Sacred Hoops : Phil Jackson's Biography

Book Cover

I first became interested in Phil Jackson as a kid.  Although ‘interested’ is the wrong choice of words here; it should be ‘disinterested’.  As a truly American kid, I grew up rooting for the underdog, and Phil Jackson and his raging Chicago Bulls were the antithesis of that.  Which is why I grew up rooting against him.  For that matter, I still root against him.  I hate the Lakers as much now as I hated the Chicago Bulls in the nineties.  Those cursed Lakers made me say some mean things to my television during the 2010 NBA Finals Game Seven between the Lakers and Celtics.  Why God?  Why?  Does Phil Jackson really need another ring?  He already had ten as a coach and two as a player.  Really?

            I both admire and detest Phil Jackson as a coach.  I admire his tenacity, poise, and success he has had on the hardwood.  And you already know why I detest him.  However, I more recently became interested in Phil Jackson after a comment a friend of mine made at a party I attended during the summer of 2010, while the Lakers were making their playoff run.  We were taking part in one of the most time-honored and sacred traditions of the male species: standing around in a circle drinking beer and talking about sports.  During this ritualistic gathering, one of my friends started talking about Phil Jackson.  He said that Phil spends the off-season dodging the media by living in Montana and studying Zen Buddhism.  He went on to tell a story about Phil Jackson.  According to my friend, Phil Jackson wants to develop his player’s talents both on and off the court.  He does this, supposedly, by hand picking books tailored to specific spiritual or emotional needs and giving them to his players, encouraging them to read them while traveling from city to city.  As my friend was saying all this, I sipped my Rolling Rock and imagined Phil Jackson handing Kobe Bryant a copy of Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh, and Kobe reading it while sitting next to Shaq on the Lakers charter flight back to LA.

            Anyway, I was intrigued, and I stored this fascination away in the back of my mind, to be opened at a later day.  A year later, and I just tearfully finished Vince Lombardi’s biography When Pride Still Mattered.  I was so moved by the book that I desperately wanted to find something that was on par with force majeure.  That’s when I remembered my friend’s anecdote about Phil Jackson.  In some ways, Vince and Phil were equals.  Vince won the first two Super Bowl’s with the Packers along with countless football championships prior to the advent of the Super Bowl.  Moreover, Phil Jackson has a uniquely calm gate in which he holds himself as a coach, in contrast to Lombardi’s uniqueness, characteristically stern and brash.  Nevertheless, each had a personal style the guided their posture as a coach.  So I went to the bookstore in search of the next Holy Grail, and I found Sacred Hoops.  The Holy Grail it was not.  Compared to David Maraniss’ Pulitzer Prize winning biography about Lombardi, it was a disappointment.  But the beginning of the book I found utterly compelling. 

            In short, Phil Jackson doesn’t portray himself as a typical coach.  He doesn’t seem belligerent or demonstrative, unlike most popular coaches.  Instead, he is offbeat and hippyish.  For instance, while coaching the Chicago Bulls, he ended games and practices in a circle reciting the Lord’s Prayer.  Also, he had the team practice Zen meditation as part of their practice regiment.  I was also impressed and perplexed by Jackson’s focus on the masculine and feminine qualities of coaching; he believes that the best leadership requires a harmony of the male and female mystique.  Can you imagine Lombardi doing any of that?  He would flip his lid: “What is the long-haired hippy nonsense going on here?  Get your ass off that Indian rug and get back to work!” 

            Sacred Hoops is a good read for anyone working in the field of education.  There is a portion of the book where Jackson describes his experiences coaching in a Puerto Rican basketball arena, fearing for his life because the intense rivalry between the team he was coaching and the home team was so intense that it was fairly normal for drunken brawls to break out amidst a crowd that often carried guns to games.  Jackson said that it was in those games, when the crowd was the loudest, the arena the hottest, the players the most worked up, that he taught himself to stay calm in the heat of chaos.  Anyone Teach For America out there?  You know what he is talking about.  I remember one of my colleagues at Kingsbury High School in Memphis joking around about carrying a gun in her glove box.  Except, I don’t think she was actually joking around. 

            There were lots of other great pearls of wisdom the unconventional coach writes about.  A simple, yet mildly provocative biography from a very successful leader.