.J. tried to muscle his way to the basket through a swarm of giants, he looked like a man on a suicide mission. The defenders would often knock him down, strip the ball away, and score a quick basket at the other end while he was still getting up from the floor.

  CELLULOID DREAMS

  Being in tune with what’s happening on court and fitting into the flow of action is far more important than trying to be heroic. “You don’t always have to be the one who takes the shot down the stretch,” I tell players. “Don’t force it. Let it happen to whoever is open.”

  Sometimes I drive this point home with movie clips. One night mulling over an upcoming game against Detroit, I came up with the idea of using The Wizard of Oz as a teaching device. The Pistons had been waging psychological warfare against us—and winning. I needed to turn the tables by making the players aware of how Detroit’s roughneck style of play was affecting the team as a whole. So I mixed vignettes from The Wizard of Oz with clips from Pistons games for our next tape session.

  This is a trick I learned from assistant coach Johnny Bach. Basketball players spend an inordinate amount of time watching videotapes, which can be a tense, embarrassing experience—especially when their teammates start ribbing them about their mistakes. Bach, a witty ex-Navy man who viewed basketball as a war game, subtly indoctrinated the players by splicing clips from movies such as An Officer and a Gentleman and Full Metal Jacket into the game tapes. The results were often quite funny.

  The Wizard of Oz tape was a hit, too. One sequence showed B.J. dribbling to the basket and being flattened by the Detroit front line, followed by a shot of Dorothy arriving in the Land of Oz, looking around and saying to her faithful dog, “This isn’t Kansas anymore, Toto.” B.J. laughed. The message? You’re not playing against college players anymore; you’re playing against hardened professionals, who’ll stomp all over you if you give them half a chance. Another sequence showed Horace Grant, who needed to develop court savvy, being faked out by Isiah Thomas on a screen-and-roll play, followed by the Scarecrow talking about how great it would be to have a brain. In one way or another, the tape poked fun at everyone on the team. That was important. I didn’t want to single out any one person for criticism. As far as I was concerned, they all needed to be smarter, more alert, and less intimidated by the Pistons’ back-alley tactics.

  THE WAY OF THE WARRIOR

  The system taught the mechanics, but to create the kind of cohesive team I envisioned, I needed to touch the players on a much deeper level. I wanted to give them a model of selfless action that would capture their imaginations.

  Enter the Lakota Sioux.

  The basketball clinic Bill Bradley and I gave at Pine Ridge in 1973 was part of a six-year series I organized with some Lakota friends to give the community something to focus on other than politics. The first clinic, which also included Willis Reed, took place in the summer of 1973, a few months after the American Indian Movement’s widely publicized protest at Wounded Knee. Working with the Lakota children, who had an intense passion for the sport, I became fascinated by Sioux culture and its proud warrior heritage.

  Lakota warriors had a deep reverence for the mysteries of life. That’s where their power, and sense of freedom, came from. It was no coincidence that Crazy Horse, the greatest Sioux warrior, was first and foremost a holy man. To the Lakota, everything was sacred, even the enemy, because of their belief in the interconnectedness of all life. As one seer put it: “We are earth people on a spiritual journey to the stars. Our quest, our earth walk, is to look within, to know who we are, to see that we are connected to all things, that there is no separation, only in the mind.”

  The Lakota didn’t perceive of the self as a separate entity, isolated from the rest of the universe. The stones they carved into arrowheads, the buffalo they hunted, the Crow warriors they battled, were all seen as reflections of themselves. Black Elk wrote in The Sacred Pipe, “Peace … comes within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the Universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that this center is really everywhere. It is within each of us.”

  The Lakotas’ concept of teamwork was deeply rooted in their view of the universe. A warrior didn’t try to stand out from his fellow band members; he strove to act bravely and honorably, to help the group in whatever way he could to accomplish its mission. If glory befell him, he was obligated to give away his most prized possessions to relatives, friends, the poor, and the aged. As a result, the leaders of the tribe were often its poorest members. A few years ago I received a beautiful handwoven blanket from a Sioux woman in North Dakota who said her brother had broken the state championship scoring record I had set in the 1960s. His achievement had brought so much honor to her family, she thought it only fitting to send me a gift.

  It struck me that the Lakota way could serve as a paradigm for the Bulls because there were so many parallels between the warrior’s journey and life in the NBA. A basketball team is like a band of warriors, a secret society with rites of initiation, a strict code of honor, and a sacred quest—the drive for the championship trophy. For Lakota warriors, life was a fascinating game. They would trek across half of Montana, enduring untold hardships, for the thrill of sneaking into an enemy camp and making off with a string of ponies. It wasn’t the ponies per se that mattered so much, bu
t the experience of pulling off something difficult together as a team. NBA players get the same feeling when they fly into an unfriendly city and steal away with a big win.

  THE MYSTIC WARRIOR

  My first lecture to the players on the Lakota ideal began as a way to poke fun at Johnny Bach. Johnny and I were both assistant coaches at the time, and he was giving the players a daily diet of his unique brand of blood-and-guts psychology. Bach, who had a long career as a head coach in college and the pros before joining the Bulls, liked to quote sayings from his mentor, Vince Lombardi. But compared to Johnny, Lombardi was a wimp. An energetic, young sixty-something, Bach was always the first person into the fray when a fight broke out on the floor. The players admired him because he was as tough as iron and steadfastly loyal. Johnny often showed up for games dressed in a suit with creases sewn into his pants, spit-shined shoes, and a floor-length military coat. On his wrist he wore the Navy wings of his twin brother, a pilot who had been shot down and killed during World War II.

  With Johnny, you could never tell how much of his “kill or be killed” philosophy was mere bluster, but the players loved it. In the dressing room before games, he’d bark like a Paris Island drill sergeant, “Let God count the dead” or “Blood, blood, blood! We want blood!” And he’d draw an ace of spades on the chalkboard when somebody knocked his man out of the game. He got the idea after reading that American soldiers in Vietnam used to place an ace of spades on the bodies of Vietcong they’d slain. I decided to counter with some propaganda of my own. I already had a reputation for being a pacifist—when I’d shown up for practice one day sporting a Grateful Dead T-shirt, one of the beat writers had done a story portraying me as the team’s resident peacenik. So to tweak Johnny, I often livened up game tapes I edited with clips of Jimi Hendrix playing the national anthem at Woodstock or David Byrne’s video of “Once in a Lifetime”—a song about the importance of being in the moment. And I found that many of the players appreciated this approach because it was such a departure from the typical coach’s routine.