Blood on the Horns

by Roland Lazenby

  9: The Big Facilitator

  It was supposed to be Magic vs. Michael.

  At least that was the hype for the 1991 NBA championship series between the Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers. But the outcome of the title bout hinged on a development no one foresaw, least of all the Bulls’ coaches, who began the series with the 6-6 Jordan defending the 6-9 Johnson. There were other disparities. Johnson and his Lakers had won five league titles in the 1980s and had appeared in the championship series three other times. Jordan and his Bulls were making their first appearance.

  Many observers, such as former Lakers coach Pat Riley, who was broadcasting the series for NBC, figured the Lakers’ experience made them a cinch to douse the upstart Bulls despite the fact that Chicago had homecourt advantage. That thinking looked good when Johnson and the Lakers used their experience to steal Game 1 in Chicago Stadium.

  Suddenly, the pressure was on the Bulls for Game 2, and they struggled with it. Then, a huge basketball accident occurred. Michael Jordan got into early foul trouble, and forced to make a decision, the Bulls coaches switched the 6-7 Pippen to cover Magic Johnson. In retrospect that would seem logical, but at the time there was an assumption that the 25-year-old Pippen would struggle to handle the wily Johnson, the master point guard of his time.

  Just the opposite happened. The long-armed Pippen was on Johnson like a Hydra, and like that, the momentum in the championship series shifted. Pippen harassed Magic into four-of-13 shooting from the floor while Pippen himself scored 20 points with 10 assists and five rebounds as the Bulls won Game 2 in a swarm.

  Forget the stats, though. The tale of terror was written on Johnson’s face. “I can’t believe this is happening,” he told reporters as the Bulls swept four straight games from Los Angeles.

  “It’s true,” Phil Jackson said in 1998 when asked if the switch of Pippen covering Johnson was entirely accidental.

  “We started to see that we were wearing him down from a physical standpoint,” Pippen happily recalled, “especially myself being able to go up and harass him and trying to get him out of their offense. He wasn’t as effective as he had been in the past against some teams, being able to post up and take advantage of situations. I saw the frustration there.”

  Pippen added that as an old man years from now, he’d probably look back on the switch as one of the defining moments in his career and in the history of the team. “It was the first year of being into the Finals and playing against one of the greatest teams with a lot of great players, future Hall of Famers,” Pippen said, “and I would have to say that Finals is definitely at the top. Being able to win my first title and playing against guys who I’d always looked up to and idolized. My being switched to cover Magic was important in the series as a whole. We found another guy who could match up with their big guard and kind of wear him down throughout the game.

  “It was very important to me personally to have the opportunity to defend someone I’d idolized and watched for so long,” he added, “to have that opportunity to step up in such a big game and such an important time of the series, to be able to defend him and to play him as well as I did.”

  Pippen went on from that series to serve as the point guard leading Chicago to five championships, and in the process, he set himself up for comparisons to Johnson. Both were distinctively tall point guards, what Tex Winter liked to call “big facilitators.” Both played essentially point guard on offense and forward on defense. Both led their teams to at least five titles. Both were selected as among the NBA’s top 50 players in the league’s first 50 seasons. Both were responsible for getting the ball to the premier offensive post weapons of their time. Johnson delivered to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Pippen’s target was Jordan, much smaller than Abdul-Jabbar but every bit as dangerous in the post.

  “I’ve always had a lot of respect for Magic,” Pippen said. “He always had an all-around game, could handle the ball for his size. I had a lot of respect for that.”

  The glaring difference between the two was Johnson’s flashy passing brilliance, an extension of his sunny personality. Pippen, on the other hand, displayed a passing game as plainly fundamental and efficient as his taciturn interview demeanor.

  “Scottie is no where near the passer that Earvin Johnson was,” said Ron Harper, Pippen’s good friend. “But on the other hand, Earvin Johnson was no where near the athlete that Scottie is.”

  That athleticism had evidenced itself over the years in his extraordinary defensive ability. Arguably, Pippen had established that he was the game’s all-time greatest defensive forward, a force so unique as to be impossible to duplicate.

  “In a lot of ways, it’s difficult to compare the two,” Tex Winter said. Then he proceeded to do it. “Both of them make their teammates better,” the 76-year-old assistant observed. “Magic, when he was out there playing with the Lakers, certainly made his teammates much better. And Scottie has that same kind of ability, I think more so than Michael. It’s my opinion that there are times—not always certainly—but there’s times when Michael detracts from his teammates. You’re not gonna find that much in Pippen. He’s totally unselfish. Michael should be selfish because he’s such a great scorer. Michael is uninhibited, and Michael is gonna look to score most of the time when he’s in a position where he thinks he can, whereas Scottie on many occasions will pass up that opportunity just to get his teammates involved.

  “And that’s what I call a facilitator.”

  After he had pondered the comparison for a while, Winter concluded, “There certainly is a likeness in many ways. Magic could probably push the ball and key the fast break, for a man his size particularly, better than anybody has in the game of basketball. Tremendous vision, tremendous passing. Scottie really doesn’t have that kind of ability, even though Scottie does gravitate to being a guard and does like to handle the ball and push it up the floor. He can’t deliver the ball the way Magic did, but on the other hand Scottie is apt to make up for that. For one thing, he may hit a shot for you, a long three-pointer off the break, or he may get the team into the offense.”

  On the defensive end, Pippen is clearly exceptional, Winter said. “From that standpoint, Scottie has it all over Magic, in my opinion. As a matter of fact, we felt Magic was someone we could take advantage of defensively in that series, because Magic, he’s a great team defensive player in that he wants to help and help to the extent that often you can take advantage of him. But Pippen can not only help, he can recover. He can do a job individually on a man, or lay off his man and help with the team defense. Scottie is able to do both, where I don’t think Magic really had that kind of ability.”

  Pippen’s overall versatility had been a giant factor in the success of the Bulls, Winter observed. “Phil has been able to utilize his talent to the utmost in that respect. There will be times when Jordan will cover the best player on the floor in crucial situations, but only in crucial situations. There’ll be other times when Pippen in placed on someone who is hurting us. Because they’re such great players, such great athletes, we’ve been able to get away with that type of thing.”

  Growing up in rural Arkansas, Pippen found himself, as did millions of other youths, identifying with Magic Johnson’s brilliance. “I think I’ve definitely taken a lot from his game, learning how to handle the ball,” he said. “I’m not the passer. Magic was a definite flashy player. His passes were so creative. Just as a great player like Michael could be creative in doing things from an offensive standpoint, Magic can make a pass just as spectacular as an offensive move.”

  Perhaps no one appreciated Pippen’s greatness more than Jackson. While the coach obviously relished Pippen’s role in the 1991 championship series, he also pointed to Pippen’s coming of age against the Pistons in the Eastern Conference playoffs that same season.

  “The real build up was in that Detroit series when Rodman head-butted him,” Jackson recalled. “He got b
eat up, he got thrown to the floor. He had to guard Laimbeer. He played through a physical, combative series, in which the stories were, ‘They’ll beat him up, and he’ll pussy out in the end and he’ll get a migraine headache or something will happen.’ They tried to make it a negative thing about Scottie, but the truth was that Scottie was extremely tough and resilient. He has magical games, really big games.”

  A perfect example was the 1997 championship series, Jackson added. “If anybody looks at Michael’s game against Utah last year in Game 5, and sees how Scottie Pippen played in conjunction with Michael Jordan, with Michael just playing offense and Scottie telling him, ‘Look, I’ll take care of the defense.’ He just ran the defense and ran the floor game brilliantly. He played an absolutely terrific ballgame. The combination of the two of them was devastating.”

  THE PATH TO POWER

  Like Rodman, Pippen’s journey to the NBA followed an unlikely route. After playing all of his young life in relative basketball obscurity, he quite suddenly and dramatically sprang to the NBA’s attention in the spring of 1987. He came from the hamlet of Hamburg, Arkansas, (population 3,394), the baby in Preston and Ethel Pippen’s family of a dozen children. “It was fun,” Pippen said. “With all those brothers and sisters I always had a friend around.”

  He attended Hamburg High, where as a junior he hardly got off the bench for the basketball team. As a 6-1, 150-pound senior, he became the school’s starting point guard. That failed to bring notice from college recruiters, however. The fall of his junior year, he had agreed to become manager of the football team, and if his prospects for higher education seemed bright, it was there.

  Don Dyer, the basketball coach at Central Arkansas, arranged for Pippen to attend school there on a federal grant while serving as manager of the basketball team. “I was responsible for taking care of the equipment, jerseys, stuff like that,” Pippen once recalled. “I always enjoyed doing that, just being a regular manager.”

  “He wasn’t recruited by anyone,” Dyer once explained. “He was a walk-on, a 6-1 1/2, 150-pound walk-on. His high school coach, Donald Wayne, played for me in college, and I took Pippen as a favor to him. I was prepared to help him through college. I was going to make him manager of the team and help him make it financially through college. When Scottie showed up for college, he had grown to 6-3. I had had a couple of players leave school. I could see a little potential; he was like a young colt.”

  “I really wasn’t that interested in playing,” Pippen recalled. “I had gone through some hard times not playing in high school, but my coach had it in his mind that basketball was the way I would get an education.”

  “By the end of his first season, he had grown to 6-5, and he was one of our best players,” Dyer said. “He had a point guard mentality, and we used him to bring the ball up the floor against the press. But I also played him at forward, center, all over the floor.”

  “I felt myself developing late,” Pippen explained. “I kept seeing myself getting better and better. It was a great feeling, like I could be as good as I wanted to be. I developed confidence in my abilities.”

  For Central Arkansas, Pippen became a two-time NAIA All-American. As a senior he averaged 23.6 points, 10 rebounds and 4.3 assists while shooting 59 percent from the floor and 58 percent from three-point range. NBA scouting guru Marty Blake had gotten a tip about Pippen, which he passed on to the Bulls and other teams. Pippen was invited to the NBA’s tryout camps, and the rest of the story became the Bulls’ sweet fortune. They selected him fifth overall in the 1987 draft, a story that Jerry Krause relished often with a retelling. NBA scout Marty Blake first alerted Krause about the unknown Pippen, who would later appear in the league’s pre-draft camp in Portsmouth, Virginia. Krause made the journey to see Pippen.

  “We watched him,” Krause later recalled, “and I just got excited. I just got really shook up bad.”

  Krause left Virginia and informed Doug Collins, who was then coaching the Bulls, that there was a special player available and that Collins should see videotape of Pippen in the NBA’s next draft camp, in Hawaii. “When we told Doug Collins about Scottie, he was skeptical,” Krause said. “So I put together a video of all the players in the Hawaii tournament and gave it to the coaches. I gave them names and rosters but no real information on the players. We let them see for themselves. After they came out of the video session, I asked if they had any questions, and the first thing out of their mouths was, ‘Who the hell is Scottie Pippen?’”

  “I’d never heard of him,” Jordan said. “He was from an NAIA school.”

  Krause made numerous moves to get Pippen and later Clemson’s Horace Grant in the first round of the draft. “That night,” Reinsdorf once recalled, “when the draft was over, we were in the conference room in the old Bulls office with the coaching staff. There were a lot of high fives going around that night because we really felt that we had pulled a coup.”

  “His is one of those stories that you read about happening somewhere else,” said Dyer. “It’s rags to riches, a guy coming from nowhere. One of those fantastic stories. Just amazing.”

  “Honestly, I didn’t expect to be drafted that high,” Pippen once acknowledged. “I figured after I went through the camps that I’d have the opportunity to be drafted. I didn’t know how high.”

  As a player from a small town and a small school who was suddenly thrust into the spotlight in Chicago, Pippen was understandably lost. But he quickly developed a friendship with the Bulls’ other first round pick that year, Horace Grant. They did everything together. Shopped. Dated girls. Partied. They both drove $74,000 Mercedes 560 SELs. They moved within a mile of each other in suburban Northbrook. And eventually, they both got married within a week of each other, serving as each other’s best man.

  In the Bulls’ 1988 yearbook, Pippen’s profile contained a question: If you were going to the moon who would you take along? Pippen’s answer was, “Horace Grant.”

  “Scottie is like my twin brother,” Grant told reporters.

  “We talk about every two hours,” Pippen said at the time. “Just to see what’s going on. Horace is my best friend, the closest anyone’s ever been to me.”

  “Scottie called in one day and skipped practice because his cat died,” recalled former Bulls trainer Mark Pfeil. “Horace called about 15 minutes later and said he was with Scottie because of the grieving. Johnny Bach, our assistant coach, was absolutely furious. He got Horace on the phone and said, ‘You get here. You oughta throw the cat in the garbage can.’ Horace, when the team got together, wanted to have a moment of silence for Scottie’s cat.

  “My first year here you could read their facial expressions like a book,” said former Bulls assistant Jim Cleamons. “They were easily frustrated when things did not go right. But over their first three years, they learned how to play, and they learned to keep their composure on the court. They matured and grew more confident.”

  “I think the physical demands on Scottie were what got to him the most,” said longtime Chicago radio reporter Cheryl Raye. “When he got here, he was very fragile mentally. I tie that to his being from a very small school, being from a different background, a different setting. Scottie never had any of the grooming that guys like Michael who went to big programs had. At the big schools, they groom those guys with the media. Usually they have some sort of maturity about them when they get to the NBA. Scottie did a couple of things on his own. He hired a speech coach from Chicago, a radio person, and worked on how he handled questions, what to say.”

  “My first year or two, I admit that I messed around a lot,” Pippen once admitted. “I partied, enjoyed my wealth and didn’t take basketball as seriously as I should have. I’m sure a lot of rookies did the same thing I did. You’re not used to the limelight or being put in a great situation financially.”

  “Starting out, you could see Scottie’s possibilities,” Phil Jackson
said. “He could rebound yet still dribble. He could post up, but he also had those slashing moves. You knew he could be very good, but you didn’t know how good. He played a few times at guard in his first few seasons, bringing the ball up against teams with pressing guards, but mostly we used him at small forward. As more and more teams pressed, however, we decided we had to become more creative. More and more we had to go to Michael to bring the ball up. We didn’t want to do that. We came up with the thought of Scottie as a third ball advancer, of an offense that attacked at multiple points. From that position Scottie started to take control, to make decisions. He became a bit of everything.”

  Key to the Bulls’ growth was the maturing of both Pippen and Grant, the two young players with enough athleticism to give the Chicago defense its bite. “He’s on the cusp of greatness,” assistant coach Johnny Bach said of Pippen. “He’s starting to do the kinds of things only Michael does.”

  “It’s just a matter of working hard,” Pippen said at the time. “I’ve worked to improve my defense and shooting off the dribble. I know I’m a better spot-up shooter, but I’m trying to pull up off the dribble when the lane is blocked.”

  Almost every night over the course of the 1989-90 season, Jordan led the Bulls in scoring, but it was Pippen who gave opposing coaches nightmares. Few teams had a means of matching up with him, particularly when they also had to worry about Jordan. A series of win streaks propelled them to a 55-27 finish, good for second place in the Central behind the 60-win Pistons, the defending World Champions.

  The Bulls sailed into the playoffs with new confidence and Pippen playing like a veteran. First they dismissed the Milwaukee Bucks and followed that by humbling Charles Barkley and the Philadelphia 76ers. But Pippen’s 70-year-old father, Lewis, died during the series, and the young forward rushed home to Arkansas for the funeral. He returned in time to help finish off Philly. Next up were the Pistons and the Eastern Finals. The year before in the playoffs, Bill Laimbeer had knocked Pippen out of Game 6 with an elbow to the head. The Detroit center claimed the shot was inadvertent, but that wasn’t the way the Bulls saw it. To win a championship, they knew they had to stand up to the Bad Boys.