Sacred Hoops_Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior

by Phil Jackson

  Around this time I also discovered The Mystic Warrior, a made-for-TV movie based on Ruth Beebe Hill’s novel Hanta Yo. It tells the story of a young Sioux warrior, loosely based on Crazy Horse, who has a powerful vision and becomes a spiritual leader. My friends at Pine Ridge dismissed the film, pointing out the inaccuracies in it. But it sharply illustrated the importance of making personal sacrifices for the good of the group, a point I thought the players needed to learn.

  During the 1989 playoffs, Johnny and I put together a film session for the players to prepare them for their upcoming slugfest with the Pistons. After Johnny did his kill-and-maim number, I showed them a tape that included clips from The Mystic Warrior. Afterwards we talked about hanta yo, the Lakota war chant, which means “the spirit goes ahead of us.” It was the warrior’s way of saying he was totally at peace with himself as he rode into battle, ready to die, if necessary. The phrase reminded me of my former teammate John Lee Williamson’s rallying cry. “Go down as you live,” he would shout before games, meaning, “Don’t hold back. Play the way you live your life, with your whole heart and soul.”

  I was encouraged by the players’ enthusiastic response to these ideas. This was something I could build on, a way to talk about the spiritual aspects of basketball without sounding like a Sunday preacher. Over the next few years, I quietly integrated Lakota teachings into our program. We decorated the team room with Native American totems. We started and ended each practice in a circle to symbolize that we were forming our own sacred hoop. We even joked with Jerry Krause about replacing the bull on the teams logo with a white buffalo.

  Slowly the group mind was starting to form.

  Seven

  BEING AWARE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN BEING SMART

  If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.

  —WU-MEN

  Basketball is a complex dance that requires shifting from one objective to another at lightning speed. To excel, you need to act with a clear mind and be totally focused on what everyone on the floor is doing. Some athletes describe this quality of mind as a “cocoon of concentration.” But that implies shutting out the world when what you really need to do is become more acutely aware of what’s happening right now, this very moment.

  The secret is not thinking. That doesn’t mean being stupid; it means quieting the endless jabbering of thoughts so that your body can do instinctively what it’s been trained to do without the mind getting in the way. All of us have had flashes of this sense of oneness—making love, creating a work of art—when we’re completely immersed in the moment, inseparable from what we’re doing. This kind of experience happens all the time on the basketball floor; that’s why the game is so intoxicating. But if you’re really paying attention, it can also occur while you’re performing the most mundane tasks. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig writes about cultivating “the peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings” while working on his bike. “When that is done successfully,” he writes, “then everything else follows naturally. Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.” This is the essence of what we try to cultivate in our players.

  In Zen it is said that all you need to do to reach enlightenment is “chop wood, carry water.” The point is to perform every activity, from playing basketball to taking out the garbage, with precise attention, moment by moment. This idea became a focus for me while I was visiting my brother Joe’s commune in Taos, New Mexico, in the late seventies. One day I noticed a banner flying near the dining hall that read simply “Remember.” It made such an impression on me that I hung a replica of the flag outside my home in Montana. Now, faded and weather-beaten, it still calls out for total attention.

  For some people, notably Michael Jordan, the only impetus they need to become completely focused is intense competition. But for most of us, athletes and nonathletes alike, the battle itself is not enough. Many of the players I’ve worked with tend to lose their equanimity after a certain point as the level of competition rises, because their minds start racing out of control.

  When I was a player, not surprisingly, my biggest obstacle was my hyperactive critical mind. I’d been trained by my Pentecostal parents to stand guard over my thoughts, meticulously sorting out the “pure” from the “impure.” That kind of intense judgmental thinking—this is good, that’s bad—is not unlike the mental process most professional athletes go through every day. Everything they’ve done since junior high school has been dissected, analyzed, measured, and thrown back in their faces by their coaches, and, in many cases, the media. By the time they reach the pros, the inner critic rules. With the precision of a cuckoo clock, he crops up whenever they make a mistake. How did that guy beat me? Where did that shot come from? What a stupid pass! The incessant accusations of the judging mind block vital energy and sabotage concentration.

  Some NBA coaches exacerbate the problem by rating every move players make with a plus-minus system that goes far beyond conventional statistics. “Good” moves—fighting for position, finding the open man—earn the player plus points, while “bad” moves—losing your man, fudging your footwork—show up as debits. The problem is: a player can make an important contribution to the game and still walk away with a negative score.

  That approach would have been disastrous for a hypercritical player like me. That’s why I don’t use it. Instead, we show players how to quiet the judging mind and focus on what needs to be done at any given moment. There are several ways we do that. One is by teaching the players meditation so they can experience stillness of mind in a low-pressure setting off the court.

  VENTURING INTO THE HERE AND NOW

  The meditation practice we teach players is called mindfulness. To become mindful, one must cultivate what Suzuki Roshi calls “beginner’s mind,” an “empty” state free from limiting self-centered thoughts. “If your mind is empty,” he writes in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, “it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”

  When I was coaching in Albany, Charley Rosen and I used to give a workshop called “Beyond Basketball” at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. The workshop served as a laboratory where I could experiment with a number of spiritual and psychological practices I’d been itching to try in combination with basketball. Part of the program involved mindfulness meditation, and it worked so well I decided to use it with the Bulls.

  We started slowly. Before tape sessions, I’d turn down the lights and lead the players through a short meditation to put them in the right frame of mind. Later I invited George Mumford, a meditation instructor, to give the players a three-day mindfulness course during training camp. Mumford is a colleague of Jon Kabat-Zinn, executive director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, who has had remarkable results teaching meditation to people coping with illness and chronic pain.

  Here’s the basic approach Mumford taught the players: Sit in a chair with your spine straight and your eyes downcast. Focus your attention on your breath as it rises and falls. When your mind wanders (which it will, repeatedly), note the source of the distraction (a noise, a thought, an emotion, a bodily sensation), then gently return the attention to the breath. This process of noting thoughts and sensations, then returning the awareness to the breath is repeated for the duration of the sitting. Though the practice may sound boring, it’s remarkable how any experience, including boredom, becomes interesting when it’s an object of moment-to-moment investigation.

  Little by little, with regular practice, you start to discriminate raw sensory events from your reactions to them. Eventually, you begin to experience a point of stillness within. As the stillness b
ecomes more stable, you tend to identify less with fleeting thoughts and feelings, such as fear, anger, or pain, and experience a state of inner harmony, regardless of changing circumstances. For me, meditation is a tool that allows me to stay calm and centered (well, most of the time) during the stressful highs and lows of basketball and life outside the arena. During games I often get agitated by bad calls, but years of meditation practice have taught me how to find that still point within so that I can argue passionately with the refs without being overwhelmed by anger.

  How do the players take to meditation? Some of them find the exercises amusing. Bill Cartwright once quipped that he liked the sessions because they gave him extra time to take a nap. But even those players who drift off during meditation practice get the basic point: awareness is everything. Also, the experience of sitting silently together in a group tends to bring about a subtle shift in consciousness that strengthens the team bond. Sometimes we extend mindfulness to the court and conduct whole practices in silence. The deep level of concentration and nonverbal communication that arises when we do this never fails to astonish me.

  More than any other player, B.J. Armstrong took meditation to heart and studied it on his own. Indeed, he attributes much of his success as a player to his understanding of not thinking, just doing. “A lot of guys second-guess themselves,” he says. “They don’t know whether to pass or shoot or what. But I just go for it. If I’m open, I’ll shoot, and if I’m not, I’ll pass. When there’s a loose ball, I just go after it. The game happens so fast, the less I can think and the more I can just react to what’s going on, the better it will be for me and, ultimately, the team.”

  VISUALIZATION

  As any fan knows, basketball is an incredibly fast-paced, high-energy game. During time-outs the players are often so revved up, they can’t concentrate on what I’m saying. To help them cool down mentally as well as physically, I’ve developed a quickie visualization exercise I call the safe spot.

  During the fifteen or thirty seconds they have to grab a drink and towel off, I encourage them to picture themselves someplace where they feel secure. It’s a way for them to take a short mental vacation before addressing the problem at hand. Simple as it may seem, the exercise helps players reduce their anxiety and focus their attention on what they need to do when they return to the court.

  B.J., Scottie and other players also practice visualization before games. “I believe that if I can take twenty or thirty minutes before each game and visualize what’s going to happen,” says Armstrong, “I’ll be able to react to it without thinking, because I’ll already have seen it in my mind. When I’m lying down before the game, I can see myself making a shot or boxing out or getting a loose ball. And then when I see that come up during the game, I don’t think about it, I do it. There are no second thoughts, no hesitation. Sometimes, after the game, I’ll go, ‘Wow! I saw that! I anticipated it before it happened.’”

  Vizualization is an important tool for me. Coaching requires a free-ranging imagination, but during the heat of the season it’s easy to get wound up so tight that you strangle your own creativity. Visualization is the bridge I use to link the grand vision of the team I conjure up every summer to the evolving reality on the court. That vision becomes a working sketch that I adjust, refine and sometimes scrap altogether as the season develops.

  One of my strengths as a coach is my ability, developed over years of practice, to visualize ways to short-circuit opponents’ offensive schemes. Sometimes if I can’t call up a clear image of the other team in my mind, I’ll study videotapes for hours until I have a strong enough “feel” for the opponent to start toying around with ideas. During one of those sessions, I visualized a way to neutralize Magic Johnson: double-teaming him in the back court to force him to give up the ball. That was one of the keys to beating the Lakers to win our first championship in 1991.

  Before each game, I usually do forty-five minutes of visualization at home to prepare my mind and come up with last-minute adjustments. This is an outgrowth of the pregame sessions I did when I played with the Knicks. When I started coaching in the CBA, I didn’t give myself enough time for this ritual, and I often got so tense during games I’d lash out at the referees and get called repeatedly for technicals. Once I was suspended for bumping up against a ref during an argument. At that point I realized I needed to become more detached emotionally and put the game in the proper perspective.

  My pregame sessions are not unlike what my father did during his early morning devotions. I usually call up images of the players in my mind and try to “embrace them in the light,” to use the Pentecostal parlance that has been adopted by the New Age. Sometimes an individual player cries out for attention because of an injury or a difficult upcoming matchup. When Horace Grant was matched up against someone like Karl Malone, for instance, I’d focus on what he needed to do. “This is going to be a real test of your manhood, Horace,” I’d say before the game. “We’ll help you out as much as we can, but you’re going to have to be the door that doesn’t open.” Sometimes a few words was all he needed to raise his game to another level.

  INTIMACY WITH ALL THINGS

  Another important aspect of what we do is to create a supportive environment for the players where they feel secure and free from constant scrutiny. Although we maintain high standards, we do everything possible to prevent the players from feeling personally responsible when the team loses.

  When I took over the Bulls in 1989, I told the players that, as far as I was concerned, the only people who really mattered were the team’s inner circle: the twelve players, the four coaches, the trainer, and the equipment manager. Everyone else was an outsider, even Jerry Krause. The idea was to heighten the feeling of intimacy, the sense that we were engaged in something sacred and inviolate. To protect the sanctity of the group, I keep the media out of practices and restrict the number of people who travel with the team. I also instruct the players not to blab to the press about everything we do. In order to build trust, the players need to know that they can be open and honest with each other, without seeing their words in the paper the next day.

  Part of my motivation is to protect the team, and Michael himself, from the Jordan phenomenon. Everywhere we go, legions of reporters, celebrities, and star-struck fans surround us, trying to get close to Michael. When I was with the Knicks, I had seen what this kind of invasion could do to a team. The Knicks were a hot item in the early seventies and attracted a gaggle of movie stars, politicians, and other high-profile hangers-on. Even though Red Holzman kept the group exclusive, our retinue grew so large that the players eventually lost each other in the crush.

  Michael’s popularity makes it virtually impossible for the team to do anything together in public, except play the game. So we have to turn our practice sessions into bonding rituals. When I was a player, I used to have a slogan Scotch-taped to the mirror in my apartment: “Make your work play and your play work.” Basketball is a form of play, of course, but it’s easy for players to lose sight of this because of the pressures of the job. As a result, my primary goal during practice is to get the players to reconnect with the intrinsic joy of the game. Some of our most exhilarating moments as a team come at these times. That’s certainly true for Jordan, who loves practice, especially the scrimmages, because it’s pure basketball, nothing extra.

  Not everything I’ve tried in practice works, however. At one session, I had the players do an exercise suggested by a prominent Chicago psychiatrist who said it had worked wonders with his patients in releasing pent-up aggression. Obviously, none of his patients were professional basketball players. The basic idea was to assume a crouching gorilla pose and lock eyes with your partner, then jump up and down together, grunting like apes. When we did this exercise in practice, the players literally fell on the floor laughing. It reminded them of the chest thumping and ape-like posturing of the New York Knicks. Needless to say, I never tried that one again.

  ENGAGING THE MIND, HARNESSING TH
E SPIRIT

  It’s easy for players to get so caught up in the fantasy world of the NBA that they lose touch with reality. My job, as I see it, is to wake them out of that dreamlike state and get them grounded in the real world. That’s why I like to introduce them to ideas outside the realm of the game, to show them that there’s more to life than basketball—and more to basketball than basketball.

  Challenging the players’ minds and getting them to share their views on topics other than basketball helps build solidarity, too. Some coaches try to force players to bond with each other by putting them through hellish Marine Corps-style training. That’s a short-term solution, at best. I’ve found that the connection will be deeper and last longer if it’s built on a foundation of genuine exchange.

  One way we do that is to talk regularly about ethics. Every season, after we’ve narrowed the team down to the basic twelve-man roster, I pass out a handbook that’s a modern-day reinterpretation of the Ten Commandments. During practices one of the players will read a section from the book to stimulate group discussion. Once we had a heated debate about guns after I noticed someone carrying a weapon on the team plane. Guns were becoming a fad in the NBA, and some of the players insisted they needed them for protection. I had a different point of view. When I was with the Knicks, I once got into an argument with a ref that made me screaming mad. Finally, after I finished my tirade, the Knicks’ trainer, Danny Whelan said, “So, if you had a gun you’d shoot him, right?” That stopped me cold. He was right. I was so angry I could have easily thrown a punch at the ref, so what was going to stop me from pulling a gun out if I had one handy? The Bulls needed to learn that before something tragic happened.