Blood on the Horns

by Roland Lazenby

  “It’s like knowing you’re gonna get a divorce and finding out after the fact that your spouse cheated on you,” he said of the tip from a friend in the business that Krause was looking for his replacement. Schaefer had planned to go to Krause in March and tell him of his decision not to return. He admitted that the circumstances shouldn’t have bothered him, but they did.

  “For a couple of weeks, I didn’t know how to react to it,” he said.

  He was crestfallen the day he learned the news. That night he ran into assistant coach Jimmy Rodgers at a movie theater and told him what he had learned. “Jimmy kind of soothed me a little bit,” Schaefer said. “He’s a guy who’s been around the NBA for 20 some years. He said, ‘You know, this whole league comes down to whose guy are you.’ My intent over all these years was never to be anybody’s guy.”

  Schaefer had a reputation around the team of taking a measured, balanced approach between Krause and Jackson. “I have always felt that I was,” he said in explaining what was disappointing about Krause’s move.

  Some employees even said that, like Winter, Schaefer was part of the glue that allowed Krause and Jackson to keep working together after their relationship deteriorated. “I think I would like to have been more of a glue for them,” Schaefer said. “But if that’s one of my responsibilities, then I’ve failed.”

  Krause’s move to replace him had left Schaefer with intensely mixed emotions. “I feel loyalty to Jerry, too,” he said of Krause. “That was one of the things that was troubling about getting caught up in the rift between these two guys. I consider myself and my story of how I came to the Bulls as a fairly decent example of what’s good about Jerry. Jerry’s reputation scoutingwise is for finding people, finding baseball players and basketball players and coaches. He’ll tell you how he found Tony LaRussa in Iowa and how he found Phil in the CBA, how he does these things.”

  Schaefer, too, was one of Krause’s “finds” and maybe more of a reach than others because he was the head trainer at Loyola Marymount University in 1990 when star Hank Gathers dropped dead of a heart ailment. “I was embroiled in one of the biggest controversies, one of the hottest things in sports litigation,” Schaefer said. “I’m in the middle of this Hank Gathers thing. If I were him and I got my resume, I would have looked at it like, ‘This guy’s done pretty well for himself, but I’m just not gonna touch this,’ and tossed the file in the garbage can. But here Jerry looked at it and somehow waded through the bullshit and saw my master’s degree in counseling, saw that I was from Deerfield, Illinois, saw that I had worked the NBA summer leagues and worked with the Lakers, did these things. All those things came out to him. Jerry’s very good about sorting through things and kind of finding the ugly duckling. To me, I’ve told my wife many times, ‘As much as I get upset at things that have happened over the years that Jerry’s been involved with I’m very grateful for the opportunity he gave me.’ I never want to lose sight of that.”

  It seemed obvious that Schaefer had no culpability in the Gathers issue. But a less-informed executive would have erred on the side of caution. The investigative nature in Krause had led him to find out that Schaefer was an excellent trainer who had done nothing but the best work in caring for Gathers and the other Loyola athletes. Krause hired Schaefer long before the litigation in the issue was resolved. Ultimately Schaefer was cleared completely of any wrongdoing in the matter and was left with a strong sense of obligation to Krause.

  Yet, like many Bulls players, Schaefer sensed his feelings toward Krause diminishing over his eight years with the team under the weight of the general manager’s brusque approach. Sadly, Krause should have enjoyed substantial loyalty from the many players and employees he assembled, but he often seemed to find a way of angering them. “Once I was led to feel that I wasn’t wanted or appreciated that killed any fire that I had,” Schaefer said. “When I heard the things that I heard, I felt like Scottie felt in November. I mean I love the players and coaches, but it extinguished whatever flame I ever had for the organization. It had been going down over the years, but he put it out. You can look at it and say, ‘Don’t let it bother you.’ But when it happens to you, you say, ‘Damn, that bothers me.’”

  Part of the conflict between Schaefer and Krause was the result of the conflict over the team’s doctors, which left medical issues with the team “pretty inflamed,” Schaefer said. “Things could have been handled differently or better. Hindsight being 20-20, I could think of things I might have done differently over the years. Again all the people involved are all good people. There’s no bad people here. It was just a matter of circumstance. John Hefferon was the team physician when I came here in 1990. He was a guy that I certainly connected well with … We had a nice relationship built up, and then Jerry over time soured on his opinion of him. For a long time, he had wanted to involve Jeff Weinberg (Krause’s personal doctor) as the team physician.”

  Part of the problem was the location of Hefferon’s downtown office, on good days an hour’s commute from the Berto Center. If a player had a sprained ankle from practice or a sore throat or whatever it often meant getting on the Kennedy Expressway at 2 p.m. and heading into Chicago’s snarl.

  “Guys loved him,” Schaefer said of Hefferon, “but they’d roll their eyes. It was a pain in the butt to go down there.”

  Another part of Hefferon’s difficulty came in 1994-95, the second season Jordan was out of the game, after Krause had signed Ron Harper and Larry Krystkowiak for the Bulls. In a series of columns for the Sun Times, Krause implied that perhaps the team’s medical staff hadn’t inspected the players’ health closely enough before they were signed. “To me what happened is that Dr. Hefferon became kind of a scapegoat for things that happened that were not his fault or were really fair,” Schaefer said. “Jerry was under a lot of pressure. At that time, neither the Harper signing nor the Krystkowiak signing was going very well. Neither was playing very well. Clearly, Jerry was pointing the finger of blame at Dr. Hefferon for passing these guys in physicals. In fact, Ron didn’t miss one practice all year long because of injury. It was a weird thing. It was like, ‘Why are you blaming him?’”

  The outgrowth of Krause’s decision to replace Hefferon with Weinberg was an image in the media that the general manager was tinkering with player availability issues. Although it may have appeared that way to the media, that was really more image than reality, the trainer said. For example, there was Game 5 of the 1997 Eastern Conference finals versus Miami. Pippen injured his foot in the first half. “He hurt the ball of his foot, the juncture where the foot meets the toe, the joint there,” Schaefer said. “The thinking was that he partially dislocated that joint, spraining that capsule and injuring some of the soft tissue around the joint. There was a little bit of a scene there on ESPN with Jeff Weinberg going up into the stands and talking to Jerry Krause, and everybody saw Jerry shaking his head no. I got put in the middle again of a situation between Phil and Jerry. It appeared that Jerry would not allow Scottie to play in that game.”

  Pippen sat out the rest of the game while the Bulls won and advanced to the NBA Finals. “As a competitor he did want to give it a try,” Schaefer said. “The doctors felt that without benefit of further diagnostic tests that there was a risk of damaging it further and being at risk for the Finals. That created a situation where Dr. Weinberg went to Jerry, and all of a sudden Jerry appeared to be making a medical decision, or what appeared to be a medical decision but was in fact a management decision. Phil got kind of upset that that happened, and I got stuck in the middle of that. He was upset that somehow his perception was that Jerry was making a decision regarding whether an athlete should play or not. There appeared to be some indecisiveness on the part of the doctors. That’s what doctors are there for. Doctors have a lot more training and education. That’s what they’re qualified for. At that time Dr. Weinberg was trying to act in good faith, as a good liaison, and as a person who has been a
friend of Jerry’s for a long time.”

  However, television cameras followed his trek up to see Krause, which was replayed on an ESPN news broadcast. To some observers, the scene resonated all the way back to the issue of control in 1986 when Jordan wanted to return from his foot injury and management questioned his decision.

  “In analysis, everybody’s a little bit right,” Schaefer said. “Teams have huge dollars invested in these guys, and they are a commodity, if you will.”

  Nothing illustrated the issue better than Patrick Ewing returning to the Knicks during the 1998 playoffs despite doctors’ concerns that his injured wrist had not healed. Or even worse, Jerry Rice returning to the San Francisco 49ers too soon after a serious knee injury and reinjuring the knee. “Certainly any team wants an athlete who wants to play to be out there playing,” Schaefer said. “But on the other hand, you can take that too far and put the athlete or yourself in jeopardy. You have to keep your eye on the big picture all the time. If Ewing fell again and hit his wrist just right, or if he tried to come back too soon, the Knicks are still going to owe him $80 million or whatever. You have to see the big picture. That’s where management probably has a wider focus on things than the player or the coach. In the middle of a game, the coach wants to win that game. Again, it goes back to where it’s kind of good to have two opinions sometimes and maybe have the coach and general manager be separate people.

  “It’s a lot easier on medical issues to say a guy can’t play,” Schaefer said. “It’s the coach who wants his best team on the floor, the athlete who wants to play. Most times whether a guy should play or not is a fairly obvious thing. It’s not a complex thing. You’re looking at the schedule, you’re looking at the game, you’re looking at the injury and the severity of it. It’s pretty obvious. There are very few times that it’s really gray. Most of the time the player makes the call.”

  While Schaefer could defend Krause on many medical controversies, the contacts with Saints trainer Dean Kleinschmidt left him wondering. “I don’t know what truth there is to his desire to hire Tim Floyd, or to the Tim Floyd/Dean Kleinschmidt thing,” Schaefer said. “But it almost appeared like he had the attitude, ‘I don’t care about professionalism. I’m gonna get my friend the coach in, and I’m gonna let my friend, the coach, hire his friend the trainer. We can all sit around and talk about bass lures or something. Forget that Phil Jackson was a great basketball coach, I want to get this batch of friends together.’ Well, what does that have to do with running a professional organization?”

  “That’s baloney,” Krause said. “Chip is very wrong in his opinions. He doesn’t have a clue what my intentions were.”

  Schaefer “aligned himself with people who treated Doc Weinberg like a dog,” Krause said. “Whether he resigned or not I had decided Chip was not going to be here next year. He and Al (strength coach Al Vermeil) had had a continual (disagreement). I had decided Chip was not going to be here under any circumstances. When we brought him back (for 1997-98) I had told him then it was just going to be a one-year contract. No more than that. As for his commenting on moves by management, he had very little knowledge of the things we did. Chip has always been a person who believed he was more than a trainer. He was nothing more than that.”

  When Schaefer informed Krause in March that he was resigning, he was struck by Krause’s urgency to accept his decision and announce it with a press release. It was almost as if Krause was “trying to get everyone out the door that he can,” the trainer said. “I think they’re trying to set themselves up with flexibility at the end of the year, but what you wind up doing is creating anxiety.”

  There was anxiety for the players, anxiety for the coaching staff. And certainly anxiety for Bulls fans. To Schaefer, though, the key was Jordan. “I see him being awfully close in similarity to the way he was when he left the game the first time in 1993,” the trainer said. “In the early ‘90s, he would talk. We would have moments where we were alone while I was treating an injury of his, and he would speak of his frustrations. He would say, ‘I don’t think I can take this much longer.’ I always thought he was just sort of venting. I was shocked when he retired the first time. But there are some things that are similar to that now. You can see the intrusions onto what he likes to do. Just a look of weariness on his face sometimes that he didn’t have two years ago, or even last year. I don’t know what he’s going to do, I really don’t. I think there’s part of him that wants to stay. If it is winding down, it’s almost like these guys don’t want to let go, whereas months ago they spoke of wanting to end it and wanting to leave. Now, it’s like you’re ready to get that divorce and you think, ‘One more time. Let’s try it again, babe.’ They’re almost afraid to move on out and do something different.”

  On the other hand, Schaefer had a perfect read on Jackson. The coach was clearly ready to move on, despite Jordan’s statements that he would quit if Jackson didn’t come back. The statements pressured both Krause and Jackson. “I can’t see Phil doing it again,” the trainer said. “They’d have to have a thing where Jimmy Rodgers signed on as coach, and they’d go back and try to do it again. But if that happens, you lose a big part of it, You lose a huge part of what makes the thing successful and makes it go.”

  “I think Phil’s just had enough,” Krause agreed. “He’s got family problems. I know that’s part of it.”

  “I’m not even sure of the best way for it to end,” Schaefer said. “To me, people in Chicago are a little weird about it, too. No one’s gonna play forever. If we both agree Michael is a human being and not gonna play forever, then it only becomes a matter of when. At some point in time, he’ll have his last year. It might not be this year. It might not be next year. It might be two years from now. But it seems like people aren’t willing to accept that, and that’s weird to me.”

  Part of the anxiety was expressed in the hopes of fans and editorialists that Reinsdorf would somehow send Krause on a sabbatical while Jackson, Jordan and Pippen finished out their careers. It would “almost be a shame if Krause took a sabbatical,” Schaefer said. “To me, there doesn’t need to be a winner and a loser. It would almost be a shame if it came to a thing in this battle of wills with the Jackson/Jordan side defeating the Reinsdorf/Krause side.”

  The Bulls had been a situation where everything worked. The spirit, camaraderie, emotion—all those elements had come together at a very special level for this team. Yet there was no question that the conflict had the potential to extinguish whatever had been achieved, just as it extinguished Schaefer’s joy at working with the team. That could be seen in the looks on Jordan’s and Pippen’s faces whenever Krause was mentioned. The situation had much potential for long-term hatred.

  Even Krause and Reinsdorf showed some signs of recognizing that. Yet it was too late. Krause’s hopes of rebuilding the team in the future had cast a deep shadow over the present.

  “Sometimes it just seems that these guys get themselves in trouble by almost trying to do too much,” Schaefer said of Krause and Reinsdorf. “Sometimes you just need to let it happen. They got a great coaching staff in place. They got a great roster of players. It’s been made so much more complex in a lot of ways than it has to be. There’s a lot of axioms about simplicity in life. It’s all gotten so complicated. I don’t understand how it got this way.”

  Once again the Bulls faltered against the Nets in the fourth quarter In Game 2, Chicago missed seven of 13 free throws. Once again, the Bulls somehow managed to hang on for a win, with 32 points from Jordan, 19 from Toni Kukoc and 16 rebounds from Rodman. Several newspaper accounts described them as vulnerable and perhaps even distracted by the internal conflict. “I’m pretty sure that’s what people have been writing,” Jordan said after the second game. “Some teams probably feel that way, too. But until they actually come in and do it (beat the Bulls), it’s just conversation.”

  He emphasized that for Game 3 in New Jersey by hi
tting 15 of his first 18 shots and scoring 38 points as the Bulls swept the Nets with a 116-101 victory. It was the third straight first-round sweep for Chicago. The Bulls had run up a 24-1 record in first round games since 1991.

  Scott Burrell did his part by hitting 9 of 11 shots from the field to finish with 23 points, including 11 in the third quarter as the Bulls stretched the lead to 93-76. Afterward, Jordan was glowing in his comments about Burrell, “his project.” Burrell had averaged 13.7 minutes and 5.2 points while playing in 80 games during the regular season. Even he admitted he was still struggling to learn the offense, evidenced by his 42 percent shooting from the floor.

  “For one thing he doesn’t play consistent minutes and when you only play five or six minutes, it’s hard to be a consistent shooter,” Kerr told reporters. As for Jordan’s tutelage, Burrell revealed in private that his Airness still hadn’t eased up on treating him like a rookie. “That’s just the way he is, I guess,” Burrell said. “That’s just the way he motivates people. I’m too old to be motivated. If I don’t know what I have to do … I just try not to pay attention to it. It’s not really irritating. That’s just the way he is. That’s just part of the price.”

  DIARY DAYS

  The opening of the playoffs also had coincided with the first issues of ESPN magazine. As a highlight, the magazine published excerpts from Jackson’s diary put together by Sun Times columnist Rick Telander. At first, Jackson and Telander had been under contract to write a book based on the diary, but Jackson said he had decided to kill the book deal as the season began. The publishers prevailed upon Jackson to at least do the magazine story, and he agreed. The coach presented his diary with the understanding that he would be able to see any parts excerpted before publication. Unfortunately, there was a time squeeze, and Jackson never got the opportunity to approve what was published. It would prove perhaps to be the worst mistake of Jackson’s career.