by Phil Jackson
Before joining the Bulls’ coaching staff in 1987, I was ready to say goodbye to basketball and let my 20-year career in the sport become history. Over the years I’d grown disenchanted with the way power, money, and self-glorification had tainted the game I love. I’d recently left a head coaching job in the Continental Basketball Association, frustrated by how shamelessly ego-driven the game had become, and determined to find something else to do with my life. I was contemplating returning to graduate school when Jerry Krause, the Bulls’ vice president of basketball operations, called and offered me a job as an assistant coach.
The more I learned about the Bulls, the more intrigued I became. It would be like going to “graduate school in basketball,” I told my wife, June. The coaching staff included a couple of the best minds in the game: Johnny Bach, a man with an encyclopedic knowledge of basketball, and Tex Winter, the innovator of the famed triangle offense, a system that emphasizes cooperation and freedom, the very values I’d spent my life pursuing off the court and dreamed of applying to the game. What’s more, the team also had the most creative player in basketball—Michael Jordan. I “was excited” to give basketball another chance.
It was the best decision I ever made.
Most leaders tend to view teamwork as a social engineering problem: take x group, add y motivational technique and get z result. But working with the Bulls I’ve learned that the most effective way to forge a winning team is to call on the players’ need to connect with something larger than themselves. Even for those who don’t consider themselves “spiritual” in a conventional sense, creating a successful team—whether it’s an NBA champion or a record-setting sales force—is essentially a spiritual act. It requires the individuals involved to surrender their self-interest for the greater good so that the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
This isn’t always an easy task in a society where the celebration of ego is the number one national pastime. Nowhere is this more true than in the hothouse atmosphere of professional sports. Yet even in this highly competitive world, I’ve discovered that when you free players to use all their resources—mental, physical, and spiritual—an interesting shift in awareness occurs. When players practice what is known as mindfulness—simply paying attention to what’s actually happening—not only do they play better and win more, they also become more attuned with each other. And the joy they experience working in harmony is a powerful motivating force that comes from deep within, not from some frenzied coach pacing along the sidelines, shouting obscenities into the air.
No team understood better than the championship Chicago Bulls that selflessness is the soul of teamwork. The conventional wisdom is that the team was primarily a one-man show—Michael Jordan and the Jordanaires. But the real reason the Bulls won three straight NBA championships from 1991 to ‘93 was that we plugged in to the power of oneness instead of the power of one man, and transcended the divisive forces of the ego that have crippled far more gifted teams. Center Bill Cartwright said it best: “Most teams have guys who want to win, but aren’t willing to do what it takes. What it takes is to give yourself over to the team and play your part. That may not always make you happy, but you’ve got to do it. Because when you do, that’s when you win.”
When Jordan came out of retirement and returned to the Bulls in the spring of 1995, expectations rose in a deafening crescendo. Michael Jordan is the greatest athlete on the planet—the argument went—then, ipso facto, the Bulls should win the championship. Even some of the players, who should have known better, bought into this line of reasoning. But what happened instead was that the team lost the identity it had forged in Jordan’s absence and regressed to the way it had been in the late eighties when the players were so mesmerized by his moves that they played as if they were mere spectators at the show.
To succeed, the new Bulls will have to rediscover the selfless approach to competition that inspired their predecessors. They will have to expand their minds and embrace a vision in which the group imperative takes precedence over individual glory, and success comes from being awake, aware, and in tune with others.
That lesson is important in all areas of life, not just on the basketball court. My friend and former assistant coach Charley Rosen used to say that basketball is a metaphor for life. He applied basketball jargon to everything he did: if someone paid him a compliment, he’d say, “nice assist”; if a taxicab nearly mowed him down, he’d shout, “great pick.” It was an amusing game. But, for me, basketball is an expression of life, a single, sometimes glittering thread, that reflects the whole. Like life, basketball is messy and unpredictable. It has its way with you, no matter how hard you try to control it. The trick is to experience each moment with a clear mind and open heart. When you do that, the game—and life—will take care of itself.
One
THE SECOND COMING
The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
—PAUL VALERY
The team room at the Sheri L. Berto Center is the perfect setting for an epiphany. It’s the inner sanctum of the Chicago Bulls—a sacred space adorned with Native American totems and other symbolic objects I’ve collected over the years. On one wall hangs a wooden arrow with a tobacco pouch tied to it—the Lakota Sioux symbol of prayer—and on another a bear claw necklace, which, I’m told, conveys power and wisdom upon its beholder. The room also contains the middle feather of an owl (for balance and harmony); a painting that tells the story of the great mystical warrior, Crazy Horse; and photos of a white buffalo calf born in Wisconsin. To the Sioux, the white buffalo is the most sacred of animals, a symbol of prosperity and good fortune.
I had the room decorated this way to reinforce in the players’ minds that our journey together each year, from the start of training camp to the last whistle in the playoffs, is a sacred quest. This is our holy sanctuary, the place where the players and the coaches come together and prepare our hearts and minds for battle, hidden from the probing eyes of the media and the harsh realities of the outside world. This is the room where the spirit of the team takes form.
Early in the morning on March 7, 1995, I held an informal meeting in the team room with assistant coaches Tex Winter and Jimmy Rodgers to review some game tapes and discuss what to do with the team. Even though Scottie Pippen was having an MVP-caliber season and Toni Kukoc had begun to flower, the team had developed a disturbing tendency to build up huge double-digit leads in the first half, only to fall apart in the closing minutes of the game. Part of the problem was that we had lost two important big men in the off-season: Horace Grant, an All-Star power forward who had signed on as a free agent with the Orlando Magic, and Scott Williams, who had jumped to the Philadelphia 76ers. As a stopgap measure, we were playing Kukoc at power forward, but though he gave it a gallant try, he wasn’t strong or aggressive enough to fend off bruisers like Charles Barkley and Karl Malone.
During the All-Star break in February, I had met with owner Jerry Reinsdorf in Phoenix to discuss the future of the team. In the year and a half since we had won our last NBA title, we had lost all but three of the regulars on our championship teams, including Bill Cartwright, now with the Seattle Supersonics; John Paxson, the Bulls’ newest radio announcer, and Michael Jordan, who had retired in 1993 and was playing for Reinsdorf’s other organization, the Chicago White Sox. Reinsdorf was convinced that unless the Bulls had a strong infusion of new talent, we would probably languish around the .500 mark for years. He was considering trading some veterans—notably Pippen—for young stars in order to rebuild the franchise. He asked me if I would be willing to stick with the team through what could be a long, sometimes frustrating process of renewal. I told him I would.
Secretly I hoped that we could find another solution. I was dubious that we could ever get fair value for Pippen, easily the best all-around player in the league, and I was relieved when the trading deadline passed in late February and Scottie was still on the team. What the Bulls needed wasn’t something a quick
trade could provide; the team needed that unshakable desire to win that Cartwright, Paxson, and, most of all, Jordan had in their bones. How could you trade for that? As I mulled these problems over in the team room with Tex and Jimmy, I tried to put an optimistic spin on the situation. But deep inside, I sensed that the players had already surrendered. They had grown comfortable with the idea of being a .500 team.
Then Michael Jordan walked in the door.
Dressed in a dark warmup suit, he glided into the room and took a seat in the back as if he had never left.
A couple of days earlier he had walked out of the White Sox spring training camp in Sarasota, Florida, and returned to Chicago, to avoid becoming a pawn in the baseball strike. Michael was adamant about not crossing the picket line, so he packed his bags rather than play in the exhibition season, which was starting that week.
“What’s going on?” I asked him. “Are you ready to suit up?”
He smiled and said, “It looks like baseball isn’t going to happen for me.”
“Well,” I replied, “I think we’ve got a uniform around here that might fit you.”
Michael and I had joked before about a possible comeback, but this time I could tell it wasn’t just banter. In September, before the team officially retired his number in a made-for-TV ceremony at our new arena, the United Center, I told him I thought he was jumping the gun. There was no reason why a superbly conditioned athlete like Michael, who was then only thirty-one, couldn’t return to the game and play into his late thirties. He said he was participating in the ceremony as a favor to Jerry Reinsdorf and to raise money for a youth center on the west side of Chicago named in honor of his father, James Jordan, who had been brutally murdered the year before.
“What if the strike doesn’t get settled?” I had asked him that day. “What if your whole year gets blown out of the water?”
“That’s a possibility,” he’d replied. “But I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
“Well, if it does happen, you could come back here and play basketball. All you’d need is twenty-five games or so to get ready for the playoffs. We could use you down the stretch.”
“Twenty-five—that’s too many.”
“Okay, maybe twenty.”
I knew then that he would consider coming back if Major League Baseball couldn’t get its act together by spring training. Which it didn’t—and that’s why he had returned to the Berto Center. When we were alone, Michael asked if he could come to practice the next day and work out with the team to see how it felt to have a basketball in his hands again.
Knowing Michael, a little sweat and intense competition was all he needed to make up his mind.
THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION
None of us could have predicted what was going to happen next. The effect on the team, from the very first practice, was electric. The players—most of whom had never played with Michael before—were thrilled about the prospect of his return, and the level of competition at practice rose instantly. Even though he wasn’t in game shape, Michael challenged everybody to step up. Scottie Pippen and B. J. Armstrong, who had felt burdened by the team’s inconsistent performance, suddenly came alive, and Toni Kukoc was almost giddy with excitement. Even Pete Myers, the player who stood to lose his spot in the starting lineup, was excited.
What Michael brought to the team was not only his extraordinary talent, but a deep understanding of the system of basketball we played. He was versatile enough to play all five positions on the floor, and could show by example how the system worked at its most sophisticated level. This was extremely valuable for the newcomers to the team. Before practice, I often found Michael working out, one-on-one, with young players like Corie Blount and Dickey Simpkins. It reminded me of the days when a younger Pippen and Jordan would work on dunking left-handed or making a 180° spin move from the corner.
Over the next two weeks, while Michael was deciding what to do with his life, the team transformed before our eyes, invigorated by Jordan’s presence on the practice floor. We won the next four out of five games, including a dramatic victory over Cleveland, one of the most physically intimidating teams in the league, and a last-minute come-from-behind win over Milwaukee. The Indiana Pacers’ coach Larry Brown predicted that with Jordan in the lineup the Bulls would be the favorites to win the NBA championship. I didn’t think that was a realistic assessment of the situation, but maybe I was wrong. Perhaps Michael could perform a miracle.
The whole world seemed to be swept up in the myth of Michael Jordan, superhero. As he started working out with the team, the word spread, and on his second day of practice, an army of reporters, photographers, and TV crews from all over the globe began to swell outside the Berto Center. One morning I saw a swarm of media descend on Scottie Pippen’s car as he entered the parking lot, hoping that he might open his window and throw them a few crumbs of information. At the front of the line was sportscaster Dick Schaap, and I realized this must be a pretty big story.
I tried to protect Michael as much as I could. I’d let him leave the floor early so that when the reporters came rushing on court after practice, he’d already be gone. Early on I asked him how long it was going to take him to make his decision, and he said about a week and a half. So I told the reporters that they should go home and come back in a week or so when we had something to tell them. What a mistake! After that they attacked the story as if it were the O. J. Simpson trial.
What interested me was the religious overtone to the proceedings. Perhaps it was the fact that the nation had spent the last year caught up in the O.J. case, suffering the disillusionment of watching a one-time beloved sports great being tried for the murder of his ex-wife and her friend. Perhaps it was just a reflection of the spiritual malaise in the culture and the deep yearning for a mythic hero who could set us free. Whatever the reason, during his hiatus from the team, Michael had somehow been transformed in the public mind from a great athlete to a sports deity.
The Associated Press reported that, in a survey of African-American children, Jordan had tied with God as the person they most admired after their parents. A radio station in Chicago asked listeners if Jordan should be named king of the world, and 41 percent of the respondents said yes. And fans were spotted kneeling and praying at the foot of Jordan’s statue in front of the United Center. To poke fun at the media’s adoration of Jordan, Tim Hallam, the Bulls’ wry director of media services, started referring to him and his entourage as Jesus and the Apostles. “Jesus goes to the bathroom,” Hallam would announce in a mock broadcaster’s baritone. “Details at eleven.”
THE MYTH OF THE SUPERHERO
Michael found the whole thing a little embarrassing. I’ve always been impressed by his ability to remain humble and down to earth despite all the attention he receives. But the hysteria surrounding his comeback created a division between Michael and his teammates that ultimately had an adverse effect on the team. The new players, which included everyone except Armstrong, Pippen, and Will Perdue, never got to know Michael intimately, nor he them—and that eventually undermined the team’s performance on court. Basketball is a sport that involves the subtle interweaving of players at full speed to the point where they are thinking and moving as one. To do that successfully, they need to trust each other on a deep level and know instinctively how their teammates will respond in pressure situations. A great player can only do so much on his own—no matter how breathtaking his one-on-one moves. If he is out of sync psychologically with everyone else, the team will never achieve the harmony needed to win a championship.
There’s a passage from Rudyard Kipling’s Second Jungle Book that I often read during the playoffs to remind the team of this basic principle:
Now this is the Law of the Jungle—
as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper,
but the Wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk,
the Law
runneth forward and back—
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf
and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
Before Michael arrived, the Bulls were beginning to gel as a team. The main thing we needed, I thought, was to strengthen our resilience in the fourth quarter—and that’s what Jordan was famous for. What I didn’t anticipate was the impact Jordan’s presence would have on the psyche of the team. I was so busy focusing on protecting Michael’s privacy, I lost sight of how isolated he was from his teammates and what that was doing to the other players.
Kukoc was simply awestruck. A talented forward from Croatia whom Jerry Krause considers the best pure passer since Magic Johnson, Toni was devastated in 1993 when Jordan announced his retirement, only a few days after Kukoc had joined the team. Now he was finally getting a chance to play with Jordan, and he was so intimidated he refused to go one-on-one against him in practice. Even when we’d run a special play for Toni that called for him to drive to the basket, he’d pull up and take a short jumper instead.
Once Michael officially joined the team and started playing in games, the situation didn’t improve. Some of the players were so bedazzled by his moves they’d unconsciously step back and wait to see what he was going to do next. And Michael was so absorbed in his struggle to prove to himself that he still had the touch, he often made uncharacteristic misjudgments. To make matters worse, his teammates were reluctant to make demands on him. In one game, Michael missed Steve Kerr, who was wide open in the corner, and drove to the hoop, only to get clobbered by three defenders. Kerr was the best three-point shooter in the league last year. When Michael went to the free throw line, I asked Steve to inform Michael that he was open, and Steve looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. There was no way he was going to tell the great Michael Jordan how to play the game.