ELEVEN RINGS Part 5

My mother, Elisabeth, was a striking, charismatic woman, with crystal blue eyes, blond hair, and strong Germanic features. She grew up in Wolf Point, Montana, where Grandfather Funk had moved the family after World War I to avoid strong anti-German sentiment in Canada. All of her siblings were valedictorians in high school, but Mom missed out by two tenths of a point because she had to skip six weeks of school to work on the fall harvest. Later she was teaching in a one-room schoolhouse when she attended a Pentecostal revival meeting and was swept away. By her early thirties, Mom had established herself as a traveling preacher in the small towns of eastern Montana.

My father was a widower when they started dating. His first wife had died a few years earlier while pregnant with their second child. (Their first child was my half sister, Joan.) My parents were drawn together more by a profound spiritual connection than by a romantic one. They were both captivated by the Pentecostal movement, which had spread quickly in rural areas during the 1920s and 1930s, and its fundamental idea that one could find salvation by connecting directly with the Holy Spirit. They were also taken by the prophecy in the Book of Revelations about the second coming of Christ and talked about how important it was to prepare spiritually for His arrival because it might come at any moment. Their deepest fear was not being right with G.o.d. "If you died today," my mother often asked, "would you meet your maker in heaven?" That was the big issue in our house.

My parents also strongly abided by St. Paul's teachings about separating yourself from materialistic society by being in this world but not of it. We weren't allowed to watch TV or movies or read comic books or go to dances-or even socialize with our school friends at the local canteen. Joan wasn't allowed to wear shorts or a swimsuit, and my brothers and I wore white s.h.i.+rts everywhere, except when we were playing sports. When I asked Joe recently what scared him as a child, he said being laughed at in school when he made mistakes. The other kids teased us relentlessly, calling us "holy rollers" and making fun of what appeared to them to be a strange, antiquated way of life.

When I was about eleven, my mother told me it was time for me to "seek the infilling of the Holy Spirit." My brothers and sister had already been "baptized" in the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues. This was an important aspect of the Pentecostal faith. For years I'd watched other people go through this ritual, but it was never something I wanted to experience myself. But my parents really wanted me to do it, and they prayed with me every Sunday night after services, when I was actively seeking the gift of tongues.

After a couple years of devoted prayer and supplication, I decided that this wasn't going to be my thing. I started desperately searching for school activities that would take me away from my nearly 24-7 life at church. I acted in plays, sang in the choir, worked on a cla.s.s float, and was a sports announcer on the school's radio program. When I was a senior in high school, my brother Joe snuck me out to my first movie, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, when my parents were away at a conference.

But my real savior was basketball. In my junior year I grew four inches to six feet five and 160 pounds and started to really improve as a player. My height and long arms gave me a huge advantage, and I averaged 21.3 points a game that year, which helped my team, Williston High, make it to the final of the North Dakota state champions.h.i.+p. But we had lost two times to our opponent, Rugby, during the regular season. I'd gotten into foul trouble in both games, so Coach Bob Peterson played a zone in the final game. We contained my high school rival, Paul Presthus, but Rugby shot the ball well enough to win by 12 points.

What I liked about basketball was how interconnected everything was. The game was a complex dance of moves and countermoves that made it much more alive than other sports I played. In addition, basketball demanded a high level of synergy. To succeed, you needed to rely upon everybody else on the floor, not just yourself. That gave the sport a certain transcendent beauty that I found deeply satisfying.

Basketball also saved me from having to go to church services most weekends. Our closest rival was 125 miles away, and we often took long overnight trips on the weekends to distant parts of the state. That meant I'd usually miss Friday-night and Sunday-morning services.

In my senior year I became a mini celebrity in the state. I averaged 23 points a game, and once again we made the state final, even though we didn't have as strong a record as the previous year. The final game against Grand Forks Red River was televised, and midway through the first half, I stole the ball and raced down the floor for a dunk. It made me kind of a folk hero in the state because most viewers had never seen a dunk before. I went on to finish with 35 points and was named MVP on our way to winning the champions.h.i.+p.

After the game I met Bill Fitch, who had just been hired as the coach of the University of North Dakota, and he promised to save a place for me on his team if I was interested. A few weeks later he showed up in Williston to give the keynote address at the team's annual awards ceremony. At the end of his talk, he called one of my teammates and me up to the stage and handcuffed us together. "As soon as I finish this speech," he joked, "I'm going to take these boys back with me to UND."

Eventually my mother, who never attended any of my high school games, asked me how my spiritual life was progressing, and I had to tell her that I was struggling with my faith. This was a heartbreaking moment for her because she had already seen her older sons "stray" from the church. When I was a baby, my parents had made a pledge to their congregation that I would be brought up as a servant of the Lord, just like Charles and Joe before me. It must have been painful for them that none of us had lived up to their expectations. That's why, I think, they never abandoned hope that someday one of us might return to our true calling, the ministry.

When I was in college, I had another rude spiritual awakening. I had been raised on the literal reading of the Bible. So when I was studying Darwin's theory of evolution in biology cla.s.s, it was disconcerting to learn that, according to the best estimates, humans had been walking upright on the planet for more than four million years. This revelation made me question a lot of what I'd been taught as a child and inspired me to try to resolve-in my own mind, at least-some of the inherent contradictions between religious dogma and scientific inquiry.

I decided to s.h.i.+ft my major from political science to a combination of psychology, religion, and philosophy. That gave me the opportunity to explore a wide range of spiritual approaches from both East and West. I was especially taken by Nikos Kazantzakis's humanistic vision of Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, which paralleled much of what I had been reading about the Buddha. I was also moved by William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, which not only helped me put my childhood experience in perspective but also showed me how my search to find a new, more authentic spiritual ident.i.ty fit within the vast landscape of American culture.

I put that search on a back burner during my early years in the NBA. But when I moved to Chelsea, I befriended a psychology grad student and devout Muslim named Hakim who reignited my interest in spirituality and inspired me to explore meditation.

One summer in Montana I recruited a neighbor, Ron Fetveit, who was an observant Christian, to help me fix my leaky roof. While we were repairing s.h.i.+ngles, we got into a long conversation about spiritual matters, and I confessed that I had a difficult time relating to his faith because of my childhood experience. "I know where you're coming from," he said, "but you know, there is no such thing as a grandchild of G.o.d. You are not your parents. You need to develop your own personal relations.h.i.+p with G.o.d."

At that point, I began quietly searching for spiritual practices that might work for me. One of my early discoveries was Joel S. Goldsmith, an innovative author, mystic, and former Christian Science healer who had founded his own movement, known as the Infinite Way. What attracted me to his work was his wholesale rejection of organization, ritual, and dogma. In his view, spirituality was a personal journey, period, and he designed his talks so that they could be interpreted from a wide range of perspectives. I was especially intrigued by Goldsmith's take on meditation, which he saw as a way to experience inner silence and plug into your intuitive wisdom. I'd always thought of meditation as a therapeutic technique for quieting the mind and feeling more balanced. But Goldsmith showed me that it could also be a subst.i.tute for prayer, a doorway to the divine.

Over time I moved on to other practices, but the Infinite Way was eye-opening for me. It was a stepping-stone from the rigid spirituality I'd been raised on to a broader vision of spiritual practice. When I was young, my mother used to cram my head with biblical scriptures every day because she believed that an idle mind was the devil's playground. But I thought that just the opposite was true. I wasn't interested in filling my head with more noise. I wanted to rest my mind and allow myself to just be.

Around this time I met my future wife, June, at my regular pinochle game in New York. She was a warm, fun-loving woman who had graduated from the University of Connecticut with a social-work degree. Our romance blossomed during a summer motorcycle trip around the Northwest, and we were married in 1974. Our first child, Chelsea, was born the next year, and our daughter Brooke, and twin sons, Charley and Ben, followed soon after.

One summer shortly after Chelsea was born, June and I went to visit my brother Joe and his new partner-June's sister, Deborah-who were living together in a commune in Taos, New Mexico. Joe had been a practicing Sufi for years and had recently left his teaching job in Buffalo to live at the Lama Foundation, a community dedicated to integrating spiritual practices from a wide range of traditions.

Sufism is a form of Islamic mysticism that focuses primarily on s.h.i.+fting consciousness from the personal to the divine. Sufis believe that you can't free yourself from identifying with the small, individual self unless you give yourself over to the power of the sacred. That means surrendering to what Sufi master Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan calls "the magical spell of unconditional love-that ecstatic embrace that bridges the separation between lover and beloved."

The Sufis at the Lama Foundation spent a good part of the day trying to connect with the divine through meditation, devotions, and an ecstatic form of chanting and bowing called zikers. Joe was attracted by the physicality of the practice, with its repet.i.tive, dancelike movements designed to s.h.i.+ft consciousness.

But after taking part in the rituals for several weeks, I decided that Sufism wasn't the right path for me. I was looking for a practice that would help me control my hyperactive mind.

A few years later I hired Joe to help me build a new house on Flathead Lake in Montana. After completing the frame, we brought in a construction worker to help us finish the job. He'd been studying Zen at the Mount Shasta monastery in northern California and had a calm, focused manner, along with a no-nonsense approach to work. I'd been interested in learning more about Zen ever since I'd read Shunryu Suzuki's cla.s.sic, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Suzuki, a j.a.panese teacher who played a key role in bringing Zen Buddhism to the West, talked about learning to approach each moment with a curious mind that is free of judgment. "If your mind is empty," he writes, "it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few."

Joe and I joined our friend's group that summer and started sitting zazen-a form of meditation-with a group once a week. What appealed to me about Zen practice was its inherent simplicity. It didn't involve chanting mantras or visualizing complex images, as had other practices I'd tried. Zen is pragmatic, down to earth, and open to exploration. It doesn't require you to subscribe to a certain set of principles or take anything on faith; in fact, Zen encourages pract.i.tioners to question everything. Zen teacher Steve Hagen writes, "Buddhism is about seeing. It's about knowing rather than believing or hoping or wis.h.i.+ng. It's also about not being afraid to examine anything and everything, including your own personal agendas."

Shunryu Suzuki's instructions on how to meditate are simple:

Sit with your spine straight, your shoulders relaxed, and your chin pulled in, "as if you were supporting the sky with your head."

Follow your breath with your mind as it moves in and out like a swinging door.

Don't try to stop your thinking. If a thought arises, let it come, then let it go and return to watching your breath. The idea is not to try to control your mind but to let thoughts rise and fall naturally over and over again. After some practice, the thoughts will start to float by like pa.s.sing clouds and their power to dominate consciousness will diminish.

According to Suzuki, meditation helps you do things "with a quite simple, clear mind" with "no notion or shadows." Most people have two or three ideas running in their heads whenever they do something, and that leaves "traces" of thoughts that cause confusion and are difficult to let go of. "In order not to leave any traces, when you do something," he writes, "you should do it with your whole body and mind, you should be concentrated on what you do. You should do it completely, like a good bonfire."

It took me years of practice to still my busy mind, but in the process I discovered that the more aware I became of what was going on inside me, the more connected I became to the world outside. I became more patient with others and calmer under pressure-qualities that helped me immensely when I became a coach.

Three aspects of Zen have been critical to me as a leader:

1. GIVING UP CONTROL

Suzuki writes, "If you want to obtain perfect calmness in your zazen, you should not be bothered by the various images you find in your mind. Let them come and let them go. Then they will be under control."

The best way to control people, he adds, is to give them a lot of room and encourage them to be mischievous, then watch them. "To ignore them is not good; that is the worst policy," he writes. "The second worst is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them, just to watch them, without trying to control them."

This piece of advice came in handy later when I was dealing with Dennis Rodman.

2. TRUSTING THE MOMENT

Most of us spend the bulk of our time caught up in thoughts of the past or the future-which can be dangerous if your job is winning basketball games. Basketball takes place at such a lightning pace that it's easy to make mistakes and get obsessed with what just happened or what might happen next, which distracts you from the only thing that really matters-this very moment.

Practicing Zen not only helped me become more acutely aware of what was happening in the present moment but also slowed down my experience of time because it diminished my tendency to rush into the future or get lost in the past. Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh talks about "dwelling happily in the present moment," because that's where everything you need is available. "Life can be found only in the present moment," he writes. "The past is gone, and the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life."

3. LIVING WITH COMPa.s.sION

One aspect of Buddhism that I found to be especially compelling was the teachings on compa.s.sion. The Buddha was known as the "compa.s.sionate one," and according to religion scholars, his moral teachings bear a close resemblance to those of Jesus, who told his followers at the Last Supper: "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends." In a similar vein, the Buddha said, "Just as a mother would protect her only child at the risk of her own life, even so, cultivate a boundless heart towards all beings. Let your thoughts of boundless love pervade the whole world."

In the Buddhist view, the best way to cultivate compa.s.sion is to be fully present in the moment. "To meditate," said the Buddha, "is to listen with a receptive heart." In her book Start Where You Are, Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron contends that meditation practice blurs the traditional boundaries between self and others. "What you do for yourself-any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself-will affect how you experience the world," she writes. "What you do for yourself, you're doing for others, and what you do for others, you're doing for yourself."

This idea would later become a key building block in my work as a coach.

In the meantime I still had a job to do as a player.

In the 197172 season Red Holzman, who was then general manager as well as head coach, made a number of moves that transformed the Knicks. First he traded Cazzie Russell to the San Francisco Warriors for Jerry Lucas, a strong, active big man who had a good twenty-five-foot shot but could also handle powerful centers like Dave Cowens and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Next, Red s.h.i.+pped Mike Riordan and Dave Stallworth to Baltimore for Earl "the Pearl" Monroe, probably the most creative ball handler in the game at that time. Red also drafted Dean "the Dream" Meminger, a quick, long-legged guard from Marquette who was a terror on defense.

With this new infusion of talent, we morphed into a more versatile team than we'd ever been before. We had more size and depth, a broader array of scoring options than the 196970 team, plus the perfect blend of individual skill and team consciousness. Some of us worried that Monroe might try to upstage Frazier in the backcourt, but Earl adapted himself to Walt's game and added a dazzling new dimension to the offense. With Lucas, a pa.s.sing magician, at center, we transformed from a power team into a multifaceted perimeter team, keying on fifteen-foot jump shots as well as layups. Red made me the prime backup to Dave DeBusschere and Bill Bradley-and I was energized in my new role. This was pure basketball at its finest, and I fit right in.