Fundamentally, the marksman aims at himself.
—EUGEN HERRIGEL
That summer in Montana, I realized that anger was the Bulls’ real enemy, not the Detroit Pistons. Anger was the restless demon that seized the group mind and kept the players from being fully awake. Whenever we went to Detroit, the unity and awareness we’d worked so hard to build collapsed, and the players reverted to their most primitive instincts.
That response was disappointing, but hardly surprising. It was how they’d originally been trained to play the game. Win or die was the code; rousing the players’ anger and bloodlust was the method. But that kind of approach, though it often gets the players’ juices flowing, interferes with concentration and ultimately backfires.
It also stinks as a blueprint for competition.
St. Augustine said, “Anger is a weed; hate is the tree.” Anger only breeds more anger and eventually fuels violence—on the streets or in professional sports.
It was no coincidence that the players had a hard time staying focused against Detroit. The Pistons’ primary objective was to throw us off our game by raising the level of violence on the floor. They pounded away at the players ruthlessly, pushing, shoving, sometimes even headbutting, to provoke them into retaliating. As soon as that happened, the battle was over.
The Bulls had a long, ugly history of battling the Pistons. In 1988 a brawl erupted during a game when Detroit’s Rick Mahorn, a 6'10", 260-pound bruiser, fouled Jordan hard on his way to the hoop. Head coach Doug Collins, who weighed in at 195 pounds, tried to quell the disturbance by jumping on Mahorn’s back and attempting to wrestle him to the floor. But Mahorn spun around and sent Collins crashing into the scorers’ table. During another game in 1989, Isiah Thomas slugged Bill Cartwright in the head after running into one of Bill’s elbows. Cartwright, who had never been punched before in a game, hit back, and both players were fined and suspended. Isiah fractured his left hand and missed a good part of the season.
Scottie Pippen had the most punishing assignment of all. On defense, he had to cover Hatchet Man No. 1, Bill Laimbeer, and on offense, he matched up against Hatchet Man No. 2, Dennis Rodman. Pippen got into some royal battles with Laimbeer, who was four inches taller and outweighed him by at least forty-five pounds. In the 1989 playoffs, Laimbeer elbowed Scottie in the head and gave him a concussion during a tussle over a rebound. The following year, in Game 5 of the playoffs, Scottie took Laimbeer down with a necktie tackle as he was driving to the basket. Afterwards, according to Jordan, Laimbeer threatened to break Michael’s neck in retaliation.
I wasn’t happy with what Scottie had done. It was foolhardy and dangerous. But I understood only too well the line between playing hard and playing angry. When I played for the Knicks, I had a reputation for being a tough defender and opponents consistently read malevolence into the aggressive way I used my elbows. It was during the 1971–72 playoffs that I learned once and for all that mean-spirited aggression is never worth the price.
The man who taught me that lesson was Jack Marin, a tough, no-nonsense forward for the Baltimore Bullets who liked to bait Bill Bradley, calling him a “pinko liberal” to rattle him. Marin was an emotional time bomb, and I knew if I could get him angry enough, he would do something stupid. So before a key game I devised a scheme to provoke him that I feel embarrassed about to this day. Late in the fourth quarter, I gave him a little shove as he dribbled toward the basket. Then I confronted him at midcourt and shoved him again. That did it. He whipped around and threw a punch. The next thing he knew, he was ejected—it was his sixth foul—and we went on to win the game.
Marin held on to his anger until the next time we faced each other, almost a year later. All of a sudden, as I was going for the hoop, he took a shot at me and I went crashing to the floor. It was a painful lesson, but what Marin showed me was that using anger to defeat an opponent inevitably comes back to haunt you.
In those days, brawling was a common occurrence in the NBA. Most teams had an enforcer—the Celtics’ “Jungle Jim” Loscutoff was the prototype—whose primary job was to protect his teammates when the going got rough. The Knicks’ enforcer during my first two years was Walt Bellamy, a 6'10½" 245-pound center, but he was missing in action when I had my baptism by fire. The game was against the Hawks, who had just moved to Atlanta from St. Louis and were playing temporarily in a stadium at Georgia Tech, where there was no soundproofing in the locker rooms. Before the game we could hear the Hawks’ coach, Richie Guerin, inciting his players to wage war against us. Guerin wasn’t my biggest fan. The year before I had cut open forward Bill Bridges’ forehead with my elbow, and Guerin was so enraged he ordered another player, Paul Silas, to pay me back. Silas didn’t get around to it in that game, but he hadn’t forgotten Guerin’s charge.
With about thirty seconds left in the first half, I got the ball near the basket and started making a move on Silas when he shoved me in the back and sent me sprawling across the floor. As I got up and handed the ball to the ref, Silas took a wayward swing at my head. I dodged the blow and walked to the free-throw line, trying, as best I could, to stay calm.
At halftime the tirade in the other locker room continued, and tensions escalated. Finally, late in the game, a brawl erupted when one of the Atlanta players threw a punch at Willis Reed. Ironically, the only player on either team who didn’t participate in the fight was Bellamy, who had withdrawn psychically from the team because of a dispute with management.
Soon after that game, the NBA started taking steps to reduce violence on court. First, players were fined, and, in some cases, suspended, for coming off the bench and joining in a brawl. Next, the league clamped down on throwing punches: anyone who struck another player was immediately ejected and suspended for at least one game. Those changes didn’t eliminate violence; they merely gave it a different face. Hall of Fame enforcer Wes Unseld argued that the no-punching rule gave the bullies in the league license to hammer away at players and get away with all kinds of treachery without having to worry about retribution. In the late 1980s, the era of the Detroit Bad Boys, the NBA instituted a new rule severely penalizing players for committing “flagrant” fouls, malicious acts away from the ball that could cause serious injury. That helped, but some teams, in particular, the New York Knicks, still found ways to intimidate their opponents with brute force. So the league changed the rules again in 1994–95, restricting hand-checking and double-teaming in certain situations.
But the problem of uncontrolled anger and brutality rages on. Writer Kevin Simpson offered this analysis in The Sporting News. “It’s not so much that violence in the NBA has flown out of control, but that deliberate violence has become the next step in a progression of sports culture. While the league has reveled in the raw, physical prowess of its athletes and promoted the game accordingly, it has also presided—unwittingly—over a kind of spiritual deterioration, one that has seen an attitude of intimidation become the preeminent force on the floor.”
There has to be another way, an approach that honors the humanity of both sides while recognizing that only one victor can emerge. A blueprint for giving your all out of respect for the battle, never hatred of the enemy. And, most of all, a wide-angle view of competition that encompasses both opponents as partners in the dance.
Black Elk spoke of directing love and generosity of spirit toward the white man, even as his people’s land was being taken away. And in Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa wrote, “The challenge of warriorship is to step out of the cocoon, to step out into space, by being brave and at the same time gentle.”
This is the attitude I try to encourage. It’s a direct extension of the Lakota ideal of teamwork we started experimenting with during my years as an assistant coach. In the beginning, though the players were interested, it wasn’t easy to turn their minds around. They’d been conditioned since early adolescence to think that every confrontation was a personal test of manhood. Their first instinct was to use force to solve every problem. What I tried to do was get them to walk away from confrontations and not let themselves be distracted. If somebody fouled them hard, I suggested turning around, taking a deep breath, and staying as composed as possible so they could keep their minds fixed on the goal: victory.
The system reinforces this perspective. The strength of the triangle offense is that it’s based on the Taoist principle of yielding to an opponent’s force in order to render him powerless. The idea is not to wilt or act dishonorably in the face of overwhelming force, but to be savvy enough to use the enemy’s own power against him. If you look hard enough, you’ll find his weaknesses. Bottom line: there’s no need to overpower when you can outsmart.
For the strategy to work, all five players have to be moving in sync so that they can take advantage of the openings that occur when the defense overextends itself. If one player gets caught in a tussle with his man, resisting the pressure rather than moving away from it, he can jam up the whole system. That lesson has to be constantly reinforced. Once in a game against the Miami Heat in 1991, I called a timeout when I saw Scottie Pippen get into a trash-talking war with the other side. Scottie knew what I was going to say, and got defensive as soon as I started talking. But Cliff Levingston, a cheerful, fun-loving forward whose nickname was Good News, defused the tension, saying, “Come on, Pip. You know Phil’s right.” Afterwards, we talked about the incident, as an example of how we had to grow as a team and not retaliate every time our opponents did something we didn’t like.
Teaching the players to embrace a nonbelligerent way of thinking about competition required continuous reinforcement. One of the first steps I took was to institute a series of “silly” fines to discourage players from insulting the other team. Example: a big man will get fined $10 for taking three-point shots at the end of the game when we’re ahead by 20 or more points. That kind of shot demeans your opponent and only builds rage that might be returned later on.
I also discourage players from turning a good move into a humiliating one. Example: in the 1994 playoffs against the Knicks, Scottie Pippen drove to the basket and sent Patrick Ewing sprawling to the floor. After dunking the ball, Scottie straddled Ewing and waved his finger in Ewing’s face. What did that accomplish? Pippen got a little ego rush, but he also got called for a technical and planted a seed of anger in the Knicks’, not to mention the refs’, minds.
Sometimes I use our opponents’ anger to try to motivate the team. There’s a clip from a Bulls-Knicks game I often screen that shows Ewing pounding his chest and yelling, “Fuck those motherfuckers!” That feeling is what the players have to steel themselves against. They have to develop a certain grittiness and dogged determination to stand up to brutality without being lured into the fray.
The implications of using the warrior ideal as a way of redirecting aggressive energy reach far beyond the NBA. The need is painfully obvious. A couple of years ago I watched a New York City high school championship game in Madison Square Garden that made my heart sink. It was a messy game, marred by a lot of in-your-face posturing and dirty tactics. When it was over, the winning team approached the losers and started taunting them until a fight broke out. That kind of confrontation, which often leads to tragic consequences, wouldn’t be so prevalent if young people knew how to preserve their pride and dignity without blindly acting out their anger.
There are those who’ve already picked up the ball. Ellen Riley, one of the few women who attended the Beyond Basketball workshop at the Omega Institute, is using the warrior model in an educational training program for at-risk teenagers in Yonkers, New York. Although it’s not a sports program, the students have embraced the warrior imagery and the ideals of dedication and commitment. “What we’re trying to convey is that individual performance is important, but it has to be embedded in a much larger context,” Riley explains. “Being a responsible member of a community, or team, is simply the most effective way to live.”
My goal in 1990–91 was to win the conference title and the home-court advantage in the playoffs. We had proved that we could beat the Pistons at home, but we didn’t have the poise yet to win consistently in their arena. Until that happened, we needed to capture the conference title so that we could benefit from the unnerving effect Chicago Stadium, the loudest arena in the NBA, had on visiting teams. That year we won 26 straight games at home, the longest streak in the history of the franchise. I cautioned the players not to get too excited about victories or too depressed about defeats. When we lost, I’d say, “Okay, let’s flush that one down the drain when you shower. Let’s not lose two in a row.” That became our motto for the season, and after mid-December we lost two straight only once. I also warned the team about becoming complacent with a three-game winning streak. If they let the momentum build, they could extend a streak to eight, nine, ten games. Winning started to come naturally. Going into a tough road trip, I’d say it would be great if we won five of the next seven games. Michael would reply confidently, “We’ll win ‘em all.”
The first big test came on February 7 in a game against the Pistons at the Palace in Auburn Hills, Michigan. We hadn’t won a game in the Palace since Game 1 of the 1989 playoffs, but this time Isiah Thomas would be out of action with a wrist injury.
Studying Detroit game films that week, I uncovered a clue to the Palace mystique: the rim of the basket closest to the Pistons’ bench was stiffer than the one on the other end. This meant that off-line shots would be less likely to get a good bounce and go in. We had rarely shot well at that basket, and I had always chalked it up to the players’ lack of poise in front of the Detroit bench. But perhaps a subtle act of gamesmanship was also a contributing factor. (Adjusting the rigidity of the baskets is not uncommon in the NBA. Some teams also install fast nets to speed up the tempo of a game or deflate the balls to slow it down.) As the visiting coach, I got to pick which basket we would shoot at in the first half. I usually chose the basket in front of our bench, so we would be playing defense at our end of the court in the second half. But this time I reversed strategy: the last thing I wanted was to have the players shooting at a rigged basket in the closing minutes of the game.
More important to me, however, was how the players dealt with Detroit’s intimidation tactics, and I began to see some promising signs. Even though Bill Cartwright was ejected in the first half for elbowing Bill Laimbeer (okay, so the gentle warrior image was not in evidence every second of every game), the team didn’t collapse when Cartwright left the floor. The younger players, especially Scottie and Horace, managed to maintain their focus. At one point somebody knocked Horace’s goggles off and I thought he might unravel. But he recovered gracefully and raced back on defense after assistant coach Jim Cleamons jumped up and screamed, “Just play through it!” B.J. Armstrong also seemed unfazed by the Bad Boys’ ploys and scored clutch baskets in the fourth quarter, as the team held on to win, 95–93. After the game, Jordan announced triumphantly to the media, “A monkey is off our back.”
That’s when the team really started to gel. We went 11–1 in February, the Bull’s most successful month ever, and began to put long winning streaks together. Around this time Bill Cartwright and John Paxson decided to give up alcohol for Lent. They did it, in part, to set an example for the young players, to show that they were willing to make sacrifices to win a championship. Three or four other players joined in, and they continued to abstain till the end of the season.
Not everything went smoothly, however. On April Fool’s Day, Stacey King, who had been carping at reporters about not getting enough playing time, walked out of practice. This act of rebellion had been building for months. Stacey, a forward who had been one of the nation’s leading scorers in college, was having a difficult time adjusting to his role as a bench player. I had been patient with him, but the selfishness of his remarks pushed me over the edge. I decided to fine him $250 and suspend him for the next game, which would cost him about $12,000 in salary. When he showed up for practice the following day, we got into a shouting match in my office. I lost control and called him a “fat ass” and a few other less flattering names.
I wasn’t proud of my performance, but my tirade had a positive effect on Stacey. Before that episode he had a distorted view of his role on the team, and some of the veterans felt he needed a dose of reality therapy to bring him in line. They were right. After sitting out a game and thinking over what he had done, he dropped the attitude. He never gave me a problem again.
As a rule I try not to unleash my anger at players that way. When it happens, I say what I have to say, then let it pass, so the bad feelings won’t linger in the air and poison the team. Sometimes what my father called “righteous anger” is the most skillful means to shake up a team. But it has to be dispensed judiciously. And it’s got to be genuine. If you’re not really angry, the players will detect it immediately.
Most importantly, eruptions shouldn’t be directed at one or two members of a group; they should encompass the whole pack. The first time I got visibly angry at the team, after a loss to the Orlando Magic during my first year as head coach, the players were speechless because they had never seen that side of me before. It was right after the All-Star Game, which had taken place in Orlando, and many of the players had been hanging out in Florida all week, chasing women and partying every night. I was angry because we had blown a 17-point lead, and it was clear that the players’ extracurricular activities were sapping their energy. After the game I kicked a can of soda across the locker room and gave the players a fire-and-brimstone sermon on dedicating themselves to winning and doing everything possible, on and off the court, to become champions. The next day the flock of groupies that had gathered around the team was nowhere in sight.
We ended the 1990–91 season on a romp, beating Detroit in the final game, and finished with the best record in the conference: 61–21. Then after beating New York, 3–0, and Philadelphia, 4–1, in the early rounds of the playoffs, we faced Detroit again. The Pistons were hobbling after a tough series against Boston and several of their players, including Isiah Thomas and Joe Dumars, were nursing injuries. But that didn’t make them any less arrogant.
This time we didn’t have to use Michael as much as we had in the past. He didn’t have to score 35 to 40 points a game because Scottie Pippen, Horace Grant, and the bench had learned how to take advantage of the openings Michael created by acting as a decoy and drawing the Detroit defense in his direction. In Game 1 he went 6 for 15 and scored only 22 points, but the reserves—Will Perdue, Cliff Levingston, B. J. Armstrong, and Craig Hodges—went on a surge in the fourth quarter and put the team ahead to stay.
As we moved toward a four-game sweep, the Pistons got more and more desperate. Scottie, as usual, took much of the abuse. Forward Mark Aguirre was relentless. “You’re dead, Pippen, you’re dead,” he jabbered, according to an account in The Jordan Rules. “I’m getting you in the parking lot after the game. Don’t turn your head, because I’m going to kill you. You’re fuckin’ dead.” Scottie just laughed it off. In Game 4, Dennis Rodman shoved Pippen into the stands so hard it took him a few seconds to stagger to his feet. As he got up, Horace rushed over and screamed, “You play, you play!” Scottie shrugged it off and kept playing. “They really weren’t focusing on basketball,” he told reporters afterwards. “Basically Rodman’s been making those stupid plays for the last couple of years, but I’ve been retaliating and giving him the opportunity to let that work to his advantage. We put our main focus into basketball, as we have all season.”
Scottie wasn’t alone. Everybody on the team was slammed around. John Paxson was thrown into the stands by Laimbeer. Other players were tackled, tripped, elbowed, and smacked in the face. But they all laughed it off. The Pistons didn’t know how to respond. We completely disarmed them by not striking back. At that moment, our players became true champions.
The Pistons, on the other hand, gave up being champions long before the final whistle blew. In the final minutes of Game 4, which we won 115–94, four of Detroit’s starters, Thomas, Laimbeer, Rodman, and Aguirre, got up from the bench and walked out of the arena scowling. On their way out, they passed by our bench without even acknowledging our presence.
After that series, the finals against the Los Angeles Lakers were anticlimactic. The Lakers won the first game in Chicago, 93–91, on a late three-pointer by forward Sam Perkins, but that was their last shining moment. After that our defense took over, pressuring Magic Johnson, keeping the ball out of his hands and double-teaming their post-up players, James Worthy and Vlade Divac. We won in five games, taking the last three in L.A.
The emergence of John Paxson as a clutch shooter was another key. When Jordan was pressed, he often dished the ball to Paxson, who shot 65 percent from the field during the series and scored 20 points in the final game, including the shot that sealed the win. After Game 4, Magic summed up the situation beautifully: “It’s not just Michael. He’s going great, but so is the team. It’s one thing if he’s going great and the team isn’t. Then you have a chance to win. They’ve got Horace playing well; Bill is playing solid; and their bench is playing outstanding. They’ve got the total game going.”
Before the final game, the Disney organization asked Jordan if he would do one of their “What are you going to do now?” commercials. He said he’d do it only if the ad included his teammates. This was a sign of how far Michael, and the team, had come. It brought back memories of the 1973 Knicks. After we won the title that year, Vaseline wanted Bill Bradley to do a post-victory commercial, but he suggested the company use his teammates instead. As it turned out, Donnie May, Bills stand-in, ended up playing the starring role.
Here I was again at another victory party in L.A. After we stopped for a moment to say the Lord’s Prayer, the champagne started flowing. It was an emotional scene. Scottie Pippen popped the first bottle of bubbly and poured it over Horace Grant’s head. Bill Cartwright took a sip of champagne and sighed, “Finally.” Sam Smith reported that B.J. Armstrong, Dennis Hopson, Stacey King, and Cliff Levingston serenaded Tex Winter with an impromptu rap song: “Oh, we believe in the triangle, Tex. We believe, yeah, we believe in that triangle. It’s the show for those in the know.” His eyes filled with tears, Michael Jordan hugged the championship trophy as if it were a newborn baby.
Strangely, I was somewhat detached. This was the players’ show, and I didn’t feel the same euphoria they did. But there was one last point I wanted to make.
Midway through the festivities, I gave my last speech of the season. “You should know,” I said, “that many championship teams don’t come back. This is a business. I’d like to have all of you back, but it doesn’t always happen. But this is something special you have shared and which you’ll never forget. This will be yours forever and it will always be a bond that will keep you together. I want to thank you all personally for this season. Now, get back to the party.”