Sacred Hoops_Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior

by Phil Jackson

  Four

  EXPERIMENTS IN THE COCKROACH BASKETBALL LEAGUE

  It is good to have an end to journey toward;

  but it is the joumey that matters, in the end.

  —URSULA K. LEGUIN

  To this point, my spiritual journey had been primarily a private affair. I rarely talked about it with my teammates, and didn’t fully understand how to apply the wisdom I had learned on the meditation cushion to the competitive world of professional basketball. It wasn’t until I became coach of my own team that I began to see for the first time how to make that leap.

  After spending an unfulfilling year in Montana running a health club and trying to get a junior college basketball program off the ground, I was offered a job in 1982 coaching the Albany Patroons in the Continental Basketball League. It wasn’t exactly a dream situation: the team was 8–17 when I arrived, and the players had been in open revolt against the coach, my ex-Knick teammate Dean Meminger. Turning the Patroons around was going to take a major dose of creativity.

  One advantage of working in Albany was that I could move my family, which now included four children—Chelsea, Brooke, and the twins, Charley and Ben—to Woodstock. It wasn’t Montana, but it was far enough from New York City so that I could remain anonymous. The free-flowing intellectual atmosphere in Woodstock also inspired me to be more inventive as a coach. In the world of professional basketball, Albany was about as far away from the big time as you could get. It was a good place to experiment with unorthodox concepts.

  My accomplice was Charley Rosen, a novelist/basketball aficionado (and the co-author of Maverick) who became attached to the Patroons after helping me out with training camp. The CBA didn’t allow teams to have assistant coaches then, so Charley, who had studied physiology in college, volunteered to be the trainer. He was paid only $25 a game and had to wear a white uniform on court that made him look like a Good Humor man. But he didn’t care because he loved the game. He especially enjoyed batting ideas around with me about how to revolutionize basketball.

  Rosen and I were a good match. He saw everything in black and white; I saw infinite gradations of gray. He was obsessed with pinpointing the exact moment when everything turned to dung and who was to blame—more often than not, a referee. I was more interested in the quality of the team’s energy as it ebbed and flowed, and figuring out what lessons could be learned when disaster struck. As my wife likes to say, I can “smell a rose in a pile of manure.”

  SEEDING THE GROUP MIND

  Although I had worked briefly as an assistant coach in the NBA, I didn’t have any formal training. But I did have a grand scheme: I wanted to create a team in which selflessness—not the me-first mentality that had come to dominate professional basketball—was the primary driving force. My goal was to find a structure that would empower everybody on the team, not just the stars, and allow the players to grow as individuals as they surrendered themselves to the group effort. To mold the Patroons into a “selfless” team, I arranged for everybody to receive the same salary, $330 a week, and distributed playing time more democratically. We had ten players on the roster, so I divided them into two five-man units—the first and second teams—and rotated them into the game as units in eight-minute intervals. For the last eight minutes, I’d use a unit made up of the players who had the hottest hands that day.

  Giving everybody playing time helped defuse a lot of the petty jealousy that usually fragments teams. It worked so well, in fact, that it became one of my trademarks as a coach. Casey Stengel, the famed skipper of the New York Yankees, once said that the key to coaching was to keep the five or six guys who got little or no playing time from banding together and poisoning the minds of everyone else on the team. I take a somewhat different tack. While most NBA coaches use only seven or eight players regularly, particularly during the playoffs, I try to work all twelve players on the roster into the rotation, to keep everybody’s mind focused on the same goal. The players were skeptical, at first, but toward the end of my inaugural season, they got a taste of what could happen if they really supported each other: they beat the CBA All-Stars in an exhibition game. After that, they started paying closer attention when I talked about selfless team play.

  One thing I learned in the CBA was how important it is to inspire players to commit to the team effort even though everything else was pushing them in another direction. The CBA was a showcase league. Most of the players were in their early twenties and, for various reasons, had missed out on making the NBA. Their dream was to be spotted by one of the scouts that toured the league and get another shot at the big money. It happened all the time, and often had a disruptive effect on the team. Just as we’d take off on a winning streak, the NBA would swoop in and pick off our best players, and the minds of those who stayed behind went with them.

  So I constantly had to figure out ways to get the players to strengthen their commitment. When Vince Lombardi was a basketball coach at Fordham in the early 1940s, he used to have his players make a pledge before each practice. He’d stand them behind the end line and say “God has ordained me to teach you young men about basketball today. I want all those who want that training to step across that line.” This wasn’t just an empty symbolic gesture. Lombardi understood the power of making a conscious act of commitment. That’s why he wanted his players to cross that line every day.

  The CBA was not as homogenized as a Catholic men’s college. The players were from all kinds of backgrounds, and many had never even finished high school. If I tried to pull a Lombardi, they would have looked at me as though I was a visitor from another planet. As I got to know them better, however, I found that most of them resonated with the idea of surrendering to something larger than themselves. Though their behavior on court often indicated otherwise, most of them secretly yearned to connect with the group and were willing to sacrifice their desire for star status in order to help the team win.

  A case in point was John Schweiz, who I had first picked as the starting shooting guard. His backup was a flamboyant former NBA player named Frankie J. Sanders. (The “J,” he said, stood for “Jumpshot.”) Sanders had been drafted by the San Antonio Spurs and modeled himself, with limited success, after George Gervin, the team’s four-time NBA scoring leader. Early in the season Schweiz came to me and suggested that I give his starter’s slot to Sanders because Frankie was morose playing for the second unit. It was a completely selfless act on Schweiz’s part, and, as it turned out, a masterful maneuver. Sanders led the Patroons in scoring that year, and the team took off, finishing in first place in the division. And even though he didn’t get as many minutes, Schweiz, not Sanders, was called up to the NBA at the end of the season.

  The identity of the team developed slowly. More often than not, it emerged in unexpected ways. Once we threw a makeshift birthday party for Rosen that had a galvanizing effect on the players. Our road trips helped, too. We spent a lot of time traveling around the Northeast in a ramshackle Dodge van—to glamorous cities such as Brockton, Massachusetts; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; and Bangor, Maine. Sometimes I’d put on the cruise control and work on crossword puzzles while I was driving. The players couldn’t believe their eyes the first time I did it, and they teased me relentlessly afterwards. It was a good sign. We were starting to feel like a family.

  The turning point for the team came in a playoff game against the Puerto Rico Coquis in San Juan. Playing in Puerto Rico was never easy because the crowds were raucous and the refs had no mercy on visiting teams. In this particular game, the Coquis started getting physical right away, and it looked like a fight might break out any minute. The refs seemed to be oblivious, and that enraged Rosen. Finally when a Puerto Rico player took a punch at one of our players, Charley ran out on court, flailing his arms and screaming, “If you don’t stop doing that, I’m going to kick your ass.”

  Everybody stopped.

  Rosen looked ridiculous: a tall, balding, forty-five-year-old man dressed in an ice cream suit yelling obscenities at a p
layer half his age. The spectacle immediately dissolved the tension. That incident showed me just how effective humor can be as a catalyst for deepening team spirit.

  My approach is slightly more understated than Charley’s. Last year Scottie Pippen, who had been angling for weeks to be traded, made a tongue-in-cheek remark to reporters in Boston: “Trade me or trade [Jerry] Krause.” That line was a banner headline in the Chicago papers the next day, and Krause called Scottie into his office to discuss it before practice. Afterwards, Scottie trudged dejectedly into the team room, where we were watching a game tape, and I said, “So, Scottie, what do you think we can get for Krause?” He laughed. The idea of trading Krause, a short, portly executive without much foot speed, for an NBA player was patently absurd. Suddenly the gloom that had been dogging the team for days lifted.

  In Puerto Rico, Charley’s antics led to a serious discussion about commitment after the game. I reminded the players that Rosen was getting paid almost nothing and had to come to work in a ludicrous uniform, but he was so devoted he was willing to make a fool of himself, and even risk his life, to help the team. As we talked about the incident, the players seemed to get the message that they needed to cross the line and make a Rosenesque commitment to the cause. After that, the team spirit began to soar, and we pushed all the way to the CBA championship.

  THE PRACTICE OF ACCEPTANCE

  Pro basketball may be a man’s world, but working with the Patroons I discovered that I was far more effective as a coach when I balanced the masculine and feminine sides of my nature. This was not an easy lesson for me. In the early years of our marriage, my wife June, who was raised in a more nurturing family than I was, would get exasperated with me when I’d display rigidity with our kids. Patiently she showed me how to temper my hard-edged aggressive instincts and become more compassionate toward myself and others—especially our children. In my case, healing the split between feminine and masculine, heart and mind—as symbolized by my compassionate father and analytic mother—has been an essential aspect of my growth both as a coach and a human being.

  Though there are occasions when a firm hand is needed, I learned early that one of the most important qualities of a leader is listening without judgment, or with what Buddhists call bare attention. This sounds easier than it is, especially when the stakes are high and you desperately need your charges to perform. But many of the men I’ve coached have come from troubled families and needed all the support they could get. I find that when I can be truly present with impartial, open awareness, I get a much better feel for the players’ concerns than when I try to impose my own agenda. And, paradoxically, when I back off and just listen, I get much better results on the court.

  In The Tao of Leadership, John Heider writes:

  The wise leader is of service: receptive, yielding, following. The group member’s vibration dominates and leads, while the leader follows. But soon it is the member’s consciousness which is transformed. It is the job of the leader to be aware of the group member’s process; it is the need of the group member to be received and paid attention to. Both get what they need, if the leader has the wisdom to serve and follow.

  There’s only so much a coach can do to influence the outcome of a game. If you push too hard to control what happens, resistance builds and reality spits in your face. During the 1991 playoffs, I got into a shouting match on the sidelines with Horace Grant precipitated by my stubborn insistence on playing defense a certain way. Horace was having trouble guarding Armon Gilliam in a series against the Philadelphia 76ers, and he pleaded for some help with a double-team. But even though the strategy I was using wasn’t working, I was adamant: I insisted that Horace play Gilliam straight up. Late in the third quarter of Game 3, Gilliam elbowed Horace, and Horace turned and hit him back. The refs called a foul on Horace, and, in a rage, I pulled him out of the game. That’s when the yelling began. All of a sudden, Horace, who is devoutly religious, was cursing at me and shouting “I’m tired of being your whipping boy.” Eventually, after a few more outbursts, he calmed down, but the game was lost. Clinging to a misguided notion of how things should be, I ended up alienating Horace and making a bad judgment that ultimately cost us the game.

  In Zen it is said that the gap between accepting things the way they are and wishing them to be otherwise is “the tenth of an inch of difference between heaven and hell.” If we can accept whatever hand we’ve been dealt—no matter how unwelcome—the way to proceed eventually becomes clear. This is what is meant by right action: the capacity to observe what’s happening and act appropriately, without being distracted by self-centered thoughts. If we rage and resist, our angry, fearful minds have trouble quieting down sufficiently to allow us to act in the most beneficial way for ourselves and others.

  THE ART OF CHAOS

  In 1984 the owner of a professional team in Quebradillas, Puerto Rico, offered me a summer job. The Superior Basketball League, whose three-month season started in June, was considered a good training ground. Red Holzman, Tex Winter, and John Bach had worked there, and so had many other NBA coaches, including K. C. Jones and Sam Jones. Three weeks after I arrived, I was fired because the team’s superstar didn’t like the selfless system of basketball I had implemented. However, the team owner lined up another spot for me with a far better team, the Isabela Gallitos. The Gallitos made it to the finals that year—a new high for them—and I returned for three more summers.

  Coaching in Puerto Rico taught me how to cope with chaos. The games were raucous affairs, played late at night in sweltering openair arenas called conchas. The fans showed up early, often drunk, and started parading around banging bongos and tom-toms and blowing air horns. Fights often broke out in the stands. The owner of the Quebradillas team always carried a gun with him to games in Isabela, he said, because there was “a lot of bad blood between the two towns.” Once, the mayor of Quebradillas fired a gun at one of the refs during a home game because he disagreed with a call, and wounded an usher. For his sentence, he was forbidden from ever attending a game in the Roberto Clemente stadium again.

  The players loved the game, and their connection with each other was stronger than on any team I’ve ever coached. Players rarely got traded or dumped, and there seemed to be a party every week for members of the extended family. Not all the players spoke English, and my Spanish consisted of a single word, at first, “Defensa!” So I had to learn how to teach and communicate nonverbally. I also had to adapt to the Puerto Rican concept of time. In Albany I had a rule that if you missed practice, you’d have to sit out the next game. If I did that in Puerto Rico, we would have had to default the whole season. Once the players were on the floor, however, they threw themselves into the game with unbridled energy. Sometimes they played in such a frenzy that all I could do was sit back and watch.

  Albert Einstein once described his rules of work: “One: Out of clutter, find simplicity. Two: From discord, find harmony. Three: In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” That was the kind of attitude I had to have working in Puerto Rico. It wasn’t easy for me. I had to let go of my compulsive need for order and learn how to stay composed when everything seemed hopelessly out of control.

  The key moment for me came during a game in San Germán, a town in the southwest whose fans hated the Gallitos so much they lit candles the night before we arrived and prayed for our death. Just before the game was about to start, someone broke a rim on one of the baskets, and everybody in the stadium, including about 5,000 fans, had to wait while the rim was being rewelded at the local gas station.

  It took forever. Meanwhile the fans were getting drunk and restless, and the drums were beating louder and louder. My kids were running wild, and June was worried about Chelsea, whose leg was swollen from a spider bite. (Thankfully she recovered a few days later.) I tend to get phobic in large stadiums, unless I’m down on the floor, separated from the crowd. All this craziness was making me nervous, so I retreated to the dressing room to sit zazen.

  It wa
s a dank concrete room, lit by a dim bulb dangling from the ceiling. My players were so spooked by the place they always came fully dressed for games in San Germán. They never told me why; I thought it had something to do with witchcraft. After sitting in the dressing room for a while, however, I spotted the reason out of the corner of my eye: a tarantula the size of a softball crawling down the wall inches from my head.

  In an attempt to escape one fear I’d come face to face with (for me) an even greater fear. Ever since childhood, I’ve been terrified of spiders, but my mind was clear enough at that moment so that I didn’t panic. I just sat there and watched the giant tarantula slowly—ever so slowly—make its way along the wall. I wanted to sit through the fear, to experience it as fully as possible, until I felt comfortable enough to just be there in the room. And I did. When I finally got up and returned to the stadium, I didn’t feel anxious anymore. From then on, the riotous nature of life in Puerto Rico no longer posed a threat.

  THE HOWL OF THE EGO

  Albany, however, was another matter. In 1984–85 the Patroons had the best record in the league, and I was named Coach of the Year. But a disturbing incident occurred during the playoffs that cost us a second championship and ultimately tore the team apart. Naturally, it involved Frankie Sanders.

  After we won the championship in 1984, Sanders asked management for a substantial raise. The man who ran the team—Albany county executive Jim Coyne—buckled under, fearing we might lose our star attraction, and effectively abolished my equal-pay scheme. Coyne had no appreciation for the subtleties of the player-coach relationship; all he cared about was winning reelection—and keeping the Patroons on top was part of his campaign strategy.