A Spiritual Basketball Leader

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Recommended: Parallels between modern sports and religion

Phil Jackson is a well-known man in the basketball world, as a championship coach and leader. Not only for his knowledge of basketball was he considered great, it was also for his use of alternative spiritual methods to assist his coaching. Through his Naturalist and Pantheist worldview he left a legacy of a role model. Phil Jackson’s money and career, views about the nature of God, and family are ultimately shaped by his worldview of Naturalism and Pantheism. Comparing my worldview of Christianity to Phil Jackson’s family, career, and nature of God, we will determine whether the role model status is relevant to how I perceived a role model.
Phil Jackson found a career in basketball, through him playing professionally and then coaching. Jackson started off playing college basketball, then on to the NBA, which increased his love for the sport and thus made a career out of it. In 1998, Jackson had the highest-regular season winning percentage and then coached and won 11 championship games in his entire career. In his career, Phil Jackson was known is as not only a basketball coach, but a head pastor to the team. He used his worldview to shape how he lived out his career. This meant that when he was coaching, he used his spirituality of Naturalism, specifically Humanism, and Pantheism, specifically Buddhism, to guide his team. According to Unsworth (1997), Phil Jackson states in his book, "Being aware is more important than being smart.” Jackson used his worldview of humanism to guide his players to be aware of the human nature they live in. Also, Jackson explains no one human can do it alone; therefore inserting the idea that humans must be connected in order to gain success (Unsworth, 1997). Through his coaching, Jackson utilize...

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...is an inspiring coach who led basketball teams to victories, which could consider him a role model. Jackson is a championship winning coach and he is looked up to because of his success. Others would choose him as a role model due to his knowledge, religion, or his inspirational teachings that led others. Although he was successful in through many aspects of life, I do not consider him to be a role model personally. He has such contrasting worldviews in which I am still quite unsure about. Jackson’s life is based around the successes of the world and the life of humans, in which I do not find as important. For my belief of Christianity, I believe in serving God through my life, as Jesus as an example. I strive to be selfless, giving, and not focused anything else like Jesus. Such that I believe in another worldview as Phil Jackson, I do not see him as a role model.

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