by Sam Smith
He didn’t look up. I hesitated for a moment, and then moved on to chat with first B.J. Armstrong, who became closest to Jordan, and then Grant, Pippen, Cartwright. I wasn’t trying to show up Jordan, and, in fact, I was uneasy and nervous. But it was something I knew I had to do. And I had nothing to apologize for.
Jordan never has mentioned the book to me nor have I ever heard from any of his close friends, like Rod Higgins and Fred Whitfield, whom I speak with when I see them, about anything regarding the book. I know Jordan didn’t like it. After games back then, especially on the road, he’d be asked to sign an assortment of items for everyone from the game official to the team owner. A few times I saw people hand him a copy of the book. I heard him say he’d sign anything but that.
If there was going to be a public/media fight, I would lose every round to Jordan. I had some respect in the community having been at the Tribune since 1979. But this was Michael Jordan. I give him credit, and it was a relief to me. Initially I was hesitant to engage him. Gone forever was the bantering I often enjoyed with him. Initially I was somewhat reluctant to even ask him questions in press conferences. But I had to do so, as well as in group sessions, to do my job. After all, he was always the story. Whenever I’d ask a question, Jordan would answer the same as with anyone else. Occasionally, he’d mention my name first, as in, “Sam, the shot was . . . ” I was a bit surprised, impressed and especially relieved. He had plenty of reason, at least in his mind with the negative onslaught of coverage, to single me out for ridicule. I wasn’t winning that one. Of course, he had bigger issues develop from his gambling party with the infamous Slim Bouler and later more gambling stuff during the playoffs.
But it also suggested to me what I always felt about Jordan, the basic decency within him from his mother and father, his close family environment and the strong values he received in high school and college. I found him to be a decent man with this overwhelming competitive drive that was a disease as much as a gift. I thought it drove him to lengths he wasn’t necessarily comfortable with. But at the same time when you are so successful at what you do and so celebrated, it’s difficult for anyone to maintain the perspectives on life and relationships that most of us can. The Michael who showed up in Chicago in 1984, truly humble and gifted, always was there. There grew another Jordan who perhaps had to develop to become a champion. He became the story of The Jordan Rules, but as the book and his subsequent reaction to me also showed, that other guy always has been there.
I never again had a familiar relationship with Jordan. But when he came back from baseball in 1995, I would ask him questions comfortably and several times I’d walk with him to the bus for an extra question or two and he’d do a one-on-one interview. I never mentioned the book. He never mentioned the book. It was as if it didn’t exist. I was just another reporter.
Once Jordan stopped playing and got into management and ownership he basically stopped giving interviews to almost anyone. I wonder sometimes what he thought about the book. But I’d be just as happy not knowing.
***
We know the history. The Bulls won three titles, Jordan retired and went to baseball. He came back. The Bulls won three more. He left again, came back for a few lamentable seasons with the Washington Wizards to get it out of his system before retiring to golf and managing. I haven’t seen him to speak with him since he left the Wizards. I’m glad the book has stood up well over the years. He has, as well. Win, win as they say around the NBA.
Prologue
June 1991
EVERYWHERE PHIL JACKSON LOOKED HE SAW RED.
The city of Chicago, celebrating the Bulls’ first-ever National Basketball Association title, was wearing the Bulls’ red like an expensive suit. It was a city more used to disappointment and failure from its teams, finally able to puff out its chest and do a little strutting. And on this night, as the Bulls players gathered at the Four Seasons Hotel downtown for the last team party in what seemed like a month of celebrations since winning the title, Jackson could see from the crimson coloring around his players’ eyes that they had joined the city in its reveling. But he could also see that their eyes still twinkled from the night they had shone brightest.
He could see his young stars, Horace Grant and Scottie Pippen, who had flashed across the NBA this season like comets, growing brighter and stronger, helping lead the way to a four-games-to-one victory in the Finals over the Lakers. They had joined with the baby-faced kid, B.J. Armstrong, in a dance line at the team’s postgame party, and were swaying to the music and singing as the band played into the early morning hours.
Jackson could see his backup center, Will Perdue, in many ways a symbol of his team, long maligned but lately cheered. The Bulls had been the team of Michael Jordan, a one-man show whose supporting cast strived but usually failed to overcome its limitations. Few had more limitations than Perdue, but he had become a competent player, a nice piece of the puzzle, and he was now celebrated by the hometown fans, perhaps as much for his ability to survive the once-angry mob as for his contributions. Perdue had survived as a test track that daily wore the tire marks of veteran center Bill Cartwright. So he sat this night with Cartwright and pounded playfully on Cartwright’s head and shoulders, yelling, “This is for the elbows to my head, and this is for the elbows to my nose, and this is for the elbows to my side….” And the two banged and hugged and laughed and looked like two of the biggest teddy bears anyone had ever seen.
And then there was Cliff Levingston, a spare part for most of the season who had proved his worth down the stretch in the playoffs. And Stacey King, the bouncy kid who’d taken his lumps in a disappointing season for him, and Armstrong, and Dennis Hopson, who also had been more wallflower than dancer for long stretches at a time. All had been discouraged by the intricacies of the offense, known to the players as “the triangle,” adapted from the teachings of assistant coach Tex Winter. But now they were serenading the grandfatherly coach in a rap version of the championship shuffle.
“Oh, we believe in the triangle, Tex, we believe, yeah, we believe in that triangle. It’s the show for those in the know. Goin’ to the triangle and goin’ to win a title.”
Jackson could feel his thin lips curling into a smile. He admired the quirky Winter, and he had stuck with him, even when his star, Jordan, said he didn’t care for that particular system because what had Winter won with it anyway? And Jackson stayed with it even when the players grumbled early in the season and Winter came to him and said he should drop the system because the players had to believe in it for it to work. He would make them believe, Jackson insisted. And now they were singing.
There was Jerry Krause, the Bulls’ general manager, joyous perhaps less from the win than from the fact that the players were treating him like one of the guys. A humorless man who lived for his job, Krause was the object of the anger some of the players felt toward the Bulls over money. Overweight and sensitive about it, Krause had been the kind of kid who’d had trouble making friends. But here were the guys, his guys, yelling out to him just as if he were one of them.
“Getting laid tonight, Jerry?” came the shouts. Manly stuff, guy talk. “Gettin’ any, Jerry?” said one player as Krause’s devoted wife, Thelma, stood by.
“You know it,” Krause said happily.
“Pax, Pax,” Perdue chimed in. “What was it? About $100,000 per shot? Like a cash register. $1.1, 1.2, 1.3…”
Owner Jerry Reinsdorf, nearby, could only laugh. John Paxson, the veteran with the all-American-boy looks, one of the lowest-paid starters in the league, had made five straight baskets down the stretch in the final game. Every time the Lakers had threatened, there was Paxson to take the big shot. And now his contract was up. “What were those shots worth, Pax?” bubbled Perdue. “Just going for the new deal?”
And then there was Jordan. Jackson knew that was a smile that wouldn’t wipe off. The crying was done; it had come, unexpectedly and touchingly, in the locker room right after the game, i
n a huge release. He was the star who couldn’t win, they had said all these years, and now not only had his team won, but he had too in the biggest way, the way he’d always dreamed it would be: He was the Most Valuable Player of the series, chosen unanimously. One of the eleven electors had all but refused the ballot, saying, “Who else could it be?” And Jordan had done it against his archrival Magic Johnson, who had been held up by basketball purists as the exemplar of all that Jordan wasn’t: a great passer, a great teammate, a winner. Well, they couldn’t say that anymore.
First they prayed. After rushing into the locker room, the Bulls gathered in a circle for the Lord’s Prayer, and then popped champagne bottles while looking for beer to slug down. Jordan collapsed into his seat for the TV cameras, but it was all too much. His head fell into the lap of his wife, Juanita, and he sobbed. His dad, James, who had never stopped telling him that he’d get to this moment, massaged his neck. But Jordan couldn’t stop. His body trembled and he tried to wipe away the tears of joy, of relief, of promise fulfilled at last. His stomach ached and his breath was short. He’d never felt better. Better than in college when he was a freshman and his North Carolina team won the NCAA title. That one was too easy. This one was a struggle, against odds and doubters for seven seasons, and now it was over. He sucked down champagne like a baby sucking on a bottle. He cried and he wouldn’t sleep. He was feeling pure, unrestrained joy.
The morning after that final victory, Jordan clutched the championship trophy like a long-lost friend. He wouldn’t put it down, and everyone saw him walk off the plane with it. He slept with it all the way back to Chicago and he wouldn’t let it get farther than five feet away from him on the team bus. It was the symbol of the struggle and it had to stay close, just in case anyone still questioned him.
Jackson saw all of this as they assembled before him this night. They had flown back to Chicago, where they were met at the airport by a few hundred fans, and the players went right up to the fence so they could touch one another, to form the kind of bond they enjoyed in the raucous Chicago Stadium. And they had gone to Grant Park in the city’s heart to give their hearts to the city. They had formed a short motorcade and the fans reached out just to touch them as if they were holy men, and Paxson waved and the hands were grabbing, clutching all over until his wife drew their two sons in close together because the hands were everywhere. And then they had gone up on stage and hundreds of thousands cheered and rained gratitude down on their every word.
And they hadn’t come down yet, nor slept much, buoyed as they were by the affection and exuberance, until they were standing there before Jackson for the last time after this magic carpet ride of a basketball season. This would be the last team party, for the players and staff and management only, before they would head their separate ways for the summer. Jackson had asked his players to get together once more as a group, twelve men of various faiths and faculties. They had endured much this season. They had lived together since last October, sharing sweat and glory, sometimes as compatible as a roomful of alley cats, as distant as former lovers. But they had grown with one another, accepting each other’s faults and sharing in each other’s successes. None had ever come this far before, and from the lonesome kid, Scott Williams, to the proud loner, Cartwright, their eyes reflected their relief and glee. Jackson didn’t want it ever to end for them.
“You should know that many championship teams don’t come back,” Jackson started out, the buzz of excitement quieting down for a while. “This is a business. I’d like to have all of you back, but it doesn’t always happen. But this is something special you have shared and which you’ll never forget. This will be yours forever and it will always be a bond that will keep you together. I want to thank you all personally for this season. Now, get back to the party.”
Who could have imagined, only one year earlier, that there’d be this party, this joy, this togetherness on this night?
Spring 1990
MICHAEL JORDAN SURVEYED HIS CREW AND GOT THAT SINKING feeling.
It was just before 11:00 A.M. on May 24, 1990, two days after the Bulls had fallen behind the Detroit Pistons two games to none in the Eastern Conference finals. The city of Chicago was awash in spring—all two hours of it, as the old-time residents like to say—but Jordan wasn’t feeling very sunny. He didn’t even feel like playing golf, which friends would say meant he was near death.
The Bulls had gathered for practice at the Deerfield Multiplex, a tony health club about thirty-five miles north of Chicago, to try to get themselves back into the series. Jordan’s back hurt, as did his hip, shoulder, wrist, and thigh, thanks to a two-on-one body slam in Game 1 courtesy of Dennis Rodman and John Salley. But his back didn’t hurt nearly as much as his pride or his competitiveness, for the Bulls were being soundly whipped by the Pistons, and Jordan was growing desperately angry and frustrated.
“I looked over and saw Horace [Grant] and Scottie [Pippen] screwing around, joking and messing up,” Jordan told an acquaintance later. “They’ve got the talent, but they don’t take it seriously. And the rookies were together, as usual. They’ve got no idea what it’s all about. The white guys [John Paxson and Ed Nealy], they work hard, but they don’t have the talent. And the rest of them? Who knows what to expect? They’re not good for much of anything.”
It was a burden Michael Jordan felt he had to bear. The weight of the entire team was on his tired shoulders.
The Pistons had taken the first two games by 86–77 and 102–93, and Detroit’s defense had put the Bulls’ fast break in neutral: The Bulls had failed to shoot better than 41 percent in either game. Jordan himself had averaged only 27 points, stubbornly going 17 for 43. No team defensed Jordan better than the Pistons, yet he refused to admit that they gave him a hard time, so he played into their hands by attacking the basket right where their collapsing defensive schemes were expecting him. The coaches would look on in exasperation as Jordan drove toward the basket—“the citadel,” assistant coach John Bach liked to call it—like a lone infantryman attacking a fortified bunker. Too often there was no escape.
Although Detroit’s so-called Jordan rules of defense were effective, the Bulls coaches also believed the Pistons had succeeded in pulling a great psychological scam on the referees. It had been a two-part plan. The first step was a series of selectively edited tapes, sent to the league a few years earlier, which purported to show bad fouls being called on defenders despite little contact with Jordan. The Pistons said they weren’t even being allowed to defense him. “Ever since then, the foul calls started decreasing,” Jordan noted, “and not only those against Detroit.”
Step two was the public campaign. The Pistons advertised their “Jordan rules” as some secret defense that only they could deploy to stop Jordan. These secrets were merely a series of funneling defenses that channeled Jordan toward the crowded middle, but Detroit players and coaches talked about them as if they had been devised by the Pentagon. “You hear about them often enough—and the referees hear it, too—and you start to think they have something different,” said Bach. “It has an effect and suddenly people think they aren’t fouling Michael even when they are.”
It only added to Jordan’s frustration with Detroit.
At halftime of Game 2, with the Bulls trailing 53–38, Jordan walked into the quiet locker room, kicked over a chair, and yelled, “We’re playing like a bunch of pussies!” Afterward, he refused to speak to reporters, boarded the bus, and sat in stony silence all the way home. He continued his silence—other than a few sharp postgame statements—for the next week. He would not comment on his teammates. “I’ll let them stand up and take responsibility for themselves,” he told a friend.
Jordan had really believed that the Bulls could defeat Detroit this time. Of course, there was no evidence to suggest it could happen, since the Pistons had knocked the Bulls out of the playoffs the previous two seasons and had taken fourteen of the last seventeen regular-season games between them. But hadn’t
there been similar odds in 1989 when the Bulls had faced Cleveland in the playoffs? The Cavaliers had won fifty-seven games that season to the Bulls’ forty-seven, and they were 6–0 against the Bulls, even winning the last game of the regular season despite resting their starters while the Bulls played theirs. The Bulls’ chances were as bleak as Chicago in February.
Jordan promised that the Bulls would win the Cleveland series anyway.
Playing point guard, Jordan averaged 39.8 points, 8.2 assists, and 5.8 rebounds in the five games. And with time expiring in Game 5, he hit a hanging jumper to give the Bulls a 1-point victory. The moment became known in Chicago sports history as “the shot,” ranking with Jordan’s other “shot” in the 1982 NCAA tournament, a twenty-foot jumper that gave North Carolina a last-second victory over Georgetown. It also sent the Cavaliers plummeting; over the next two seasons, they would not defeat the Bulls once.
The playoffs had become Jordan’s stage. He was Bob Hope and Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger and Frank Sinatra. His play transcended the game. It was a sweet melody received with a grand ovation. Others jumped as high and almost everyone slammed the ball, but Jordan did it with a style and a smile and a flash and a wink, and he did it best in the postseason.
“There’s always been the feeling on this team,” Bach had said after that Cavaliers series, “that if we got to the Finals, Michael would figure out some way to win it. He’s the greatest competitor I’ve ever seen and then he goes to still another level in the big games.”