Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success Read Online Free PDF Page A

championship rings as a player than anyone else (eleven), revealed in his memoir,
Second Wind
, that he sometimes secretly rooted for the opposing team during big games because if they were doing well, it meant he would have a more heightened experience.
    Lao-tzu saw it another way. He believed that being too competitive could throw you out of whack spiritually:
    The best athlete
    wants his opponent at his best.
    The best general
    enters the mind of his enemy . . .
    All of them embody
    the virtue of non-competition.
    Not that they don’t love to compete,
    but they do it in the spirit of play.
    That’s why at the start of every season I always encouraged players to focus on the journey rather than the goal. What matters most is playing the game the right way and having the courage to grow, as human beings as well as basketball players. When you do that, the ring takes care of itself.

3
    RED
    The greatest carver does the least cutting.
    LAO-TZU
    M y first impression of the NBA was that it was an unstructured mess.
    When Red Holzman recruited me for the New York Knicks in 1967, I’d never seen an NBA game before, except for a few playoff games on TV between the Boston Celtics and the Philadelphia Warriors. So Red sent me a film of a 1966 game between the Knicks and the Lakers, and I invited a bunch of my college teammates over to watch it on a big screen.
    I was stunned by how sloppy and undisciplined both teams were. At the University of North Dakota, we prided ourselves on playing the game in a systematic way. In fact, in my senior year coach Bill Fitch had implemented a system of ball movement that I really liked, which I later learned was a version of the triangle that he’d picked up from Tex Winter.
    There seemed to be no logic to the Knicks game we were watching. To me it looked like nothing more than a bunch of talented players running up and down the floor looking for shots.
    Then the fight broke out.
    Willis Reed, the Knicks’ imposing six-nine, 235-pound power forward got tangled up with forward Rudy LaRusso near the Lakers’ bench. Then there was a pause in the film, and when it started up again, Willis was shrugging several Lakers players off his back, before leveling center Darrall Imhoff and slugging LaRusso twice in the face. By the time they finally subdued him, Willis had also broken forward John Block’s nose and thrown center Hank Finkel to the ground.
    Wow. We all jumped up in unison and shouted, “Run that back again!” Meanwhile, I’m thinking,
What have I gotten myself into? This is the guy I’m going to be going up against day in and day out in practice!
    Actually, when I met Willis that summer, I found him to be a warm and friendly guy, who was dignified, bighearted, and a natural leader whom everyone respected. He had a commanding presence on the floor and he felt instinctively that his job was to protect his teammates. The Knicks expected Willis to be suspended for that incident in the game against L.A., but the league was more tolerant about fighting in those days and let it go. From that point on, big men around the league started thinking twice before getting into a tussle with Willis on the floor.
    Reed wasn’t the only great leader on the Knicks. In fact, playing for New York during the championship years was like going to grad school in leadership. Forward Dave DeBusschere, who had been a player/coach for the Detroit Pistons before joining the Knicks, was an astute floor general. Forward Bill Bradley, the future U.S. senator, was gifted at building consensus among the players and helping them meld together into a team. Shooting guard Dick Barnett, who later earned a Ph.D. in education, used his biting wit to keep everyone from taking themselves too seriously. And Walt Frazier, my roommate during the first season, was a masterful point guard who served as the team’s quarterback on the floor.
    But the man who taught me the most about leadership was the most unassuming of them all: