PLAYER:
So what does all this being in the moment stuff, all this jabberwocky about compassion, have to do with real life?
ZEN COACH:
Can bulls walk on air?
PLAYER:
Is that a koan?
ZEN COACH:
You figure it out.
In his book, Thoughts Without a Thinker, psychiatrist Mark Epstein describes an encounter in a Laotian forest monastery with a famous master, Achaan Chaa, which made an indelible impression on a group of American travelers.
“You see this goblet?” Chaa asked, holding up a glass. “For me, this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on a shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that this glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”
In its simplicity this story illustrates one of the basic principles of Buddhist teachings: that impermanence is a fundamental fact of life. So it is, the tale seems to be saying, for everything from crystal goblets to championship basketball teams.
It wasn’t until Michael Jordan left the Bulls in the fall of 1993 that I began to see what we’d really accomplished and how all the pieces of our crazy-quilt style of coaching fit together. It was a new season, and though many of the players remained, it was a new team. The challenge was not to try to repeat ourselves but to use what we had learned to re-create ourselves—to conjure up a new vision for this team.
Basketball had taught me many lessons about impermanence and change. I was about to learn another one.
In the weeks following Jordan’s retirement, an eerie gloom hovered over the team. The day after the news broke, the Las Vegas line on the Bulls winning a fourth championship dropped from 1 in 5 to 1 in 24. Some insiders were even more pessimistic. One of our pr guys confessed to me that he picked the team to finish 27–55 in the office pool.
I was more sanguine. When a star of Jordan’s caliber retires, there’s usually a dropoff of fifteen games or more. I didn’t think the Bulls would sink that far, but I was concerned about how the players would respond to the loss. My hope was that once the initial shock wore off, the veterans who had been playing in Jordan’s shadow for so long would seize the opportunity to prove to the world that they could win a championship on their own.
Losing Michael presented a major challenge for me, though not an entirely unwelcome one. What’s exciting about coaching is the building process, not the ongoing maintenance work required once your team has achieved success. During Michael’s final season, the Bulls ran pretty much on automatic. The biggest problem I faced was keeping the players from getting bored and losing their edge. Now I would get a chance to reshape the team and see if our approach to the game would work without the world’s greatest player on the roster.
Not that there weren’t problems. At the start of the 1993–94 season, we had four veterans recovering from injuries: Pippen, Cartwright, Paxson, and Scott Williams. Also, the timing of Jordan’s announcement—a few days before the start of training camp—made it difficult for Jerry Krause to find a replacement for him. All of the top free agents were gone, so Krause turned to Pete Myers, a veteran who had once played for the Bulls and was eager to get back to the NBA after spending a year in the Italian pro league. The team Krause put together was a patchwork blend of insiders and outsiders, champions and nonchampions, haves and have-nots. Many of the free agents were getting rock-bottom salaries, between $150,000 to $200,000 a year, while most of the veterans were multimillionaires.
The free agents’ hunger helped energize the team, but it was difficult blending such a diverse group into a harmonious unit. The players weren’t in each other’s blood the way the members of the earlier teams had been, and it often showed on court. One of the first things I noticed was that everyone was trying to fill the Jordan vacuum singlehandedly. All of a sudden, several players started to compete to see who could become “The Man.” I had to remind them that it wasn’t Jordan’s team or any other individual’s team, for that matter; it was our team. As long as they vied for the spotlight, the players would have difficulty finding a new identity as a group.
For Toni Kukoc, being “The Man” was second nature. He’d been the star on every team he’d ever played for and had developed a lot of bad habits along the way. It was obvious what Toni’s agenda was: every time he got the ball, he wanted to do something special with it. This drove the rest of the players crazy. They’d expect him to do one thing, then all of a sudden he’d start freelancing and throw everybody else off. Theoretically, the other players should have been able to adjust, but Toni’s playful meanderings around the court often defied logic.
Toni wasn’t a selfish player. Nothing gave him more pleasure than to dish the ball off to somebody else. But he didn’t want to conform to the triangle offense. I knew right from the start that I would have to ride him hard in practice to protect him from being torn apart by his teammates. I’m sure my method didn’t seem like an act of kindness to Toni. He couldn’t understand why I allowed Scottie the freedom to make creative moves outside the system, but would start yelling at him when he tried similar gambits. The difference, I told him, was that Scottie was looking at the game from a completely different perspective. He had spent years working within the offense, so when he decided to step outside of it, he usually had a good reason. But when Toni bucked the system, it was because he was impatient and wanted to assert his individuality, often at the team’s expense.
Kukoc wasn’t the only player having a hard time. Horace Grant and Scott Williams, who were playing out their options that year, had distanced themselves from the team, and Corie Blount, a rookie power forward, felt like an outsider. In February the team started to flounder, and I called a meeting to discuss the lack of cohesiveness. Afterwards, assistant coach Jim Cleamons gave the players a short, but moving speech. “We’ve always been a team that played from the heart,” he said. “But we’ve gotten away from that. We’re thinking about money; we’re thinking about our careers; we’re thinking about our stats, instead of thinking about our teammates and how we’re going to get ourselves into the game.”
Inspired by Cleamons’ words, the players had one of their best practices of the season that afternoon. Horace and Scott recommitted their energy, and the Bulls soon became a team again. We went on a 17–3 streak in March and April and came within two games of finishing first in the conference. We rode that momentum into the first round of the playoffs and swept Cleveland in three games. Then we headed to New York for the Eastern semifinals.
This series was the most memorable clash ever between the two teams. After we dropped a 15-point lead and lost the first game, my strategy was to do an end-around on the New York media, but the reporters were craftier than I imagined. We were scheduled to practice the next day at an athletic club near Wall Street. I thought it would be unproductive for the players to spend the morning being grilled by reporters and rehashing a tough loss. So as we approached the gym, I told the bus driver to take us to the Staten Island Ferry. Little did I know that a pack of reporters had been tailing us from the hotel and were ready and waiting, notebooks in hand, when we lined up for the boat.
That wasn’t our first impromptu field trip. I like to do the unpredictable every now and then to keep the players from getting stale. In 1993, for example, I canceled a shootaround in Washington, D.C., to take them to visit Bill Bradley in the U.S. Senate. The Staten Island trip was a little more leisurely. It was a perfect spring day, and we had the top deck of the boat all to ourselves. Scott Williams later told a reporter he found the trip mentally refreshing: “We came away saying, yeah, we blew one, but let’s forget about it and come back with a good mental attitude.”
The team played with renewed energy the next day, but the Knicks beat us again in the fourth quarter. That set the stage for one of the most surrealistic events I’ve ever seen on a basketball court: Game 3 in Chicago.
The weirdness began to build in the second quarter when a fight broke out between backup guard Jo Jo English and the Knicks’ point guard Derek Harper that spilled into the stands a few rows down from where NBA Commissioner David Stern was sitting. Both English and Harper were ejected, and the Knicks started to fall apart, but they climbed back in the fourth quarter and tied the score with 1.8 seconds left. I called time out and drew up a play that called for Pippen to pass the ball inbounds to Kukoc for the final shot. Breaking out of the huddle, I heard Scottie grumble “bullshit.” He was already angry at Kukoc for creating a traffic jam on the previous play and forcing him to take a bad shot. Now Toni was getting a chance to be “The Man.”
I told Scottie what had happened on the previous play didn’t matter anymore. “You had an opportunity to score, and it didn’t work,” I said. “Now we’re going to do something else.” Then I turned around, assuming the problem had been solved. But a few seconds later I glanced over my shoulder and saw Scottie hunched over at the far end of the bench, glowering.
“Are you in or out?” I asked him, puzzled by his behavior.
“I’m out,” he said.
His reply caught me off guard, but I didn’t have time to argue. I called another timeout and replaced Scottie with Pete Myers, one of our better passers. Myers lofted a perfect pass to Kukoc, and Toni tossed in the game-winning shot at the buzzer. Pippen just sat there and watched.
I felt sorry for Scottie as I walked off the court and made my way to the dressing room. I knew the fallout from this incident would haunt him for days, if not the rest of his career. He had broken one of the unspoken rules of sports, and I wasn’t sure if his teammates, not to mention the media, would ever forgive him. Despite his reputation as a malcontent, I couldn’t remember Scottie ever challenging one of my decisions. He was one of the most selfless players on the team. That’s why I had named him a cocaptain with Bill Cartwright after Michael retired. But none of that mattered now. In a rash moment, he had violated the trust of his teammates.
My guess was that frustration had blurred Scottie’s thinking. And I knew that if I came down too hard on him, it would only make matters worse. Scottie is a brooder. When things go wrong for him, he often falls into a deep funk that lasts for days. I knew the incident would weigh on his mind like a Sisyphean boulder.
All these thoughts were buzzing around in my mind as I stood over a sink in the shower room, taking out my contact lenses and preparing to talk to the team. Just then I heard Cartwright gasping for air in the showers. He was so overcome with emotion he could barely breathe.
“What’s wrong, Bill?” I asked.
“I can’t believe what Scottie did,” he said in a faint whisper. “I’ve got to say something.”
By then, all the players had returned to the dressing room except Kukoc, who was doing a TV interview. The room, in the nether region of Chicago Stadium, was cramped, poorly lit, and smelled like an old, forgotten gym bag. Its dank cavelike atmosphere heightened the feeling of intimacy.
After I made a few remarks, Bill took over. “Look, Scottie,” he said, staring at Pippen, “that was bullshit. After all we’ve been through on this team. This is our chance to do it on our own, without Michael, and you blow it with your selfishness. I’ve never been so disappointed in my whole life.”
When he finished, tears were streaming down his cheeks. The room was silent. Bill is a proud, stoic man who commanded the highest respect because of his ability to endure punishment and not back down. None of us had ever seen him show the slightest hint of vulnerability. In fact, his wife, Sheri, later told June that in fifteen years of marriage, she had never seen Bill cry. For him to break down like that in front of his teammates was significant, and Pippen knew that as well as anyone.
After Bill’s speech I led the group in the Lord’s Prayer, then left for the press conference. The players continued to meet in private. Visibly shaken by Bill’s words, Scottie apologized to his teammates, explaining the frustration he felt during the final minutes. Then some of the other players said what they felt. “I’ve been to that point,” says B. J. Armstrong. “I know what it’s like to be so angry you want to quit. But to quit at that moment, especially on John Paxson and Bill Cartwright, was not right. I felt strongly about that. John was going to retire at the end of the season, and Bill was on his last go-round with the team. We owed it to them to get out there no matter what.” Talking it through helped repair the broken circle. “To be honest,” adds B. J., “I think the whole thing brought us closer. Because we weren’t going to let one incident, no matter how big or small, break down what we had worked so hard to build.”
The next morning Pippen told me he had worked everything out with his teammates. He assured me that he’d be in the right state of mind for the next game. Watching him hustle for the ball at practice, I could see that the boulder had been lifted from his shoulders.
After the dust had settled, several friends told me that they admired the way I handled the situation. But really all I did was to step back and let the team come up with its own solution.
That was a turning point for the Bulls. In the process of healing the wound, the players had found a new identity for the team sans Michael Jordan, and they played with a poise and self-assurance I hadn’t seen since the 1993 playoffs. The story has a strange twist, though. We dominated the Knicks in the next three games, but a controversial call on Pippen with three seconds left erased our one-point lead in Game 5. The law of basketball karma, it seems, finally caught up with Scottie and ultimately the Bulls. As a result, we lost to the Knicks in seven games, instead of beating them in six. If it hadn’t been for that call, we might have won our fourth championship in a row.
That was my favorite season that we didn’t come away with a trophy. I was pleased with the way the players had transcended the loss of Jordan and turned themselves into a real team. Three championships had taught them a lot. On paper they may not have been as talented as their rivals, but they had an unshakable collective will that won them a lot of close games. Players like Pippen, Cartwright, Grant, and Paxson couldn’t bear the idea of lapsing into mediocrity. They expected to win the big ones, even when they were outgunned, and that alone often carried them to victory.
I realized that the new team would take time to evolve into a cohesive whole. My challenge was to be patient. There’s no percentage in trying to push the river or speed up the harvest. The farmer who’s so eager to help his crops grow that he slips out at night and tugs on the shoots inevitably ends up going hungry.
In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Suzuki Roshi writes that when we “cannot accept the truth of transiency, we suffer.” I had to remind myself of this again and again at the start of the 1994–95 season. Over the summer I had watched the team I had worked so hard to build dissolve in front of my eyes. First, John Paxson retired. Then Scott Williams and Horace Grant signed free-agent deals with Philadelphia and Orlando, respectively, and Bill Cartwright, on the verge of retirement, signed with Seattle. The loss of Horace was especially painful. At one point during the negotiations, Horace reached a verbal agreement with Jerry Reinsdorf to stay with the Bulls, but he backed out of the deal after discussing it with his agent. I’ve never talked to Horace about why he changed his mind, but I suspect he felt he needed to go somewhere else to grow psychologically and be treated as a seasoned veteran. No matter how much money we paid him in Chicago, he might have always felt like the class dunce.
At one point, it looked as though we might lose Pippen, too. The Seattle Supersonics offered to trade us All-Star power forward Shawn Kemp, guard Rickey Pierce, and a draft pick for Pippen, but the deal fell through at the last minute. Scottie, who was already upset about being underpaid compared to other NBA stars, felt that Jerry Krause had misled him about what was going on. In January he asked to be traded, hoping that a new club would tear up his contract and pay him what he thought he was worth. He was quoted as saying he would go anywhere, even to the lowly Los Angeles Clippers.
Luckily, Pippen’s dispute with management didn’t affect his performance on court; in fact, he was having the best season of his career. But the team was inconsistent, and I started getting concerned about our inability to finish games. We were falling apart in the closing minutes and losing to teams we should have beaten—Washington, New Jersey, and even, God forbid, the Clippers. February was the cruelest month. We played eight of our thirteen games on the road and won only two of them. Scottie thought the problem was that the players were sitting back and waiting for him to perform a miracle, just as they had done with Michael Jordan before him. My reading of the situation was that, as a group, the team didn’t have an overwhelming desire to win. And that’s something you just can’t teach.
Then Jordan returned.
Michael had enough competitive drive for twelve men, and I was certain some of it would inevitably rub off on the rest of the team. But in the back of my mind, doubts lingered. After his 55-point extravaganza in New York, Michael settled down and focused on working within the offense. But the team often flowed better when he wasn’t on the floor, and Michael was still groping around trying to figure out his teammates. By the time we polished off Charlotte, 3–1, in the first round of the playoffs, the team had become overly dependent on him, especially in the fourth quarter. I could sense that the other players had lost some of their confidence: they felt that Michael was going to have to score 35 to 40 points a game for us to beat our next opponent—the Orlando Magic.
Our plan was to keep the ball out of Shaquille O’Neal’s hands and prevent Orlando’s three-point shooters, Anfernee Hardaway, Nick Anderson, and Dennis Scott, from taking over. To contain Shaq, a 7'1", 301-pound force of nature, we unleashed the Three-Headed Monster, centers Luc Longley, Will Perdue, and Bill Wennington. That strategy worked in Game 1, but Michael squandered a one-point lead in the last ten seconds, making two surprising mental errors.
In the locker room, I put my arm around Michael and told him to forget what had happened. But I could tell by his expression that he wasn’t going to let himself off that easily. The next day Nick Anderson, who had stolen the ball away from Michael to spark Orlando’s go-ahead basket, was quoted in the papers, saying: “Before [Jordan] retired, he had that quickness, explosiveness. Not that it’s not there now, but it’s not the same as No. 23.”
When Michael showed up for Game 2, he had traded in his new number, 45, for his old one, 23. Then he proceeded to score 38 points and lead the team to a 104–94 victory. But the brouhaha that followed his number switch set Michael even further apart from the rest of the team. Orlando complained to the NBA, and so did a lot of parents who had purchased No. 45 jerseys for their kids. The league fined the Bulls $25,000, even though there was no rule prohibiting what Michael had done, and threatened to raise the stakes much higher if he didn’t go back to No. 45 for Game 3. Finally, after a long, heated conference call with Michael and Jerry Krause, league officials decided to postpone any further action until after the playoffs. (Subsequently, the Bulls were fined $100,000 for their noncompliance with the league’s rules. That amount will probably be lessened through negotiation.)
We split the next two games in Chicago and returned to Orlando for the critical Game 5. In the first half, it looked like we might walk away with the game, but the Magic roared back in the third quarter and won, 103–95, led by none other than Horace Grant, who went 10 for 13 from the field and scored 24 points. The next day Jerry Krause, who had been taking a lot of heat for letting Grant go, pleaded with me: “Can’t you find somebody else other than Horace to beat us?”
Actually, Horace wasn’t the problem. Time was. By Game 6 it was clear that this version of the Bulls didn’t have the deep intuitive knowledge of each other that a team needs to work harmoniously under pressure, and which takes years to develop. This club didn’t have the same “think power,” to use Michael’s phrase, that the championship Bulls teams had. Everybody was relying heavily on Michael, but he didn’t know his teammates well enough to be able to anticipate how they would respond during crunch time. And they were in the dark about him.
This became glaringly apparent in the last three minutes of the game. B. J. Armstrong put us ahead by 8 points with a 3-pointer from the corner, and I told the players to slow things down and try to maintain control of the tempo. But they were out of sync, and Orlando stole back the momentum. In our final seven possessions, nobody scored. Kukoc tried. Pippen tried. Jordan tried. Longley tried with two players hanging on his arms. But it was not to be.
After the game, I felt stunned. The end had come crashing down so suddenly. I tried to lift the players’ spirits, recounting the steps we had taken since the start of the season. “Just swallow this loss and digest it,” I said. “Then get on with your lives.” On the drive home, June and I talked about the season and what an emotional ride it had been. As we pulled away from the United Center and headed for the expressway, she started to cry.
The best part of winning, I once heard someone say, is that it’s not losing. There’s something to be said for that. Losing can open the lid on a Pandora’s box of dark emotions. Some coaches go home after big losses and start smashing up the furniture or browbeating their kids. Others put their energy into complaining about the referees or tyrannizing their players. My method is to direct my anger at a much easier target—myself.
That night I woke up at about four in the morning obsessing about a call on Scottie Pippen at the end of the game. My mind was running wild, replaying the last three minutes over and over. What could I have done differently? What was our fatal flaw? When I was a player, I used to torture myself after games, reliving all my mistakes in the movie house of my mind. Now I’m more compassionate toward myself, but the images keep fast-forwarding through my head just the same.
In 1994 I was too shaken by our loss to New York in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinals to study the tape afterwards, and memories of the game haunted me all summer. That was a hard moment for me—the first time we had been knocked out of the playoffs in four years. After the buzzer sounded, I headed toward the Knicks’ bench to shake hands with Pat Riley, but by the time I made my way through the crowd he was already gone. The whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth.
This time I was determined not to dance away from reality, but to make it my teacher. Losing is a lens through which you can see yourself more clearly and experience in the blood and the bones the transient nature of life. The day after the final game, the coaches and I got together at the Berto Center and did a postmortem. Then over the next few days, Jerry Krause and I met with each player individually to discuss the season and see how they were handling the loss. As we talked, a vision of the future started forming in my mind. I could imagine a new incarnation of the Bulls built around the new Michael Jordan, now an elder statesman, not a young rambunctious warrior.
That week, my assistant, Pam Lunsford, handed me a letter from a fan in Massapequa, New York, that put our loss to the Magic in perspective:
Dear Mr. Jackson,
I just had to write to tell you how much I enjoy watching the Bulls play. You have such an exciting team with so much talent.
I must admit I only became interested in basketball a few years ago, primarily because of Michael Jordan, but as I continued to watch the Bulls in action, I became a real fan! I don’t know how men view sports, but, as a woman, I appreciate it when there is mutual respect among the players and a real team effort. From what I can see, the Bulls are not arrogant and do not mouth off. They act very professionally when they are on court. Even when they are called for a foul, they don’t throw temper tantrums.
I realize the team will probably never get to read my letter, but I would appreciate it if you would pass along my comments to them, just to encourage them. Let them know I don’t only admire them for their talent, but respect each one because of their attitude.
Sincerely yours,
Lillian Pietri
We must be doing something right. Despite the unpredictable nature of the game, our way of working offers a genuine center, a still point in a sea of change. The makeup of the team might be different from year to year, but the principles of selflessness and compassion that guided the Bulls to three straight championships will always be available to us.
June gets frustrated by how little emotion I display after big victories. Once she suggested that I wave to her in the stands after games “to let me know how happy you are about winning.” Although I’m not demonstrative by nature, recently I’ve begun to take her up on her request.
Winning is important to me, but what brings me real joy is the experience of being fully engaged in whatever I’m doing. I get unhappy when my mind begins to wander, during wins as well as losses. Sometimes a well-played defeat will make me feel better than a victory in which the team doesn’t feel especially connected.
This hasn’t always been the case. As a young player, winning meant everything to me. My sense of self-worth rose and fell depending on my personal performance and how my team stacked up. In 1978, my last year with the Knicks, we were swept by Philadelphia in the playoffs. After the next-to-last game, Doug Collins, then a player with the 76ers, came over to shake my hand, but I snubbed him. June, who was watching from the stands, couldn’t believe her eyes. I explained that the series wasn’t over yet, and I wasn’t prepared to acknowledge defeat. She thought that was ridiculous. Doug wasn’t trying to one-up me; he just wanted to congratulate me for a good game.
She was right. My obsession with winning had robbed me of my joy in the dance. From that point on, I started looking at competition differently. I realized that I’d been trapped for years on an emotional roller coaster of winning and losing, and it was tearing me apart.
I wasn’t alone. Our whole social structure is built around rewarding winners, at the perilous expense of forsaking community and compassion. The conditioning starts early, especially among boys, and never stops. “There is no room for second place,” the late coach Vince Lombardi once said. “It is and always has been an American zeal to be first in anything we do, and to win and to win and to win.” How can anyone, from sports figures to entrepreneurs, possibly maintain their self-esteem when this attitude dominates our cultural mindset?
Eventually, everybody loses, ages, changes. And small triumphs—a great play, a moment of true sportsmanship—count, even though you may not win the game. Walt Whitman got it right when he wrote, “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.” As strange as it may seem, being able to accept change or defeat with equanimity gives you the freedom to go out on the floor and give the game your all.
I used to believe that the day I could accept defeat was the day I would have to give up my job. But losing is as integral a part of the dance as winning. Buddhism teaches us that by accepting death, you discover life. Similarly, only by acknowledging the possibility of defeat can you fully experience the joy of competition. Our culture would have us believe that being able to accept loss is tantamount to setting yourself up to lose. But not everyone can win all the time; obsessing about winning adds an unnecessary layer of pressure that constricts body and spirit and, ultimately, robs you of the freedom to do your best.
When I learned to shift my focus—two steps forward, one step back—from winning and losing to my love of the game, the sting of defeat began to diminish. Once, after a game in Denver, my sister-in-law dropped by the locker room and told me that she’d broken into tears watching me coach. “I started crying,” she said, “because I realized that this is exactly what you were meant to do. You’re so comfortable out there. It just seems so right.”
That’s when I come alive: on the basketball court. As the game unfolds, time slows down and I experience the blissful feeling of being totally engaged in the action. One moment I may crack a joke and the next cast a woeful look at a ref. But all the while I’m thinking: how many timeouts do we have left? Who needs to get going out there on court? What’s up with my guys on the bench? My mind is completely focused on the goal, but with a sense of openness and joy.
In its own way, basketball is a circus. When the tension builds, I’ll often call a timeout to slow the game down and plan our next move. The players will be wiped out, anxiously trying to pull themselves together before they have to make their next run. And after they’ve taken a drink and settled into their chairs, what do they see out on the court? Young women waving pompoms. Children racing around the floor in go-carts. Grown men in gorilla suits trying to slam dunk a ball from a trampoline.
That’s when you realize that basketball is a game, a journey, a dance—not a fight to the death.
It’s life just as it is.