Authors: Derek Fisher,Gary Brozek
Whether it was from my parents, or from the Reverend Mr. Sawyer at the Eighth Street Baptist Church, or from my teachers at Wilson Elementary School, I learned early on that rules were rules and I needed to abide by them. But when I was six or seven and out playing with the guys in Boyle Park, I learned some valuable lessons about human nature. The first was that not everybody held the truth in the same high regard as my family did. I was no saint, but if I fouled somebody or committed some kind of turnover on the basketball court or didn’t foul tip a third strike, I’d admit it straight up. My mother and father would not tolerate lying. If I did something wrong, I’d own up to it. At first, I did that because I feared the punishment for lying about something was going to be worse than the punishment for doing that something. Later on, as my sense of ethics and morality more fully developed, I understood more clearly that there were the right things and the wrong things to do because of certain absolutes.
With my mom and dad, especially when I was younger, there were no “Yes, but . . .” or fuzzy gray areas.
Rules were rules.
My dad, an ex-military guy, expected discipline and would only put up with so much nonsense. But like a lot of kids, I discovered early that rules were made to be broken—or at least bent. I was recently talking to a friend of mine I went to college with back in Little Rock. He lives in Southern California now too, though. He’s married and has two kids as I do, so we were swapping stories about family life. We both have stepsons—mine was twelve and his was eleven—and our talked turned to the knucklehead stuff that kids do in sixth and seventh grade. You tell them something fifty thousand times, and they still don’t remember.
Now we get what our parents tried to tell us and how we didn’t listen. The difference was, though, we knew what the rules were. We sometimes ignored them—and suffered the consequences. “I didn’t know” would not cut it with my mom and dad. “Ignorance is no excuse. Ignorance is ignorance, and I didn’t raise an ignorant child,” my mother used to say. And they did spell out the rules clearly for us. They didn’t issue a sixty-one-page document with all kinds of sub-paragraphs, but we understood—but.
For example, my mom and dad told me that I wasn’t allowed to go to somebody else’s house to play with them unless their parents were home. That meant that if I wanted to hang out with Rodney, Crash, or Larry, I’d have to check to see if their folks were home. Picking up the phone and calling was a pain in the butt, so I’d often just go over there to check things out. My other buddy Clarence had a basketball hoop in his driveway, and I loved nothing better than shooting hoops—if I couldn’t be inside playing video games. I would go down the block to Clarence’s place and knock on his bedroom window—front doors were for adults and not kids—to see if he was home. If he wasn’t there, I’d be a little disappointed, but I also figured, “Hey, Clarence isn’t home. I’m not playing with anybody but myself, so even if Clarence’s parents aren’t home, I’m okay. The rule says, don’t play with somebody else at their house if their parents aren’t home.” I was a little lawyer in the making back then, as most kids are. In my heart, I knew I was breaking the rule. In my head, I invented all kinds of rationalizations for my misbehavior. Somehow, someway, my parents always seemed to know when I had broken a rule.
We had a fairly tight-knit community, and parents looked out for one another’s kids. I think that’s a good thing, and it’s one aspect of small-town life that I miss living in the Los Angeles area. We had a real sense of community back in my Little Rock neighborhood, and at times when I drive through the area I live in today and I scan the backyards looking for groups of kids playing a pickup game of touch or baseball, I see no one. I see driveway and playground basketball hoops standing like dinosaur skeletons in an empty museum. All that makes me wonder if kids are learning about different approaches to solving problems, settling disputes, and how people have different views about rules and regulations. Sometimes when I’m with friends who have kids, I see them acting as referee and commissioner as they settle squabbles. We were expected to figure things out for ourselves. My parents laid down the broad outline of what was expected of us, and my siblings and I resolved our differences without running to the big authorities.
Throughout my life, in addition to my parents, I’ve had coaches who’ve been influential in shaping my view of the game and life. I’ve been fortunate in my NBA career to work under two of the most talented and successful coaches in the history of the pro game. Jerry Sloan was a hard-nosed guard who spent most of his playing career with the Chicago Bulls. He was a tenacious defender, and in his eleven-year career he made the All-Star squad in two seasons, while being named All-Defensive First Team four times and All-Defensive Second Team an additional two seasons. As a coach, he brought a lot of the same attributes he had as a player, and the results speak for themselves. As of the end of the 2007–8 season, Jerry was the fourth-winningest coach in NBA history, with 1,086 victories. Born in McLeansboro, Illinois, Jerry would be the first to admit that the small-town values he learned in rural mid-America shaped who he is and how he approaches coaching.
Like Coach Sloan, Phil Jackson enjoyed a stellar NBA playing career. Spending his entire thirteen-year career in the New York and New Jersey area, Phil cultivated a reputation as a thinking man’s player and as someone with interests far beyond the boundary lines of the basketball court. Though he didn’t get to play in the 1970 Knicks’ championship series due to an injury, he did publish a book called
Take It All!
that was a photo diary of that championship season. As a coach, he’s led his teams to ten NBA championships. Until our 2009 championship, they were equally divided among three three-peats—two with the Bulls and one with the Lakers. His teams have won at an astounding .701 clip—70 percent. He’s also earned a reputation for working well with so-called troubled players.
Like Jerry, his values were shaped by his upbringing in rural America—except Phil decided to pursue his own path. The son of two Assembly of God ministers who wouldn’t permit their children to watch television, see movies, or dance, Phil grew up in a strict and austere environment in Deer Lodge, Montana. Yet he became influenced by Eastern philosophy (that’s why he’s known as the Zen Master) and Native American spirituality.
I feel privileged to have played under two living legends and to have seen how two different approaches to the game and how to treat players can both produce winning teams. The Jazz and the Lakers organizations each have a reputation among players in the league. Much of that sense is a reflection of the head coaches. In addition to understanding the rules of the game, as professionals we need to understand and respect the rules that our coaches lay down for us governing our conduct on and off the court. The NBA also has certain expectations regarding the use of drugs, but the teams also have guidelines covering everything from curfews when we are on the road to how we are expected to dress while traveling with the team. When I first played for the Jazz, I was introduced to the Sloan Way in a surprising manner. During training camp, we were issued a pamphlet that ran down the team’s regulations. In one meeting, Jerry discussed the possibility of a curfew for road trips. We all knew that one was coming, but we didn’t get all the details. Nothing really surprising there, the Jazz had one of the most extensively written codes of conduct.
On our first road trip of the season, we traveled to the East Coast. Traveling is one of the most difficult parts of our profession, and it’s easy to believe that NBA players are pampered crybabies. I’m aware of that perception, but when we travel, we have to perform at a high level in front of thousands of fans at the game and potentially millions more on television. This is no knock on New Jersey, but when you compare staying at the Secaucus, New Jersey, Sheraton to the Four Seasons in Manhattan, Jersey doesn’t quite cut it. For West Coast teams traveling east and vice versa, those trips are the toughest because of the time-zone changes. On this particular trip, we got into the Sheraton a little after 9 p.m. for a game the following evening. My body was still on West Coast time, so I was eating dinner late but not terribly late. Room-service food was the only real option since the Sheraton is stuck in the middle of the Meadowlands in a sea of pavement and outlet malls and such. You’ve got a great view of Manhattan’s skyline, but that view is no substitute for being in Manhattan and having every type of food imaginable (and some I can’t) available to you just outside your hotel.
I didn’t eat a whole lot, and by eleven thirty that night I was tired of flipping channels and still had a bit of a gnawing sensation in my belly. Normally, I would just have got something from the minibar, but the Sheraton’s rooms don’t have them. So I pulled on a pair of shoes and went to the lobby to get a cab. The driver took me to a convenience store, where I picked up some snacks and a Gatorade before returning to my room—inside scoop on the glamorous NBA life, right? I didn’t get back to the room until a little after midnight. I ate and turned in for the night.
The next morning at our shootaround at what was then known as the Brendan Byrne Arena, one of the assistant coaches told me that Coach Sloan wanted to see me after practice. After I’d showered, I went to the visiting coach’s office and knocked on the door. Coach Sloan waved me in. He was doing paperwork of some kind and told me he’d be with me in a minute.
“Derek,” he said as he looked up from his work, “I heard that you got in at twelve fifteen last night.”
I nodded. “That’s about right.”
“Well, we have a curfew of midnight and you violated that curfew,” he began, then said a couple of other things. I knew some of our younger guys had had a few off-court problems in the preseason. Coach Sloan was doing what he could to make sure that we didn’t go completely off the rails. At age thirty-two, I could appreciate better why he was saying the things he was saying, but one thought kept nagging at me. When he was through, I said, “Coach Sloan, I appreciate what you’re saying, but we were never given a clear directive about curfew. You said that you were thinking about a midnight road curfew, but you never specifically stated that it was in effect.” There I was back again reading the fine print, but in this case I really wasn’t. I didn’t object that I was just going out to get snacks and complain that other players were doing worse things than eating pretzels. Instead, I simply stood up for myself and the essential truth of the situation: we didn’t have a curfew, so how could I have violated it?
Coach Sloan leaned back in his chair and his angular face looked thoughtful. Normally he was a black-and-white, yes/no kind of guy. I could see that my comments didn’t fit into an easy scheme like that. He thanked me and told me that he had to check on some things before deciding what course of action to take. I’d been raised to believe in fairness and justice, and I was sure that the outcome would reflect those. I was right. At our next team meeting, Coach Sloan stated that we were all going to be subject to a midnight curfew on road trips starting that day. He didn’t mention me or my situation, and I thought that was good. Some coaches might have tried to make themselves look good by letting everyone on the team know that he’d cut a player some slack.
As a younger guy, and I’ve seen other younger players do this, I could have got all upset when Coach Sloan said I came in “late.” I could have viewed all the rules as just another attempt by management to be on the backs and at the throats of the players. Instead, I simply relied on a strict interpretation of what had not been stated clearly. What I appreciated from Coach Sloan was his willingness to listen to my side and not to make a snap judgment—both attributes that I try to emulate in dealing with my family, friends, and colleagues.
In Coach Sloan’s approach to team discipline on and off the court, he established clear boundaries. This is what I expect. He’s old-school in that sense: clear boundaries and clear consequences. If we talk about working the clock and you fire up a jumper early and don’t make it, you almost certainly will hear about it—while sitting on the bench. While I have great respect and appreciation for his approach to rules, I also realized that I couldn’t take that same approach with my kids or as a coach. Setting up boundaries makes it easier for the person establishing the rules, but I’m not convinced that creating a strictly black/white, yes/no set of expectations works as well with adults as it does with kids. Nuance and allowing for individual differences seems more like the ideal approach to take.
In contrast to Coach Sloan, Phil has far fewer rules. Both of them have the same outcome in mind when it comes to the team’s rules: to create an environment conducive to success on the court; to have players respect themselves, their opponents, and the league. They just take different routes to get there. Phil simply makes the objectives clear, then lets his players decide on how to behave to produce those results. He believes that you need to know the rules and it’s up to you to figure out how to conduct yourself like a professional. He’s less focused on the small details, and for that reason I always felt a bit freer on and off the court when playing for him. He understands the need to find a balance between a rigid system and too little discipline that meets everybody’s needs.
In a lot of ways, we are all still like kids. We need structure, but we also need freedom. The two aren’t contradictory, and gradually through trial and error, we all do or don’t find that balance essential to success. I believe that the teams that are the most successful have a shared concept. In that sense, discipline is key. There is always some correlation between how you conduct yourself off the court and on, but I don’t think it’s a direct connection. The teams with the fewest curfew violations don’t always win the NBA championship.
I guess that I’m a lot like Phil in that we both grew up in homes in which adherence to rules was important. We also both grew in a slightly different direction from our roots. Balance and flexibility are more important to us than structure and exactness. While we don’t resort to the shoot-for-it solution to resolve conflicts, we do believe people can have different perspectives, yet put aside some of those differences to execute the shared vision of the team. One approach is somewhat simple and reduces complexity, while the other acknowledges that any human enterprise is complicated and that needs to be accounted for and acknowledged up front. Again, same destination, but different routes.