Sacred Hoops_Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior

by Phil Jackson

  In his book, Leading Change, management consultant James O’Toole talks about a different style of leadership, known as “value-based” management, that closely resembles my approach. “Value-based” leaders, O’Toole says, enlist the hearts and minds of their followers through inclusion and participation. They listen carefully to their followers out of a deep respect for them as individuals and develop a vision that they will embrace because it is based on their highest aspirations. “To be effective,” writes O’Toole, “leaders must begin by setting aside that culturally conditioned ‘natural’ instinct to lead by push, particularly when times are tough. Leaders must instead adopt the unnatural behavior of always leading by the pull of inspiring values.”

  What O’Toole is talking about essentially is compassionate leadership. In the Buddhist tradition, compassion flows from an understanding that everything derives its essential nature, or Buddha nature, from its dependence on everything else. As Pema Chodron, an American Buddhist nun, puts it in her insightful book, Start Where You Are: “By being kind to others—if it’s done properly, with proper understanding—we benefit as well. So the first point is that we are completely interrelated. What you do to others, you do to yourself. What you do to yourself, you do to others.”

  In terms of leadership, this means treating everyone with the same care and respect you give yourself—and trying to understand their reality without judgment. When we can do that, we begin to see that we all share basic human struggles, desires, and dreams. With awareness, the barriers between people gently give way, and we begin to understand, directly, remarkably, that we’re part of something larger than ourselves.

  Horace Grant taught me this lesson. When I became head coach, Horace was still making a lot of mistakes, and I decided to do something drastic to shake him up. I asked him if he minded being criticized in front of the group, and he said no. So I rode him hard in practice—thinking that my words would not only motivate Horace, but also galvanize the other players. If I was particularly harsh in my criticism, the rest of the team would rally around to give him support.

  As Horace matured, he asked me to stop treating him that way, and I respected his wish. Then in 1994 a conflict erupted between us when he decided to play out the option on his contract. Early on, Horace had asked my advice on whether he should declare himself a free agent. I told him that if he could live with the risks, he would probably do extremely well financially. But if he went ahead with it, I would expect him to play just as hard in his option year as John Paxson had done a few years earlier. Once the 1993–94 season began, however, I could sense that Horace was pulling away from the team.

  During the All-Star Game, he had a flare-up of tendinitis and asked to sit out the next several games. At the time, we were also missing Kukoc, Paxson, and Cartwright, and our lock on first place was in jeopardy. After a few games I told Horace we needed to reactivate him, but he balked, saying, “Coach, I’ve got to think about next year.”

  That was the wrong answer. As far as I was concerned, he was getting paid to play this year, not next year. The fact that he was going to be a free agent was no excuse. Many of his teammates were in the same situation, but they hadn’t retreated from the team.

  My anger made me shut down and freeze Horace out of the group. I told him in front of the team that he wasn’t living up to the code the Bulls had always honored: play hard, play fair, play now. And when he walked out in the middle of practice complaining of tendinitis, I started yelling at him in the trainers’ room: “Go home. I don’t want to see you around here until you get it together.” There were a few expletives mixed in there, as well.

  This confrontation troubled me. Why had I been so hardhearted with Horace? Why did I take his rebellion as a personal affront? Talking it over with my wife, I realized that my own agenda for Horace was getting in the way of seeing the situation clearly. When I stepped back, I saw how much I blamed Horace for trying to sabotage the season when all he was doing was looking out for his future. What I needed to do was open my heart and try to understand the situation from his point of view. I needed to practice the same selflessness and compassion with Horace that I expected from him on court. When I was able to relax the steel grip on my heart and finally see him through a less self-centered lens, our relationship was repaired.

  THE DARK SIDE OF SUCCESS

  One thing I needed to be particularly mindful of was the effect success was having on the players. Success tends to distort reality and make everybody, coaches as well as players, forget their shortcomings and exaggerate their contributions. Soon they begin to lose sight of what made them successful in the first place: their connection with each other as a team. As Michael Jordan puts it, “Success turns we’s back into me’s.”

  I had seen that happen with the New York Knicks after the 1970 championship, and I desperately wanted to protect the Bulls from the same fate. It wasn’t easy. After we won our first championship, success nearly tore the team apart. Everybody wanted to take credit for the victory, and several players began clamoring for a bigger role. Scott Williams wanted to shoot more; B. J. Armstrong wanted to be a starter; Horace Grant wanted to be more than just a “blue-collar worker.” All of a sudden, I had to spend a lot of time babysitting fragile egos.

  I also had to fend off the media invasion. After we won the championship in 1991, the media presence grew and started feeding off the team. Players who didn’t have Jordan’s gift for handling reporters were given a national soapbox, and the results were sometimes unfortunate. The first incident occurred before the next season even started. We were invited to a post-championship celebration at the White House in October. Jordan decided not to attend because he had met President Bush before and felt that, if he went, he would be the center of attention. Horace thought it was unfair that Michael was the only player allowed to skip the event and told reporters so. Jordan, he added, “is going to be the death of this team.”

  Michael wasn’t pleased with these remarks, particularly since he had been spending more time with Horace, trying to strengthen their relationship. My guess was that Horace had been manipulated by reporters into speaking out against Jordan. Horace considered it a badge of honor to be honest and forthright, and sometimes he got lured into making pronouncements that sounded a lot more inflammatory than he intended. Jordan seemed to understand this about Horace and didn’t take him to task for his remarks.

  I could empathize with Horace and other players who got caught in that trap because it had happened to me when I was with the Knicks. Reporters are seductive—that’s their job—and if you’re inexperienced, they can often trick you into saying something provocative that you’ll regret the next day. As a player, I had made some off-the-wall comments to get a laugh or, on occasion, to make a reporter I didn’t particularly like stop pestering me. Sometimes I went too far. In 1977 All-Star forward George McGinnis and I got into a tussle, and he leveled what could have been a knockout punch at me from behind. Luckily, I stepped out of the way and the blow merely grazed the side of my head, but I was furious at the refs for not throwing him out of the game. A month or so later when Kermit Washington hit Rudy Tomjanovich in the face and put him out of action for the rest of the season, I was still angry, and made a flip remark to reporters about how it took a black player to hit a white star for the league to do something about the violence issue. Out of context, my remarks sounded racist, and insensitive to Tomjanovich, who had sustained massive head injuries. From that point on, I was more circumspect about what I said to the press.

  Some coaches try to force players to be close-mouthed by humiliating them in front of their teammates. Former Knicks coach Hubie Brown used to read newspaper stories to his team, sometimes extending practice by a half an hour or more to get through his pile of clips. When Bill Fitch was coaching the Houston Rockets, he used to have the players give the readings. Once he had 7'4" center Ralph Sampson, who had made some divisive remarks, stand on a stool in practice and read his quotes aloud to th
e team.

  In my view, that approach only increases the media’s power in the players’ minds. Instead I try to play the stories down. Once the season starts, I don’t pay much attention to the news unless a problem crops up that I have to address. Whenever a “big” story develops, I try to laugh it off in front of the players to show them that I don’t consider what appears in the papers to be very important.

  When you’re young and in the public eye, it’s easy to get caught up in fame’s seductive web. But the truth is the players aren’t fighting for the media or the public, they’re fighting for the inner circle of the team. Anyone outside that circle who can destroy the team harmony has to be handled with care.

  I’m not always perfectly detached. Sometimes I’ll step in if I think a player is trying to manipulate the media for selfish reasons. At one point, Will Perdue, whose wry wit has made him a media darling, started making noise in the papers about getting more playing time. When I asked him why he had gone public, he said he thought he’d try it because it had worked for Stacey King. I reminded him that Stacey’s experiment backfired in the end, costing him a lot of money and playing time.

  The players have learned a lot about fame watching how Michael Jordan is treated by the press. Writers usually portray him as a larger-than-life superhero or a tarnished celebrity with dark hidden flaws—neither of which is true. That helps the players see through the media’s game and become less vulnerable to criticism. Talking about the Bulls’ championship run, B. J. Armstrong recalls, “We didn’t care about anything they said in the press. That’s what kept us together. If a guy said something bad to the press, we didn’t care because he was one of our group. That’s what enabled us to win three championships in a row.”

  Over the years the Bulls have been caught up in a number of controversies, such as the White House flap, Pippen and Grant’s contract disputes and Jordan’s gambling adventures. But none of those well-publicized problems shook the unity of the group. Even when credible rumors that Scottie was going to be traded hovered over the team for the first half of the 1994–95 season, the effect on team play was minimal. Once the game starts, the players know how to tune out those distractions because of the trust they have in each other. The untold story of the Bulls, says B.J. Armstrong, is “the respect each individual has for everybody else.”

  ALCHEMY

  When everything is running smoothly, I, like Lao-tzu’s craftsman, try to leave few traces. In the first half of the 1991–92 season, the Bulls were in such perfect harmony they rarely lost. During that period, according to B.J., it felt as if the team was “in tune with nature” and that everything fell into place “like fall and winter and spring and summer.”

  The team went 36–3 during that stretch. At one point Jerry Reinsdorf asked me if I was driving the team toward the record, and I said no. In truth, it was out of my hands. The Bulls were too good that year to try to slow them down. The only thing that threw them off track briefly was when Michael was ejected from a game, then suspended from another for protesting the call and bumping the ref. We lost both games, and racked up our longest losing streak of the season: two.

  This is what I’d been striving for ever since I had started coaching: to become an “invisible” leader. University of Indiana coach Bobby Knight once said that he could never work in the NBA because the coaches don’t have any control over the players. My question is: How much control do you need? It’s true that NBA coaches don’t have the autocratic power of someone like Knight, but we have far more power than it appears. The source of that power is the fact that coaches have played a central role in the players’ lives since they were kids. The players are used to having an authority figure telling them what to do, and the only reason they’ve made it as far as they have is that at some point they listened to what some coach somewhere had to say. The way to tap into that energy is not by being autocratic, but by working with the players and giving them increasing responsibility to shape their roles.

  SPOKES IN A WHEEL

  That’s why I like to have strong people around me. When I took over as head coach, I named Tex Winter offensive coordinator and Johnny Bach defensive coordinator. In truth, those distinctions were somewhat artificial; the lines of authority on basketball teams are never that clear cut. But I wanted to make it clear to the players that Tex and Johnny’s views should be taken seriously. Tex, Johnny, and I didn’t always see things the same way, but the interplay of ideas stimulated everybody’s creativity.

  The players have also taken on key leadership roles. Scottie Pippen is a good floor leader, energizing the team and inspiring the players to stay focused. B. J. Armstrong provided behind-the-scenes support for the young players; John Paxson was a much-needed voice of reason in the locker room; and Cliff Levingston had an uncanny knack for smoothing over conflicts.

  During the championship years, the most important leaders were Bill Cartwright and Michael Jordan. I relied on them to solve minor problems and give me an accurate reading of what was going on with the team. Once during the 1992–93 season, the team went into a slump, losing four out of five games, our worst slide in two years. The next game was against the Utah Jazz, always a tough opponent. On the plane to Salt Lake City, I asked Bill and Michael what they thought we could do to revive the team. They said that some of the players had split themselves off from the group, and I should do something to bring them back together. Bill and Michael were especially concerned about Scottie and Horace, who had recently cooled toward one another after being close friends for so many years.

  It was Super Bowl Sunday. When we arrived at the hotel, I told the players to get some pizzas and beers after practice and watch the Super Bowl in their hotel rooms. “You guys need to get together and remember what you’re doing this for,” I said. “You’re not doing it for money. It may seem that way, but that’s just an external reward. You’re doing it for the internal rewards. You’re doing it for each other and the love of the game.” Michael had a lively Super Bowl party in his room that afternoon, and the players reconnected. The next day they came alive, erasing a 17-point deficit in the fourth quarter to beat Utah 96–92. After that, they settled down and cruised through the rest of the season.

  SKILLFUL MEANS

  In Buddhist teachings the term skillful means is used to describe an approach to making decisions and dealing with problems in a way that is appropriate to the situation and causes no harm. Skillful means always arise out of compassion, and when a problem emerges, the idea is to address the offense without denying the humanity of the offender. A parent who packs a kid off to bed for spilling milk instead of handing the child a sponge is not practicing skillful means.

  Like large families, basketball teams are highly charged, competitive groups. Because you win or lose as a team, individual recognition sometimes gets lost in the larger effort. The result is heightened sensitivity. Everybody is competing with everybody else all the time, and alliances are sometimes tentative and uneasy—a fact of pro sports life that works against deepening intimacy. Players are always complaining about not getting their fair share of playing time or having their role on the team diminished.

  Though some coaches try to settle differences in team meetings, I prefer to deal with them on an individual basis. This helps strengthen my one-on-one connection with the players, who sometimes get neglected because we spend so much of our time together en masse. Meeting with players privately helps me stay in touch with who they are out of uniform. During the 1995 playoffs, for instance, Toni Kukoc was troubled by reports that Split, Croatia, where his parents live, had been hit by a barrage of artillery fire. It took several days for him to get through on the phone and learn that his family was all right. The war in his homeland is a painful reality of Toni’s life. If I ignored that, I probably wouldn’t be able to relate to him on any but the most superficial level.

  Athletes are not the most verbal breed. That’s why bare attention and listening without judgment are so important. When you
’re a leader, you have to be able to read accurately the subtle messages players send out. To do that means being fully present with beginner’s mind. Over the years I’ve learned to listen closely to players—not just to what they say, but also to their body language and the silence between the words.

  I find it amusing when people ask me where I get my ideas for motivating players. The answer is: in the moment. My approach to problem-solving is the same as my approach to the game. When a problem arises, I try to read the situation as accurately as possible and respond spontaneously to whatever’s happening. I rarely try to apply someone else’s ideas to the problem—something I’ve read in a book, for instance—because that would keep me from tuning in and discovering a fresh, original solution, the most skillful means.

  During the 1991 playoffs, Philadelphia’s Armon Gilliam was doing a dance on our front line. Scottie was too small to guard him, and Horace had trouble containing him. So, in an inspired moment, I decided to throw Scott Williams, then an untested rookie, at Gilliam, and it worked. To keep Scott from losing his composure in the closing minutes of the game, I told Jordan to keep his eye on him. From then on, Scott, who like Michael is a North Carolina alum, became Jordan’s personal project. All because I refused to play the game by the book.

  Ultimately, leadership takes a lot of what St. Paul called faith: “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). You have to trust your inner knowing. If you have a clear mind and an open heart, you won’t have to search for direction. Direction will come to you.

  FIVE FINGERS ON A HAND

  The Bulls certainly had faith in themselves in 1991–92. At one point, Johnny Bach proclaimed, “Only the Bulls can beat the Bulls,” and he was right. Except for a few minor flareups, everything flowed smoothly. There were no serious injuries and only one change in the roster: backup shooting guard Dennis Hopson was replaced by Bobby Hansen. After the All-Star break, the team lost only six games, and we finished with the best record in the league: 67–15.