Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success (19 page)

I had one more meeting with Reinsdorf at our championship party. He offered me a chance to stay with the Bulls, but without any guarantee that he’d bring back Michael and Scottie. He and Krause had decided to rebuild the team, a process that didn’t interest me. Besides, I was desperately in need of a break. June and I were planning to move to Woodstock, New York, where we’d lived before I joined the Bulls. So I graciously turned him down. Michael waited for the lockout to end in January 1999 before officially announcing his departure.

As I walked out of the Berto Center on my last day, there were some reporters waiting outside. I chatted with them briefly, then climbed on my motorcycle and sped away. It was a bittersweet moment. I felt a great sense of relief, leaving behind all the drama of the past year. But I also knew it was going to be a challenge to let go of my deep attachment to this team that had given me so much.

The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron talks about letting go as an opportunity for true awakening. One of her favorite sayings is “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.”

That’s what I was searching for. And I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. But as a new future unfolded before me, I took comfort in the knowledge that letting go is a necessary, if sometimes heart-wrenching, gateway to genuine transformation.

“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing,” writes Chodron. “We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

I felt all those emotions during my final year in Chicago. And before long I would be headed off on another wild ride that would test me even more.

ONE BREATH, ONE MIND

Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.

THICH NHAT HANH

I
was in the middle of nowhere—a small village on Iliamna Lake in Alaska—when I heard the news. My sons, Ben and Charlie, were with me. We were on a fly-fishing trip in a secluded wilderness area, and the fishing wasn’t going very well. So that afternoon we knocked off early and boated up the Iliamna River to see the falls. When we arrived back at the village, a throng of children surrounded us.

“Are you Phil Jackson?” one of the boys asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “Why?”

“I hear you got the job with the Lakers.”

“What? How do you know that?”

“We got a dish. It’s on ESPN.”

That’s how my adventure began. Actually, it didn’t come as a total surprise. My agent, Todd, and I had discussed the deal before I left for Alaska. I’d given him the go-ahead to negotiate with the Lakers since I would be unreachable by phone. Still, it was a bit of a shock to get the news from an Inuit boy in a place as far away in spirit from the glitzy, high-stakes culture of Los Angeles as any I could imagine.

This was not a simple move for me. After the 1997–98 season, June and I had relocated to Woodstock, New York, a town where we’d lived before. Our hope was to revitalize our marriage, which had suffered during the past stressful year with the Bulls. What’s more, June had grown weary of her role as an NBA wife. Now that all of our children were out of the house, she was looking forward to creating a new, more fulfilling life. So was I—or so I thought. I explored other interests, including giving speeches on leadership and working on my friend Bill Bradley’s presidential campaign. But in the end, I couldn’t find anything that captured my imagination as much as leading young men to victory on the basketball court.

Toward the end of the 1998–99 season, I started getting calls from teams interested in talking to me and I had meetings with the New Jersey Nets and the New York Knicks. Neither of these conversations went anywhere, but they whetted my appetite to get back in the game. Needless to say, this was not the kind of reaction June was expecting. She thought I was ready to put basketball behind me and move into a field with a less demanding travel schedule. But that was not to be, and over the summer we decided to separate.

Soon after, as I moved back to Montana—my true place of refuge—the Lakers called. The team was loaded with talent, including rising stars Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, and two of the best outside shooters in the league, Glen Rice and Robert Horry. But the Lakers had struggled in the playoffs because of weak group chemistry, and the players lacked the mental toughness to finish off big games.

Mulling over whether or not to accept the job, I remembered sitting in my hotel room during my cross-country trek and watching the Lakers get swept by the San Antonio Spurs in the Western Conference semifinals. It had been painful to watch. The Spurs’ big men, Tim Duncan and Dave Robinson, were forcing Shaq to take off-balance fadeaway jump shots instead of his power move to the middle and then beating Shaq downcourt to break through the Lakers’ defense. Watching those games, I’d found myself visualizing ways to counter the Spurs’ strategy and transform the Lakers into the team they were destined to be.

That’s the message I wanted to deliver in late June at my first news conference as the newly appointed head coach of the team. The event was held at the Beverly Hills Hilton, and while I was preparing my remarks, Kobe dropped by my room, carrying a copy of my book,
Sacred Hoops.
He asked me to sign the book and said he was really excited about working with me because he was a big Bulls fan. It was a good sign.

“This is a team that is talented, young, and on the verge,” I told reporters that day. “It’s been on the verge, and it hasn’t gotten over the top. It’s a similar situation that happened ten years ago in Chicago, and we hope to have the same type of success.”

The key, I said, was to get the Lakers to trust one another enough to work together effectively and make the transition from a
me
team to a
we
team, the way the Bulls had in the early 1990s. “When you have a system of offense, you can’t be a person that just is taking the basketball and trying to score,” I explained. “You have to move the basketball, because you have to share the basketball with everybody. And when you do that, you’re sharing the game, and that makes a big difference.”

After the news conference, Jerry West drove me out to Westchester to visit Jerry Buss at his new Spanish-style palazzo on the bluffs overlooking the ocean. Dr. Buss, who has a Ph.D. in physical chemistry but made his fortune in real estate during the 1970s, had the good luck to buy the Lakers (plus the Forum and the Los Angeles Kings) in 1979, the year Magic Johnson arrived and led the team to five championships over the next decade. Since then, the team had not lived up to its promise.

Dr. Buss was smart but very low-key, dressed in jeans, a plain shirt, and his trademark sneakers. He said he was proud of the great success the Lakers had enjoyed in the past, but he wanted to win one more championship.

“I think you can win three, maybe four championships,” I said.

“Really?” he replied, stunned.

He was impressed by my chutzpah. He said later that he’d never heard a coach set such a high bar for himself at the start of the season. But the truth is, I wasn’t bluffing.

—

It was a strange summer. Not long after I returned to Montana after my meetings with the Lakers’ organization, my daughter Chelsea came to visit with her boyfriend and shattered her ankle in an off-road motorcycle accident that put her in a cast for eight weeks. Since getting around was difficult, she decided to take a leave from her job in New York and recuperate in Montana, where my son Ben and I could take care of her. June also came out for several weeks to lend a hand.

One day Shaq dropped by the house unannounced. He’d ventured to Montana in order to perform at a rap concert in nearby Kalispell. I wasn’t home when he arrived, so June invited him in. When I drove up, Shaq was bouncing on a trampoline down by the lake and creating quite a sensation in the neighborhood. All of a sudden, dozens of boats filled with curious onlookers crowded into the bay near our house to gawk at this giant leaping through the air. Shaq did not disappoint. After the trampoline exhibition, he started doing comical backflips off the dock, then took off on a madcap Jet Ski tour of the bay.

Since he was already wet, I asked Shaq to help me move a large tree that had toppled in our yard during a recent storm. It was impressive watching him work. “We’re going to have a lot of fun, Coach,” he said when we were finished. That’s what Shaq was all about: fun.

When the time came to pack up and drive to L.A., I felt anxious about my new life. I worried about what would happen to my kids now that I was becoming a single dad and moving to a new, unfamiliar city. To ease the transition, my daughters Chelsea and Brooke put together a mix tape for me of songs about starting over. It had been more than twenty-five years since I’d driven through the back roads of California. As I crossed the Sierra Nevada range, Willie Nelson’s soulful version of “Amazing Grace” came on, and I was so overwhelmed with emotion that I pulled over, stopped the car, and cried. Looking out over the sunlit California peaks, I felt as if I were putting a dark chapter of my life behind me and heading toward something bright and new. And my kids understood. This was their way of saying, “Move forward, Dad. Live life. Don’t close yourself off.”

My first days in L.A. were magical. A friend found me a beautiful, airy house on the beach in Playa del Rey, not far from the airport and the Lakers’ future practice facility. My new home had plenty of room for guests. To my delight, Brooke, who had just graduated from the University of Colorado, moved in a few weeks later to help me get settled, then stayed on to pursue a graduate degree in psychology. And during my first week in town, Bruce Hornsby, a songwriter friend who had introduced me to the Grateful Dead, invited me to a concert at the Greek Theatre in Griffith Park, where he was performing with Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, and other music-world icons. It was a warm September evening, and the crowd was friendly and easygoing. Very California. I felt right at home.

One of my first jobs was to attend the NBA’s annual business meeting in Vancouver. While I was there, I finally got to meet Dr. Buss’s daughter, Jeanie, the team’s executive VP of business operations, who hosted a dinner for the Lakers executives. She was smart and attractive, with beautiful eyes and a playful sense of humor. The next day I bumped into her at the airport. She was heading home to celebrate her birthday with friends, but her flight had been delayed, so we ended up chatting in the lounge. She told some amusing stories about Dennis Rodman’s disastrous stint with the Lakers in 1999, which sounded like a bad reality show gone Theatre of the Absurd.

I still felt pretty raw emotionally and wasn’t sure if I was ready for a new relationship. But then it happened. The next day I came into the office and found a slice of Jeanie’s birthday cake sitting on my desk. When I dropped by her office to thank her, she blushed and I sensed this gift was more than a collegial gesture. So I invited her to dinner that night. Things were definitely looking up.

—

As we gathered at the University of Santa Barbara for training camp, I saw the Lakers as a stage 3 team with a decidedly “I’m great, you’re not” point of view. One of the team’s biggest strengths was Shaq’s dominance at center. The triangle offense was designed for powerful centers who could dominate the lane, post up effectively, and catalyze the offense with sharp passing. Shaq could do all those things as well as or better than the centers we’d had in Chicago, but he was also an explosive scorer who attracted double- and triple-teams, which opened up all sorts of possibilities.
Los Angeles Times
columnist Mark Heisler wrote that Shaq represented an evolutionary step: “the first 300-pound seven-footer the NBA had ever seen who wasn’t fat.” Shaq had ballooned up to 350 pounds over the summer, but when he was in shape, he was stronger, faster, and more mobile than any other center in the league. He was also extremely gifted at running fast breaks. However, he wasn’t as strong at rebounding or playing defense as I had expected, and I noticed that he was averse to moving out of the lane to cover screens, which made him vulnerable to good screen-roll teams, such as the Jazz, the Spurs, and the Trail Blazers.

Kobe was one of the most creative shooting guards I’d ever seen, capable of dazzling moves comparable in many ways to those of his idol, Michael Jordan. I admired Kobe’s intense desire to win, but he still had a lot to learn about teamwork and self-sacrifice. Though he was a brilliant passer, his first instinct was to penetrate off the dribble and dunk over whoever was in his way. Like many younger players, he tried to force the action rather than letting the game come to him. I was toying with the idea of having him play point guard, but I questioned whether he’d be able to contain his ego long enough to master the triangle system.

Rice was another gifted player. A former All-Star small forward with the Charlotte Hornets, he had a precision jump shot that used to drive Scottie Pippen mad. Earlier in his career Glen had also been a quick, aggressive defender, but he’d fallen out of practice since joining the Lakers. The lineup also included Horry, a willowy six-ten power forward who was later dubbed “Big Shot Rob” because of his talent for shooting last-minute game-winning shots. Rob had won two rings with Houston before being traded, first to Phoenix, then to L.A. But his scoring average had tapered off and I was concerned that he might not have enough strength and size to battle the bigger power forwards in the league.

The team also had some promising backup players, including Rick Fox and Derek Fisher, both of whom would become important leaders later on. Rick was a former University of North Carolina star who was big and mobile enough to play both forward positions. He’d been drafted by Boston but languished there for several years during the post–Larry Bird era. Rick was known for making senseless errors, which the players called “Ricky Ball,” but he was also a clutch shooter, a strong defender, and a selfless team player. Fisher, a six-one, two-hundred-pound point guard from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, was smart, aggressive, and versatile, with a good outside shot and natural leadership abilities.

Our biggest weaknesses were at point guard and power forward. We pushed hard to make a deal with Houston for Scottie Pippen, but we lost out to the Portland Trail Blazers, our strongest rival in the Western Conference that year. Luckily, we were able to acquire Ron Harper, whose contract had run out with the Bulls, and A.C. Green, a veteran power forward who not only was a strong defender but was also well versed in the triangle, having played for former Bulls coach Jim Cleamons on the Dallas Mavericks. We also picked up backup center John Salley, who had won rings with the Bulls and the Pistons.

The reason we recruited so many experienced players was to reverse the Lakers’ sorry history of caving under pressure because of immaturity and lack of discipline. In 1998 the Lakers missed 15 of their first 18 shots on the way to their most embarrassing defeat in team history, a 112–77 blowout by the Jazz in game 1 of the Western Conference finals. Horry said the game reminded him of
The Wizard of Oz
because the team played with “no heart, no brain, no courage.” To which coach Del Harris added, “And no wizard.”

I also assembled an experienced coaching staff, primarily made up of veterans I’d worked with in Chicago, including Cleamons, Frank Hamblen, and Tex Winter (much to Jerry Krause’s dismay). I also retained Lakers assistant coach Bill Bertka.

Our plan was to begin at the beginning, teaching the players the rudiments of the system, starting with basic passing and shooting drills. The team soaked up everything we threw at them. When I asked the players to form a circle in the center of the court on the first day of training camp, it reminded Chip Schaefer, an athletic-performance coordinator I’d brought over from the Bulls, of that old E.F. Hutton television commercial. “Everyone was just hanging on every word, even the veterans,” recalls Chip. “Everybody’s just, ‘Shhhhh. I want to hear everything this guy has to say.’” Later, during practice, Chip noticed Rick Fox grinning from ear to ear. “He said, ‘I feel like I’m back in junior high again,’” says Chip. “But it wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God, I’m back in junior high school.’ He was beaming because there’s something about fundamentals that basketball players love.”