This article appeared in the January 2012 issue of Esquire.
The first NBA game I ever saw in person was the one I played in.
Respect is what you get when you take the ball away from somebody.
Being the youngest of twelve kids and having your underwear handed down teaches you how to share.
When I was four or five, I had an older brother who got paralyzed from the neck down in junior high school. Some kid did a wrestling fall on him and hit his spine. We had to take care of him. I went from being the baby to not really being the baby anymore.
I was way behind physically in high school. They had weight bars that were about forty-five pounds. I couldn't handle them. Couldn't even put the weights on. It was embarrassing. So I always figured out ways to avoid lifting when I was young.
To some degree, I was always fighting my way out of a corner.
It's really Scotty. But for some reason, when people see it with a y, they shorten it to Scott.
That's how they announced me at the NBA draft. Scott Pippen. What was I going to do, argue with the commissioner?
There was never a buddy-buddy day where we took it easy on each other in practice. Guarding Michael Jordan meant trying to keep from getting embarrassed. Especially when we practiced at our own facility — which was pretty much open early on. There were cameras and film crews every day. I could've guarded Kareem in the playoffs and it would've been less intimidating.
Most of basketball is in the mind. But it helps to have big hands. Michael had the ability to hold a basketball as if it were a tennis ball.
Michael wasn't the easiest guy to play with early on. He was always looked at as a great scorer that would never win. So he tried to meet the challenge all by himself. It just doesn't work that way. When Phil took the job, his main goal was to change Michael's mentality. Phil felt Michael needed to do other things in order to make us successful.
Chemistry is something that a team has to develop over time. It comes from being out on the court together. It comes from playing cards together. It comes from watching other teams play together. It comes from being in the film room together. It comes from winning.
You learn how to protect one another.
People are going to like the Cubs even if they never win because if you live in Chicago, all huddled up during the wintertime, the opportunity to go out in the summertime and enjoy baseball makes it very easy to like the Cubs.
Phil got us into yoga. It was tough in the beginning. We hadn't even heard of yoga. But it was something that allowed us to calm down after practice, to relax and stop thinking about going to the mall to buy this or that. It's seldom that you go into a gym and not hear a basketball bouncing or weights dropping. But the lights would dim after practice, and over time it became a sacred place.
Winning three championships back to back doesn't give you a chance to evaluate one from the other.
I didn't enjoy the championships as much as I should have. It's a long season and we couldn't wait for it to be over. The celebration would last for a day, and then we'd want to get away.
Winning separates you from losers.
What I've learned from being successful is to be thankful.
If I had left, Michael would have probably tried to shoot more and score more. I didn't try to become a thirty-point-per-game scorer when Michael left. My mentality was to do other things better rather than to try to change who I was. I eased up maybe one or two points from my normal average, but I probably averaged more assists, had more rebounds, and was more of a verbal leader. If you watched the film, you wouldn't be able to tell any difference in my play.
Your wife becomes a teammate. You've got to do what you've got to do to win. Sometimes you don't win. But there's another day.
Film don't lie.
There probably is courage in fashion. For Dennis Rodman, yes.
My six rings are in storage. I don't have to wear them. The rings are more like a tattoo on me that everybody can see.
