Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success (20 page)

Fish takes a broader view. “We’d been through a couple of years of frustrating playoffs,” he says. “Although we had a lot of talent, we still hadn’t figured out a way to maximize our potential. So when Phil and the staff were hired, it brought everybody to attention and got us to focus in a way I hadn’t seen in the first three years we played together. Whatever Phil said, whatever he wanted us to do and however he wanted us to do it, everybody seemed to have that kind of kindergarten impressionable spirit. And it made us into a machine, an efficient group that can be compared to some of the best teams in history.”

My experience was somewhat different that first day. Although I was pleased by everyone’s eagerness to learn, I was vexed by how short the players’ attention spans were. Before training camp I’d sent them a three-page letter on the triangle offense, mindfulness meditation, and other topics I planned to discuss during camp. But when I started delivering my first serious talk, they had a difficult time focusing on what I was saying. They looked at the ceiling; they fidgeted; they shuffled their feet. This was an issue I’d never encountered with the Bulls.

To remedy the problem, psychologist George Mumford and I designed a program of daily meditation practice for the players, slowly increasing the time spent in each session from three minutes to ten minutes. I also introduced the players to yoga, tai chi, and other Eastern practices to help them balance mind, body, and spirit. In Chicago we’d used meditation primarily to increase awareness on the court. But with this team our goal was to bond the players together so that they would experience what we called “one breath, one mind.”

One of the basic principles of Buddhist thought is that our conventional concept of the self as a separate entity is an illusion. On a superficial level, what we consider the self may appear to be separate and distinct from everything else. After all, we all look different and have distinct personalities. But on a deeper level, we are all part of an interconnected whole.

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke eloquently about this phenomenon. “In a real sense, all of life is interrelated,” he said. “All persons are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

The thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist teacher Nichiren took a more pragmatic view. He wrote in a letter to his disciples who were being persecuted by feudal authorities that they should chant together “with the spirit of many in body but one in mind, transcending all differences among themselves to become as inseparable as fish and the water in which they swim.” The unity that Nichiren prescribed was not a mechanical uniformity, imposed from without, but a connection that respected the unique qualities of each individual. “If the spirit of many in body but one in mind prevails among the people,” he added, “they will achieve all their goals, whereas if one in body but different in mind, they can achieve nothing remarkable.”

That was the kind of unity I wanted to foster with the Lakers. I didn’t expect to turn the players into adepts, but I thought that meditation practice would help them break out of their me-oriented view of themselves and give them a glimpse of a different way of relating to others and the world around them.

When I first started coaching the Bulls, they had already started transforming themselves into a one-mind-oriented team. The Lakota ideal of the warrior appealed to them because they had been through so many battles with their major rival, the Detroit Pistons. But that approach didn’t resonate as strongly with the Lakers. They had many enemies, not just one, and the most troubling of all, from my perspective, was the culture that fed them.

By the time most future NBA players are middle schoolers, they become immersed in a universe that reinforces egoistic behavior. As they grow older and continue to succeed, they become surrounded by legions of agents, promoters, groupies, and other sycophants who keep telling them they’re “da man.” It doesn’t take long before they start to really buy into it. What’s more, L.A. is a world devoted to celebrating the notion of the glorified self. Everywhere the Lakers went—not just the superstars but the other players as well—they were greeted as heroes and offered endless, often lucrative, opportunities to bask in their wonderfulness.

My intention was to offer them a safe, supportive refuge from all that craziness and put them in touch with their deep—but as yet undeveloped—longing for real connection. That was the essential first step on which the team’s future success would depend.

THE EIGHTFOLD OFFENSE

Greatness is a spiritual condition.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

R
ick Fox describes my approach to coaching as a play in three acts. The way he sees it, during the first twenty or thirty games of each season I’d sit back and let the characters reveal themselves. “Most coaches come into a season with an idea of what they’re going to do and impose that on the players,” he explains. “But I always felt that Phil came to the table with an open mind. ‘Let’s see how each individual expresses himself. Let’s see how the group responds under fire and whether it’s capable of solving problems.’ He never appeared too concerned about the team at that point. Never any panic. Never overanalyzing anything because that would be premature.”

Act 2 would take place during the twenty or thirty games in the middle of the season, before and after the All-Star game. “That’s when he would nurture the team, when guys were starting to get bored,” Rick adds. “Phil would spend more time with each of us then. He’d give us books. I always felt that he drove me the hardest during that time.”

Then, during the last twenty or thirty games leading up to the playoffs, act 3 would begin and, according to Fox, my whole demeanor would change—the way I’d look, talk, and move my body—as if I were saying, “This is my time.” In the run-up to the playoffs, I’d often restrict the media’s access to the players and take a more assertive role in promoting the team. “Phil gave us new confidence and an identity we didn’t have before,” says Rick. “But he would also take the pressure off of us and put it on himself. He would turn whole cities against him. And everyone would get upset at him and wouldn’t be thinking about us. It was like, ‘Look at this mess I’ve created over here,’ and we would be able to do what we were doing without the spotlight being on us.”

As the players used to say, “Sounds good.” Of course, things didn’t always turn out so neatly.

Before my first season with the Lakers started, I met with Shaq, Harper, and Kobe, and I told them that this was going to be Shaq’s team and the offense would run through him. But I added that Kobe would be the floor leader, not unlike the relationship between Kareem and Magic in a previous era. I didn’t feel that Kobe was ready to be cocaptain yet, so I put Ron in that spot and asked him to serve as Kobe’s mentor while he learned how to be a leader. I wanted to spell everything out at the beginning so there wouldn’t be any ambiguity about roles—especially with Kobe.

We didn’t really get a chance to try out this structure, though, because Kobe broke his right hand during the first preseason game and was out until December. We picked up Brian Shaw, a big, versatile journeyman guard, to help cover for Kobe while he was out, and the team started to come together, going 12-4 in the first month. Our first loss was to the Trail Blazers, who did a good job of trapping our guards, sabotaging our offense, and fouling Shaq as soon as he got the ball. Afterward I asked Scottie, who was now with the Trail Blazers, what he thought of our team, and he quipped, “I think your triangle looks more like a square.”

Later that month during a game against the Nets, I called a play we referred to as a “home run,” but Horry missed it and the play fell apart. When I asked Robert what had happened, he said, “I didn’t hear your call.” At which point I made a reference to the Bible, knowing that Horry came from a religious family. “The sheep know their master’s voice,” I said. “It’s all about recognizing the master’s voice and responding to his call.” Salley asked me what I meant by that politically incorrect statement, and I told him that it referred to a parable about the sheep knowing the master’s voice that Jesus used as a metaphor to explain his disciples’ understanding of the will of God. For weeks after that incident, the players would kid me when I called them to the circle at the start of practice, saying, “Yes, master.”

Kobe returned on December 1 and the team continued its streak into January. But the offense wasn’t flowing as smoothly as it had before. Kobe was having a difficult time staying in the triangle and would frequently go rogue, which annoyed his teammates. Many of them told me they didn’t like playing with Kobe because he didn’t respect the system. I’d been through this before with Michael, but Kobe, who had recently turned twenty-one, wasn’t as mature and open-minded as Jordan.

If children are fated to live out the unfulfilled dreams of their parents, Kobe was a textbook case. His father, Joe “Jellybean” Bryant, was a six-nine forward for the legendary 1970s Philadelphia 76ers. Bryant Sr. once claimed that he played the same kind of game as Magic Johnson, but the NBA wasn’t ready for his playground style. So after stints with two other teams, he finished his career in Italy, where Kobe grew up.

The youngest of three children (and the only boy), Kobe was the golden child in the family who could do no wrong. He was a bright, talented overachiever with a natural gift for the game. He spent long hours practicing, imitating the moves of Jordan and others he studied on tapes his relatives sent from the United States. When he was thirteen, the family moved back to Philadelphia, and he soon developed into a star at Lower Merion High School. John Lucas, then head coach of the 76ers, invited Kobe to scrimmage with the team over the summer and was surprised by the young player’s courage and level of skill. Not long afterward, Kobe decided to forgo college and jump right into the pros, even though he had high enough SAT scores to take his pick of schools. Jerry West said Kobe’s predraft workout at age seventeen was the best he’d ever seen. Jerry made a trade with the Hornets to draft Kobe thirteenth overall in 1996—the same year he lured Shaq away from Orlando with a seven-year, $120 million free-agent deal.

Kobe had big dreams. Soon after I started with the Lakers, Jerry called me into his office to report that Kobe had asked him how he had averaged 30-plus points a game when his teammate, Elgin Baylor, was also scoring 30-plus points per game. Kobe was hell-bent on surpassing Jordan as the greatest player in the game. His obsession with Michael was striking. Not only had he mastered many of Jordan’s moves, but he affected many of M.J.’s mannerisms as well. When we played in Chicago that season, I orchestrated a meeting between the two stars, thinking that Michael might help shift Kobe’s attitude toward selfless teamwork. After they shook hands, the first words out of Kobe’s mouth were “You know I can kick your ass one on one.”

I admired Kobe’s ambition. But I also felt that he needed to break out of his protective chrysalis if he wanted to win the ten rings he told his teammates he was shooting for. Obviously, basketball isn’t an individual sport. To achieve greatness, you must rely on the good offices of others. But Kobe had yet to reach out to his teammates and try to get to know them. Instead of spending time with them after games, he usually went back to his hotel room to study tapes or chat with his high-school friends on the phone.

Kobe was also a stubborn, hardheaded learner. He was so confident in his ability that you couldn’t simply point out his mistakes and expect him to alter his behavior. He would have to experience failure directly before his resistance would start to break down. It was often an excruciating process for him and everyone else involved. Then suddenly he would have an aha moment and figure out a way to change.

One of those moments happened in early February. That’s when the team was struck by a puzzling malaise. After a less-than-stellar performance, I closed the locker room to all but the players and asked what had happened to cause them to suddenly stop playing together. It was a rhetorical question, but I let them know we’d take it up the following day after practice. We gathered in a small video room at Southwest Los Angeles Community College—our temporary practice space. There were four rows of five chairs, and in the first row sat Shaq, Fox, Fish, Harp, and Shaw. Kobe was in the last row with his hoodie pulled over his head. I reviewed the demands that the triangle offense placed on each team member, then concluded: “You can’t be a selfish player and make this offense work for the team’s good. Period.” When I opened the floor to comments, there was complete silence, and I was about to adjourn the meeting when Shaq spoke up. He got right to the point, saying, “I think Kobe is playing too selfishly for us to win.” That got everyone fired up. Some of the players nodded in support of Shaq, including Rick Fox, who said, “How many times have we been through this?” No one in that room came to Kobe’s defense. I asked him if he had anything to say. Kobe finally addressed the group, and in a calm, quiet voice he said he cared about everyone and just wanted to be part of a winning team.

I wasn’t pleased with the meeting. I worried that having everyone’s complaints on the table without any resolution would have a negative effect on team harmony. In the days that followed, we lost four out of five games, including a 105–81 “massacre” by the Spurs in the Alamodome. One night that week I had a dream about spanking Kobe and giving Shaq a smack. “Shaq needs and Kobe wants—the mystery of the Lakers,” I wrote in my journal.

The players started blaming one another for the breakdown, and I realized that I had to address the unrest head-on. The first thing I did was meet Shaq for breakfast to discuss what it means to be a leader. I started by relating the story of how Michael galvanized the Bulls with his confidence in himself and his teammates before the must-win game 5 against Cleveland in the 1989 playoffs. The Cavaliers had just beaten us at home to tie the series, and Michael had had an off night. Still, that didn’t faze him. His uncompromising faith revved up the team, and we won the final game—not surprisingly, on a last-second miracle shot by Jordan.

I told Shaq he needed to find his own way to inspire the Lakers. He needed to express his confidence and natural joy for the game in such a way that his teammates—Kobe especially—felt that if they joined forces with him, nothing would be impossible. A team leader’s number one job, I explained, was to build up his teammates, not tear them down. Shaq had probably heard this kind of spiel before, but this time I think it clicked.

With Kobe I took a different tack. I tried to be as direct as possible and show him in front of the other players how his selfish mistakes were hurting the team. During one film session, I said, “Now I know why the guys don’t like playing with you. You’ve got to play together.” I also indicated to him that if he didn’t want to share the ball with his teammates, I would gladly work out a trade for him. I had no trouble being the bad cop in this situation. (See under:
Sometimes you have to pull out the big stick.
) I knew Harper would soften the blow later by explaining to Kobe—in far less strident terms—how to play more selflessly without sacrificing his creativity.

I also talked to Kobe about what it takes to be a leader. At one point I told him, “I guess you’d like to be the captain of this team someday when you’re older—maybe like twenty-five.” He replied that he wanted to be captain tomorrow. To which I said, “You can’t be captain if nobody follows you.”

Eventually it sank in. Kobe began looking for ways to fit himself into the system and play more collaboratively. He also made an effort to socialize more with his teammates, especially when we were on the road. And after the All-Star break, everything started to come together. We went on a 27-1 streak and finished the season with the best record in the league, 67-15.

The players seemed relieved that we’d put to sleep a problem that had haunted the team for the past three years. As Rick Fox put it, Kobe’s me-first attitude “was a land mine that was about to explode. We all knew that somebody had to step on it, but nobody wanted to. So Phil did it, and we all walk a lot more freely now.”

—

As we prepared for the playoffs, I thought it might be useful for the players to have a refresher course on selfless basketball, but this time from a different perspective—that of the Buddha. So I devoted one of our practice sessions to talking about the Buddha’s thinking and how it applies to basketball. I probably lost some of the players early on, but if nothing else, the discussion took their minds off the pressure of the upcoming postseason.

In a nutshell, the Buddha taught that life is suffering and that the primary cause of our suffering is our desire for things to be different from the way they actually are. One moment, things may be going our way, and in the next moment they’re not. When we try to prolong pleasure or reject pain, we suffer. On the bright side, the Buddha also prescribed a practical way for eliminating craving and unhappiness by following what he called the Noble Eightfold Path. The steps were right view, right thinking, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

I thought the teachings might help explain what we were trying to do as a basketball team.

1. RIGHT VIEW
   —involves looking at the game as a whole and working together as a team, like five fingers on a hand.
   
2. RIGHT THINKING
   —means seeing yourself as part of a system rather than as your own one-man band. It also implies going into each game with the intention of being intimately involved with what’s happening to the whole team because you’re integrally connected to everyone on it.
   
3. RIGHT SPEECH
   —has two components. One is about talking positively to yourself throughout the game and not getting lost in aimless back talk (“I hate that ref,” “I’m going to get back at that bastard”). The second is about controlling what you say when you’re talking with others, especially your teammates, and focusing on giving them positive feedback.
   
4. RIGHT ACTION
   —suggests making moves that are appropriate to what’s happening on the floor instead of repeatedly showboating or acting in ways that disrupt team harmony.
   
5. RIGHT LIVELIHOOD
   —is about having respect for the work you do and using it to heal the community rather than simply to polish your ego. Be humble. You’re getting paid a ridiculous amount of money to do something that’s really simple. And fun.
   
6. RIGHT EFFORT
   —means being unselfish and exerting the right amount of energy to get the job done. Tex Winter says that there’s no substitute for hustle, and my addendum is, if you don’t hustle, you’ll get benched.
   
7. RIGHT MINDFULNESS
   —involves coming to every game with a clear understanding of our plan of attack, including what to expect from our opponents. It also implies playing with precision, making the right moves at the right times, and maintaining constant awareness throughout the game, whether you’re on the floor or on the bench.
   
8. RIGHT CONCENTRATION
   —is about staying focused on what you’re doing at any given moment and not obsessing about mistakes you’ve made in the past or bad things that might happen in the future.