Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success

by Phil Jackson

  The example George gives is Jared Dudley, a forward for the Phoenix Suns whom he has worked with. At Boston College, Dudley was a high-scoring post-up player with an aggressive style that won him the nickname “Junkyard Dog.” But when he got to the pros, he realized he had to take on a different role. Working with George, he discovered how to adapt to the situation and grow as a player. George remembers: “Jared looked around and said, OK, they need somebody to play defense—I’ll do that. They need somebody to hit three’s—I’ll do that. He was always thinking: How do I want to play and how do I need to change?” The result: Jared flourished in his new role, and averaged 12-plus points per game in 2011–12.

  Our goal was to help the players make a similar shift. They each needed to find a role for themselves that played to their strengths. At first George focused on getting them simply to pay attention and adjust their behavior to the team’s goals. But after working with the players for a while, he realized that the first step was to help them understand that what they were learning to do on the court would also enhance their own individual growth. As George says, they needed to see how “in the process of becoming a we, they could also be their best me.”

  —

  None of this was accomplished overnight. For most people, the process of waking up to the connectedness between oneself and others, as well as to the wisdom of the present moment, takes years. But the members of the 1993–94 team were especially receptive. They wanted to prove to the world that they could be more than Michael’s supporting cast and win a championship on their own. They weren’t as talented as some of the other teams I’ve coached, but they knew intuitively that their best hope was to bond together as seamlessly possible.

  At first it looked as if the home opener might be prophetic. Several players were sidelined with injuries—including Scottie, John Paxson, Scott Williams, and Bill Cartwright—and by the end of November our record was 6-7. But I was beginning to see signs that the team was gelling—including last-minute wins against the Lakers and the Bucks. And when Scottie returned, the team erupted, winning thirteen of the next fourteen games. At the All-Star break, we were 34-13 and on track to win sixty games.

  Scottie was the ideal leader for this team. At the start of the season he took over Michael’s extralarge locker to make a statement, but to his credit he didn’t try to turn himself into a clone of M.J. “Scottie hasn’t tried to be something he’s not,” Paxson said at the time. “He hasn’t tried to score 30 a game. He just plays the way Scottie Pippen plays, and that’s to distribute the ball. It’s the old standard: Great players make other players better. And Scottie has definitely done that.” To wit: Horace and B.J. made the All-Star team for the first time. Toni blossomed into a strong clutch shooter. And Kerr and Wennington turned into reliable go-to scorers.

  Coaching Toni was a challenge for me. He was used to playing a more freewheeling style of basketball in Europe and was frustrated by the constraints of the triangle offense. He couldn’t understand why I gave Scottie so much freedom and slapped his wrist whenever he made the same move. I explained that Scottie might look like he’s freelancing, but every move he made was geared toward making the system work more effectively. When Toni went rogue, there was no telling what was going to happen next.

  Toni was especially unpredictable on defense, which drove Scottie and other players crazy. To increase his level of mindfulness, I developed a special form of sign language to help us communicate with each other during games. If he strayed from the system, I’d give him a look, and I expected him to give me a sign of acknowledgment. This is the essence of coaching: pointing out mistakes to players and having them signify to you that they know they’ve done something wrong. If they don’t acknowledge the mistake, the game is lost.

  The Bulls fell into a slump after the All-Star break, and we didn’t push out of it until March. But we finished the season with a 17-5 run and a convincing 55-27 record. The surge continued through the first round of the playoffs with Cleveland, which we swept 3–0. Then we ran into a roadblock in New York, losing the first two games of the series.

  Game 3 had the most bizarre finish of any game I’ve coached. But it also was a key turning point for the team.

  Patrick Ewing drove across the lane and lofted a hook shot that tied the score, 102–102. I called a time-out and designed a play that had Scottie inbounding a pass to Kukoc for the final shot. Scottie wasn’t happy with the play, and when the huddle broke up, he retreated to the far end of the bench, sulking.

  “Are you in or out?” I asked him.

  “I’m out,” he replied.

  I was surprised by his answer, but the clock was ticking, so I had Pete Myers toss in the pass to Kukoc, who put in a jumper for the win.

  As I walked off court into the locker room, I was puzzled about what to do. This was unusual behavior for Scottie. He had never challenged one of my decisions before. In fact, I considered him the ultimate team player. I presumed that the pressure of not being able to put the game away on the previous possession had made him crack. If I came down too heavily on him at that moment, I feared, Scottie might sink into a funk that could last for days.

  As I was taking out my contact lenses in the bathroom, I heard Bill Cartwright groaning in the shower, gasping for air. “Bill, are you okay?” I asked.

  “I can’t believe what Scottie did,” he said.

  A few minutes later I gathered the players in the dressing room and gave Bill the floor. “Look, Scottie, that was bullshit,” he said, staring at his fellow cocaptain. “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.”

  He stood there with tears in his eyes and everyone sat in stunned silence.

  After Bill finished talking, I led the team in the Lord’s Prayer and left for the press conference. The players stayed behind and talked over the situation. Scottie apologized to them for letting the team down, saying he was frustrated by the way the game ended. Then others chimed in about how they felt. “I really think it cleansed us as a team,” said Kerr later. “We got some things out of our system and realized what our goals are again. The crazy thing is, it helped us.”

  It’s amusing to look back on how the media handled the story. They went into high moralizing mode, arguing that I should do everything short of incarcerating Scottie. Most coaches would probably have suspended him or worse, but I didn’t think being punitive was the best way to handle the situation. The next day Scottie assured me that he had put the incident behind him, and that was that. And I could tell by the way he moved during practice that this wasn’t going to be a big issue for him.

  Some people applauded my clever management strategy. But I wasn’t trying to be clever. In the heat of the game, I simply tried to stay in the moment and make decisions based on what was actually happening. Rather than asserting my ego and inflaming the situation further, I did what needed to be done: find someone to throw in the ball and go for the win. Afterward, rather than trying to fix things myself, I let the players solve the problem. I acted intuitively, and it worked.

  The team came alive in the next game, led by Scottie, who amassed 25 points, 8 rebounds, and 6 assists, en route to a 95–83 victory that tied the series 2–2. “All of a sudden there was a lovefest going on,” said Johnny Bach after the game. “It was in Chicago instead of Woodstock.”

  I wish there were a fairy-tale ending to this story, but the plot took another bizarre turn. We were leading by one point in the final seconds of game 5 when referee Hue Hollins decided to step through the looking glass. Most refs try to avoid making calls that decide big games as the clock is running down. But this was Madison Square Garden, and the age-old rules of basketball didn’t seem to apply.

  With 7.6 seconds left, John Starks got trapped along the sideline and tossed a desperation pass to Hubie
Davis at the top of the key. Scottie stormed out to cover Davis, and Hubie got off a rushed, off-kilter jumper that didn’t come close to the basket. Or at least that’s how it looked on the replay. But that’s not what happened in Hollins’s parallel universe. He called a foul on Scottie, saying he had made contact with Hubie and disrupted the shot. (Davis had kicked out his legs and Scottie collided with them, a move the NBA has since deemed an offensive foul.) Needless to say, Hubie hit the two free throws, and the Knicks went ahead in the series, 3–2.

  We beat the Knicks decisively in game 6, but the fairy tale ended in game 7. After the 87–77 loss, I gathered the players together to pay homage to our achievement. This was the first time in years that we’d ended a season without being surrounded by TV cameras. We should absorb this moment, I told the team, because losing is as much a part of the game as winning—and I really meant it. “Today they beat us,” I said. “We were not defeated.”

  —

  It was a difficult summer. Suddenly, the team started to come apart. Paxson retired and became a radio announcer for the team. Cartwright announced his retirement but changed his mind after being offered a lucrative deal by the Seattle SuperSonics. Scott Williams grabbed a big contract with Philadelphia. And Horace Grant, who was eligible for free agency, initially accepted an offer from Jerry Reinsdorf to stay with the Bulls but shifted and went to Orlando instead.

  I also had to let go of Johnny Bach. Tensions between Jerry Krause and Johnny had hit the boiling point and were making it difficult for us to work together as a group. Jerry, whose nickname in the media was “the Sleuth” because of his reputation for surreptitiousness, was already suspicious of Johnny because of his supposed leaks to Sam Smith for The Jordan Rules. Now Jerry was claiming that Johnny was responsible for leaking confidential information about our interest in seven-seven Romanian center Gheorghe Muresan. This was an outrageous accusation. Even though we’d been following Muresan closely in Europe and had even brought him in for a secret tryout, there were several other teams that had been scouting him, including Washington, which ended up drafting him.

  Nevertheless, I thought it would be best for everyone concerned, including Johnny, to have him move on, and he landed a spot as an assistant coach for the Charlotte Hornets. Johnny’s departure had a dispiriting effect on my staff and the players, and it created a crack in my relationship with Krause.

  Another troubling development in the 1993–94 off-season was the conflict between Pippen and Krause over the possible trade of Scottie to the Seattle SuperSonics for forward Shawn Kemp and swingman Ricky Pierce. Scottie was stunned when he heard about the deal from reporters and didn’t believe Krause when he told him that he was just listening to trade offers, as he would with any player. Seattle’s owner eventually pulled the plug on the deal under pressure from the Sonics’ fans. But the damage had been done. Scottie felt insulted by the way he’d been treated, and it tainted his perception of Jerry from that point on.

  Team morale began to improve in late September when we signed free-agent shooting guard Ron Harper and formally announced that we didn’t have any plans to trade Pippen. I warned Scottie against getting caught in a media war with Krause. “I know you’ve got this feud going on,” I said, “but it’s not helping you and it’s not helping the team. Frankly, it’s making you look bad. Things are going to work out for you, Scottie. You had an MVP-like season last year. Why don’t you just let it go?”

  “Yes, I know,” he said, with a shrug. “It is what it is.” Nevertheless, the flare-ups between Pippen and Krause continued for some time, and as late as January 1995 Scottie was asking to be traded.

  Still, the acquisition of Harper was promising. He was six feet six, with a strong drive and a nice shooting touch and had averaged close to 20 points a game during his nine years with the Cavaliers and the Clippers. Ron had had a devastating ACL injury in 1990 and had recovered, but he wasn’t the same threat we’d faced in the ’89 playoffs against Cleveland. Yet we were optimistic that he could fill at least part of the Jordan scoring gap. As for the rest of the lineup, I was less certain. Our biggest weakness was our two untested newcomers at power forward—Corie Blount and Dickey Simpkins.

  As the season got under way, I was troubled by the team’s lack of competitive spirit. This was a new problem for us. Michael had such an overpowering drive to win that it rubbed off on everybody else. But now that all the players on the core championship teams had left, except for Scottie, B.J. Armstrong, and Will Perdue, that drive was only a faint memory. Typically, we’d build up leads in the first half then succumb to pressure in the fourth quarter when the games got more physical. By the All-Star break we were struggling to stay above .500 and losing games on the road that in years past would have been victories for us.

  Then one morning in early March, Michael Jordan showed up at my office in the Berto Center. He’d just left spring training and returned home, after refusing the White Sox’s offer to be a replacement player during Major League Baseball’s upcoming lockout season. Michael said he was considering a return to basketball and wondered if he could come to practice the next day and work out with the team. “Well, I think we’ve got a uniform here that might fit you,” I replied.

  What followed was the weirdest media circus I’ve ever witnessed. I did everything I could to protect Michael’s privacy, but word soon got out that Superman was in the house. Within days an army of reporters were gathered outside our training facility, waiting to hear when Michael was going to suit up again. After more than a year of being fixated on the O.J. Simpson murder case, America was yearning for good news about a sports superhero. And the mystery surrounding Michael’s comeback gave the story an additional allure. When Michael finally decided to return, his agent sent out what may be the pithiest press release in history. All it said was, “I’m back.”

  Michael’s first game—on March 19, against the Pacers in Indianapolis—was a worldwide media event that attracted the largest television audience ever for a regular-season game. “The Beatles and Elvis are back,” quipped Indiana’s coach, Larry Brown, as a phalanx of TV cameras crowded into the locker rooms before the game. And during warm-ups, Corie Blount saw a TV crew taking a shot of Michael’s Nikes and said, “Now they’re interviewing his shoes.”

  Michael’s arrival had an enormous impact on the team. Most of the new players were in awe of his basketball skills and competed intensely during practice to show him what they could do. Still, there was a vast gulf between Michael and his teammates that was difficult for him to bridge. To build the deep level of trust that a championship team requires usually takes years of hard work. But this team didn’t have that luxury. Michael didn’t know many of the players very well, and there wasn’t enough time left in the season to change that.

  At first it didn’t seem to matter. Though Michael had trouble finding his shooting rhythm in that first game in Indiana, he erupted in the next game against Boston and the team began a 13-3 run. If anyone had doubts about Michael’s ability the second time around, he erased them six days later when he scored 55 points against the Knicks in Madison Square Garden—the highest total for any player that year.

  After the game, however, Michael came to my office and voiced some reservations. “You’ve got to tell the players they can’t expect me to do what I did in New York every night,” he said. “In our next game, I want them to get up and get going—to play as a team.”

  This was a new Michael. In the past he would have reveled in his triumph over the Knicks—and most likely attempted a repeat performance the following day. But he’d returned from his baseball sabbatical with a different perspective on the game. He wasn’t interested in going solo anymore; he longed for the team harmony that had made the Bulls champions.

  He would have to wait. After we pushed past the Charlotte Hornets, 3–1, in the first round of the playoffs, we faced Orlando, a young, talented team designed to exploit our weaknesses. The
Magic had Shaquille O’Neal, one of the most dominant centers in the league, and Horace Grant, who matched up well against us at power forward. It also featured a deadly trio of three-point shooters—Anfernee Hardaway, Nick Anderson, and Dennis Scott. Our strategy was to double-team Shaq and force him to beat us at the foul line. We also decided to put Michael on Hardaway and have the defenders covering Horace slide off him, when necessary, to collapse on Shaq or chase down three-point shooters. This approach might have worked if our offense had been more in sync throughout the series.

  One of the most startling moments came in game 1 when Michael, who was having an off night, got stripped by Anderson with ten seconds left and the Bulls up by one. Then after the Magic went ahead, he threw the ball away, ending our chance of winning. After the game I put my arm around Michael and tried to console him. I told him we’d turn the experience around and use it in a positive way to help guide us going forward. “You’re our guy, and don’t ever forget that,” I said.

  Michael bounced back in game 2, leading us to victory with a 38-point surge. We split the next two games in Chicago, but Horace made us pay for leaving him open too often in game 5. He hit 10 of 13 from the field on the way to 24 points, to pilot the Magic to a 103–95 win.

  Horace’s performance was a minor blip, though, compared to our embarrassing collapse at the end of game 6. It looked like we were in pretty good shape when B.J. put us ahead 102–94 with 3:24 left. Then the whole team imploded and we went scoreless from that point on. We missed 6 shots in a row and turned the ball over twice, while the Magic went on a maddening 14–0 romp, including a breakaway dunk by Shaq to end the game. The season was over.