A short life of the author
Philip Douglas Jackson (born 17 September 1945) is an American basketball coach and author who won eleven NBA championships as head coach — six with the Chicago Bulls (1991–1993, 1996–1998) and five with the Los Angeles Lakers (2000–2002, 2009–2010) — more than any other coach in NBA history. Known as the “Zen Master,” Jackson developed a coaching philosophy that synthesised Zen Buddhism, Native American spirituality, the triangle offence (learned from his mentor Tex Winter), and an intuitive understanding of group psychology into a system for managing extraordinary talent — including Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Kobe Bryant, and Shaquille O’Neal — under the extreme pressures of professional championship competition. His books are among the most intellectually serious works in the literature of sports.
Life
Jackson was born in Deer Lodge, Montana, the son of Pentecostal ministers. His childhood was strict — no television, no movies, no dancing — and the collision between his fundamentalist upbringing and the secular world he entered as a young man is a recurring theme in his writing. He played basketball at the University of North Dakota and was drafted by the New York Knicks, where he played from 1967 to 1980 — a useful but not exceptional player whose real talent was for understanding the game’s spiritual and psychological dimensions.
During his playing career and early coaching years, Jackson immersed himself in a reading program that was unusual for a professional athlete: Zen Buddhism (Suzuki, Alan Watts), Native American philosophy (Black Elk, Lakota traditions), transpersonal psychology, and the works of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. He also studied the triangle offence with Tex Winter, the assistant coach whose geometric system would become the tactical foundation of Jackson’s championship teams.
Sacred Hoops (1995)
Jackson’s first and most influential book — written with Hugh Delehanty — is a memoir and philosophical treatise that explains his approach to coaching: the integration of Zen mindfulness practice (he had his players meditate before games), the use of the triangle offence as a system that distributes the ball and empowers all five players rather than depending on a single star, and the application of Lakota Sioux concepts of sacred space and communal purpose to the dynamics of a basketball team.
The book’s central insight is that championship basketball is not primarily a matter of talent — the NBA is full of talented players who never win — but of selflessness: the willingness of individual players to subordinate their egos to the needs of the group. Jackson’s genius was his ability to persuade the most talented and most ego-driven athletes in the world — Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant — to play within a system that required them to share the ball and trust their teammates.
The Last Season (2004)
Jackson’s account of the 2003–2004 Lakers season — the year the team imploded, losing in the Finals to the Detroit Pistons amid the Kobe-Shaq feud, Kobe’s sexual assault charges, and the general dysfunction of a team of enormous talent and no cohesion — is the darkest and most revealing of his books. It reads as a coaching failure narrative: an honest account of what happens when the Zen Master’s methods are defeated by egos, resentments, and circumstances beyond his control.
Eleven Rings (2013)
Jackson’s final book is a comprehensive account of all eleven championship seasons, structured as a series of leadership lessons. The book revisits the relationships with Jordan, Pippen, Bryant, O’Neal, and other players with the reflective distance of a man looking back on a completed career. It is the most systematic presentation of Jackson’s philosophy: the integration of meditation, the triangle offence, and Native American wisdom into a coherent system of leadership.
Collecting Jackson
Sacred Hoops (1995, Hyperion) in first edition brings $20–$60. Eleven Rings (2013, Penguin Press) brings $15–$35. Signed copies are available through his public appearances. Items signed by both Jackson and Jordan are particularly valuable.