Sacred Hoops_Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior by Phil Jackson

Sacred Hoops_Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior by Phil Jackson

Author:Phil Jackson [Jackson, Phil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B007MB5UTG
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2012-10-09T00:00:00+00:00


THE MYSTIC WARRIOR

My first lecture to the players on the Lakota ideal began as a way to poke fun at Johnny Bach. Johnny and I were both assistant coaches at the time, and he was giving the players a daily diet of his unique brand of blood-and-guts psychology. Bach, who had a long career as a head coach in college and the pros before joining the Bulls, liked to quote sayings from his mentor, Vince Lombardi. But compared to Johnny, Lombardi was a wimp. An energetic, young sixty-something, Bach was always the first person into the fray when a fight broke out on the floor. The players admired him because he was as tough as iron and steadfastly loyal. Johnny often showed up for games dressed in a suit with creases sewn into his pants, spit-shined shoes, and a floor-length military coat. On his wrist he wore the Navy wings of his twin brother, a pilot who had been shot down and killed during World War II.

With Johnny, you could never tell how much of his “kill or be killed” philosophy was mere bluster, but the players loved it. In the dressing room before games, he’d bark like a Paris Island drill sergeant, “Let God count the dead” or “Blood, blood, blood! We want blood!” And he’d draw an ace of spades on the chalkboard when somebody knocked his man out of the game. He got the idea after reading that American soldiers in Vietnam used to place an ace of spades on the bodies of Vietcong they’d slain. I decided to counter with some propaganda of my own. I already had a reputation for being a pacifist—when I’d shown up for practice one day sporting a Grateful Dead T-shirt, one of the beat writers had done a story portraying me as the team’s resident peacenik. So to tweak Johnny, I often livened up game tapes I edited with clips of Jimi Hendrix playing the national anthem at Woodstock or David Byrne’s video of “Once in a Lifetime”—a song about the importance of being in the moment. And I found that many of the players appreciated this approach because it was such a departure from the typical coach’s routine.

Around this time I also discovered The Mystic Warrior, a made-for-TV movie based on Ruth Beebe Hill’s novel Hanta Yo. It tells the story of a young Sioux warrior, loosely based on Crazy Horse, who has a powerful vision and becomes a spiritual leader. My friends at Pine Ridge dismissed the film, pointing out the inaccuracies in it. But it sharply illustrated the importance of making personal sacrifices for the good of the group, a point I thought the players needed to learn.

During the 1989 playoffs, Johnny and I put together a film session for the players to prepare them for their upcoming slugfest with the Pistons. After Johnny did his kill-and-maim number, I showed them a tape that included clips from The Mystic Warrior. Afterwards we talked about hanta yo, the Lakota war chant, which means “the spirit goes ahead of us.



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