Sacred Hoops

Posted on August 27, 2020

Author: Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty
My Rating: 4/5

While watching The Last Dance, it was easy to see that the most interesting character from The 1990’s Bulls team was Phil Jackson. How did he keep all of these superstars in check and working together as a team? In Hoop Dreams, which was written after the 1st 3-peat and before the 2nd, Phil describes some of his philosophies on coaching and on life.

“Creating a successful team… is essentially a spiritual act. It requires the individuals involved to surrender their self-interest for the greater good so that the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts.”

Phil’s philosophies were basically a conglomeration of 5 sources –

• Christianity -which he learned growing up with his father being a paster and his mother who taught Bible classes and gave fire-and-brimstone talks in the evening.
• Zen Budhism – which he was introduced to by his brother Joe who was the family rebel and studied at the University of Texas.
• Lakota Sioux – which Phil interacted with throughout the 1970’s when he conducted basketball clinics at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
• Basketball coaches – especially Red Holzman who coached Phil while he played at the New York Knicks.
• Books – Phil seems to be an avid reader and mentions many other books throughout this book.

Phil takes pieces from each of those sources and talks a lot about team over individual, selflessness, clearing your mind and “not thinking”. He also describes how hard that is to do in a “society that places such a high premium on individual achievement” especially in the NBA which has a skewed financial reward system. “Few players comes to the NBA dreaming of becoming good team players.”

Here are a few quotes and pieces from the book I found interesting:

• Christianity focuses on the hereafter, Zen Buddhism focuses on the here and now.
• A passage from Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan – “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.”
• 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?… The thoughts themselves are not he problem; it’s our desperate clinging to them and our resistance to what’s actually happening that causes us so much anguish.
• Was Christ a Zen Master?
• In Zen it is said that the gap between accepting things the way they are and wishing them to be otherwise is “the tenth of an inch of difference between heaven and hell”.
• Albert Einstein’s rules for work:
  1. Out of clutter, find simplicity
  2. From discord, find harmony
  3. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity
• The triangle offense… demanded that they put their individual needs second to the group.
• “What makes basketball so exhilarating is the joy of losing yourself completely in the dance, even if it’s just for one beautiful transcendent moment.”
• Scoring champions rarely play for championship teams.
• Black Elk wrote in The Sacred Pipe, “Peace… comes within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and then they realize that at the center of the Universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that this center is really everywhere. It is within each of us.”
• Success tends to distort reality and make everybody forget their shortcomings and exaggerate their contributions.
• Buddhism teaches us that by accepting death, you discover life.

I also liked this Chinese fable that John Paxson brought to Phil once and told him he thought it represented his leadership style…

“The story was about Emporor Liu Bang, who, in the third century BC, became the first ruler to consolidate China into a unified empire. To celebrate his victory, Liu Bang held a great banquet in the palace, inviting many important government officials, miltiary leaders, poets, and teachers, including Chen Cen, a master who had given him guidance during the campaign. Chen Cen’s disciples who accompanied him to the banquet were impressed by the proceeding were baffled by an enigma at the heart of the celebration.

Seated at the central table with Liu Bang was his illustrious high command. First there was Xiao He, an eminent general whose knowledge of military logistics was second to none. Next to him was Han Xin, a legendary tactician who’d won every battle he’d ever fought. Last was Chang Yang, a shrewd diplomat who was gifted at convincing heads of state to form alliances and surrender without fighting. These men the disciples could understand. What puzzled them was how Liu Bang, who didn’t have a noble birth or knowledge comparable to that of his chief advisers fit into the picture. “Why is he the emperor?” they asked.

Chen Cen smiled and asked them what determines the strength of a wheel. “Is it not the sturdiness of the spokes?” one responded. “Then why is it that two wheels made of identical spokes differ in strength?” asked Chen Cen. After a moment, he continued, “See beyond what is seen. Never forget that a wheel is made not only of spokes but also of the space between the spokes. Sturdy spokes poorly placed make a weak wheel. Whether their full potential is realized depends on the harmony between. The essence of wheelmaking lies in the craftsman’s ability to conceive and create the space that holds and balances the spokes within the wheel. Think now, who is the craftsman here?”