Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success

by Phil Jackson

  All these activities made us stronger not just as individuals but also as a team. “One of the best things about our practices,” says Steve Kerr, who joined the Bulls in 1993, “was that they delivered us from the mundane. In the NBA if you have a coach that says the same thing every day and the practices are the same too, it gets old fast. But our communal gatherings were really important. Our team bonded in ways that the other teams I’ve played for never did.”

  For Paxson, our adventures outside of basketball routines were transcendent. “It felt as if we were part of something really important,” he says. “We felt like the good guys because we were trying to play the game the right way. It was as if we were part of something bigger than the game. And it was reinforced after we started to win, because the fans would let you know how important it was to them. I still have people come up and talk to me about where they were when we won our first championship and why it was such a priceless moment for them. We were playing the game the right way, and that’s what people long for.”

  —

  “Transcendent” isn’t exactly the word I would use to describe the Bulls as the playoffs began in late April. We had struggled all season, limping along without Cartwright and other players who were nursing injuries. Although we ended up winning the division, we finished with 57 wins, 10 fewer than the year before. What’s more, we couldn’t count on home-court advantage throughout the playoffs, as we had in the previous season.

  As soon as the playoffs began, however, the players shifted to another level. At least, that’s how it seemed as we swept both Atlanta and Cleveland in the first rounds. But then we ran into the Knicks in New York and lost two games straight. This time the aspiring king slayer was John Starks, a quick, hard-driving guard with a deadly three-point shot who was giving Jordan endless grief on defense. With forty-seven seconds left in game 2, Starks went airborne over Michael and Horace for an in-your-face dunk that put the Knicks up by five. Pat Riley called Starks’s move “the exclamation mark.”

  When we returned to Chicago, I showed the players a video of the dunk and told Michael we needed to stop Starks from penetrating our defense and cut off his post passes to Ewing. That got Michael’s attention.

  But Michael’s challenges weren’t restricted to the basketball court. That week New York Times columnist Dave Anderson revealed that Michael had been spotted gambling in Atlantic City on the day of game 2, and Anderson questioned whether his late-night field trip had hampered his performance. All of a sudden an army of reporters descended on our training facility, asking detailed questions about Michael’s gambling habits, which he found offensive. He stopped talking to the media, and so did his teammates. I thought the story was ludicrous. “We don’t need a curfew,” I told reporters. “These are adults. You have to have other things in your life or the pressure becomes too great.”

  Unfortunately, the story wouldn’t die. Soon afterward a book was published by businessman Richard Esquinas claiming that Michael owed him $1.25 million for gambling losses on golf. Michael denied that the losses were that big, and it was later reported that he’d agreed to pay Esquinas a $300,000 settlement. Other stories began to surface about Michael getting fleeced for large sums of money by shady golf hustlers. As the coverage escalated, Michael’s father, James Jordan, came to his son’s defense. “Michael doesn’t have a gambling problem,” he said. “He has a competitiveness problem.”

  Fortunately, none of these distractions affected the team’s play. If anything, they helped to focus everyone’s energy on the task at hand. Michael roared out in game 3, shutting down Starks and leading the Bulls to a decisive four-game sweep. “The big thing about this team is everyone in here has a burning desire to win,” said Cartwright. “Everyone in here really hates to lose. That’s the attitude we take onto the court. We just hate to lose, and when you have guys like that, they’ll do anything to win.”

  —

  The next series—the championship finals against Phoenix—was billed as a showdown between Michael and Charles Barkley, who had emerged as a superstar that year after winning the MVP award and piloting the Suns to a league-leading 62-20 record. I wasn’t that concerned about Barkley because our players knew most of his moves from his days on the 76ers. A bigger threat, I thought, was point guard Kevin Johnson, who spearheaded their lightning-quick fast break, the key to their high-scoring offense. I was also concerned about guard-forward Dan Majerle and his maddening three-pointers.

  Johnny Bach encouraged me to stay with our full-court defensive pressure to contain Johnson—using B.J., Pax, and Horace to trap him in the backcourt—and it helped us steal the first two games in Phoenix. But when we returned to Chicago, the Suns came back to life and won two of the next three games, including a triple-overtime marathon in game 3. But Michael was unflappable. As we boarded the plane for game 6, he showed up smoking a footlong cigar. “Hello, world champs,” he said. “Let’s go to Phoenix and kick some ass.”

  The game was an all-out battle. Afterward I thought the best slogan for this series would be “Three the Hard Way,” because the Suns defense held us to only 12 points in the fourth quarter. But our defense was even more effective, restricting the Suns to a paltry 24 percent shooting average in the final period.

  It all came down to a play that put a smile on Tex Winter’s face. Jordan came into the game with eight minutes left and took over, scoring our first 9 points in the period, including a breakaway jam that put us within 2 points at the thirty-eight-second mark. At the break, I called the players together and said with a straight face, “Let’s go away from M.J.” Some of the players looked at me as if I were mad. Then they realized I wasn’t serious and the tension broke.

  As it turned out, it wouldn’t be Michael who took the final shot. He dribbled up court and hit Pippen, who passed it back to M.J. But when the Suns’ defense collapsed on him, he passed the ball back to Scottie, who started driving toward the basket. At the last moment Scottie dished off to Horace on the baseline. Then Horace, who saw Danny Ainge closing in to foul him, tossed the ball to Paxson, who was wide open at the top of the key. And John nailed the three-pointer.

  Talk about a peak experience. Years later, in an interview with author Roland Lazenby, Paxson described what was going through his mind. “It was a dream come true,” he said. “You’re a kid out in your driveway shooting shots to win championships. When you get down to it, it’s still just a shot in a basketball game. But I think it allowed a lot of people to relate to that experience, because there are a lot of kids and adults who lived out their own fantasies in their backyards. It made the third of the three championships special. It’s a real nice way of defining a three-peat, by making a three-point shot.”

  It wasn’t the shot that captivated me, however. It was the pass from Michael that led to the pass from Scottie that led to the pass from Horace that led to the shot. That sequence of passes would never have happened if we hadn’t spent all those months and years not only mastering all of Tex’s drills but also developing the kind of group intelligence needed for a team to perform as one. That night the triangle was a thing of beauty.

  After the game, the sports pundits began comparing the Bulls with the giants of the past. With this victory, we became only the third team in history—along with the Minneapolis Lakers and the Boston Celtics—to win three NBA championships in a row. It was flattering to be included in the same sentence with those hallowed teams. But what they missed was the real story: the inner journey the players had gone through to transform the Bulls from a stage 3 (“I’m great, you’re not”) team into a stage 4 (“We’re great, they’re not”) team.

  I’ve always been against packing suitcases before a big game, just in case the basketball gods favor our opponent and we have to stay around to play another day. So after the win, we returned to our hotel, packed our luggage, and celebrated on the plane back to Chicago, where a huge, ecstatic crowd of fans was waiting to greet
us.

  This season had been a hard ride. The pressure kept building and building until it felt like it might never stop. But the players turned to one another for strength, and then ended it all with a moment of pure basketball poetry that made all the pain and ugliness melt away. That night I awoke suddenly after a few hours of sleep, overwhelmed by a feeling of deep satisfaction. Then I drifted back and was out for hours.

  —

  Soon the feelings of joy turned to sorrow. In August Michael Jordan’s father was murdered on his way home from a funeral in Wilmington, North Carolina. Michael was shattered. He was very close to his father, who had retired and spent a good deal of time in Chicago as Michael’s chief supporter. The media hordes shadowed Michael everywhere after his dad’s death, and it pained him that his fame made it difficult for his family to mourn in private. There was a time when all Michael had to deal with was a handful of sportswriters, many of whom he knew personally. Now he was being stalked by a large, faceless crowd of celebrity journalists who had no qualms about invading corners of his personal life that had once been off limits.

  For a long time I suspected Michael might want to step away from the game—and all the pressures it entailed—and do something else with his life. He’d been dropping hints for months that he might be interested in switching to professional baseball, and he’d even gone as far as having his trainer, Tim Grover, design a baseball-oriented workout program. So it didn’t surprise me when Michael met with Jerry Reinsdorf over the summer and told him he wanted to leave the Bulls to play for Jerry’s other club: the White Sox. Jerry told Michael that before he could give him an answer, he needed to talk it over with me.

  I wasn’t interested in trying to talk Michael out of following his dream, but I wanted to make sure he’d examined the move from every possible angle. I talked to him more as his friend than as his coach, never raising my own personal interest in the matter. For starters, I appealed to his sense of a higher calling. I said that God had given him a remarkable talent that made millions of people happy, and I didn’t think it was right for him to walk away. But he had an answer for that. “For some reason, God is telling me to move on, and I must move on,” he said. “People have to learn that nothing lasts forever.”

  Then we tried to figure out a way that he could compete in the playoffs without playing the whole regular season. But he’d already considered everything I suggested and rejected the idea. Finally I realized he had made his mind up and was serious about leaving the game he had dominated for so long. It was very moving.

  “We sat in that room getting all emotional and talking about the steps I needed to take,” Michael recalls. “And I walked away with the understanding that Phil was a great friend. He made me think about a lot of different things, and didn’t let me rush into the decision. But at the end of the day he totally understood that I needed a break. That I had gotten to a point when I was battling a lot of demons rather than focusing on basketball. And walking away was what I needed to do at that particular time.”

  But as Michael walked out the door, somehow I sensed that this wasn’t going to be the end of the story.

  10

  WORLD IN FLUX

  If you live in the river you should make friends with the crocodile.

  INDIAN PROVERB (PUNJABI)

  It was supposed to be a night of celebration. Michael Jordan was there with his family for the 1993 ring ceremony and home opener at Chicago Stadium. This was his first public appearance since he’d announced his retirement on October 6, and the fans were eager to express their gratitude. “Deep down in my heart,” Michael said to the crowd after receiving his third ring, “I will always be a Chicago Bulls fan and I’ll support my teammates to the fullest.”

  What we needed that night, however, wasn’t just another fan. I’m not sure if it was Michael’s presence in the front row or the fact that we were playing the Miami Heat, an oft-beaten rival that was looking for vengeance, but we went on to play one of the worst games in franchise history. How bad was it? We set team records for fewest points scored in a period (6), in a half (25), and in our beloved stadium (71). It was so bad the Miami bench trash-talked us shamelessly all night without any consequences and the fans started streaming out midway through the third period.

  After the 95–71 blowout, Miami’s center, Rony Seikaly, said he was worried that Michael was going to “take his suit coat off and be Superman against us again.” Actually, I’m glad he didn’t. What better way for the players to learn that they no longer could count on Michael to bail them out than to lose by such historic proportions with the man himself sitting in the front row?

  The sports pundits thought we were on life support now that Michael had retired. If we were lucky, they said, we might win thirty games. And the odds in Vegas were twenty-five to one against our winning a fourth championship. But I was guardedly optimistic. The core of our championship team sans Michael was still intact, and I believed the team spirit we’d built over the years could carry us into the playoffs. I wrote down what I thought would be a reasonable goal for the season: forty-nine wins. But I didn’t feel confident enough yet to share it with anyone.

  My biggest concern was figuring out how to replace the 30-plus points Michael averaged every game. Because Jordan’s retirement happened so late in the year, Jerry Krause didn’t have many options left. So he signed Pete Myers, a reliable free-agent guard (and former Bull) who was a solid defender, an exceptional passer, and a quick study on the triangle offense. But in his seven years in the NBA he had averaged only about 3.8 points per game—not exactly Jordanesque numbers. A stronger possibility was Toni Kukoc, whom Jerry had finally persuaded to join the Bulls after a long courtship. Kukoc, a six-eleven forward billed as “the best player in the world outside of the NBA,” was a gifted shooter who had averaged 19 points per game in the Italian pro league and had led Croatia’s national team to a silver medal in the 1992 Olympics. But Toni had yet to be tested in the NBA, and I questioned whether he was tough enough to withstand the punishment. Two other additions were guard Steve Kerr and center Bill Wennington, both of whom showed promise but had yet to post big numbers. Clearly, it was going to take a village to fill the Jordan gap.

  —

  In the preseason I’d invited George Mumford, a sports psychologist and meditation teacher, to join us at training camp to give the players a mini workshop on coping with the stress of success. But a few days before George arrived, Michael announced his retirement, and the team was going through an identity crisis. So George talked about the two aspects of every crisis: danger and opportunity. If you have the right mind-set, he said, you can make the crisis work for you. You have the chance to create a new identity for the team that will be even stronger than before. Suddenly, the players perked up.

  George had an interesting background. He’d played basketball at UMass and roomed with NBA great Julius Erving and Boston College coach Al Skinner. But he had a serious injury that forced him off the team. During recovery he grew interested in meditation, and he spent several years studying at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center. He later started exploring new ways to integrate meditation, psychology, and organizational development. When I met him, he was working with Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and a pioneer in research on the effects of mindfulness on pain management and overall health.

  George had a gift for demystifying meditation and was able to explain it in language that made sense to the players. He also had an intuitive feel for the issues they were grappling with because of his friendship with Dr. J and other elite athletes. I’d already introduced mindfulness meditation to most of the players, and they knew how much it could help them improve their ability to read what was happening on the floor and react more effectively. But George wanted to move them to the next level. He believed that mindfulness training would help them become both more focused
as individuals and more selfless as a team.

  The word “mindfulness” has become so diluted in recent years that it’s lost much of its original meaning. It comes from the Sanskrit word smriti, which means “remember.” “Mindfulness is remembering to come back to the present moment,” writes Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. This is an ongoing process that is not limited to the act of meditation itself. “Sitting and watching our breath is a wonderful practice, but it is not enough,” he adds. “For transformation to take place, we have to practice mindfulness all day long, not just on our meditation cushion.” Why is this important? Because most of us—basketball players included—spend so much time bouncing back and forth between thoughts of the past and the future that we lose touch with what’s happening right here, right now. And that prevents us from appreciating the deep mystery of being alive. As Kabat-Zinn writes in Wherever You Go, There You Are, “The habit of ignoring our present moments in favor of others yet to come leads directly to a pervasive lack of awareness of the web of life in which we are embedded.”

  George taught mindfulness as a way of life, what he called “meditation off the cushion.” That meant being fully present not just on the basketball floor but throughout the rest of the day as well. The key, he said, was not just to sit and calm your mind but to learn to read and react effectively in any situation based on what’s happening at that very moment.

  One of the first things he noticed about the players, particularly the younger ones, was that they were trapped in a restrictive mind-set that made it difficult for them to adapt to their new reality. “Many of these guys were the main dude on their college teams,” he says. “But now they were in the NBA and there were a lot of players who were faster, quicker and stronger. So they had to figure out a new way to compete and be successful. The thing that got them here was not going to get them to the next level.”