For the raindrop, joy is entering the river.
—GHALIB
First I heard a pop, then I felt searing pain in my shoulder, and I knew I was in trouble. Is this it? I said to myself, as I walked off the mound, clutching my arm. Is this the last game I’ll ever pitch? I had been virtually untouchable—if a tad wild—that summer pitching for the Williston American Legion team, often fanning 15 or more batters a game with my blinding “80 mph” fastball. Though I had just completed my freshman year at the University of North Dakota on a basketball scholarship, I still harbored fantasies of becoming a major league pitcher. Now I had torn my shoulder, and the future looked bleak.
My brother Joe, who was getting a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Texas, suggested self-hypnosis to get my rhythm back once the injury had healed. The very idea seemed like blasphemy because of my fundamentalist religious training. I was wary of giving up control of my mind, even if it was just an experiment. But my brother, who had been raised in the same tradition, found a way to break down my resistance. Eventually my shoulder improved, and the night before my return game, I agreed to let Joe show me some auto-suggestion techniques, which, in my case, involved repeating phrases such as “I will be relaxed” or “I won’t throw too hard,” to reprogram my subconscious.
The next day I pitched one of my best games ever. Normally I tried to overpower hitters with my heater, but the more determined I was to blow the ball by a batter, the more reckless I would become, giving up almost as many walks as strikeouts. This time, however, I didn’t try to force anything—I focused on the act of throwing the ball and letting the motion flow naturally. Not only did the nagging pain in my shoulder miraculously disappear, but I also experienced something new for me—near perfect control. This was my introduction to the hidden power of the mind and what I could accomplish if I could turn down the chattering in my head and simply trust my body’s innate wisdom.
For me, this was a radical idea. It flew in the face of everything I had been taught as a child about the nature of the mind. I was trained to keep my mind busy at all times, filling it with passages from the Bible to prevent evil thoughts from creeping in. When I was four, my mother hung a large brown paper sign in my bedroom with a quotation from John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.” From then on I started being concerned with keeping the faith so that I, too, could find eternal life. My mother truly believed that an idle mind was the devil’s playground. She gave me hundreds of quotations from the King James Bible to memorize, to keep me armed and ready for the trials and temptations of life. Words and more words—they never stopped.
My mother, Elisabeth, is as passionate about spirituality as anyone I’ve ever met. She got her calling to become an evangelist when she was a teenager living on a small farm in eastern Montana. One day in the late 1920s, a Pentecostal preacher came to town and won her over. As one of six children from a poor family of German Mennonite homesteaders who had emigrated to Montana from Canada during World War I, she found the idea of being saved by Christ very appealing. After finishing high school, she became a country schoolteacher and then went to Winnipeg Bible College to prepare for her ministry. She traveled all over Montana spreading the Pentecostal message and forming new congregations. She had a voluminous memory and loved to argue theology with anyone foolish enough to take her on. For her, the Bible was a prophetic book, the Word of God, and it predicted that time was running out. The world was headed toward chaos and the Antichrist. It was the midnight hour.
My father, Charles, was a warm, compassionate man with a view of life based on a literal translation of the King James version of the Bible. Once a runaway pickup truck smashed into his car and sent him flying through a window, breaking his arm and putting him in traction for six weeks. The driver of the truck, which was unlicensed, uninsured, and brakeless, was stunned when my father didn’t sue. But it didn’t surprise any of us. As far as Dad was concerned, litigation was out of the question. It wasn’t the Christian thing to do.
Dad was a man of God, pure and simple. He did everything by the Book, and expected me and my brothers, Charles and Joe, to do the same. When we broke one of his many rules, my father would dispense justice swiftly, usually with his razor strap in the cellar of the parsonage. I can remember getting hit only once, and Dad broke into tears while he was doing it. But Joe was not so lucky. He was the rebel in the family. The two of them were always at odds. Once when Joe was ten, he gave my father a Bronx cheer in front of the church after being scolded for some minor indiscretion. Even though he was dressed in a business suit and freshly laundered white shirt, Dad chased Joe down with the rage of Moses, circling the church several times until he caught him. A handful of parishioners looked on, dumbfounded.
My father’s first wife died from complications during pregnancy with her second child. Not long afterwards he reconnected with my mother, whom he had met at Bible college, and moved from Ontario with his daughter, Joan, to get married. He was the first member of the Jackson clan to settle in the United States since before the Revolutionary War, when our ancestors, who were English loyalists, had emigrated to Canada. Together, my parents formed a powerful team, working for humble wages at various parishes in Montana and North Dakota. My father was the pastor, making home visitations and delivering sermons on Sundays, while my mother taught Bible classes, played the organ, and gave fire-and-brimstone talks in the evening.
Our lives were dictated by the rhythms of church life. In fact, in my first four years, we actually lived in the basement of the church until the parish could afford a parsonage. Sundays were devoted almost entirely to church activities, and we also had to attend services on Wednesday and Friday evenings. Some weeks we’d spend up to twenty hours in the pews, trying to sit perfectly still under the hawklike gaze of Mom and Dad. The rules in our house were strict. We didn’t have a TV, and we were discouraged from going to movies and listening to rock and roll, not to mention experimenting with smoking, drinking, or sex. The point was to be not just an average Christian, but an exceptional one, so when the “end of times” came, we would be chosen. We were taught to believe that the apocalyptic vision in the Book of Revelations was about to be fulfilled any minute, and if we weren’t prepared, we’d be left out when Christ returned and gathered up his saints. As a little boy I was terrified of being excluded from the “rapture of saints,” as it was called, and losing my parents. One day my mother wasn’t home when I returned from school and I got so frightened the rapture had started without me that I ran all over town looking for her. I was shaking when I finally tracked her down at a local radio station, taping a religious program with my dad.
That fear made me a devoted student of the Bible, and my parents had high hopes that I might someday join the ministry. But in my teens, my faith was shaken. The heart of Pentecostal religion is being able to experience the presence of the Holy Spirit physically. This involves “speaking in tongues,” a form of ecstatic, highly emotional discourse that sounds like gibberish to the untrained ear. As a boy I had seen thousands “give utterance,” as it was called, including my brothers, though I later learned that Joe had doubts about whether his experience was the real thing. But when my turn came, around age twelve or thirteen, nothing happened. It was agonizing. I worked hard for the next two or three years, praying long hours, asking forgiveness for my sins and “tarrying for the Spirit” after services. Still nothing. It began to make me skeptical. Why were some people able to do it so easily while others who were far more diligent—namely me—were left speechless? Were all those people making it up? Was it a manufactured experience?
By the time I was fifteen, I realized that, for whatever reason, it wasn’t going to happen for me. I began ducking out early at services. My mother didn’t hide her disappointment.
“Phil, I noticed you skipped the prayer service,” she would say. “You know you’ve really got to tarry if you want to find the Holy Spirit.”
“Well, Mom, I don’t know if it’s for me.”
“Don’t say that, Phil. You hurt my spirit when you say things like that. It’s for everybody.”
What could I do? The act of being filled by the Holy Spirit was the central tenet of the Pentecostal faith; it was what separated our sect from other Protestant denominations. I felt like a failure, and yet I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. Was it my sinful nature? If so, I didn’t feel like a sinner. Was it my lack of faith? Perhaps, but I was no less committed than my brothers. So rather than reject the faith outright, I avoided the issue. I dodged services and started working on my jump shot.
Fortunately, I had an outlet for my energy in which success came easily—basketball. I was 6'6" in high school—and would grow to 6'8" in college—with square shoulders and arms so long I could sit in the back seat of a car and open both front doors at the same time. My classmates poked fun at my gangling physique and nicknamed me “Bones,” but I didn’t mind because I loved the game. In 1963, my senior year, I led Williston High to the state championship, scoring 48 points in the tournament final. The next thing I knew, I was being hotly pursued by the new coach at the University of North Dakota, Bill Fitch.
One reason for my early success was my fierce competitive drive, honed over the years by battling two older brothers at everything from checkers to one-on-one hoops. Charles and Joe, six and four years older, respectively, made fun of me when I tried to compete with them, and their laughter drove me to try even harder. No doubt I inherited some of that spirit from my mother, who was a basketball player in high school and turned every activity—ironing shirts, playing Scrabble, hiking with her Sunday school class—into an Olympic sport. For me, winning was a matter of life and death. As a kid, I often threw temper tantrums when I lost, especially if I was competing against my brothers. Losing made me feel humiliated and worthless, as if I didn’t exist. Once during a high school baseball tournament, I was called in as a reliever and pitched nearly perfect ball for several innings. But I was inconsolable when we lost, even though it was probably my best performance that year. I just sat in the dugout after the game and wept.
My obsession with winning was often my undoing. I would push so hard to succeed when things weren’t going my way that it would hurt my performance. That’s the lesson I learned after my self-hypnosis session with Joe. I was trying to force my body to cooperate, and, when it didn’t respond, my mind became even more insistent. But on the pitcher’s mound that day I discovered that I could be effective, even overcome pain, by letting go and not thinking. It was an important turning point for me. Though I soon gave up baseball to pursue a basketball career, the feeling of freedom I experienced during that game stayed with me and made me curious about finding a way to re-create it consistently.
That weekend Joe also introduced me to Zen Buddhism, which he had been experiencing with one of his professors at the University of Texas. His description of Zen baffled me. How could you have a religion that didn’t involve belief in God—or at least the personalized idea of God I was familiar with? What did Zen practitioners do? Joe said they simply tried to clear their minds and be in the present. To someone raised in a Pentecostal household—where attention was focused more on the hereafter than the here and now—this was a mind-boggling concept.
Inspired by those discussions, I signed up for a combined major of psychology, philosophy, and religion when I returned for my sophomore year at UND and began to expand my intellectual horizons. Sensing, no doubt, that I could use some worldly wisdom, coach Bill Fitch had me room with Paul Pederson, one of the stars of the team. Pederson had been raised as a Lutheran and had a healthy skepticism about institutionalized religion. He encouraged me to take a detached look at the belief system I had been spoon-fed since childhood and explore life more freely. It was a heady feeling. The sixties were in full swing, and I immersed myself in the counterculture—or at least the version that had made its way to North Dakota. I hung out with some rather dissident friends on campus and started catching up on rock and roll, Fellini movies, and other fine points of contemporary life that I’d missed out on in high school. I also began dating my first wife, Maxine, a political science major and student leader who inspired me to become more active politically. In 1967, my senior year, we got married, and had a daughter, Elizabeth.
What appealed to me about the sixties—and what I carried away with me when it was over—was the emphasis on compassion and brotherhood, getting together and loving one another right now, to paraphrase The Youngbloods. Many people were on the same path, trying to escape from their parents’ archaic views and reinvent the world. I no longer felt so isolated from my peers. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t an outsider looking in.
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.
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.
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 was 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.