Sacred Hoops_Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior

by Phil Jackson

  THE STING OF FAME

  An important aspect of Jordan’s leadership is his handling of the media. He has never really liked working with the press, but he’s skilled at dealing with reporters and takes his responsibility seriously. He started to get disenchanted with the media during the 1993 playoffs when reports surfaced that he had bet huge sums of money on golf. The stories forced the NBA to launch an investigation, which it later dropped.

  Jordan was stunned at the lengths the media went to probe into his personal life. Those feelings came up again that year when his father was murdered in South Carolina. “The only insecurity I have is with the media,” he says. “Because a misinterpretation by the media is never corrected. They’ll misinterpret a quote and say, ‘I’m sorry.’ But what about the people who read it? That’s the power of the media today. It builds you up to the point where you’re afraid to make a mistake. You’re afraid to do the easiest things that could be misconstrued as negative—like going to a casino, which is very normal, very harmless, or losing money in one-on-one betting.”

  In the early days, Michael had a hard time saying no to reporters. The world at large expected him to be Joe All-American, and he was reluctant to disabuse anyone of that notion, even though he knew it was a fiction. The Jordan Rules, which came out in 1991, presented an equally distorted portrait of Michael as a sarcastic, mean-spirited egoist who spent most of his time poking fun at his teammates and Jerry Krause. Michael was furious when it appeared, but in a strange way, it had a liberating effect on him. He realized that he didn’t have to be Mr. Perfect all the time, and that freed him to find out who he really was.

  Now Michael has a more detached view of the press. “The media helps you become famous,” he says, “but after you reach a certain level, they break you down bit by bit. It’s a contradiction. If you want me to be a role model, why are you looking for negative things in my life to attack? My real job comes as soon as I step off the court and have to deal with the expectations and contradictions that come with being in the spotlight.”

  THE LONG GOODBYE

  Michael always said that when basketball stopped being fun, he was going to walk away. During the 1992–93 season, I could see the toll the long season was taking on him. He’d always been able to bounce back quickly, but every now and then I detected an unusual bout of despondency. He’d been dropping hints all season that he might retire early, and that summer when I heard the news on the radio that his father had been murdered, my first thought was that he wouldn’t be coming back for the next season.

  When we finally met to talk about his decision to leave the sport in late September, Michael had thought it through from every angle. I tried to appeal to his spiritual side. I told him that God had given him a talent that made people happy, and I didn’t think it was right for him to walk away. He talked about impermanence. “For some reason,” he said, “God is telling me to move on, and I must move on. People have to learn that nothing lasts forever.”

  Then he posed an unsolvable riddle. “Can you think of any way I can just play in the playoffs?” he asked. I suggested making him a parttime player during the regular season as we had done with Cartwright the year before. He shook his head. “I’m not going to come back and play thirteen games and get criticized by the press for being a prima donna. That would be too much of a headache.” I told him I couldn’t think of anything else. “That answers my question,” he said. “Until we can come up with a solution for that one, I must retire.” (Little did I know how prophetic that conversation would be.)

  Everyone expected me to be shattered by the news, but I felt surprisingly calm. My wife thought I was in a state of denial. “How do you feel, Phil?” she asked. “Are you mad at M.J.? Are you sad?” Though I wasn’t happy about the news, I wasn’t in a state of shock, either. Ever since his father’s death, I had a strong intuition that he would be leaving the team.

  What made the transition easier for me was the meeting we had with Michael in the Berto Center just before he made his official announcement to the press. I was impressed by the players’ depth of feeling for Michael. We went around the room, and each one of the players made a heartfelt statement. Scottie Pippen thanked him for showing him the way, and John Paxson acknowledged how grateful he was to have played by his side. B. J. Armstrong, Jordan’s closest friend on the team, said he was worried for him because now he would have “the two scariest things in life: a lot of money and a lot of free time.” The person who surprised Michael the most was Toni Kukoc, who was so upset by Jordan’s departure, he broke into tears.

  Afterwards, the players followed Michael down to the press conference and stood by the podium while he announced his retirement. “That was true respect,” Jordan recalls, deeply moved. “They didn’t have to be there. They didn’t have to show tears. You can’t make those things up. I think it sealed the relationship between us.”

  About a month later, just before the season was about to start, I got a call from Michael asking if he could come down to the training center and work out with the team. He said he just wanted to check it out one more time.

  It was an interesting moment. I thought he’d spend the time doing what he often did: wowing us with his one-on-one moves. But instead, he played it straight, performing all the drills by the book. Then he walked off the court and was gone.

  Later I learned that he was meeting with Jerry Reinsdorf that day to sign his letter of intent to retire. Before he did that, he needed to know if he could really leave the game behind. The answer that day was yes.

  Eleven

  YOU CAN’T STEP IN THE SAME RIVER TWICE

  PLAYER:

  So what does all this being in the moment stuff, all this jabberwocky about compassion, have to do with real life?

  ZEN COACH:

  Can bulls walk on air?

  PLAYER:

  Is that a koan?

  ZEN COACH:

  You figure it out.

  In his book, Thoughts Without a Thinker, psychiatrist Mark Epstein describes an encounter in a Laotian forest monastery with a famous master, Achaan Chaa, which made an indelible impression on a group of American travelers.

  “You see this goblet?” Chaa asked, holding up a glass. “For me, this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on a shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that this glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”

  In its simplicity this story illustrates one of the basic principles of Buddhist teachings: that impermanence is a fundamental fact of life. So it is, the tale seems to be saying, for everything from crystal goblets to championship basketball teams.

  It wasn’t until Michael Jordan left the Bulls in the fall of 1993 that I began to see what we’d really accomplished and how all the pieces of our crazy-quilt style of coaching fit together. It was a new season, and though many of the players remained, it was a new team. The challenge was not to try to repeat ourselves but to use what we had learned to re-create ourselves—to conjure up a new vision for this team.

  Basketball had taught me many lessons about impermanence and change. I was about to learn another one.

  TRANSITION GAME

  In the weeks following Jordan’s retirement, an eerie gloom hovered over the team. The day after the news broke, the Las Vegas line on the Bulls winning a fourth championship dropped from 1 in 5 to 1 in 24. Some insiders were even more pessimistic. One of our pr guys confessed to me that he picked the team to finish 27–55 in the office pool.

  I was more sanguine. When a star of Jordan’s caliber retires, there’s usually a dropoff of fifteen games or more. I didn’t think the Bulls would sink that far, but I was concerned about how the players would respond to the loss. My hope was that once the initial
shock wore off, the veterans who had been playing in Jordan’s shadow for so long would seize the opportunity to prove to the world that they could win a championship on their own.

  Losing Michael presented a major challenge for me, though not an entirely unwelcome one. What’s exciting about coaching is the building process, not the ongoing maintenance work required once your team has achieved success. During Michael’s final season, the Bulls ran pretty much on automatic. The biggest problem I faced was keeping the players from getting bored and losing their edge. Now I would get a chance to reshape the team and see if our approach to the game would work without the world’s greatest player on the roster.

  Not that there weren’t problems. At the start of the 1993–94 season, we had four veterans recovering from injuries: Pippen, Cartwright, Paxson, and Scott Williams. Also, the timing of Jordan’s announcement—a few days before the start of training camp—made it difficult for Jerry Krause to find a replacement for him. All of the top free agents were gone, so Krause turned to Pete Myers, a veteran who had once played for the Bulls and was eager to get back to the NBA after spending a year in the Italian pro league. The team Krause put together was a patchwork blend of insiders and outsiders, champions and nonchampions, haves and have-nots. Many of the free agents were getting rock-bottom salaries, between $150,000 to $200,000 a year, while most of the veterans were multimillionaires.

  REBUILDING

  The free agents’ hunger helped energize the team, but it was difficult blending such a diverse group into a harmonious unit. The players weren’t in each other’s blood the way the members of the earlier teams had been, and it often showed on court. One of the first things I noticed was that everyone was trying to fill the Jordan vacuum singlehandedly. All of a sudden, several players started to compete to see who could become “The Man.” I had to remind them that it wasn’t Jordan’s team or any other individual’s team, for that matter; it was our team. As long as they vied for the spotlight, the players would have difficulty finding a new identity as a group.

  For Toni Kukoc, being “The Man” was second nature. He’d been the star on every team he’d ever played for and had developed a lot of bad habits along the way. It was obvious what Toni’s agenda was: every time he got the ball, he wanted to do something special with it. This drove the rest of the players crazy. They’d expect him to do one thing, then all of a sudden he’d start freelancing and throw everybody else off. Theoretically, the other players should have been able to adjust, but Toni’s playful meanderings around the court often defied logic.

  Toni wasn’t a selfish player. Nothing gave him more pleasure than to dish the ball off to somebody else. But he didn’t want to conform to the triangle offense. I knew right from the start that I would have to ride him hard in practice to protect him from being torn apart by his teammates. I’m sure my method didn’t seem like an act of kindness to Toni. He couldn’t understand why I allowed Scottie the freedom to make creative moves outside the system, but would start yelling at him when he tried similar gambits. The difference, I told him, was that Scottie was looking at the game from a completely different perspective. He had spent years working within the offense, so when he decided to step outside of it, he usually had a good reason. But when Toni bucked the system, it was because he was impatient and wanted to assert his individuality, often at the team’s expense.

  Kukoc wasn’t the only player having a hard time. Horace Grant and Scott Williams, who were playing out their options that year, had distanced themselves from the team, and Corie Blount, a rookie power forward, felt like an outsider. In February the team started to flounder, and I called a meeting to discuss the lack of cohesiveness. Afterwards, assistant coach Jim Cleamons gave the players a short, but moving speech. “We’ve always been a team that played from the heart,” he said. “But we’ve gotten away from that. We’re thinking about money; we’re thinking about our careers; we’re thinking about our stats, instead of thinking about our teammates and how we’re going to get ourselves into the game.”

  Inspired by Cleamons’ words, the players had one of their best practices of the season that afternoon. Horace and Scott recommitted their energy, and the Bulls soon became a team again. We went on a 17–3 streak in March and April and came within two games of finishing first in the conference. We rode that momentum into the first round of the playoffs and swept Cleveland in three games. Then we headed to New York for the Eastern semifinals.

  1.8 SECONDS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD

  This series was the most memorable clash ever between the two teams. After we dropped a 15-point lead and lost the first game, my strategy was to do an end-around on the New York media, but the reporters were craftier than I imagined. We were scheduled to practice the next day at an athletic club near Wall Street. I thought it would be unproductive for the players to spend the morning being grilled by reporters and rehashing a tough loss. So as we approached the gym, I told the bus driver to take us to the Staten Island Ferry. Little did I know that a pack of reporters had been tailing us from the hotel and were ready and waiting, notebooks in hand, when we lined up for the boat.

  That wasn’t our first impromptu field trip. I like to do the unpredictable every now and then to keep the players from getting stale. In 1993, for example, I canceled a shootaround in Washington, D.C., to take them to visit Bill Bradley in the U.S. Senate. The Staten Island trip was a little more leisurely. It was a perfect spring day, and we had the top deck of the boat all to ourselves. Scott Williams later told a reporter he found the trip mentally refreshing: “We came away saying, yeah, we blew one, but let’s forget about it and come back with a good mental attitude.”

  The team played with renewed energy the next day, but the Knicks beat us again in the fourth quarter. That set the stage for one of the most surrealistic events I’ve ever seen on a basketball court: Game 3 in Chicago.

  The weirdness began to build in the second quarter when a fight broke out between backup guard Jo Jo English and the Knicks’ point guard Derek Harper that spilled into the stands a few rows down from where NBA Commissioner David Stern was sitting. Both English and Harper were ejected, and the Knicks started to fall apart, but they climbed back in the fourth quarter and tied the score with 1.8 seconds left. I called time out and drew up a play that called for Pippen to pass the ball inbounds to Kukoc for the final shot. Breaking out of the huddle, I heard Scottie grumble “bullshit.” He was already angry at Kukoc for creating a traffic jam on the previous play and forcing him to take a bad shot. Now Toni was getting a chance to be “The Man.”

  I told Scottie what had happened on the previous play didn’t matter anymore. “You had an opportunity to score, and it didn’t work,” I said. “Now we’re going to do something else.” Then I turned around, assuming the problem had been solved. But a few seconds later I glanced over my shoulder and saw Scottie hunched over at the far end of the bench, glowering.

  “Are you in or out?” I asked him, puzzled by his behavior.

  “I’m out,” he said.

  His reply caught me off guard, but I didn’t have time to argue. I called another timeout and replaced Scottie with Pete Myers, one of our better passers. Myers lofted a perfect pass to Kukoc, and Toni tossed in the game-winning shot at the buzzer. Pippen just sat there and watched.

  I felt sorry for Scottie as I walked off the court and made my way to the dressing room. I knew the fallout from this incident would haunt him for days, if not the rest of his career. He had broken one of the unspoken rules of sports, and I wasn’t sure if his teammates, not to mention the media, would ever forgive him. Despite his reputation as a malcontent, I couldn’t remember Scottie ever challenging one of my decisions. He was one of the most selfless players on the team. That’s why I had named him a cocaptain with Bill Cartwright after Michael retired. But none of that mattered now. In a rash moment, he had violated the trust of his teammates.

  My guess was that frustration had blurred Scottie’s thinking. And I knew that if I came d
own too hard on him, it would only make matters worse. Scottie is a brooder. When things go wrong for him, he often falls into a deep funk that lasts for days. I knew the incident would weigh on his mind like a Sisyphean boulder.

  All these thoughts were buzzing around in my mind as I stood over a sink in the shower room, taking out my contact lenses and preparing to talk to the team. Just then I heard Cartwright gasping for air in the showers. He was so overcome with emotion he could barely breathe.

  “What’s wrong, Bill?” I asked.

  “I can’t believe what Scottie did,” he said in a faint whisper. “I’ve got to say something.”

  By then, all the players had returned to the dressing room except Kukoc, who was doing a TV interview. The room, in the nether region of Chicago Stadium, was cramped, poorly lit, and smelled like an old, forgotten gym bag. Its dank cavelike atmosphere heightened the feeling of intimacy.

  After I made a few remarks, Bill took over. “Look, Scottie,” he said, staring at Pippen, “that was bullshit. After all we’ve been through on this team. This is our chance to do it on our own, without Michael, and you blow it with your selfishness. I’ve never been so disappointed in my whole life.”