Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success by Phil Jackson, Hugh Delehanty Page A
Authors: Phil Jackson, Hugh Delehanty
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Business & Economics, Coaching, Sports & Recreation, Sports, Leadership, Basketball
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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 class 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 championship. 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 championship.
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 class, 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
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 class 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 championship. 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 championship.
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 class, 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
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