by Phil Jackson
1. GIVING UP CONTROL
Suzuki writes, “If you want to obtain perfect calmness in your zazen, you should not be bothered by the various images you find in your mind. Let them come and let them go. Then they will be under control.”
The best way to control people, he adds, is to give them a lot of room and encourage them to be mischievous, then watch them. “To ignore them is not good; that is the worst policy,” he writes. “The second worst is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them, just to watch them, without trying to control them.”
This piece of advice came in handy later when I was dealing with Dennis Rodman.
2. TRUSTING THE MOMENT
Most of us spend the bulk of our time caught up in thoughts of the past or the future—which can be dangerous if your job is winning basketball games. Basketball takes place at such a lightning pace that it’s easy to make mistakes and get obsessed with what just happened or what might happen next, which distracts you from the only thing that really matters—this very moment.
Practicing Zen not only helped me become more acutely aware of what was happening in the present moment but also slowed down my experience of time because it diminished my tendency to rush into the future or get lost in the past. Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh talks about “dwelling happily in the present moment,” because that’s where everything you need is available. “Life can be found only in the present moment,” he writes. “The past is gone, and the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.”
3. LIVING WITH COMPASSION
One aspect of Buddhism that I found to be especially compelling was the teachings on compassion. The Buddha was known as the “compassionate one,” and according to religion scholars, his moral teachings bear a close resemblance to those of Jesus, who told his followers at the Last Supper: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” In a similar vein, the Buddha said, “Just as a mother would protect her only child at the risk of her own life, even so, cultivate a boundless heart towards all beings. Let your thoughts of boundless love pervade the whole world.”
In the Buddhist view, the best way to cultivate compassion is to be fully present in the moment. “To meditate,” said the Buddha, “is to listen with a receptive heart.” In her book Start Where You Are, Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron contends that meditation practice blurs the traditional boundaries between self and others. “What you do for yourself—any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself—will affect how you experience the world,” she writes. “What you do for yourself, you’re doing for others, and what you do for others, you’re doing for yourself.”
This idea would later become a key building block in my work as a coach.
—
In the meantime I still had a job to do as a player.
In the 1971–72 season Red Holzman, who was then general manager as well as head coach, made a number of moves that transformed the Knicks. First he traded Cazzie Russell to the San Francisco Warriors for Jerry Lucas, a strong, active big man who had a good twenty-five-foot shot but could also handle powerful centers like Dave Cowens and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Next, Red shipped Mike Riordan and Dave Stallworth to Baltimore for Earl “the Pearl” Monroe, probably the most creative ball handler in the game at that time. Red also drafted Dean “the Dream” Meminger, a quick, long-legged guard from Marquette who was a terror on defense.
With this new infusion of talent, we morphed into a more versatile team than we’d ever been before. We had more size and depth, a broader array of scoring options than the 1969–70 team, plus the perfect blend of individual skill and team consciousness. Some of us worried that Monroe might try to upstage Frazier in the backcourt, but Earl adapted himself to Walt’s game and added a dazzling new dimension to the offense. With Lucas, a passing magician, at center, we transformed from a power team into a multifaceted perimeter team, keying on fifteen-foot jump shots as well as layups. Red made me the prime backup to Dave DeBusschere and Bill Bradley—and I was energized in my new role. This was pure basketball at its finest, and I fit right in.
The only team we worried about in 1972–73 was the Celtics, who had dominated the Eastern Conference with a 68-14 record. In the four years since Bill Russell’s departure, GM Red Auerbach had re-created the team in the classic Celtics tradition, with a strong, active center (Dave Cowens), a sly outside shooter (Jo Jo White), and one of the best all-around players in the game (John Havlicek).
Holzman wasn’t a huge fan of Auerbach’s because he used every trick he could to give his team an edge. Auerbach was a master of gamesmanship. One of his trademark ploys was to light a cigar when he thought his team had won the game, which infuriated his opponents, especially when the score was still close.
But Auerbach outdid himself in the 1973 playoffs, and it ultimately backfired on him. We met the Celtics in the Eastern Conference finals after beating Baltimore 4–1 in the first round. Boston had the home-court advantage in the series, and Auerbach took full advantage of it. Whenever we played in Boston, Auerbach made our lives miserable: He’d put us in locker rooms where the keys didn’t work, the towels were missing, and the heat was set at over one hundred degrees and we couldn’t open the windows. For this series, he put us in a different locker room for every game, and the last one—for game 7—was a cramped janitor’s closet with no lockers and a ceiling so low many of us had to stoop to get dressed. Rather than demoralize us, as Auerbach no doubt expected, the locker-room gambit made us so angry it galvanized us even more.
No one had ever beaten the Celtics at home in a game 7 before, but we were still confident, because we had dominated Boston with our full-court press early in the series. The night before the big game, we were watching film of game 6 and noticed that Jo Jo White was killing us coming off high screens. Meminger, who was covering Jo Jo, started to get defensive, and Holzman snapped back. “I don’t give a damn about the screen,” he said. “Find a way to get through the screen and stop this guy. Don’t bitch about the screen, just get the job done.”
The next day Dean was a man possessed. He went at Jo Jo early and shut him down, effectively short-circuiting the Celtics’ offensive game plan. Then Dean came alive on the other end, breaking through the Celtics’ press and igniting a decisive 37–22 run in the second half. After that, Boston never recovered. The final score was Knicks 94, Celtics 78.
I’ve never seen Red Holzman happier than he was that night in the Boston janitor’s closet. It meant a great deal to him to beat his nemesis, Auerbach, on his own turf. Beaming with joy, he came over to me and said with a wry smile, “You know, Phil, sometimes life is a mystery and you can’t tell the difference between good and evil that clearly. But this is one of those times when good definitely triumphed over evil.”
The championship series against the Lakers was anticlimactic. They surprised us in the first game, but we closed down their running game after that and won in five. The postgame celebration in L.A. was a fizzle: just a handful of reporters standing around looking for quotes. But I didn’t care. I finally had a ring I could call my own.
—
The next season—1973–74—was one the best of my career. I settled into my role as sixth man and averaged 11.1 points and 5.8 rebounds per game. But the team was going through a transformation that worried me.
The hallmark of the championship Knicks was the extraordinary bond among the players and the selfless way we worked together as a team. That bond was particularly strong during our advance to the first championship in 1970. After the arrival of Earl Monroe, Jerry Lucas, and Dean Meminger in 1971, the team chemistry shifted, but a new bond formed that was more strictly professional in nature yet no less effective. We didn’t spend a lot of time with one
another off the court, but we meshed brilliantly on the floor. Now the team was going through another sea change, but this time the effect would be more disruptive.
We struggled to hold things together during the 1973–74 season with Reed, Lucas, and DeBusschere hobbled by injuries, and we limped into the Eastern Conference finals against the Celtics after barely surviving a tough seven-game series with the Bullets. The pivotal moment came in game 4 in Madison Square Garden, with the Celtics up 2–1 in the series and young backup center John Gianelli and me trying to make up for our diminished big men. But this time there would be no magical Willis Reed epiphany. Boston’s Dave Cowens and John Havlicek knew how to take advantage of our lack of strong front-court leadership and outmaneuvered us at every critical turn in the second half. Boston won 98–91.
The Celtics finished us off three days later in Boston en route to another successful championship run against the Milwaukee Bucks. I remember sitting in Logan Airport with my teammates after that loss and feeling as if our once-glorious dynasty had come to an end. Lucas and DeBusschere had already announced that they were planning to retire. By the time the next season got under way, Reed and Barnett had also moved on and Meminger had been picked up by New Orleans in the expansion draft and traded to Atlanta.
Nothing was the same after that. I stepped in as a starter the next year to replace DeBusschere and played pretty well, but only three other members of the core team remained—Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley, and Earl Monroe—and it was difficult to forge the kind of unity we’d had before. Times were changing, and the new players flooding into the NBA were more interested in showing off their flashy skills and living the NBA high life than in doing the hard work of creating a unified team.
Over the next two years, we added some talented players to the roster, including All-NBA star Spencer Haywood and three-time NBA scoring champion Bob McAdoo, but neither of them seemed to be that interested in mastering the Knicks’ traditional combination of intense defense and selfless teamwork.
Every day the gap between generations became more apparent. The new players, who were accustomed to being pampered in college, started complaining that nobody was taking care of their laundry or that the trainer wasn’t doing good enough tape jobs. The old Knicks were used to taking responsibility for our own laundry because there was no equipment manager then, and strange as it may sound, washing our own uniforms had a unifying effect on the team. If the newcomers weren’t willing to wash their own gear, we wondered whether they would take responsibility for what they had to do on court.
It didn’t take long to find out. Within a remarkably short time, the Knicks transitioned into a dual-personality team that could run up 15-point leads, then collapse at the end because we couldn’t marshal a coordinated attack. We held several team meetings to discuss the problem, but we couldn’t agree on how to bridge the gap. Nothing Red did to stimulate team play worked.
In 1976 the Knicks failed to make the playoffs for the first time in nine years. A year later Bradley retired and Frazier was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Then Red stepped down and was replaced by Willis Reed.
—
I thought the 1977–78 season would be my last, but in the off-season the Knicks made a deal to send me to the New Jersey Nets. I was reluctant at first, but I agreed to come on board when coach Kevin Loughery called and told me that he needed my help to work with the younger players. “I know you’re at the end of your career,” he said, “but coming to New Jersey could be a good bridge between playing and coaching.”
I wasn’t that interested in becoming a coach, but I was intrigued by Loughery’s maverick style of leadership. After training camp, Loughery said he wanted to move me over to assistant coach, but before that could happen forward Bob Elliott got injured and I was activated as a player. Nevertheless, I got a chance that year to work with the big men as a part-time assistant coach and take over for Kevin as head coach when he was thrown out of games by the refs, which happened fourteen times that season.
Loughery, who had won two ABA championships, had an exceptional eye for the game and was gifted at exploiting mismatches. But what I learned from him was how to push the envelope and get away with it. Loughery was the first coach I knew who had his players double-team inbound passers at half-court, a high-risk move that often paid off. He also adopted Hubie Brown’s ploy of double-teaming the ball handler and made it a regular part of the defense, even though it wasn’t strictly legal. One of his biggest innovations was developing out-of-the-box isolation plays for our best shooters. That tactic didn’t exactly align with Holzman’s model of five-man offense, but it fit the Nets lineup, which was loaded with good shooters, and opened the way for new forms of creativity to flower in the years to come.
Our star player was Bernard King, an explosive small forward with a superquick release who had averaged 24.2 points and 9.5 rebounds per game as a rookie the year before. Unfortunately, he also had a substance-abuse problem. One night that season he was found asleep at the wheel at a stop sign and was arrested for drunk driving and cocaine possession. (The charges were later dropped.) This incident pushed Loughery over the edge. He was known for being good at managing self-absorbed stars, but he felt he wasn’t getting through to King and was losing control of the team. So he threatened to quit. When general manager Charlie Theokas asked Loughery to suggest a replacement, he put my name forward. I was a little stunned when I heard this, but it felt good to know that someone of Kevin’s stature thought I could handle the job. Eventually Loughery backed down. Several months later, the Nets traded King to the Utah Jazz, where he spent most of the season in rehab.
At the start of the 1979–80 season, Loughery told me that he was going to cut me from the active roster but offered me a job as a full-time assistant coach at a substantial pay cut. This was the moment I had always dreaded. I remember driving my car to the Nets’ training center in Piscataway, New Jersey, and thinking that I was never going to feel the thrill of battle again. Sure, I said to myself, I might have some high moments in the future, but unless I had to go through a life-and-death crisis of some kind, I’d probably never have another experience quite like the one I’d had as a player in the NBA.
Being a coach was not the same, or at least that was how I felt at the time. Win or lose, I’d always be one step removed from the action.
Somewhere on the outskirts of Piscataway, I found myself having an imaginary conversation with my father, who had died a few months earlier.
“What am I going to do, Dad?” I said. “Is the rest of my life going to be total drudgery, just going through the motions?”
Pause.
“How can anything else ever be as meaningful to me as playing basketball? Where am I going to find my new purpose in life?”
It would take several years for me to find the answer.
5
DANCES WITH BULLS
Don’t play the saxophone. Let it play you.
CHARLIE PARKER
This wasn’t the first time that Jerry Krause had called me about a job with the Bulls. Three years earlier, when Stan Albeck was head coach, Jerry had invited me to interview for an assistant-coach slot. I was coaching in Puerto Rico at the time and arrived in Chicago sporting a beard and dressed for the tropics. Atop my head was an Ecuadorian straw hat with a blue parrot feather sticking out of it—very fashionable (and practical) down in the islands. Albeck took one look at me and invoked his veto power. Jerry had already rejected Stan’s first choice for assistant coach, so Stan’s veto may have been payback. In any case, I didn’t get the job.
The second time around Krause advised me to lose the beard and wear a sport jacket and tie. The new head coach was Doug Collins, whom I’d played against when he was a star shooting guard for the Philadelphia 76ers. He was a smart, energetic coach whom Krause had hired to replace Albeck in 1986. Krause was looking for someone who could galvanize the Bulls’ young player
s into a championship-contending team—which Doug did. Johnny Bach, who knew Collins from their days with the 1972 Olympics team, said Doug reminded him of coach Adolph Rupp’s famous pronouncement that there are only two kinds of coaches: those who lead teams to victory and those who drive them. Doug was definitely in the second category. Although he didn’t have a deep coaching background, he had boundless energy, which he used to rev up the players for big games.
Doug and I hit it off immediately. On the ride back to my hotel after dinner with Jerry, Doug said he was looking for someone with a history of winning championships to inspire the players. Two days later Jerry offered me a job as assistant coach and gave me one more piece of fashion advice. The next time you come back to Chicago, he said, bring along your championship rings.
The Bulls were a team that was about to break loose. They still had a few holes in their lineup: Their center, Dave Corzine, was not that quick or skilled on the boards, and their six-eleven forward, Brad Sellers, had chronic injury problems. But they had a strong power forward, Charles Oakley, a solid outside shooter, John Paxson, and two promising rookie forwards, Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant, whom Bach called “the Dobermans” because they were fast and aggressive enough to play smothering pressure defense.
The star, of course, was Michael Jordan, who had blossomed the previous year into the most transcendent player in the game. Not only did he win the scoring title, averaging 37.1 points per game, he also tested the limits of human performance, creating breathtaking moves in midair. The only player I knew who came close to Michael’s leaps was Julius Erving, but Dr. J didn’t have Jordan’s remarkable energy. Michael would have a great game one night and follow it with an even more mind-boggling performance the next day, then come back two days later and do it all over again.
The Bulls’ chief rivals were the Detroit Pistons, a rough, physical team that proudly referred to themselves as “the Bad Boys.” Led by point guard Isiah Thomas, the Pistons were always spoiling for a fight, and they had a team full of bruisers, including Bill Laimbeer, Rick Mahorn, Dennis Rodman, and John Salley. Early in my first season a fight broke out between Mahorn and the Bulls’ Charles Oakley that erupted into a melee. Doug Collins rushed on court to calm things down and was hurled over the scorers’ table. Johnny Bach also sprained his wrist trying to be a peacemaker. Thomas boasted later that the Pistons were “the last of the gladiator teams.”