Krause’s announcement, in turn, prompted Jordan to respond when training camp opened in October that he would retire if Jackson was not retained. “If Phil’s not going to be here, I’m certainly not going to be here,” Jordan told reporters.
Like that, the short, portly Krause had put himself in the unenviable position of being the man to drive Jordan from the game. At least that was what appeared to be happening. In actuality, the matter involved a tangle of worn relationships. And in time, the future of the team would come down a tug-of-war over the career of Pippen, the star forward who masterfully complemented Jordan during the team’s drive to five championships.
In 1991, Pippen made the egregious error of signing a long-term contract with the team, despite being cautioned against such a move even by team officials. As a result, the forward had labored much of the past decade while earning an average of about $3 million a year. While most Americans would be absolutely bug-eyed with delight at such prospects, the NBA had become a fantasy world awash in cash in recent seasons, leaving Pippen to labor for essentially 1991 dollars as he watched dozens of younger, far less accomplished athletes pull in deals worth $10, $15 even $20 million per season.
The problem for the Bulls was that at the close of the 1998 playoffs, Pippen’s contract would be up and the going price for his services was forecast to run in the neighborhood of $45 million over three seasons. In the absurdity of NBA dollars, that wasn’t a terrible price, except that the Bulls were already paying Jordan approximately $33 million per season.
Where there’s money and success and vast public attention, there are usually immensely complicated personality conflicts. Such was the case with Chicago’s basketball team. As spring approached, these conflicts had manifested themselves in a nasty little public relations war between the key parties that had created a tangle of illusions for the fans, for the media, for the Bulls themselves.
Despite this uncomfortable checkmate hanging over their heads, the Bulls still managed to work their way through an injury-filled season, and despite early setbacks, found themselves on this night in mid-March with a 47-17 record, the best in the league’s Eastern Conference.
Even so, the comfort level was not very high. Heading into the season, Krause had likened the situation to a divorce, and it had that horrible feel to it, with the same air of confusion and mistrust.
Jackson had contended privately for the past few years that Krause employed a “brusque” management style and seemed caught up in the petty trappings of his title. “Jerry wants to be the most powerful person in the organization, and it’s hard for him to allow Michael just to be Michael,” Jackson said. “Michael doesn’t want power. He wants to be one of the players. But he wants a person who’s not gonna boss him around or shove him around or squeeze him into corners and do those types of things. That’s what it’s all about.”
In the public’s mind, team chairman Jerry Reinsdorf was allied with Krause, his loyal charge. They were known to Bulls fans as “the two Jerrys,” the befuddling coalition that had somehow managed to rule the administration of “the Jordan era.” As the plot of this story took its twists and turns, the mystery grew, because allowing the break up of this great team appeared to be a colossal business mistake, a miscalculation of gigantic proportions. And Reinsdorf, who had worked his way up from a lower middle-class upbringing in Brooklyn to become a hugely successful real estate/sports entrepreneur, had rarely made big mistakes.
“We’ve been through this 1,000 times, and nobody can really figure out what the plan is,” said Bulls guard Steve Kerr, acknowledging that management’s moves had left him and his teammates stumped. “In Chicago, everywhere we go, people are asking us, ‘How can they possibly think about breaking this team up?’ And frankly, we don’t have any answers for that.”
Kerr surmised that Reinsdorf, who hadn’t been around the team during the season, was getting the same kinds of questions from the Bulls’ two dozen minority shareholders, who in turn were being asked questions by family and friends at every cocktail party or family gathering.
“Why,” Jordan himself had asked a month earlier, “would you change a coach who has won five championships when he has the respect of his players and certainly the understanding of his players to where they go out and play hard each and every day. Why?
“I think it’s more or less a personality conflict, and that has a lot to do with it. It certainly can’t be because of (Jackson’s) job and what he’s done with the players and the respect he’s won from the players. His success as a coach is certainly impeccable. I don’t think that can be questioned. I think it’s more personal than anything.”
Actually, the matter was really an issue of Jackson and Jordan trying to take away Krause’s power, Reinsdorf implied in a phone conversation from his Arizona home, a winter refuge. “It’s Phil who doesn’t want to stay on,” the team chairman said, adding that in 1996 Jackson had turned down a five-year contract extension.
The suggestion here was that Jackson and Jordan had manipulated the circumstances to make it appear that Krause wanted to break up basketball’s most successful team. The public, Reinsdorf said, had “a total misread of what Jerry Krause wants to accomplish, a belief that what Jerry Krause wants to do is dismantle the team. Jerry Krause doesn’t want to do that.”
Reinsdorf said this privately, yet publicly had been defiantly mum on the issue. He and Krause had suffered a tremendous battering in the press over this issue. He could have spoken publicly to perhaps clear up Jackson’s status or at least defend the team’s actions, but doing so, he said, would have likely resulted in an even bigger “pissing match,” further sullying Reinsdorf’s own reputation and that of Jackson’s. “We have a great coach,” Reinsdorf said. “Why get into it publicly and do something to damage his reputation?”
Yet as a result of their silence, Reinsdorf and Krause, in the public’s eyes, appeared tremendously challenged in explaining what they were doing and exactly why they were doing it. What spoke for them was a collection of half-statements and implied motivations from over the past few years.
Clearly, there were practical considerations that drove the owner and his general manager. The Bulls were the most costly team in NBA history with a player payroll for 1997-98 that stretched beyond $60 million, more than twice the league’s salary cap. And the Bulls were an aging team. Both Krause and Reinsdorf acknowledged that they wanted to make the transition from the Jordan era to the next team of Bulls without falling into the deep misery of losing, as the Boston Celtics had done in the wake of Larry Bird’s retirement in 1992. The Celtics, according to some NBA observers, were so busy honoring the aging Bird and co-stars Kevin McHale and Robert Parish that the team’s management failed to plan adequately for the future.
Krause and Reinsdorf said they didn’t want to make that same mistake. Instead, it seemed they were making an even bigger one by pushing the wildly popular superstar out the door, the kind of public relations nightmare from which the two Jerrys might never recover.
“They’ve been saying for three years now they don’t want to see this team fall at the end of this run like the Larry Bird Boston Celtics fell,” observed a Bulls staff member. “Eventually that’s gonna turn around and haunt them. It has and it will. Even if you want to get rid of these guys, you don’t say, or you don’t insinuate it. You keep your mouth shut from day one.”
Krause had often cited the Celtics as his example of a franchise to emulate because of their ability to win 16 league championships while rebuilding a series of teams over three decades. But Pippen said Krause had missed the major point about the Celtics—club president Red Auerbach built his teams on allegiance and mutual respect, the so-called “Celtic Pride.” The jersey numbers of the great Celtics were retired, and many of them were allowed to spend their entire careers in Boston.
The Bulls, Pippen said, “just haven’t put themselves into a pos
ition to be looked at as a franchise like the Lakers, the Boston Celtics, who have had great teams and allowed their great players to finish their careers there.”
Celtics players supposedly held great respect, if not love, for Auerbach, Pippen said. “But you won’t get any player to say anything good about Krause.”
Krause, unfortunately, had made sometimes vague and ambiguous statements, leading to a public interpretation that he so badly wanted to prove that he was a great general manager that he planned to break up a team that had won five championships in seven seasons so that he could start over with new players and establish his own genius.
“I think Krause just wants control,” Pippen said in a private interview. “He wants to win a title without Michael. And he wants to win one without Phil. And me. Just to be able to say he’s great at what he does.”
What Bulls players, team staff members, media representatives and other parties interviewed could not figure out was why Reinsdorf would for even a minute allow Krause to entertain such a notion.
“Both Jerrys egos are large enough to make them think they can do it, despite the obstacles, despite the public opinion,” one Bulls employee theorized. “They think they can do it again (win a series of titles) over the next 10 years.”
As Phil Jackson noted, Reinsdorf was a “guy who doesn’t make bad business deals.” That, in turn, led Jackson to speculate that perhaps Reinsdorf was planning to sell the team to a party that would keep Jordan, Pippen and Jackson as the nucleus of the Bulls. “A big corporation,” Jackson said when asked about possible purchasers. “A Chicago corporation. It’s a possibility. I know there’s people out there who would like to see it happen.”
Another team official conceded that someday in the next few years Reinsdorf could sell the team, but nothing of that nature was impending, the official said, explaining that “the Bulls are a big part of Jerry’s life.”
Asked about the situation, Reinsdorf emphasized that his interest was simply winning more championships. “We want to win as many as we can,” he said.
Whatever the outcome, the plot was packed with intrigue, pulling the emotional strings of NBA fans everywhere like a soap opera. At every road game in every city, media representatives were peppering Jordan with questions about the team’s future. “It’s fascinating,” Kerr said during a March trip to New York, “to go through this whole thing. It would be better if it were a little less exciting and we could just kind of keep things together. But it’s fun to be a part of, regardless of what happens. It’s an exciting team to play for.”
TEX
Square in the middle of this conflict was the franchise’s elder conscience, 76-year-old assistant coach Tex Winter. While it was true that the grind of success and competition had brought an end to the once-close personal ties between Jackson and Krause, it was Winter who had helped hold together their tenuous professional relationship.
Winter brought to the debate the rare perspective of a half century spent in coaching. He had played against Jackie Robinson in junior college and later wound up at Southern Cal, where he was a teammate of Bill Sharman and Alex Hannum playing basketball for the legendary Sam Barry. Only an injury prevented Winter from competing in the 1942 Helsinki Olympics as a pole vaulter. He served in the Navy during World War II, and in the aftermath became one of America’s premier college coaches, getting his first head coaching job at Marquette University at age 28. Over his many years in the game, he had devised the Bulls’ famed triangle offense and deserved a substantial portion of the credit for the team’s success in blending the supremely talented Jordan with the host of role players on the roster.
Furthermore, Winter held a giant regard for Jackson, his immediate boss; a tremendous loyalty to Krause, the longtime friend who had hired him; and a deep and abiding respect for Jordan, whose talent and playing style constantly challenged Winter’s deeply held convictions about the game.
“He’s been so honest that it’s been a blessing for all of us,” Jackson said of Winter. “Because he’s the one person in the entire organization who can speak his piece. I think Jerry looks to him for balance in a lot of ways. You know, he’s the first one to tell Jerry, ‘You know, Jerry, you’re nothing except the title.’ The next minute, he’ll tell me, ‘What have you coached?’ I’ll say, ‘I coached the CBA championship in Albany.’ He’ll pop everybody’s balloon.”
“I feel like sometimes I’m sorta caught in the middle on this thing because I am friends with both Jerry Krause and Phil Jackson,” Winter said. “Jerry Krause is our overall boss as far as the franchise is concerned, yet I’m the assistant coach to Phil Jackson. I don’t like to get caught in the middle on a lot of the things that might transpire. But a lot of the time I feel like I am. I certainly don’t like to be put in that position. But the good thing about it is, Jerry Krause and Phil Jackson have tried to avoid putting me in the box like that. That helps tremendously. Sometimes I put myself in that box because I don’t know which way to go, who to support on certain issues and who not to. But I try to be just a mediator more or less.”
Surprisingly, despite the circumstances Jackson and Krause “have worked together very well,” Winter said, speaking quietly while sitting courtside before a recent game. “One thing, here again, about both of them, they’re smart enough to know that the team comes first, the organization comes first. As a consequence, neither one is going to intentionally do anything to hurt the organization, especially the team.”
Asked if he had discussed the situation with Krause and Jackson, Winter said, “I try to stay away from that, because I don’t want to feel like I’m in the middle on the thing. On the other hand, there’s times that I’m with Phil, and we do talk about the relationship somewhat. And there’s times that I’m with Jerry and certain things come up. What I try to do, as best I can, is to take the middle-of-the-road view on the thing and try to help each maybe understand what the other is doing and the reasoning for it.”
Winter admitted the circumstances had become complicated and frustrating at times, but he pointed out that “both of them have a great deal of respect for me, and I have a great deal of respect for both of them. They know that the only thing I’m interested in seeing is that the Bulls be as good a basketball team as we can possibly be.”
Like most Bulls fans, Winter held on to the hope that a reconciliation could occur. “I think it’s possible,” he said, pointing out that Jerry Reinsdorf had a sign in his office that said “Nothing is cut in stone.”
“That pretty much in itself explains Jerry Reinsdorf’s philosophy,” Winter said. “In the final analysis, he’s the guy who will make the decision on what does transpire with this franchise.”
Bulls guard Ron Harper, however, figured the conflict had been overheated too long, leaving too many scorched relationships. “There will never be peace here,” he said, sitting in the locker room before the New Jersey tip off. “There will never be peace. There’s always gong to be a bad feel for guys. This is it. There ain’t no tomorrow.”
The Bulls’ game on this Monday night against New Jersey was their fifth in nine days, and it showed. In the first quarter, Chicago’s Toni Kukoc fired a pass underneath to Pippen, who flipped up a reverse that missed badly. A few minutes later, Pippen penetrated and dropped a pass off to Kukoc, who wasn’t looking. The ball bounced off his arm, and the Nets scooped it up and headed the other way.
In another sequence, Jordan rose up for a slam dunk and found instead the back of the rim. The crowd emitted a tremendous groan as the ball soared high and out of bounds. Later Jordan was fouled on a putback, the shot missed, and he made only one of two free throws, allowing the Nets to hope that they might be able to do a little business against the Bulls on this night, much as the woeful Dallas Mavericks had done two games ago in Texas with a surprising win.
The crowd offered up another huge groan and an ‘ohh!’ or two late in the qua
rter when Jordan moved for yet another dunk only to be greeted by New Jersey’s David Vaughn, who stuffed Jordan’s shot, a move that left even Vaughn blinking in surprise. This was the same David Vaughn who had been acquired briefly by the Bulls in February, only to be released a few days later.
With 52.4 seconds to go in the first period, Steve Kerr replaced Jordan, who came to the bench tiredly chewing his gum and took a seat as his teammates patted his rump and the crowd applauded. As the noise settled, a fan shouted, “We love you, Michael!”
Yes, they did. Someone was calling Jordan’s name at seemingly every interval. If the fans weren’t yelling, they were flashing those infernal Instamatics.
Despite this slow start on a tired evening, Jordan was in the midst of yet another spectacular season, thrilling crowds everywhere with extraordinary performances. Even at age 35 when the athletic skills of most players begin to show dramatic erosion, he was once again leading the league in scoring, averaging better than 28 points a game, and although he had come to rely on his excellent jump shot in recent seasons, Jordan could still display the leaping ability, body control and confounding athleticism that amazed spectators and drove television ratings. Remarkably, he’d shown that he was still capable of taking over virtually any game while scoring 40 or more points, a skill level that the vast majority of his younger opponents would never come close to displaying.
“Can Michael play any better?” longtime Bulls photographer Bill Smith asked one night before a game. “Is this 1987? How can he walk away? I have a hard time accepting it.”
His thoughts echoed the sentiments of many fans. The better Jordan played, the greater the longing for him to stay in the game. “If you’re winning, why ruin a good thing?” asked Tina Martinez, a longtime Bulls fan waiting in the Berto Center parking lot in hopes of getting players to sign her basketball after a recent practice. “I mean, if they lost the championship I could understand it. But they’re not. If they got a good team why ruin it?”
Blood on the Horns Page 2