After a preseason opener at home, the Bulls jetted to Lawrence, Kansas, to meet the Seattle Super Sonics in humid Allen Field House on the University of Kansas campus. Jordan had a Carolina blue affection for Kansas coach Roy Williams, an assistant during Jordan’s playing days at UNC. The sold-out crowd in the grand old arena was well aware of that affection and returned it to Jordan upon his introduction. Sitting courtside, Krause’s eyes tightened into a glare as the fans stood and pounded out their respect for the Chicago star. True to the pattern that would follow Jordan in every building, the arena sparkled with the pop of flash cameras. “Like a laser show,” Krause observed.
The evening brought Scott Burrell’s second game with the team. Krause had tried to trade forward Dickey Simpkins to Charlotte for Burrell in February 1997, but the Hornets opted instead to send Burrell to Golden State. Finally, a month before training camp opened, Krause had managed to get Burrell from the Warriors in a trade for Simpkins. “I’m nothing if not stubborn,” the GM said as he watched Burrell guard Seattle’s Greg Anthony. It was just this ability to defend smaller quicker guards that made Burrell a player Krause coveted.
“He’ll be important later in the season,” the GM said.
Afterward, Jordan offered the same appraisal, that Burrell would be important. “But it’ll take time.”
After Kansas, it was back to Chicago briefly for an exhibition loss followed by a transatlantic jump to Paris to play in the McDonald’s Open in mid October. The city was still in shock from the death of Princess Diana in an auto wreck six weeks earlier. The Bulls landed and headed immediately to practice. “Bon jour. Bon jour,” Jordan, accompanied by his son Jeffrey, told a crowd of French teen-agers after the workout.
Joining Chicago in the international exhibition tournament were Paris-St. Germain, Atenas de Cordoba of Argentina, Benetton Treviso of Italy, FC Barcelona and Olympiakos Pieaeus of Greece.
Paris used to be a place Jordan could enjoy before he was engulfed by his worldwide fame. “I used to come every other year when I first got into the league and I used to sit out at some of the restaurants outdoors and not be bothered,” he told reporters. “Basketball has grown here due to the Olympics, Dream Team or whatever. It’s become a major sport worldwide now. It’s just hard for me to go anywhere now unnoticed—in the sense of getting out in the public and trying to enjoy myself without people bothering me. This was like my last area that I could go to where no one really knew who I was to some degree. And now it’s been exposed.”
Nowhere was the sense of adulation greater than on the playing floor, where opponents didn’t hesitate to hit him up for autographs. “I try to oblige them,” Jordan said. “I don’t have a problem separating autograph seekers from the competition. But once the ball is tossed up, the only autograph you are going to get is maybe a jump shot or two in your face.”
The Bulls made quick work of the tournament field, but not without a cost. Jordan developed a sore toe. “It hurts him and he can’t jump,” Jackson told reporters. As the team headed back across the Atlantic to Chicago, it was announced that Jordan would miss the final three exhibition games, although the injury wasn’t viewed as serious.
A much bigger concern was Rodman, who still had not signed his contract by the time the team got back home. Immediately Jordan and Jackson went to work on him. “I talked to Michael a couple of days here and there,” Rodman said. “He says, ‘Don’t leave me out here hanging to dry.’ The guys gave me a lot of support. The least I can do is give something back.”
With the proper prodding, the 36-year-old forward signed up for another season. “The players and the people of Chicago, they gave me a lot, so I figured I might as well come back and give them one more year,” he told reporters. “The people of Chicago and the players … other than that, I wouldn’t have come back at all.”
Asked why he had hesitated, he replied, “Just to make sure in my mind that my interest was still there. You’ve been in this league so long and you’ve done so much, you’ve got to find some motivation to keep you going. I’ve just got to go out there, get on the court, get around the guys, get around the atmosphere, get my feel for the game again. Once I get on the floor, I’m not going to give less than 100 percent.”
NOTHING FINER
That Friday, October 24th, Rodman accompanied the team to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for an exhibition game at the Dean Smith Center on the UNC campus. At first, it was announced that Jordan would not play, which created a swell of fan disappointment. Then came the calls from Jordan’s old friends back home. With his toe feeling better, he decided he better suit up after all.
Up to that point in the young season, there had been no friction, no embarrassing moments between Krause and the players. But just before game time at the Smith Center, Jordan went to use the restroom and spied Krause’s feet dangling underneath the stall. From that point, Jordan, as he had explained to Jackson, couldn’t help himself. Krause was just too inviting a target. If he was going to invade Jordan’s pre-game routine, he was going to pay the price.
“He was in there,” Ron Harper recalled, “and Michael said, ‘I’m not going in there yet, Phil. I ain’t goin’ in until Jerry leaves.’ It was almost time to go out on the court. It was a sad scene then. He was killing him in the can. It’s a thing where Jerry will embarrass himself if Jerry gets a chance. You won’t have to embarrass him. He’ll find a way to embarrass himself. So we tend to let Jerry embarrass himself, and guys just laugh at him. But the guys want to be a part of it.”
“It’s a ribbing situation,” Jackson said. “Jerry ends up using the bathroom when the team’s trying to get ready. You know, the players use a pecking order. It goes down to Dennis is taking a shower, Harp’s in the bathroom, Michael’s in the bathroom. And that’s it. It usually goes in that kind of routine. Michael goes in the bathroom, and Jerry’s in there in the bathroom. You know, it’s like, ‘What are you thinking about?’ I don’t go in the player’s bathroom. This is a place where a guy wants to be alone and get his business done before a game. This is a team kind of thing. Those are the things that Jerry gets himself embroiled in that have just alienated himself from the team a number of times. So he goes back there and gets some kind of grief. I don’t know what was said. I never know what’s said in that situation. I just hear kind of a ruckus going on.”
With the laughter ringing in their ears, the Bulls took the floor that Friday evening against the Philadelphia 76ers. It proved to be an evening of humorous embarrassment. In the first quarter, Jordan stole a ‘Sixer pass and broke into the open court. All 21,000 fans in the Smith Center gasped in excitement. His Royal Airness was about to treat the home folks to a rim-rocking slam.
Instead, he missed, and the ball popped away from the rim. Ready to roar in delight, the crowd instead let out a giant groan.
Moments later, during a pause in the action, Harper came up to him and whispered, “Nice dunk.”
“That tells you what kind of friends I’ve got, doesn’t it?” Jordan said afterward and laughed.
In the hallway outside the locker room at halftime, he had encountered a scout from another team. “You’re not gonna put my missed dunk in your scouting report, are you?” Jordan asked with a wink.
“I’m never immune to an embarrassing moment,” he admitted after the game. “It’s just one of those things where I misjudged my time, my jump. I missed it. If I’m gonna miss a dunk this is the proper place to do it.”
With one final exhibition against the Sacramento Kings the next night in Chicago, the Bulls finished their preseason schedule and turned their thoughts to the opening of the regular season the following Friday, October 31, and how they would survive without Pippen. Jordan called the upcoming season, his thirteenth in the league, “my biggest challenge ever.”
He told reporters he would play 48 minutes a night if that was necessary to deliver the sixth championship
. “I’m gearing myself up for a long season—all 82 games and 15 playoff games,” Jordan said. “I don’t know what burnout is. I haven’t burned out so far, so why worry about it?”
“We don’t want to wear him out,” Jackson said. “But he just wants to win, as usual. He just wants to win.”
That Wednesday the players gathered with an array of fans for the team’s annual preseason luncheon. “When we win the championship,” Jordan told the group, “I think we’ll see the road we took and look back at this sixth championship and appreciate this as being the most important championship we won … just because of the cards we’ve been dealt.”
The next day, Pippen predicted Jordan would produce yet another amazing answer to a challenge. “The competitiveness is going to come out. He’s going to try to shoulder as much of the load as he can,” the injured forward said.
Steve Kerr agreed: “Michael feels that we’ve got something to prove and—though I don’t know what it could be—that he’s got something to prove, too. So you know he’s got something special in mind.”
Timed to open with the start of the season was a new CBS SportsLine web page dedicated to Jordan’s array of commercials for a variety of products, from sunglasses to sports drinks. Wouldn’t such a site have undue sway over young minds? a reporter asked.
“Michael’s commercials are pieces of art,” replied CBS’ Mark Mariani. “There are a lot worse things kids can get into on the Internet.”
That Friday night, October 30th, they opened the season in Boston, and it became immediately apparent just how badly they would miss Pippen. The Bulls pushed to a big first-quarter lead against the Celtics, but without Pippen there to control the tempo of the game, Chicago couldn’t hold the edge. And the young Celtics ran and pressed and ran and pressed some more, leaving the Bulls grabbing their shorts and sucking wind.
Chagrined, they headed home with a loss. The next night at the United Center, they held their ring ceremony and revealed the team’s 1997 championship banner, to hang alongside 1991, 1992, 1993, 1995 and 1996. The rings featured a Bulls logo made up of 46 diamonds and five sculpted NBA title trophies and inscriptions “World Champions” and “Team of the Decade.”
The 20-minute ceremony before Chicago’s home game against Philadelphia brought another brace of boos for Krause. Reinsdorf was present, but wasn’t introduced.
Pippen was obviously emotional when he stepped to the microphone and thanked the fans for 10 years of “wonderful moments.”
“I’ve had a wonderful career here,” he said. “If I never have the opportunity to say this again: ‘Thank you.’”
“I said then that we’d win a championship by the time I leave,” Jordan told the crowd. “Well, we’re the five-time champions, going for six, and … we’re certainly going to win the sixth.”
“Did you like the green? You did, didn’t you? I should go back to the green.”
—The Devil’s Advocate
6: Dennis Rodman’s Illusions
Since his earliest days in the league, Dennis Rodman had been an open book, one of those people who lived his life on the edge, right there in plain view for everyone to see. As open books went, his was a fascinating mix, one part mystery thriller, one part comic book, one part experimental poetry. That’s why fans in Chicago swooned over him after he joined the Bulls in October 1995.
A thousand zany incidents later, they still loved him. Sometimes maybe too much, both for their sakes and his. He stopped after practice one day to sign an autograph for a young teen-aged fan outside the Berto Center, and long after he had departed she was still trembling with excitement. Asked just what it was about Rodman she found so appealing, Jennifer Santiago replied that she, too, played basketball on her school team and she could identify with his hustle and energy. Then there was also the matter of his image. “He’s not afraid to show, like, who he is,” she said. “He can be famous, but he doesn’t let other people decide who he is. And I think that’s important.”
In one brief answer, she had summed up something of immense significance to Rodman—never being something you’re not. He had played for two great coaches in the NBA, Chuck Daly in Detroit and Phil Jackson. “That’s one thing you really got to have on a team,” Rodman observed. “You got to have a coach that makes you feel at home, that you feel comfortable with, that’s there’s no pressure to go out there and be someone that you’re not.”
Many observers figured that with the tattooed man’s third season in Chicago, the thriller-mystery part of his persona would deepen, with strange plot twists and more unusual turns, including suspensions and weird acts. Reinsdorf even cautioned him about it before offering the new contract. Rodman would be welcomed back only if he gave up the bad behavior, the team chairman said. Since Rodman’s earliest days with the Bulls, Phil Jackson and the other coaches and players hadn’t known what to expect from him on any given night. A couple of hundred games later, they still didn’t.
The scary part, said Tex Winter, was that even Dennis had no idea where his raw, exposed nerve and boundless energy would take him next. Make a wild, full-stretch dive for a loose ball? Kick a cameraman in the groin? Declare he’s ready to quit the game? Produce an unexpected play of pure unbridled heart, one that turns the entire United Center on its ear? Each and every one of these items, plus countless others, was on the Rodman menu. All of them set on edge by Rodman’s acknowledged fantasy to finally leave the game one night by stripping off his uniform and walking naked off the floor.
Would it happen?
No one, not even Rodman, knew for sure.
Could it happen?
You betcha.
On the other hand there was a part of Rodman that was as old-fashioned as family values. The contrast was sometimes dramatic. For example, Rodman, the supposed rebel, treated Winter with a reverential respect. When the Bulls were on a road trip, it was Rodman who would knock on Winter’s door in the evening, looking for extra videotape to study. The old coach and the player with the wild hair shared a love for the technical aspects of the game. Rodman would never have wanted that information out. It was bad for his rebel image. But it was true.
Perhaps the strangest sight was the two of them sitting together on the team bus, said equipment manager John Ligmanowski. “There’s Dennis with all his gold earrings and nose rings and tattoos and all his wild shit on. And there’s Tex. There really isn’t anybody more conservative than Tex. He went through the Depression. He was a Navy pilot. He’s so tight he saves old shoeboxes.”
“I enjoy Dennis,” Winter said when asked about Rodman. “I enjoy coaching him. I talk to him about his life a little bit, but I’m not gonna correct him or tell him how to live his life. That would be a mistake. At my age, I think he sort of looks upon me as a grandfather figure. He’s willing to listen, and he’s very receptive, especially in the coaching aspect of it. And he’s been fun to work with on the floor as far as that’s concerned. I am concerned when we go into a ball game because he is an emotional guy. We don’t want to take that energy away from him. One of the reasons that he’s such a terrific player is that he’s so energized. He gives this basketball team that same kind of energy. And if you squelch him, if you say, ‘Dennis you can’t do this and you can’t do that,’ well then he’s probably not gonna be nearly the basketball player that he is.”
Jason Caffey, Rodman’s backup, even considered Rodman something akin to a mentor/coach. “Dennis is quiet,” Caffey explained during the 1997 playoffs. “But he’ll give me direction if I need it out there on the court. He’ll guide me through. He’s a great person to listen to, and he gets me through some tough times when I’m out there. He knows a lot of ball. He’s very smart as far as basketball and things like that.”
Even so, the Bulls had often been left to deal with whatever boiled to the top of the Worm’s cauldron. The team’s means of coping with that for 1997-98 wa
s a contract that paid him a base of $4.5 million with a batch of incentives aimed at keeping him behaving and playing. If Rodman met those incentives, his pay could rise to nearly $10 million. Reluctant as they were to turn it loose, Krause and Reinsdorf knew it would be money well spent, if they could keep Rodman’s open book turned to the same chapter as the rest of the team.
After the hold up on his contract during training camp, both Rodman and the Bulls had experienced a tenuous beginning to their third year together. At age 36 did he feel like going through another long, pressure-filled NBA season? The thought of that made him long for his early days in the league in Detroit as part of the Motor City Bad Boys, in the sweet old 1980s, before the league became so image conscious, before everything became so corporate.
Reinsdorf had called the Pistons “thugs” and Rodman a “lunatic” back then. But for Rodman, there was a huge thrill to being a part of that band of intimidators. “I miss the attitude,” he admitted, “the attitude of how we approached the game. We knew we were gonna go out there and beat your ass. Simple as that. We knew that. We were just gonna go out there and whup your ass. That was the mentality I loved right there. And you don’t have that today. You don’t have that today at all.”
The Bulls were a team driven by Jordan’s immense will, but with the Pistons “not just one person had to do it,” Rodman said. “It wasn’t just one person who had the heart of a lion. I think everyone on that team had the heart of a lion and the heart of a tiger and the demeanor of an elephant. We’d just run right over you. That’s what I miss about it. No one could beat us. We could barely tolerate each other some times, but in the end everyone got along.”
If only the Bulls could have taken a lesson from that. Then again, the Pistons shoved their way to two championships and fell victim to the stress and pressure. The Bulls had already tallied five and had set their sights on a sixth. Each and every one of those titles had taxed them personally. The long run was a great tribute to the ability of Jordan, Pippen, Jackson, Krause, Reinsdorf and the rest of the team. Despite their differences, they all knew that winning a sixth title would put them one ahead of the Los Angeles Lakers Showtime team that won five in the 1980s. Like it or not, the Bulls’ key figures were all linked for the ages by their accomplishments. Still, as the strife-filled 1998 season wore on, none of them had time to think about the ages. They were just trying to get through the moment.
Blood on the Horns Page 16