Sublime

“Every great team has a one-two punch,” Jackson said. “This is your team, Shaq. And Kobe, you’re gonna be our floor leader. You guys don’t like that, let me know now and I’ll trade you now. You’re gonna do what I say, and if you don’t, you’re out of here.”

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.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are. JOSEPH CAMPBELL

He immediately brought calm to a frenzied scene, presenting each player with a book (the first he gave Jordan was Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison), lowering expectations, cutting back on Collins’s intensity, letting the men express themselves as individuals.

“It sounds more mystical than it really is,” he says of the process he went through. “The coaches’ goal was to set down some basic guidelines for us on how to play basketball together as a group. And then you were expected to create your own chart for everything else. It was an uncanny way of creating organization without over-organizing. It wasn’t

Basketball isn’t a one-person game, even though the media lords sometimes portray it that way. Nor is it a five-person game, for that matter. It’s an intricate dance that includes everything happening at any given moment—the

He is the greatest winner in basketball history—eleven NBA championships in thirteen years. Some players can amass individual statistics. Only one has had the strength and focus to keep his team a champion for over a decade.