Sacred Hoops_Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior

by Phil Jackson

  My basketball career took off, too. Fitch, who later became an NBA coach, was a stern taskmaster who taught me discipline and how to play without fear. I wasn’t exactly a selfless player: I had a tendency to try and score every time I got the ball, without even looking to see if one of my teammates had a better shot. But that didn’t worry Fitch as long as I played selflessly when it really counted: executing his trademark full-court defense. In my junior year I averaged 21.8 points and, to my surprise, was named a first-team All-American, along with future teammates Walt Frazier and Earl Monroe. That year North Dakota, which had a lackluster record before Fitch arrived, made it to the NCAA (college division) finals for the second year in a row, and the NBA scouts began to notice me. One of them was my future boss, Jerry Krause, then a scout for the Baltimore Bullets, who wrote that he liked my hook shot and my “better than average moves inside.” New York’s Red Holzman also gave me a favorable report, and, after I made the All-American team again as a senior, the Knicks drafted me in the second round.

  THE HOLZMAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

  On my first visit to New York, Holzman and his wife, Selma, picked me up the airport. As we were driving along the expressway into Manhattan, a teenager threw a rock at the car from an overpass and smashed the windshield. Red was furious. I expected him to turn around and chase after the kid. But when he realized that nobody was hurt, he lightened up. “Well, that’s New York City, Phil,” he said, brushing off the incident. “If you can take that, you’ll do just fine here.”

  Thus began my course in the Holzman school of management.

  Lesson one: Don’t let anger—or heavy objects thrown from overpasses—cloud the mind.

  Holzman was no Eastern philosopher, but he understood instinctively the importance of awareness in building championship teams. Playing under him, I transformed from a me-first hotshot into a multidimensional team player with a deeper understanding of the inner game of basketball. The lessons I learned from Red provided the foundation for the selfless approach to teamwork that I would later develop with the Bulls.

  Red took over as coach of the Knicks in the middle of my rookie year, and it was clear from the first practice what he was looking for. He wanted us to be in tune with each other and what was happening on court at all times. That was true even if you were riding the bench. Once during a timeout at the end of a game, I was goofing around on the sidelines with backup center Nate Bowman when Red suddenly stormed down the floor, stuck his nose in my face and asked, “How much time is left, Jackson?”

  “A minute and twenty-eight seconds,” I said.

  “No. How much time is left on the twenty-four-second clock?”

  “Uh, I don’t know.”

  “Well, you’ve got to know, because you may be going into the game, and if you don’t know the time, you could get us in trouble. Don’t let me catch you doing that again.”

  He didn’t.

  Lesson two: Awareness is everything.

  Holzman was a master of defense. In fact, during that first practice, he had us running up and down the floor, applying full-court pressure. Red believed that hard-nosed defense not only won big games, but also, and more importantly, forced players to develop solidarity as a team. On offense a great scorer can often dominate a game, and players frequently place their own individual goals of pumping up their scoring average ahead of what’s best for the team. But on defense everybody has the same mission—stopping the enemy—and you can’t get far trying to do it single-handedly.

  The Knicks were so loaded with good shooters—Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley, Cazzie Russell—Holzman didn’t concern himself about offense. He let us design our own plays. We had the D play for Dave DeBusschere to set him up for an easy outside shot. And for Bradley, we ran the Princeton Tiger play, which he had used in college when he was being double- and triple-teamed. What was important to Holzman was that we keep the ball moving and not let one or two players get all the shots. As a result, we often had six to eight players in double figures.

  Lesson three: The power of We is stronger than the power of Me.

  To survive on the Knicks, I had to carve out a new role for myself. Coming off the bench I couldn’t be “The Man” anymore, so I focused on improving my defense. Luckily, Holzman’s high-pressure style of defense came easily to me because it resembled Bill Fitch’s. That year, on the strength of my defensive play, I was selected to the All-Rookie team and started fantasizing about breaking into the starting lineup.

  Then disaster struck.

  Midway through my second year, I went up for a turnaround jump shot in Oakland, got bumped by Clyde Lee, and came down hard on my heels, herniating two disks in my vertebrae. The injury required spinal-fusion surgery and sidelined me for that season and the next. I had to spend the first six months in a back brace. The pain was excruciating—and many of my standard options for distracting myself were off limits. Basketball was out. Sex was out. Overnight, Action Jackson had become Traction Jackson.

  To entertain myself, I began observing my thoughts and trying to figure out what made my mind click. What I discovered was a mountain of guilt. I felt guilty about my back injury, which could have easily ended my career. I felt guilty about my marriage, which had been showing signs of strain ever since Maxine and I had moved to New York. I felt guilty about not spending enough time with my daughter. Though I still occasionally went to church, I felt guilty about distancing myself from my parents and my spiritual heritage. Why did I put so much pressure on myself? Would I ever be able to escape all those years of Bible school conditioning?

  Obviously, I wasn’t as liberated as I thought.

  When my injury healed, the Knicks decided to keep me off the roster for the 1969–70 season to protect me from the expansion draft. During that period Holzman adopted me as his assistant coach ex officio. I practiced with the team, scouted upcoming opponents, and discussed strategy with Red before and after games. I learned how to look at the game from the perspective of what the whole team was doing and to conceptualize ways to disrupt an opponent’s game plan. In short, I began to think like a coach.

  The nucleus of the Knicks’ championship team was already formed. Shortly after I was injured, forward Cazzie Russell broke his leg, which cut the roster down to nine players, three of whom were rookies. That meant that the starting five—guards Walt Frazier and Dick Barnett, center Willis Reed, and forwards Bill Bradley and Dave DeBusschere—had to average forty minutes or more per game—at an all-out Holzmanesque pace. To survive, they had to forge themselves into a harmonious working unit. All they needed was a stronger bench, which happened in 1969–70, when Russell and forward Dave Stallworth returned to the lineup. The team took off early that season and persevered to win the championship.

  THE GIFT OF AWARENESS

  When I came back the next year, I knew I would no longer be able to rely solely on talent to carry me through. I would have to use my mind more effectively to offset my loss of flexibility and quickness. Ultimately the key would be to increase my level of awareness. My teacher was Bill Bradley. Unlike DeBusschere, who liked to take it easy in practice, Bradley demanded constant attention. He wasn’t that fast, but he had an uncanny sense of court awareness. If your mind wandered for a millisecond, he’d vanish into thin air, then reappear on the other side of the court with a wide open shot.

  Covering him in practice showed me just how weak my powers of concentration were. I had been a center in college and, by instinct, focused on following the ball and protecting the basket. But Bradley was such a great player off the ball, I had to learn how to attach myself to him without being distracted and losing track of what was happening on the rest of the floor. To train myself to be relaxed and fully alert, I began practicing visualization. I would sit quietly for fifteen or twenty minutes before the game in a secluded part of the stadium—my favorite place was the New York Rangers’ locker room—and create a moving picture in my mind of what was about to happen. I’d call up images of the man I w
as going to cover and visualize myself stopping his moves. That was the first part. The next step, which was much harder, was to lay back and not try to force the action once the game started, but to allow it to unfold naturally. Playing basketball isn’t a linear thought process: “Okay, when Joe Blow takes that funny drop step over there I’m going to jump in and do my Bill Russell imitation.” The idea was to code the image of a successful move into my visual memory so that when a similar situation emerged in a game it would seem, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, like déjà vu all over again.

  A turning point came in the fifth game of the 1971–72 playoffs in Boston. Bradley had been having trouble guarding the Celtics’ crafty Don Nelson, so Holzman put me on him. One of Nelson’s tricks was to load up his fingers with pine tar resin so that the ball would stick to his fingers when he faked a shot. This was maddening for me because I had a quick trigger in blocking shots. To beat him, I had to pick the move apart in my head, step by step, then try to remain clearheaded so that when he finally made his move I would recognize the moment and do what I had to do. It worked. The first time Nelson tried to fake me out in that game, I didn’t get tense and overreact because I knew what was going to happen. That clarity allowed me to stick with him and throw him off his game, creating some important scoring opportunities for us that helped seal the victory.

  We beat Boston in that series, 4–1, but without Willis Reed, who was recovering from knee surgery, we weren’t able to get past Wilt Chamberlain and the Lakers in the finals. All that changed the following year when Reed returned, and the addition of center-forward Jerry Lucas and guards Earl Monroe and Dean Meminger gave us the most versatile attack in the NBA. The critical point in the playoffs came in the seventh game of the Eastern Conference finals, against the Celtics again in Boston Garden. During a film session the night before, Holzman pointed out that the Celtics were disrupting our full-court press by having their forwards set picks upcourt against the slight 6'1" Meminger.

  “You’ve got to get through those picks, Dean,” said Red.

  “I can’t—they’re too big,” replied Meminger.

  “‘I can’t’ is no excuse. Get through the picks!”

  The next day Meminger was relentless, breaking picks, containing Jo-Jo White, and scoring 26 points as we abolished the myth of the Celtics’ invulnerability in the Garden. Before that day, they’d never lost a seventh playoff game on their home floor.

  After that series, the finals against L.A. seemed anticlimactic. Chamberlain was ineffective, and we flew past the Lakers in five games to clinch the title. The postgame festivities in L.A. were exhilarating. This was the pinnacle of my sports career to that point, the moment I had been striving for with all my heart since I was a kid. And yet two days later when we gathered again in New York for a celebration with family and friends at Tavern on the Green, suddenly the thrill was gone. The room was crowded with celebrities—Robert Redford held court in one corner, Dustin Hoffman in another—but the intense feeling of connection with my teammates I had experienced in L.A. seemed like a distant memory. Instead of being overwhelmed with joy, I felt empty and confused. Was this it? I kept saying to myself. Is this what was supposed to bring me happiness?

  Clearly the answer lay somewhere else.

  Three

  IF YOU MEET THE BUDDHA IN THE LANE, FEED HIM THE BALL

  Our own life is the instrument with which we experiment with the truth.

  —THICH NHAT HANH

  What I was missing was spiritual direction. The unfulfilled legacy of my devout childhood had left an emptiness, a yearning to reconnect with the deeper mysteries of life.

  In 1972 my marriage fell apart. Maxine felt isolated and unfulfilled living in Queens and being an NBA “widow,” and I wasn’t ready to commit myself to family life. We parted amicably, and I moved into a loft above an auto repair shop in the Chelsea district of Manhattan.

  The man I purchased the apartment from was a lapsed Catholic turned fundamentalist Muslim named Hakim. We soon became friends, and every week or so we would have dinner at the loft and check up on each other’s spiritual progress. Hakim, a graduate student in psychology who had grown up in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, was drawn to the Muslim faith because he had lived on the edge for years and felt he needed a strict canon of rules to put his life back in order. I was looking for just the opposite: a way to express myself spiritually without giving up my newfound freedom.

  One evening, during a moment of quiet reflection, Hakim told me he had a vision of my childhood. “I see you as a little boy sitting in a high chair,” he said. “You want to eat with your left hand, but your mother is forcing you to use your right. She’s hovering over you, shoving the spoon into your right hand and making sure you use it. Meanwhile, your father’s in the background, smiling and allowing it to happen.”

  Hakim had never met my parents, but he understood the dynamic in my family with uncanny accuracy. When I was little, my mother tried to force me to submit to her will, cramming my head with Bible passages, making me eat with my right hand instead of my left, while my father looked on benignly and loved me unconditionally, no matter what I did. It struck me listening to Hakim that I had inherited my mother’s mind and my father’s heart, and those two sides of my character were still in conflict. The part of me that was like my mother, always searching for logical answers, always trying to exert control, usually won out over the part that, like my father, was moved by compassion, trusting the song in my heart.

  One summer in Montana around this time, my parents, Joe, and I got into a heated theological debate after dinner—a common occurrence whenever you got two or more Jacksons in a room. Early in the evening, my father checked out and went to bed. When I asked him the next day why he had left the conversation, he replied, “Arguing isn’t where faith is. That just feeds the ego. It’s all in the doing.” To him, there were certain mysteries that you could only understand with the heart, and intellectualizing about them was a waste of time. He accepted God on faith and lived his life accordingly. This was an important lesson for me.

  There’s a passage in Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan, in which Don Juan advises Castaneda: “Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone the question.... Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good. If it doesn’t, it is of no use.”

  That was the question I had to ask myself.

  I started exploring a variety of paths. Inspired by Sunseed, a film about the search for enlightenment, I began taking yoga classes, reading books about Eastern religion, and attending lectures by Krishnamurti, Pir Vilayat Khan, and other spiritual teachers. By then my brother Joe had left academia and moved to the Lama Foundation in New Mexico to experience the Sufi way. I visited him there and participated in many of the rituals. Much to my surprise, the more I studied other traditions, the more intrigued I became about taking another look at my spiritual roots.

  REAWAKENING

  At the time Christianity was going through its “Godspell” phase. The charismatic movement, a kinder, gentler version of Pentecostalism, was in full swing, and everyone from Methodists to Unitarians and Roman Catholics had woven elements of sixties culture into their services. That made it easier for me to poke my head back in the door.

  What interested me most was revelation, though not in the way I remembered it from childhood: scenes of men and women so overcome by divine bliss their bodies quivered and their mouths went on automatic. Frankly, the idea of being swept away in a paroxysm of emotion, no matter what the benefits, made me quiver. Perhaps there was a less histrionic way to experience the Holy Spirit.

  On one of the Knicks’ road trips, I picked up a copy of William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, a book filled with firsthand accounts by Quakers, Shakers, and other Christian mystics. I couldn’t put it down. Reading their stories, it was clear that mystical experience didn’t have to be a big production.
It didn’t require hallucinogenic drugs or a major Pentecostal-style catharsis. It could be as uneventful as a moment of reflection.

  When I finished the book, I put it down, said a prayer and, all of a sudden, experienced a quiet feeling of inner peace. Nothing special—and yet there it was. This was the experience I had longed for as a teenager. It wasn’t the big, crashing moment of transcendence that I expected, but it came close enough to give me an idea of what I had been missing. It also gave me a deeper understanding of my Pentecostal roots and helped lift the curtain of guilt that had shrouded me most of my life. I no longer felt compelled to run from my past or cling to it out of fear. I could take from it what worked for me and let the rest go. I could also explore other traditions more fully without feeling as if I was committing a major sacrilege against God and family.

  ZEN BONES

  My next step was to explore meditation. First I tried the simple breath-counting technique outlined in Lawrence LeShan’s book, How to Meditate. That kept me busy for a while, but it was devoid of spiritual content and began to feel like mental calisthenics. I turned to Joel Goldsmith’s Practicing the Presence, a book that attempts to bridge the gap between East and West by using Christian maxims as guidelines for meditation. Goldsmith demythologized meditation and helped me understand it within a Christian context. But the technique he recommended, which involved visualization and repeating inspirational phrases, was far too cerebral for me. The last thing I needed was to increase my level of mental activity.