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When Pat Croce first tried to meditate, his mind would start wandering or racing. Sometimes, he’d question why he was even sitting on a mat, trying to learn to be mindful. In those moments, he’d picture a red balloon with the word “thinking” printed on it in big, bold, black letters. Taking deep breaths in and out, he’d imagine the balloon floating up and away into the sky.
“I’m telling you, I used that red balloon for a 10-minute meditation 50 times,” he said. “I know you can’t control thoughts, but I could eventually learn to observe them.”
If you had met Croce 25 years ago, mindfulness meditation seemed like the last thing the highly driven business owner would ever embrace.
These days, Croce doesn’t dwell much on the past, “because the past has served its purpose perfectly, and I let it go,” as he puts it in the parlance of his Zen mindset. Or in slightly different terms, “I look back and think, that Pat Croce, what a whack job.”
Croce shares some of the lessons he’s learned in pursuit of a calmer, more present life in his new book, “Enjoy Your Self Now! 66 Sacred Shifts to Instantly Awaken the Peaceful Presence Within You.”
In the Philadelphia region, Croce is a bit of a legend. In the 1980s, he helped develop the field of sports conditioning and rehabilitation, training superstars like Julius Erving and Charles Barkley. He built up a chain of 40 sports medicine centers. A decade later, he became part owner and president of the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team, which was on a massive losing streak until they selected Allen Iverson with the No. 1 draft pick in 1996.
From there, it was magic. Allen Iverson, or “The Answer,” was an absolute force of nature, and the team took off — going all the way to the NBA Finals in 2001.
Croce was the team’s energetic, passionate and sometimes-explosive hypeman, pacing courtside and jumping up and down. He seemed unstoppable, but at the same time, his success was not bringing him happiness.
“I was always after some objective experience in the external world: another Sixers win, or another sports medicine center — seeking, searching, striving, clinging towards something externally. There was a hole in me that I didn’t recognize,” he said. “My mind was always, ‘What’s next?’ It was never ever fully at rest or fulfilled.”
Croce was known for his passion and intensity, as well as his hair-trigger temper. He left the 76ers in 2001 after a blowup with the team’s majority owner.
From there, Croce did motivational speaking and started a slew of pirate-themed bars and restaurants. He kept going and going until something felt off: His signature passion and drive felt diminished. In the summer of 2014, he was in Key West, Florida, meeting with restaurant managers when a realization dawned on him.
“I’m sitting there thinking, ‘What am I doing here? This is not my passion.’ The next great grouper sandwich really didn’t mean anything to me,” he said. “And, I sat there thinking right then and there, ‘I’m done.’”
Croce didn’t know what he’d do next, until the next thing found him. He was on a plane heading to Florida when he came across a quote by travel writer Pico Iyer.
“So much of our life takes place in our heads — memory or imagination or interpretation or speculation — that if I really want to change my life, I might best begin by changing my mind,” Iyer wrote. It was an eye-opening statement for Croce.
He had never thought about trying to influence or change his mind, thoughts or feelings, or that he could take a step back.
“When someone was late, my mind would tell me that’s disrespectful, and I would get upset. Or if I had an expectation of something in the future and it didn’t come to pass, I would get upset,” Croce said. “This frustration was due to expectation, or this frustration or irritation was due to comparison. I had no clue that I didn’t have to listen to any of this garbage.”
He finished reading the article and started watching TED Talks about mindfulness.
“And so, I land in Key West and I decide to give this meditation trick a try. I sit on the back porch. I can’t even last 10 minutes,” he said. “So, I get up, I say, ‘Oh, this is BS.’”
But he gave it another shot the next day, this time with a meditation app, and something about it kept him interested. Maybe this could be his new venture, a new book or a new business?
“It was ego,” Croce said. “Remember, it’s all about money. It’s all about accolades. It was nothing about a spiritual path. I didn’t even know there was a spiritual path.”
But as he meditated more, he started reading more books. From there, he started traveling to far-away retreats to learn from different spiritual leaders, and he got deep into different spiritual traditions.
“Hinduism, Sufism, Buddhism, Zen, they were all saying the same thing, distilled down to the truth that we have this peace, love, and happiness is our being, and we share this beingness with everyone and everything,” Croce said. “That’s respectively love and beauty. And I just was so hooked.”
These days, Croce looks like part pirate, part Zen guru with a long, white beard and lots of tattoos. He says that he’s come to realize how much of his life was spent trying to be tough, physically and mentally.
“Vulnerability was a mortal sin,” he said. “I didn’t cry. I wasn’t allowed to cry. If you do something wrong, we’re gonna fight, I’m gonna fight, and I’m gonna fight until I die. I’d wear the leather jacket. There’s no way I was gonna prove I was vulnerable.”
He says much of his dogged pursuit of ever-bigger successes was about pleasing his father.
“And my father was tough. I was the oldest of four boys. He was Italian, so it was tough love,” Croce said. “He worked hard, but he demanded a lot of me, and I don’t think I could ever really live up to his goals for me, or to be what he envisioned, and so when I became a success, it was never enough for me then.”
