Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood

Sacred Hoops A. Bibliography: Jackson P. (1995). Sacred Hoops. 1st ed. New York, NY: Hyperion. B. Summary: Phil Jackson’s book, Sacred Hoops is him telling a story about his spiritual basketball journey to becoming one of the greatest NBA coaches of all time. It starts out with him coaching a season of the Bulls, then it flashes back to his high school life and him winning the state championship for Williston High School. After that he goes from an all American in college to a player at the New York Knicks, and the New Jersey Nets.
After realizing playing pro ball wasn’t his thing, he turned to Zen Buddhism. From this Zen Buddhism he found himself, and found better ways to do things. He got asked to help coach the Nets as an assistant for a while. Phil also coached many minor league teams before becoming the assistant, and head coach of the Chicago Bulls where his career took off from there. C. Essay: The book: Sacred Hoops is about Phil Jackson and his story about the journey he took all the way from a little High School team, to coaching the Chicago Bulls where he won many National Championships.
Sacred Hoops has many different ways that it relates to psychology. It relates to psychology when Phil kinda loses his way in life, and turns to Zen, How cognitive thinking can affect basketball playing, and how sports can deeply affect players emotions. Sacred Hoops relates to psychology in many ways, one of the first is that Phil kind of turned his life around with A religion called Zen Buddhism. Zen relates to psychology because it is a religion that is all about finding your inner self, and it helps you think in different, better ways.

After Phil was kind of in a “drought” in his professional basketball career, he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go but to Zen. This religion taught him that his thoughts had many forms. This mean, say he had the ball he would have different thought like angered thoughts, thoughts to be a ball hog or not, or even thoughts to self praise him. These helped him all the time, and especially during coaching so he had different thoughts and could always handle a situation in the way. Zen also taught Phil that he needs to trust the moment.
Like he says in the book “it’s not uncommon for basketball players, especially young ones, to expend a great deal of energy trying to be someone they’re not. ” (Jackson, 51) this is saying players are trying to be someone better than who they are, and they get caught up in the game and just fail from there. He found out that if you just trust the moment, and trust yourself, you will do your best and succeed easier. This book also relates to psychology by showing how cognitive thinking can affect basketball playing.
Basketball players can be greatly affected psychologically by all of their different surroundings, the things going on, and how games can affect them. Phil shows that many things affect how players may play, and media is one of the big factors. Media can get into a players head so easily and then they can play like absolute crap just because one thing can be blown out of proportion. Even coaches can be affected by their surroundings. In one of Phil’s games, there were 7 seconds left and they had the ball on a timeout.
Phil was peer pressured into making one of the not so skilled shooters to take the shot, when their best shooter should of taken the shot, and they lost the game because of his decision. Some players just may play bad if they have an amazing player on the team like Michael Jordan. In most of the games, a lot of the players would think they wouldn’t have to do anything because Michael was just so good and basically won the games by himself. Well when it came to championship games, these players would make their team lose cause Jordan would get triple teamed and couldn’t score, so they then lose.
Lastly players can also be hugely affected by a game win or loss. A win can boost someone up so much, and make them the happiest person alive, where as a loss can psychologically crush you, and tear you apart. Some losses can be worse than others, like game 7 of the finals when Phil lost cause he told his team to just relax a little and hold onto the ball. Because of those they lost, and he was so sad he never got over it, and kept reminiscing about it. Sports can also greatly affect and change people’s lives. Lastly this book shows how sports can greatly affect people’s lives.
People can be affected for the greater, worse, or sports help them find abetted place. Some players careers can go so great, per say Michael Jordan, who is one of the greatest basketball players of all time. Basketball affected his life so positively because he was so good, and because of this his life was great. For some people sports can also tear their life apart, say they have a rough year or an injury, this could get to their head and mess up their career. So many athletes are affected by injuries and after they attempt a comeback might never play as good as they did before because they let it get to their heads.
There are also people like Phil Jackson that playing professional basketball wasn’t made for him, so once he learned that he figured out that his thing was coaching, and he became one of the greatest coaches ever because of how much the sport of basketball impacted his life. These are some of the many different reasons that Sacred Hoops can relate to psychology, and a showing of some of his story to becoming one of the greatest coaches ever. This book is easily one of my favorite books, because it is about sports, and it teaches you so many different things. I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone even if you don’t like sports.