Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success

by Phil Jackson

  One of the players I worked with closely during my tenure as an assistant coach was Scottie Pippen. We both started with the team the same year, and I spent a lot of time helping him learn how to pull up and shoot off the dribble. Scottie was a quick learner and devoted time to absorbing how the triangle worked. He had been a point guard in college before becoming a small forward, and he had an innate sense of how all the pieces fit together on the floor. Scottie had long arms and excellent court vision, which made him the perfect person to spearhead our defensive attack.

  What impressed me most about Scottie, however, was his development over time as a leader—not by mimicking Michael but by teaching his teammates how to play within the system and always offering a compassionate ear when they ran into trouble. This was critical because Michael wasn’t very accessible and many of the players were intimidated by his presence. Scottie was someone they could talk to, someone who would keep an eye out for them on court. As Steve Kerr says, “Scottie was the nurturer; Michael was the enforcer.”

  —

  The Bulls started to take off during my first season with the team, 1987–88. We won fifty games and finished tied for second in the tough Central Division. Michael continued to soar, winning his second scoring title and his first MVP award. The best sign was the 3–2 victory over the Cleveland Cavaliers in the first round of the playoffs. But the Pistons rolled over the Bulls in five games in the conference finals, en route to the championship finals, against the Los Angeles Lakers.

  During the off-season Jerry Krause traded Charles Oakley to the Knicks for Bill Cartwright, a move that infuriated Michael because he considered Oakley his protector on the floor. Jordan made fun of Cartwright’s “butterfingers” and dubbed him “Medical Bill” because of his ongoing foot problems. But despite his small shoulders and narrow frame, Bill was a smart, rock-solid defender who could shut down Patrick Ewing and other big men. Once we ran a drill in practice that ended up pitting six-six Michael against seven-one Cartwright in a one-on-one battle of wills. Michael was determined to dunk over Cartwright, but Bill was equally determined not to let that happen. So they collided in midair and everyone held their breath while Bill slowly eased Michael to the floor. After that, Michael changed his tune on Cartwright.

  Cartwright wasn’t the only weapon the team needed to move to the next level. Collins was pushing hard for Krause to find a strong, playmaking point guard who could orchestrate the offense like Isiah Thomas did in Detroit. But the team had already gone through several point guards—including Sedale Threatt, Steve Colter, and Rory Sparrow—trying to find someone who would meet Jordan’s expectations. The latest candidate was Sam Vincent, who had come over in a trade with Seattle, but he didn’t last long. So Doug decided to make Jordan the point guard, which worked fairly well but reduced M.J.’s scoring options and wore him down physically during the regular season.

  At one point, Doug got into a heated argument with Tex about the point-guard dilemma. Tex suggested that if Doug instituted a system of offense—not necessarily the triangle but any system—he wouldn’t have to rely so heavily on a point guard to run the offense. By this time, Doug had grown weary of listening to Tex’s constant stream of criticism, so he decided to banish him to the sidelines and reduce his role as a coach.

  When Krause heard about this move, he began to lose faith in Collins’s judgment. Why would anyone in his right mind exile Tex Winter to Siberia? The players seemed to be losing faith in Doug as well. He changed plays so frequently—often modifying them in the middle of games—that team members began to refer to the offense flippantly as “a play a day.”

  A critical point came during a game in Milwaukee right before Christmas. Doug got into a battle with the refs and was tossed out late in the first half. He turned the team over to me and handed me his play card. The Bulls were so far behind, I decided to run a full-court press and give the players a free hand running the offense, rather than calling Doug’s plays. The team quickly turned the game around and we won handily.

  What I didn’t realize until later was that toward the end of the game the Chicago TV broadcast showed my wife, June, sitting next to Krause and his wife, Thelma, in the stands. That, as much as anything else, created a great deal of tension between Doug and me over the next few months.

  A few weeks later, I was in Miami planning to scout a game when I got a call from Krause telling me that he didn’t want me to be away from the team anymore. Doug and Michael, I learned later, had gotten in an argument of some kind, and Jerry wanted me available to step in if there was more friction on the team. Soon after, Jerry began to take me into his confidence.

  Eventually things settled down, and the Bulls stumbled through the rest of the season, finishing fifth in the conference with three fewer wins than the previous year. But the addition of Cartwright and the rise of Pippen and Grant made the team much better positioned than before to make a strong run in the playoffs.

  The first round against the Cavaliers went all five games, but Michael was bursting with confidence when he boarded the bus for the finale in Cleveland. He lit a cigar and said, “Don’t worry, guys. We’re going to win.” Cleveland’s Craig Ehlo almost made him eat his words when he put the Cavs ahead by one with seconds left. But Michael responded with a balletic double-clutch shot, with Ehlo draped all over him, to win the game, 101–100. Afterward Tex said to me, “I guess now they won’t be changing coaches anytime soon.” I had to smile. I didn’t care, because we were on our way to the Eastern Conference finals. The Bulls had come a long way from their 40-42 record the year before I’d joined the team.

  Next we faced the Pistons, and, as usual, it was an ugly affair. Chicago won the first game at the Silverdome, but after that the Pistons overpowered the Bulls with their intimidating defense and won the series, 4–2. Krause told me later that midway through that series he told owner Jerry Reinsdorf that the team needed to replace Collins with someone who could win a championship.

  After the playoffs I attended the NBA’s talent showcase in Chicago, an event organized by the league for draft-eligible players to show off their skills to coaches and scouts. While I was there, Dick McGuire, my first coach with the Knicks, asked me if I would be interested in replacing New York’s head coach, Rick Pitino, who was leaving to coach the University of Kentucky. I said I would, and suddenly the wheels were in motion.

  Shortly after that, Reinsdorf invited me to meet him at O’Hare Airport. I’d always liked Jerry because he had grown up in Brooklyn and was a big fan of the Knicks’ selfless style of basketball. He’d gotten wind of my interest in the New York job and asked me if I could choose, which team I’d rather coach, the Bulls or the Knicks. I said I had a lot of affection for New York, having played there, but I also thought the Bulls were poised to win multiple championships, while the Knicks would be lucky to win one. In short, I said I’d rather stay with the Bulls.

  A few weeks later Krause called me in Montana and asked me to go to a secure phone. So I drove my motorcycle into town and called him back from a pay phone. He told me that he and Reinsdorf had decided to make a coaching change, and he offered me the job.

  I was thrilled, but the fans in Chicago were not so pleased. Collins was a popular figure in town and he’d taken the team to new heights during the past three years. When reporters asked Reinsdorf why he had made such a risky move, he said, “Doug brought us a long way from where we had been. You cannot say he wasn’t productive. But now we have a man we feel can take us the rest of the way.”

  The pressure was on.

  6

  WARRIOR SPIRIT

  Think lightly of yourself and think deeply of the world.

  MIYAMOTO MUSASHI

  As I sat by Flathead Lake in Montana that summer, contemplating the season ahead, I realized that this was a moment of truth for the Bulls. For the past six years we had been struggling to create a team around Michael Jordan. Now we had the tale
nt in place to win a championship, but there was an important piece missing. In a word, the Bulls needed to become a tribe.

  To succeed we had to get by the Detroit Pistons, but I didn’t think we could outmuscle them unless we acquired a completely different lineup. They were just too good at fighting in the “alligator wrestling pond,” as Johnny Bach called it. And when we tried to play the game their way, our players ended up getting frustrated and angry, which was just what the Pistons hoped would happen.

  What our team could do, though, was outrun the Pistons—and outdefend them as well. Nobody on the Pistons, except perhaps Dennis Rodman, was quick enough to keep up with Michael, Scottie, and Horace on the fast break. And with Bill Cartwright’s formidable presence under the basket, we had the makings of one of the best defensive teams in the league. M.J. had taken great pride in winning the Defensive Player of the Year award the previous season, and Scottie and Horace were quickly developing into first-rate defenders. But in order to exploit those advantages, we needed to be more connected as a team and to embrace a more expansive vision of working together than simply getting the ball to Michael and hoping for the best.

  When I was an assistant coach, I created a video for the players with clips from The Mystic Warrior, a television miniseries about Sioux culture based on the best-selling novel Hanta Yo by Ruth Beebe Hill. Ever since childhood I’ve been fascinated by the Sioux, some of whom lived in my grandfather’s boardinghouse, which was near a reservation in Montana. When I was with the Knicks, a Lakota Sioux friend from college, Mike Her Many Horses, asked me to teach a series of basketball clinics at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The purpose was to help heal the rift in his community caused by the 1973 standoff between police and American Indian movement activists at the site of the Wounded Knee massacre. I discovered during those clinics, which I taught with my teammates Bill Bradley and Willis Reed, that the Lakota loved the game and played it with an intense spirit of connectedness that was an integral part of their tribal tradition.

  One of the things that intrigued me about Lakota culture was its view of the self. Lakota warriors had far more autonomy than their white counterparts, but their freedom came with a high degree of responsibility. As Native American scholar George W. Linden points out, the Lakota warrior was “the member of a tribe, and being a member, he never acted against, apart from, or as the whole without good reason.” For the Sioux, freedom was not about being absent but about being present, adds Linden. It meant “freedom for, freedom for the realization of greater relationships.”

  The point I wanted to make by showing the players The Mystic Warrior video was that connecting to something beyond their individual goals could be a source of great power. The hero of the series, who was based loosely on Crazy Horse, goes into battle to save his tribe after experiencing a powerful vision. In our discussion after watching the video, the players seemed to resonate with the idea of bonding together as a tribe, and I thought I could build on that as we moved into the new season.

  As I mentioned in the first chapter, management experts Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright describe five stages of tribal development in their book, Tribal Leadership. My goal in my first year as head coach was to transform the Bulls from a stage 3 team of lone warriors committed to their own individual success (“I’m great and you’re not”) to a stage 4 team in which the dedication to the We overtakes the emphasis on the Me (“We’re great and you’re not”).

  But making that transition would take more than simply turning up the heat. I wanted to create a culture of selflessness and mindful awareness at the Bulls. To do that, I couldn’t just rely on one or two innovative motivational techniques. I had to devise a multifaceted program that included the triangle offense but also incorporated the lessons I had learned over the years about bonding people together and awakening the spirit.

  My first step was to talk with Michael.

  —

  I knew Michael wasn’t a fan of the triangle. He referred to it sarcastically as “that equal-opportunity offense” that was designed for a generation of players who didn’t have his creative one-on-one skills. But at the same time I knew that Michael longed to be part of a team that was more integrated and multidimensional than the current incarnation of the Bulls.

  This was not going to be an easy conversation. Basically I was planning to ask Michael, who had won his third scoring title in a row the previous season with an average of 32.5 points per game, to reduce the number of shots he took so that other members of the team could get more involved in the offense. I knew this would be a challenge for him: Michael was only the second player to win both a scoring title and the league MVP award in the same year, the first being Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1971.

  I told him that I was planning to implement the triangle and, as a result, he probably wouldn’t be able to win another scoring title. “You’ve got to share the spotlight with your teammates,” I said, “because if you don’t, they won’t grow.”

  Michael’s reaction was surprisingly pragmatic. His main concern was that he didn’t have much confidence in his teammates, especially Cartwright, who had difficulty holding onto passes, and Horace, who wasn’t that skilled at thinking on his feet.

  “The important thing,” I replied, “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, I guess I could average thirty-two points,” he said. “That’s eight points a quarter. Nobody else is going to do that.”

  “Well, when you put it that way, maybe you can win the title,” I said. “But how about scoring a few more of those points at the end of the game?”

  Michael agreed to give my plan a try. Shortly after our conversation, I later learned, he told reporter Sam Smith, “I’ll give it two games.” But when he saw that I wasn’t going to back down, Michael dedicated himself to learning the system and figuring out ways to use it to his advantage—which is exactly what I had hoped he would do.

  It was fun watching Tex and Michael argue about the system. Tex admired Jordan’s skill, but he was a purist about the triangle and wasn’t shy about giving Michael a piece of his mind when he went off script. Meanwhile, Michael wasn’t shy about creating variations on Tex’s beautiful machine. He thought the system was at best a three-quarter offense. After that the team needed to improvise and use its “think power” to win games.

  It was a clash of visions. Tex believed it was foolhardy for a team to rely so heavily on one person, no matter how talented he was. Michael argued that his creativity was opening up exciting new possibilities for the game.

  “There’s no I in the word ‘team,’” Tex would say.

  “But there is in the word ‘win,’” Michael would counter with a grin.

  As far as I was concerned, they were both right—up to a point. I didn’t believe the triangle alone was the answer for the Bulls. What I was looking for was the middle path between Tex’s purity and Michael’s creativity. It took time, but once the players had mastered the basics, we added some variations to the system that allowed the team to set certain plays in motion to avoid intense defensive pressure. Once that happened, the Bulls’ game really took off.

  Another change I introduced to make the Bulls less Jordan-centric was to shake up the team’s pecking order. Michael had a powerful presence on the floor, but he had a different style of leadership than Larry Bird or Magic Johnson, who could galvanize a team with their magnetic personalities. As Los Angeles Times columnist Mark Heisler put it, Jordan wasn’t “a natural leader, he was a natural doer.” He drove the team with the sheer force of his will. It was as if he were saying, “I’m going out here, men, and I’m going to kick some ass. Are you coming with me?”

  Michael also held his teammates to the same high standard of performance he expected of himself. “Michael was a demanding teammat
e,” says John Paxson. “If you were on the floor, you had to do your job and do it the right way. He couldn’t accept anyone not caring as much as he did.”

  I thought we needed another leader on the team to balance Michael’s perfectionism, so I named Bill Cartwright cocaptain. Despite his soft-spoken demeanor, he could be deceptively forceful when he wanted to be, and he wasn’t afraid to stand up to Michael, which Jordan respected. “Bill was a quiet, quiet leader,” says Michael. “He didn’t talk much, but when he did, everybody listened. He would challenge me when he felt I was out of place. Which was okay. We had that kind of relationship. We challenged each other.”

  The players called Cartwright “Teach” because he took other big men to school when they tried to get past him in the lane. “Bill was the physical rock of our team,” says Paxson. “He didn’t back down for anybody—and the game was much more physical then. He was like a big brother. If someone was picking on you, he was going to make sure you knew that he was there looking out for you.”

  At thirty-two, Bill was the oldest player on the team. He knew instinctively what we were trying to do with the Bulls and had a gift for explaining it to the players better than I could. One of my weaknesses is that sometimes I speak in broad generalizations. Bill brought the conversation back to earth.

  —

  Basketball is a great mystery. You can do everything right. You can have the perfect mix of talent and the best system of offense in the game. You can devise a foolproof defensive strategy and prepare your players for every possible eventuality. But if the players don’t have a sense of oneness as a group, your efforts won’t pay off. And the bond that unites a team can be so fragile, so elusive.

  Oneness is not something you can turn on with a switch. You need to create the right environment for it to grow, then nurture it carefully every day. What the Bulls needed, I decided, was a sanctuary where they could bond together as a team, protected from all the distractions of the outside world. I prohibited players from bringing family and friends to our training facility, except on special occasions. I also restricted the media from observing practices. I wanted the players to feel that they could act naturally during practice without having to worry about doing or saying something that might show up in the papers the next day.