Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success (8 page)

I was thrilled, but the fans in Chicago were not so pleased. Collins was a popular figure in town and he’d taken the team to new heights during the past three years. When reporters asked Reinsdorf why he had made such a risky move, he said, “Doug brought us a long way from where we had been. You cannot say he wasn’t productive. But now we have a man we feel can take us the rest of the way.”

The pressure was on.

WARRIOR SPIRIT

Think lightly of yourself and think deeply of the world.

MIYAMOTO MUSASHI

A
s I sat by Flathead Lake in Montana that summer, contemplating the season ahead, I realized that this was a moment of truth for the Bulls. For the past six years we had been struggling to create a team around Michael Jordan. Now we had the talent in place to win a championship, but there was an important piece missing. In a word, the Bulls needed to become a tribe.

To succeed we had to get by the Detroit Pistons, but I didn’t think we could outmuscle them unless we acquired a completely different lineup. They were just too good at fighting in the “alligator wrestling pond,” as Johnny Bach called it. And when we tried to play the game their way, our players ended up getting frustrated and angry, which was just what the Pistons hoped would happen.

What our team could do, though, was outrun the Pistons—and outdefend them as well. Nobody on the Pistons, except perhaps Dennis Rodman, was quick enough to keep up with Michael, Scottie, and Horace on the fast break. And with Bill Cartwright’s formidable presence under the basket, we had the makings of one of the best defensive teams in the league. M.J. had taken great pride in winning the Defensive Player of the Year award the previous season, and Scottie and Horace were quickly developing into first-rate defenders. But in order to exploit those advantages, we needed to be more connected as a team and to embrace a more expansive vision of working together than simply getting the ball to Michael and hoping for the best.

When I was an assistant coach, I created a video for the players with clips from
The Mystic Warrior
, a television miniseries about Sioux culture based on the best-selling novel
Hanta Yo
by Ruth Beebe Hill. Ever since childhood I’ve been fascinated by the Sioux, some of whom lived in my grandfather’s boardinghouse, which was near a reservation in Montana. When I was with the Knicks, a Lakota Sioux friend from college, Mike Her Many Horses, asked me to teach a series of basketball clinics at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The purpose was to help heal the rift in his community caused by the 1973 standoff between police and American Indian movement activists at the site of the Wounded Knee massacre. I discovered during those clinics, which I taught with my teammates Bill Bradley and Willis Reed, that the Lakota loved the game and played it with an intense spirit of connectedness that was an integral part of their tribal tradition.

One of the things that intrigued me about Lakota culture was its view of the self. Lakota warriors had far more autonomy than their white counterparts, but their freedom came with a high degree of responsibility. As Native American scholar George W. Linden points out, the Lakota warrior was “the member of a tribe, and being a member, he never acted against, apart from, or
as
the whole without good reason.” For the Sioux, freedom was not about being absent but about being present, adds Linden. It meant “freedom
for
, freedom for the realization of greater relationships.”

The point I wanted to make by showing the players
The Mystic Warrior
video was that connecting to something beyond their individual goals could be a source of great power. The hero of the series, who was based loosely on Crazy Horse, goes into battle to save his tribe after experiencing a powerful vision. In our discussion after watching the video, the players seemed to resonate with the idea of bonding together as a tribe, and I thought I could build on that as we moved into the new season.

As I mentioned in the first chapter, management experts Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright describe five stages of tribal development in their book,
Tribal Leadership
. My goal in my first year as head coach was to transform the Bulls from a stage 3 team of lone warriors committed to their own individual success (“
I’m
great and you’re not”) to a stage 4 team in which the dedication to the We overtakes the emphasis on the Me (“
We’re
great and you’re not”).

But making that transition would take more than simply turning up the heat. I wanted to create a culture of selflessness and mindful awareness at the Bulls. To do that, I couldn’t just rely on one or two innovative motivational techniques. I had to devise a multifaceted program that included the triangle offense but also incorporated the lessons I had learned over the years about bonding people together and awakening the spirit.

My first step was to talk with Michael.

—

I knew Michael wasn’t a fan of the triangle. He referred to it sarcastically as “that equal-opportunity offense” that was designed for a generation of players who didn’t have his creative one-on-one skills. But at the same time I knew that Michael longed to be part of a team that was more integrated and multidimensional than the current incarnation of the Bulls.

This was not going to be an easy conversation. Basically I was planning to ask Michael, who had won his third scoring title in a row the previous season with an average of 32.5 points per game, to reduce the number of shots he took so that other members of the team could get more involved in the offense. I knew this would be a challenge for him: Michael was only the second player to win both a scoring title and the league MVP award in the same year, the first being Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1971.

I told him that I was planning to implement the triangle and, as a result, he probably wouldn’t be able to win another scoring title. “You’ve got to share the spotlight with your teammates,” I said, “because if you don’t, they won’t grow.”

Michael’s reaction was surprisingly pragmatic. His main concern was that he didn’t have much confidence in his teammates, especially Cartwright, who had difficulty holding onto passes, and Horace, who wasn’t that skilled at thinking on his feet.

“The important thing,” I replied, “is to let everybody touch the ball, so they won’t feel like spectators. You can’t beat a good defensive team with one man. It’s got to be a team effort.”

“Okay, I guess I could average thirty-two points,” he said. “That’s eight points a quarter. Nobody else is going to do that.”

“Well, when you put it that way, maybe you
can
win the title,” I said. “But how about scoring a few more of those points at the end of the game?”

Michael agreed to give my plan a try. Shortly after our conversation, I later learned, he told reporter Sam Smith, “I’ll give it two games.” But when he saw that I wasn’t going to back down, Michael dedicated himself to learning the system and figuring out ways to use it to his advantage—which is exactly what I had hoped he would do.

It was fun watching Tex and Michael argue about the system. Tex admired Jordan’s skill, but he was a purist about the triangle and wasn’t shy about giving Michael a piece of his mind when he went off script. Meanwhile, Michael wasn’t shy about creating variations on Tex’s beautiful machine. He thought the system was at best a three-quarter offense. After that the team needed to improvise and use its “think power” to win games.

It was a clash of visions. Tex believed it was foolhardy for a team to rely so heavily on one person, no matter how talented he was. Michael argued that his creativity was opening up exciting new possibilities for the game.

“There’s no
I
in the word ‘team,’” Tex would say.

“But there is in the word ‘win,’” Michael would counter with a grin.

As far as I was concerned, they were both right—up to a point. I didn’t believe the triangle alone was the answer for the Bulls. What I was looking for was the middle path between Tex’s purity and Michael’s creativity. It took time, but once the players had mastered the basics, we added some variations to the system that allowed the team to set certain plays in motion to avoid intense defensive pressure. Once that happened, the Bulls’ game really took off.

Another change I introduced to make the Bulls less Jordan-centric was to shake up the team’s pecking order. Michael had a powerful presence on the floor, but he had a different style of leadership than Larry Bird or Magic Johnson, who could galvanize a team with their magnetic personalities. As
Los Angeles Times
columnist Mark Heisler put it, Jordan wasn’t “a natural leader, he was a natural doer.” He drove the team with the sheer force of his will. It was as if he were saying, “I’m going out here, men, and I’m going to kick some ass. Are you coming with me?”

Michael also held his teammates to the same high standard of performance he expected of himself. “Michael was a demanding teammate,” says John Paxson. “If you were on the floor, you had to do your job and do it the right way. He couldn’t accept anyone not caring as much as he did.”

I thought we needed another leader on the team to balance Michael’s perfectionism, so I named Bill Cartwright cocaptain. Despite his soft-spoken demeanor, he could be deceptively forceful when he wanted to be, and he wasn’t afraid to stand up to Michael, which Jordan respected. “Bill was a quiet, quiet leader,” says Michael. “He didn’t talk much, but when he did, everybody listened. He would challenge me when he felt I was out of place. Which was okay. We had that kind of relationship. We challenged each other.”

The players called Cartwright “Teach” because he took other big men to school when they tried to get past him in the lane. “Bill was the physical rock of our team,” says Paxson. “He didn’t back down for anybody—and the game was much more physical then. He was like a big brother. If someone was picking on you, he was going to make sure you knew that he was there looking out for you.”

At thirty-two, Bill was the oldest player on the team. He knew instinctively what we were trying to do with the Bulls and had a gift for explaining it to the players better than I could. One of my weaknesses is that sometimes I speak in broad generalizations. Bill brought the conversation back to earth.

—

Basketball is a great mystery. You can do everything right. You can have the perfect mix of talent and the best system of offense in the game. You can devise a foolproof defensive strategy and prepare your players for every possible eventuality. But if the players don’t have a sense of oneness as a group, your efforts won’t pay off. And the bond that unites a team can be so fragile, so elusive.

Oneness is not something you can turn on with a switch. You need to create the right environment for it to grow, then nurture it carefully every day. What the Bulls needed, I decided, was a sanctuary where they could bond together as a team, protected from all the distractions of the outside world. I prohibited players from bringing family and friends to our training facility, except on special occasions. I also restricted the media from observing practices. I wanted the players to feel that they could act naturally during practice without having to worry about doing or saying something that might show up in the papers the next day.

As the season progressed, I slowly started to introduce the team to some of the tribal customs of the Lakota. Some of these were quite subtle. At the beginning of every practice, we had the core team—players, coaches, and training staff—convene in a circle at center court to discuss our objectives for that day. And we would end practice the same way.

Lakota warriors always gathered in circular formations because the circle was a symbol of the fundamental harmony of the universe. As Black Elk, the famed Lakota wise man, explained it:

Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are the stars. . . . The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood-to-childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.

For the Lakota everything is sacred—including the enemy—because they believe in the fundamental interconnectedness of all life. That’s why Lakota warriors didn’t seek to conquer other tribes. They were far more interested in performing acts of bravery, such as counting coup (touching an enemy with a stick), taking part in a raiding party to steal horses, or rescuing a fellow warrior who had been captured. For the Lakota going into battle was a joyful experience, much like playing a game, though the stakes were obviously much higher.

Another Lakota practice I adopted was beating a drum when I wanted the players to congregate in the tribal room for a meeting. The tribal room—aka the video room—was decorated with several Indian totems I’d been given over the years: a bear-claw necklace (for power and wisdom), the middle feather of an owl (for balance and harmony), a painting illustrating the story of Crazy Horse’s journey, and photos of a newborn white buffalo calf, a symbol of prosperity and good fortune. Sometimes when the team lost a particularly lopsided game, I’d light a sage smudge stick—a Lakota tradition—and playfully wave it through the air to purify the locker room. The first time I did it, the players ribbed me: “What kind of weed you smokin’ there, Phil?”

The coaching staff also played a critical role in getting the players to shift consciousness. When I was an assistant coach, Tex, Johnny, and I used to sit around for hours talking about the history of the game and the right way to play it. We didn’t agree on everything, but we did develop a high level of trust and a commitment to modeling the sort of teamwork that we wanted the players to embrace.

Needless to say, the coaching profession attracts a lot of control freaks who remind everyone constantly that they’re the alpha dog in the room. I’ve been known to do this myself. But what I’ve learned over the years is that the most effective approach is to delegate authority as much as possible and to nurture everyone else’s leadership skills as well. When I’m able to do that, it not only builds team unity and allows others to grow but also—paradoxically—strengthens my role as leader.

Some coaches limit staff input because they want to be the dominant voice in the room. But I encouraged everyone to take part in the discussion—coaches and players alike—to stimulate creativity and set a tone of inclusiveness. This is especially important for players who don’t get a lot of playing time. My favorite poem about the power of inclusion is Edwin Markham’s “Outwitted”: