Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success by Phil Jackson, Hugh Delehanty Page B

teammates,” I said, “because if you don’t, they won’t grow.”
    Michael’s reaction was surprisingly pragmatic. His main concern was that he didn’t have much confidence in his teammates, especially Cartwright, who had difficulty holding onto passes, and Horace, who wasn’t that skilled at thinking on his feet.
    “The important thing,” I replied, “is to let everybody touch the ball, so they won’t feel like spectators. You can’t beat a good defensive team with one man. It’s got to be a team effort.”
    “Okay, I guess I could average thirty-two points,” he said. “That’s eight points a quarter. Nobody else is going to do that.”
    “Well, when you put it that way, maybe you
can
win the title,” I said. “But how about scoring a few more of those points at the end of the game?”
    Michael agreed to give my plan a try. Shortly after our conversation, I later learned, he told reporter Sam Smith, “I’ll give it two games.” But when he saw that I wasn’t going to back down, Michael dedicated himself to learning the system and figuring out ways to use it to his advantage—which is exactly what I had hoped he would do.
    It was fun watching Tex and Michael argue about the system. Tex admired Jordan’s skill, but he was a purist about the triangle and wasn’t shy about giving Michael a piece of his mind when he went off script. Meanwhile, Michael wasn’t shy about creating variations on Tex’s beautiful machine. He thought the system was at best a three-quarter offense. After that the team needed to improvise and use its “think power” to win games.
    It was a clash of visions. Tex believed it was foolhardy for a team to rely so heavily on one person, no matter how talented he was. Michael argued that his creativity was opening up exciting new possibilities for the game.
    “There’s no
I
in the word ‘team,’” Tex would say.
    “But there is in the word ‘win,’” Michael would counter with a grin.
    As far as I was concerned, they were both right—up to a point. I didn’t believe the triangle alone was the answer for the Bulls. What I was looking for was the middle path between Tex’s purity and Michael’s creativity. It took time, but once the players had mastered the basics, we added some variations to the system that allowed the team to set certain plays in motion to avoid intense defensive pressure. Once that happened, the Bulls’ game really took off.
    Another change I introduced to make the Bulls less Jordan-centric was to shake up the team’s pecking order. Michael had a powerful presence on the floor, but he had a different style of leadership than Larry Bird or Magic Johnson, who could galvanize a team with their magnetic personalities. As
Los Angeles Times
columnist Mark Heisler put it, Jordan wasn’t “a natural leader, he was a natural doer.” He drove the team with the sheer force of his will. It was as if he were saying, “I’m going out here, men, and I’m going to kick some ass. Are you coming with me?”
    Michael also held his teammates to the same high standard of performance he expected of himself. “Michael was a demanding teammate,” says John Paxson. “If you were on the floor, you had to do your job and do it the right way. He couldn’t accept anyone not caring as much as he did.”
    I thought we needed another leader on the team to balance Michael’s perfectionism, so I named Bill Cartwright cocaptain. Despite his soft-spoken demeanor, he could be deceptively forceful when he wanted to be, and he wasn’t afraid to stand up to Michael, which Jordan respected. “Bill was a quiet, quiet leader,” says Michael. “He didn’t talk much, but when he did, everybody listened. He would challenge me when he felt I was out of place. Which was okay. We had that kind of relationship. We challenged each other.”
    The players called Cartwright “Teach” because he took other big men to school when they tried to get past him in the lane. “Bill was the