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

was an incredibly resilient player who would often make shots with two or three players hanging on him, but the Pistons’ strategy was effective—initially, anyway—because the Bulls didn’t have many other options on offense.
    My job was to travel around the country and scout the teams the Bulls would be facing in the coming weeks. This gave me a chance to see firsthand how dramatically the rivalry of Magic Johnson’s Lakers and Larry Bird’s Celtics had transformed the NBA. Only a few years earlier the league had been in serious trouble, weighed down by drug abuse and out-of-control egos. But now it was soaring again with charismatic young stars and two of the league’s most storied franchises playing an exciting new brand of team-oriented basketball that was fun to watch.
    Even more important, this job was a chance for me to go to graduate school in basketball, with two of the best minds in the game: Johnny Bach and Tex Winter. I had just spent the past five years as head coach of the Albany Patroons and had experimented with all kinds of ideas about how to make the game more equitable and collaborative, including paying all the players the same salaries one year. We won the league championship during my first season as coach, and I discovered that I had a gift for making adjustments during games and getting the most out of the talent on the roster. But after a while I realized that my biggest weakness as a coach was my lack of formal training. I hadn’t gone to Hoops U or any of the summer clinics where coaches share trade secrets. Working with Johnny and Tex was my chance to play catch-up. In the process I realized that some of the long-forgotten strategies of the past could be revitalized and made relevant for today’s game.
    Bach was a master of Eastern-style basketball, the aggressive, in-your-face version of the game played east of the Mississippi. He grew up in Brooklyn and played basketball and baseball at Fordham and Brown before joining the navy and serving in the Pacific during World War II. After brief stints with the Boston Celtics and New York Yankees, he was named one of the youngest head coaches of a major college basketball team, at Fordham in 1950. Later he was successful coaching Penn State for ten years. Then he moved over to the NBA as an assistant coach and briefly served as head coach for the Golden State Warriors. In 1972, while he was an assistant coach of the U.S. Olympic team, Johnny hit it off with Collins, who played a pivotal role in the controversial gold-medal game. Doug scored the two free throws that would have won the game if an IOC official hadn’t inexplicably decided to put three seconds back on the clock after the buzzer had sounded.
    Unlike Tex, Johnny didn’t subscribe to any particular system of play. He was a walking encyclopedia of basketball strategy who relied on his quick wits and photographic memory to devise creative ways to win games. When I was in the office, Johnny would often show up at my desk with dog-eared books by coaching geniuses I’d never heard of and videotapes of current NBA teams using moves invented years ago.
    Once I was sitting at my VCR trying to decipher what kind of offense the Milwaukee Bucks were running, and I called Johnny over to look at the tape. He took one glance and said, “Oh, that’s Garland Pinholster’s pinwheel offense.” Then he proceeded to explain that Pinholster was one of the nation’s most innovative coaches in the fifties and sixties. He was a coach at small Oglethorpe College in Georgia and amassed a 180-68 record using the continuous-motion offense he’d invented before losing interest in basketball and going into the grocery business and state politics.
    Bach, who focused primarily on defense, had a fondness for using military images and playing clips from old war movies to get the players ready for battle. One of his favorite symbols was the ace of spades, which the Marines in World War II used, according to