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.
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.
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.
Then I turned to Zen. Though my brother Joe had already introduced me to the basics, it wasn’t until the mid-seventies that I started practicing seriously, using Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, by the late Japanese roshi, Shunryu Suzuki, as my guide. One summer I began sitting with a small group of Zen students in Montana who were connected with the Mt. Shasta Abbey in northern California. By then I had remarried, to my present wife, June, and had another daughter, Chelsea. When I met June a few years earlier at a pinochle game in New York, she had just graduated from the University of Connecticut and was working at a job she hated at Bellevue Hospital. I invited her to spend the summer traveling around the northwest on my motorcycle. After that magical trip, June moved into my loft, and marriage soon followed.
The summer I discovered the Mt. Shasta group, Joe and I were consumed with building a vacation home for my family on Flathead Lake. Every morning at 5:30 he and I would start the day with a half hour of meditation, then in the afternoon we’d take a break to do Sufi grounding exercises. After we finished putting up the rough-cut pole-and-beam frame, we recruited one of the members of the Zen group to help us build the deck. I was impressed by his demeanor as he worked. He was fast and efficient, and radiated a peaceful self-assurance, developed through years of daily Zen practice, that put everyone at ease.
What appealed to me about Zen was its emphasis on clearing the mind. As the Buddha put it in the Dhammapada, “Everything is based on mind, is led by mind, is fashioned by mind. If you speak and act with a polluted mind, suffering will follow you, as the wheels of an oxcart follow the footsteps of the ox.... If you speak and act with a pure mind, happiness will follow you, as a shadow clings to a form.” But the Zen idea of a polluted mind is quite different from the traditional Christian perspective, which dictates that “impure” thoughts be rooted out and eliminated. What pollutes the mind in the Buddhist view is our desire to get life to conform to our peculiar notion of how things should be, as opposed to how they really are. In the course of everyday life, we spend the majority of our time immersed in self-centered thoughts. Why did this happen to me? What would make me feel better? If only I could make more money, win her heart, make my boss appreciate me. The thoughts themselves are not the problem; it’s our desperate clinging to them and our resistance to what’s actually happening that causes us so much anguish.
There’s an old Zen story that illustrates this point. Two monks were traveling together in a heavy downpour when they came upon a beautiful woman in a silk kimono who was having trouble crossing a muddy intersection. “Come on,” said the first monk to the woman, and he carried her in his arms to a dry spot. The second monk didn’t say anything until much later. Then he couldn’t contain himself anymore. “We monks don’t go near females,” he said. “Why did you do that?”
“I left the woman back there,” the first monk replied. “Are you still carrying her?”
The point of Zen practice is to make you aware of the thoughts that run your life and diminish their power over you. One of the fundamental tools for doing that is a form of sitting meditation known as zazen. The form of zazen I practice involves sitting completely still on a cushion with the eyes open but directed downward and focusing attention on the breath. When thoughts come up, the idea is not to try to blot them out or to analyze them, but simply to note them as they arise, and to experience, as fully as possible, the sensations in the body. When you do that regularly, day after day, you begin to see how ephemeral your thoughts are and become acutely aware of your bodily sensations and what’s going on around you—the sound of the traffic in the distance, the smell of the flowers across the room. Over time your thoughts calm down, first for a few seconds, then much longer, and you experience moments of just being without your mind getting in the way.
I found the Zen perspective on concentration particularly intriguing. According to Suzuki, concentration comes not from trying hard to focus on something, but from keeping your mind open and directing it at nothing. “Concentration means freedom,” he writes in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. “In zazen practice we say your mind should be concentrated on your breathing, but the way to keep your mind on your breathing is to forget all about yourself and just to sit and feel your breathing. If you are concentrated on your breathing, you will forget yourself, and if you forget yourself you will be concentrated on your breathing.”
As a basketball player, this made a lot of sense to me. I knew from experience that I was far more effective when my mind was clear and I wasn’t playing with an agenda of some kind, like scoring a certain number of points or showing up one of my opponents. The more skilled I became at watching my thoughts in zazen practice, the more focused I became as a player. I also developed an intimate knowledge of my mental processes on the basketball court.
My thoughts took many forms. There was pure self-interest (“When I get the ball, I’m going for the hoop, no matter what”) and selfless self-interest (“When I get the ball, I’m going to pass it to Bradley, no matter what”). There was anger (“That #$%^&* Wilt Chamberlain. Next time he’s dead meat”) and fear (“That #$%^&* Chamberlain. Next time I’ll let Willis handle him”). There was self-praise (“That was cool. Do it again”) and, more likely in my case, self-blame (“What’s wrong with you, Phil? A sixth grader could make that shot”). The litany was endless. However, the simple act of becoming mindful of the frenzied parade of thoughts, paradoxically, began to quiet my mind down.
Basketball happens at such a fast pace that your mind has a tendency to race at the same speed as your pounding heart. As the pressure builds, it’s easy to start thinking too much. But if you’re always trying to figure the game out, you won’t be able to respond creatively to what’s going on. Yogi Berra once said about baseball: “How can you think and hit at the same time?” The same is true with basketball, except everything’s happening much faster. The key is seeing and doing. If you’re focusing on anything other than reading the court and doing what needs to be done, the moment will pass you by.
Sitting zazen, I learned to trust the moment—to immerse myself in action as mindfully as possible, so that I could react spontaneously to whatever was taking place. When I played without “putting a head on top of a head,” as one Zen teacher puts it, I found that my true nature as an athlete emerged. It’s not uncommon for basketball players, especially young ones, to expend a great deal of mental energy trying to be somebody they’re not. But once you get caught up in that game, it’s a losing battle. I discovered that I was far more effective when I became completely immersed in the action, rather than trying to control it and fill my mind with unrealistic expectations.
Another aspect of Zen that intrigued me was its emphasis on compassion. The goal of Zen is not just to clear the mind, but to open the heart as well. The two, of course, are interrelated. Awareness is the seed of compassion. As we begin to notice ourselves and others, just as we are, without judgment, compassion flows naturally.
Compassion is where Zen and Christianity intersect. Though I still have reservations about the more rigid aspects of Christianity, I have always been deeply moved by the fundamental insight that love is a conquering force. In I Corinthians 13:1–2, St. Paul writes: “If I speak in the tongues of men and angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic power, and understand all mysteries and knowledge, and I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”
When I was a boy, I was so caught up in the mental aspects of worship—building a wall in my mind with prayers and quotations from the Bible—that I lost track of the essence of Christianity. But by practicing Zen, I was able to clear my mind of all that interference and open my heart again. Merging Zen and Christianity allowed me to reconnect with my spiritual core and begin to integrate my heart and mind. The more I learned about the similarities between the two religions, the more compatible they seemed. Was Christ a Zen master? That may be a stretch, but clearly he was practicing some form of meditation when he separated himself from his disciples and became one with “the Father.”
What does all this have to do with professional basketball? Compassion is not exactly the first quality one looks for in a player. But as my practice matured, I began to appreciate the importance of playing with an open heart. Love is the force that ignites the spirit and binds teams together.
Obviously, there’s an intellectual component to playing basketball. Strategy is important. But once you’ve done the mental work, there comes a point when you have to throw yourself into the action and put your heart on the line. That means not only being brave, but also being compassionate, toward yourself, your teammates, and your opponents. This idea was an important building block of my philosophy as a coach. More than anything else, what allowed the Bulls to sustain a high level of excellence was the players’ compassion for each other.
Pro basketball is a macho sport. Many coaches, worried about showing any sign of weakness, tend to shut down emotionally and ostracize players who aren’t meeting their expectations. This can have a disturbing ripple effect on the players that undermines team unity. Late in my career the Knicks acquired Spencer Haywood, one of the game’s premier forwards, to strengthen the front line. When he arrived, he announced to the press that he was going to be “the next Dave DeBusschere” and was so cocky everybody on the team, not to mention the fans, started secretly waiting for him to fail. Haywood lived up to his own hype at first—much to my dismay, since he had replaced me as a starter—but a year or two later he began to have trouble leaping. Initially the doctors were baffled by his condition, so the coaching staff, and then the players, became convinced that he was faking it. Everybody treated him as if he were a leper, and his performance deteriorated even further. It wasn’t until the off-season that the doctors learned that Haywood had a nerve problem in his leg that could be partially remedied by surgery. But by then the damage to the team had already been done.
In my work as a coach, I’ve discovered that approaching problems of this kind from a compassionate perspective, trying to empathize with the player and look at the situation from his point of view, can have a transformative effect on the team. Not only does it reduce the player’s anxiety and make him feel as if someone understands what he’s going through, it also inspires the other players to respond in kind and be more conscious of each other’s needs.
The most dramatic example of this occurred in 1990 when Scottie Pippen’s father died while we were in the middle of a tough playoff series against the Philadelphia 76ers. Pippen skipped Game 4 to attend the funeral and was still in a solemn mood before the start of the next game. I thought it was important for the team to acknowledge what was going on with Scottie and give him support. I asked the players to form a circle around him in the locker room and recite the Lord’s Prayer, as we often do on Sundays. “We may not be Scottie’s family,” I said, “but we’re as close to him as anyone in his life. This is a critical time for him. We should tell him how much we love him and show compassion for his loss.” Demonstrations of heartfelt affection are rare in the NBA, and Scottie was visibly moved. That night, buoyed by his teammates, he went on a 29-point romp, as we finished off the 76ers to take the series.
In the next series, against the Pistons, the stress finally took its toll on Scottie, and just before the seventh game he came down with a migraine headache that gave him double vision. Some members of the press speculated that Scottie, who didn’t have a history of migraines, must be faking it and blamed him for the team’s heartbreaking defeat. I was as disappointed by the loss as anyone, but I defended Scottie because I knew that his suffering was real. The players were deeply affected by my compassion for Scottie, and rallied behind him. That spirit was the seed from which a championship team would grow.
I can empathize with players because I, too, have been through painful experiences in this game. The most humbling was when my playing career ended. To me, this was a kind of death. It meant giving up my identity as as warrior, my raison d’etre since boyhood, and becoming, in my view, a nonperson. I wasn’t prepared psychologically when it finally happened.
In 1978 I was traded to the New Jersey Nets. Toward the end of training camp that year, the Nets’ coach, Kevin Loughery, asked me to go for a ride with him in his car. I was thirty-three at the time, and the Nets were loaded with young, talented players. I figured Loughery was going to cut me, but he threw me a curve. “Basically, Phil, we’re in a difficult situation,” he said. “You’ve had a good run and I hate to tell anyone he’s through playing ball. But I’d like you to stay here as an assistant coach. We’ve got a lot of young kids who don’t know how to play yet. I’d like you to dress for practices and play against them, just in case we need you for a game, but mostly I want you to be a coach.”
Me? A coach? Just four years earlier I had written in my autobiography, Maverick, that I could never imagine myself coaching in the NBA. Now here it was—a reality. Coaching seemed like an impossible profession: watching, critiquing, dealing with egocentric players like me. I had coached Pee Wee and Babe Ruth League baseball teams in college, and enjoyed teaching fundamentals and plotting strategy. But baseball is a simple, linear game, while basketball is a complex, ever-changing flow, all happening under the intense glare of the TV cameras. Was I ready for this?
Loughery didn’t have any doubts. His confidence in me helped me make the transition to coaching, which turned out to be more gradual than I expected. (Over the next two years, he often inserted me in the lineup to fill in for injured players.) Loughery had a subtle intuitive gift, and often surprised me with his insights about the team. During the 1978–79 season the Nets got off to the best start in the history of the franchise, but Loughery was skeptical. He felt that early success had spoiled the players, and nobody was listening to him anymore. One night after a home game, he told the general manager, Charlie Theokas, he wanted to quit. An emergency meeting of the coaches and management followed in the equipment room.
“Kevin, how could you possibly think about leaving this team?” implored owner Joe Taub. “We’re ten games over .500. This is the best we’ve ever played, and we’re not even halfway through the season. Who’s going to replace you?”
Loughery looked around the room.
“Phil. He can coach the team.”
“He doesn’t have enough experience.”
“Sure, he does.”
My heart went into overdrive. When Taub turned to me, I said, “Yeah, I can coach this team,” and, in my naiveté, I actually thought I could. But it would have been a disaster. Loughery was right: the Nets were a flashy, fast-starting team that didn’t have the courage or desire to go all the way. They would fade early that year, just barely making the playoffs with a 37–45 record.
Management persuaded Loughery to stay and he let me step in for him every now and then when he was tossed out of games. One night I took over in a close game on the road against the Seattle Supersonics. We went ahead down the stretch, but with six seconds left, Seattle’s Gus Williams tied the score. I called a timeout to set up the final play. As the players came off the floor, John Lee Williamson, a cocksure shooting guard who loved to take pressure shots, said to me, “You’re going to go with ‘The Man,’ aren’t you?”
“The Man” he was referring to, of course, was himself.
“No,” I replied, put off by his arrogance. “I’m going to go with Eric Money.”
Money was having a good game, and I thought we could surprise the Sonics by having him take the shot. But he didn’t live up to his name. As he started his move to the basket, Gus Williams stole the ball from him and drove the length of the court for the game-winning layup. After the game, Williamson came striding over to me in the locker room and said, “I guess that’ll teach you a lesson—you go with ‘The Man’ down the stretch.” I hated to admit it, but he was right. I realized that I had been reacting to his arrogant manner rather than doing what was best for the team.
That wasn’t the only lesson I had to learn. In fact, it would take years—and coaching jobs in Albany and Puerto Rico—before I’d master the subtleties of the game well enough to coach in the NBA. But first I had to step away from basketball and put my life as a player behind me. I also had one more lesson to learn from my father.
In June 1979 Dad was diagnosed with cancer and had part of one of his lungs removed. He was seventy-three years old at the time and calmly reminded us after the operation that, according to the Bible, a man is given three score and ten years. A few days later the doctors told my brother Joe and I that he was in good enough shape to return home. “Well, you’re getting out of here tomorrow, Dad,” I said, trying to sound upbeat.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I want you guys to pray for me to go home.”
“What do you mean? You’re going home tomorrow.”
“No, I don’t mean that home.”
Joe and I looked at each other, knowingly. The next morning we learned that he had died of a heart attack during the night.
My brothers and I and Hal Rylands, a close family friend, dug my father’s grave at the Big Fork, Montana, cemetery. While we were working, an English sparrow appeared out of nowhere and started fluttering around the gravesite. Suddenly it became clear that this was no ordinary bird. It seemed to have no fear at all. It flew up to me and alighted on my shoulder. Then it darted around and touched everyone in the group. My Lakota Sioux friends would say that the bird was my father’s spirit bidding us farewell.
Though I sorely missed him, my father’s death had a liberating effect on me. As long as he was alive, I felt a certain pressure to keep up appearances. He was a respected minister, and I didn’t want to embarrass him by not going to services, particularly during the off-season when I spent a lot of time in Montana. It wasn’t until he died that I felt that I could finally break from my past without guilt and become more fully myself.