by Sam Smith
“Right, Dad,” Jordan agreed.
Michael Jordan returned to his team. The dam of silence was swept away by a flood of hope. Jordan was joking on the team bus as it traveled to the Palace, and in the locker room, as if nothing had happened the last two weeks. He made fun of Pippen’s shoes and Grant’s after-shave lotion. It smelled like a lawn, Jordan said, one just fertilized. They asked Jordan where he’d left his comb. The scene seemed to relax everyone, and it was a calm, outwardly confident Bulls team that readied for the game. This was all Jordan had asked for, a chance. This was a chance to get to the Finals. Let the better team win. Throw it all out there and go on or go home. It was the farthest one of his teams ever had gone.
But the Bulls would go no farther. As Jordan feared, even suspected, his teammates disappeared. Paxson tried, but couldn’t go. His ankle was too sore and swollen, and he would need surgery in a week. Hodges, rusty from months of virtual inactivity, couldn’t sustain his effort for two games and shot 3 for 13, 2 for 12 on three-pointers. His big, toothy smile was gone and he’d soon be contemplating his feet.
It wasn’t much of a game. The Pistons hit 9 straight shots in the second quarter while the Bulls went 2 of 12. The score was 48–33 at halftime and the game was over. The score was 61–39 in the third quarter, and even though the Bulls closed the gap to 10 after three quarters, they never had a chance.
Scottie Pippen was 1 of 10 for 2 points. Stricken by a migraine headache, he was blinking his eyes madly before the game and putting an ice pack on his head during time-outs. He played forty-two minutes, but could barely distinguish his teammates from the Pistons. He broke down and drowned himself in tears in the locker room afterward. Grant was ferocious on the boards, pulling down more offensive rebounds than the entire Detroit team and grabbing a game-high 14 overall, but he shot 3 of 17. Cartwright had worn down and would need knee surgery, and Hodges also would go under the knife. The rookies were deadly—B. J. Armstrong flew out of control in front of the Detroit crowd and was 1 of 8. The Pistons’ bench outscored the Bulls’ 33–21, as Mark Aguirre had 15 points and 10 rebounds and John Salley had 14 points. Thomas was brilliant in orchestrating the Pistons’ break with 21 points and 11 assists. “They may have the best player, but we have the better team,” noted Laimbeer, the mockery in his voice scratching at Chicagoans like fingernails on a chalkboard.
Jordan was left to consider the 93–74 loss. He agreed Detroit was better. The Bulls had to get better. He wasn’t the general manager, but if he were … It was obvious the team needed veterans. But he wasn’t just slapping at the rookies. Where was Pippen? This was the second straight year he’d vanished in the last game against the Pistons; he’d received a concussion in the first minute of the final conference playoff game in 1989. Were he and his buddy, Grant, serious enough? Paxson had broken down and the other guys hadn’t done much. Jordan had scored 31 points, 21 more than anyone else, but he’d also attempted 27 shots. And many were wondering how the Bulls were ever going to win if he was to continue to shoot at that pace.
As for Jordan, he believed he had to continue at that pace. Otherwise, who would?
Just before he stepped from the postgame podium and onto the golf courses of America, Jordan offered one final thought: “We have to do some things. We need to make some changes.”
Summer 1990
JERRY REINSDORF SAT BACK, SURROUNDED BY HIS FELLOW National Basketball Association owners, at one of their regular meetings, enjoying another wonderful day in the summer of 1990.
He was going to lose a player he would have liked to keep for his Bulls, but little setbacks like that didn’t bother Reinsdorf much; he was having too much fun being Jerry Reinsdorf.
Being Jerry Reinsdorf didn’t look like it would be worth much when he was growing up. He was just another face in the crowd at Brooklyn’s Erasmus High School, which has a reputation for producing special students. Among its graduates are actor Eli Wallach, singer Barbra Streisand, writer Bernard Malamud, playwright Betty Comden, and chess champion Bobby Fischer. And Reinsdorf, the son of lower-middle class parents, his father a sewing machine repairman, vividly remembers his high school graduation day. He was in a class of nearly 1,000 students and the school had given out literally hundreds of awards, for everything from proficiency in English and math to excellence in hall monitoring. Reinsdorf’s name hadn’t been called. He remembers walking home a long time in silence with his mother, Marion, who finally said, “Couldn’t you at least have gotten one?”
He had been just another sports-crazed kid growing up in Brooklyn, but he went on to amass a fortune in real estate after moving to Chicago, eventually selling his business, Balcor, to American Express for $53 million. By then he had fulfilled his lifelong dream of running a baseball team by leading a group that bought the Chicago White Sox. But the White Sox were a financial drain, so much so that Reinsdorf sought to buy an interest in the Chicago Bulls so he could remain in sports if he lost the team. Basketball had never thrived in Chicago, where the Stags disbanded in 1950 and then the Packers/Zephyrs moved in 1963 to become the Baltimore (now Washington) Bullets. The Bulls came along in 1966, but were averaging just over sixty-three hundred fans per game in 1984 when Reinsdorf began negotiations. George Steinbrenner, then the New York Yankees’ principal owner, was a Bulls part-owner then and, by chance, mentioned to Reinsdorf that he was embarrassed by the team and wanted to get out. Reinsdorf said he wanted in, but didn’t say why. A deal was quickly put together; Reinsdorf would acquire more than half the team’s stock for about $9 million. He then watched as NBA revenues soared, aided in no small part by one player, Michael Jordan, who was just joining the Bulls when Reinsdorf bought in. Chicago Stadium was now a complete and constant sellout, and, all in all, Reinsdorf was feeling pretty good.
Ed Nealy, the player the Bulls were about to lose, was a thirty-year-old barrel-chested forward from Kansas who had joined the team for a second go-round before the opening of the 1989–90 season. He was one of those players the newspapers liked to call “much traveled.” Coaches called him “smart.” Both were euphemisms for Nealy’s pokiness, his inability to jump very well, and the fact that he was rarely in demand. But he’d had a steadying influence on the Bulls, even a motivating one, for his teammates could look at Nealy and see what hard work could do for a player. Here was a guy with so little talent, yet he was still around after seven years in the NBA. It was tempting to look at him and think, “If he can play seven years, I ought to be able to play until I’m forty,” but it wasn’t as easy as that, as most would eventually learn. Nealy didn’t cruise the clubs at night and he was always the first one to practice or to work out in the weight room. He never complained when he didn’t play and he rarely shot when he did. Playing time and shots: Even more than money, they are the pro basketball player’s measures of self-worth. Nealy didn’t make an issue of either, so he was a favorite of both management and his teammates. And the Chicago fans took to Nealy because he personified their city—hardworking and blue collar (even though tickets had become so expensive that only the whitest of collars could afford them, assuming they could even find a ticket to buy).
Yes, he worked hard. He set screens, boxed out, took on the strongest inside player. He did the basketball dirty work, even if his limited talent didn’t allow him to do it often enough. Still, he had had a 9-rebound, 9-point game in the playoffs against Philadelphia as the Bulls won without Scottie Pippen, who was home after the death of his father. Nealy took several rebounds away from Charles Barkley in the fourth quarter and was chosen player of the game by the CBS broadcasters.
He’d come to Chicago that season unwanted. The Bulls had traded him to Phoenix the previous season for Craig Hodges, but even Suns coach Cotton Fitzsimmons, who had originally drafted Nealy as the 166th pick in 1982 for Kansas City, had no use for him. Fitzsimmons promised to find Nealy a spot in the NBA, and the Bulls agreed to take him back as a twelfth man. He played in little more than half the regular-seas
on games, earning about $250,000, so the Bulls were stunned when he rejected their two-year offer of $400,000 per year; Nealy said he could get almost $700,000 per year for three years. Bulls coach Phil Jackson argued that the team should keep Nealy, but he understood it was impossible at that cost.
Reinsdorf was laughing about the Nealy offer and shaking his head when he turned to Phoenix president Jerry Colangelo. “Somebody’s going to give Ed Nealy seven hundred thousand dollars,” Reinsdorf said. “Jerry, who’d do something that stupid?”
Colangelo mumbled something about not knowing. The next day, Phoenix announced it had signed Ed Nealy for three seasons.
Losing Nealy posed a problem for the Bulls. They were a young team, and Michael Jordan didn’t think young teams won titles. Jordan made that clear following their seventh-game loss to the Pistons in the 1990 playoffs. Rookie guard B. J. Armstrong shot 10 for 38 and averaged 4.4 points in fifteen minutes per game in the series, and rookie forward Stacey King went 9 for 28 and averaged 5 points in his fifteen minutes per game. Jordan had reserved much of his anger for King, screaming at him to rebound and “hit somebody” several times. “Management knows where we can improve,” said Jordan. “And I don’t think they’ll be looking at the draft.”
Jordan respected Nealy, even if he doubted his overall athletic talent, for Nealy was the basketball version of rolling up your sleeves, spitting on your hands, and going to work. Jordan would always go to Nealy’s side of the court when they were playing together, no matter where Jordan was supposed to be in that particular set. “He’s the only one who’ll set a good pick,” Jordan said. “He’s a tough guy.”
That kind of respect is hard to earn from Jordan, who can be as cold and demanding as a landlord on the last day of the month. Just ask Brad Sellers, whom Jordan regularly derided for his soft play and eventually helped evict from the team. In 1987, the Bulls drafted Sellers, a seven-footer from Ohio State who was projected as a small forward. The obvious pick appeared to be Duke guard Johnny Dawkins, but the Bulls decided they needed a small forward since they were getting rid of Orlando Woolridge and had already arranged a deal to get point guard Steve Colter from Portland. And the Bulls were, to some extent, drafting Sellers to accommodate Jordan: “They liked Sellers because you couldn’t leave with your three [small forward] to double on Michael because Brad could hit the jumper,” Jackson explained.
But Jordan believed that Dawkins would be the choice, and he had told Dawkins so in pickup games they’d played in North Carolina before the draft. So when the Bulls skipped Dawkins for Sellers, Jordan felt both betrayed and embarrassed. He felt the team made him look like a fool, and he took it out on Colter, a quiet kid from New Mexico, and later on Sellers, likewise sensitive and uncertain about how to respond to a superstar. Jordan’s famous tongue became a whip for these plowhorse players, as he saw them. Sellers would eventually break under the strain of Jordan’s attacks, the constant derision during practice, and the physical attacks when Jordan had him in his sights coming downcourt in practice, and Sellers’s game would plummet to such depths that he was out of the NBA by the 1990–91 season.
Jordan can be demanding on the court, and it’s always been his habit to wave off the point guard to get the ball. That’s one reason Paxson had been the most successful point guard to play with Jordan; Paxson isn’t a creator. Unlike most point guards, who need the ball to make plays and set up teammates, Paxson feeds off creative players like Jordan and Pippen. He’s more comfortable passing the ball upcourt and then spotting up for a jump shot. Not so Colter—or most point guards, for that matter. But Jordan kept running Colter off the ball, demanding the ball in every crucial situation, and criticizing him whenever he’d made a mistake.
It wasn’t always Jordan’s fault, since his coaches, Kevin Loughery, Stan Albeck, and Doug Collins, all permitted Jordan to stay back to pick up the ball in the backcourt and then run the offense. Jackson tried to change that and Jordan balked much of the 1989–90 season, but Jackson would continue to work on him for the 1990–91 season. He knew what a great weapon Jordan would be for the Bulls if he would just take off downcourt, because the defense would have to follow him and leave the court clearer for the ball handler to advance the ball.
Colter wasn’t strong enough to stand up to Jordan; few Bulls ever have been. It’s one reason some people felt the Bulls should have pursued Danny Ainge after the 1989–90 season, when the feisty point guard was being made available by Sacramento. The Bulls were looking for a scorer for their second team, but they also needed someone to stand up to Jordan when he routinely ordered his teammates out of the way late in the game. “He’ll tell Michael to fuck off when he starts screaming for the ball,” said assistant coach John Bach at the time. “And sometimes we need that.”
Another Bull who appeared to be wilting under Jordan’s heat was Will Perdue. “You’ve got to get Michael’s respect to do well on the Bulls,” said John Paxson. “Will had trouble.”
“I never really understood,” admitted Perdue. “I’ll always set a screen for him when I’m in there and I know no one else but Ed [Nealy] would. I know Bill [Cartwright] would never do it. But I know Michael hated me and Bill.”
Perdue came out of Vanderbilt, known perhaps more for his size-22 shoes than his game. Although he was Southeastern Conference Player of the Year in 1988, he had yet to find a role in the pros. He was slow afoot, although he had a good passing touch and could score. But he often shrank back from contact, which doomed him almost immediately as a pro center. The lane in pro basketball is an area Bach appropriately describes as “an alligator wrestling pond.” All sorts of holding, pushing, grabbing, and clawing is allowed among men who are seven feet tall and weigh more than 250 pounds. The center has to establish his position and then fight to keep it. Perdue often backed away from combat. The daily beatings he took in practice from Bill Cartwright, whose flying elbows had already given Perdue a cauliflower left ear, made him instinctively wary. To many on the team, it didn’t even look as if he enjoyed basketball. He appeared to be a big kid who was told he had to play basketball, so he did. That almost was the case, although Perdue had come to appreciate the game for what it could do for him, having been a so-so football player growing up in Florida, where football is king. Finally, he took up basketball at age thirteen.
“I thought, ‘Hey, I can do this. This might get me something,’” Perdue recalls about his introduction to the game. And maybe that was enough for him. He refused to go to the pro summer league after his unsuccessful first season, souring some among the Bulls on his work habits. He’d been described as looking like a character from the painting American Gothic and he seemed to have about as much movement. Some of his teammates called him “Shytown.”
Jordan’s dislike for Perdue was palpable. He called him “Will Vanderbilt.” “He doesn’t deserve to be named after a Big Ten school,” Jordan would explain. Jordan rarely talked to the big center, whom general manager Jerry Krause had projected as the team’s pivot player of the 1990s. By Perdue’s second season, it was clear that Krause had over-stated Perdue’s potential. “If Bill Cartwright plays until he’s fifty, Will Perdue will still be his backup,” Bach once told Krause. Krause would grow angry at such observations, but Perdue never did much to change anyone’s feelings.
It didn’t help that Perdue was backup to one of the most respected players on the Bulls (if not by Jordan), Bill Cartwright.
“Bill’s always the one we look to when things aren’t going right on the floor or if there’s a problem in the locker room,” said guard B.J. Armstrong. “That’s just the way it is.”
It was Cartwright who organized players to buy some gag gifts for the coaches at a team party around Christmastime, one that Jordan didn’t attend. It was the first time in twenty years in the NBA, Bach remarked, that he’d seen players buy anything for the coaches.
Cartwright admired Jordan’s talent and saw him as one of the great individual players ever, an art
ist and a genius of the hardwood, a man who could spin the straw of effort into the gold of brilliance. Cartwright said he respected that, even if he didn’t always care for Jordan’s habits. Jordan usually worked hard in practice, but sometimes so effectively that Bulls’ practices became disorganized because no one could stop or guard him. It was one reflection of the eternal Bulls problem: Jordan so focused on what he could do that he lost sight of the team’s goal in practicing. Journeyman Charles Davis stayed on the team much of one season because he gave Jordan trouble in practice, thus enabling the coaches to conduct some reasonably competitive scrimmages.
But the trouble between Jordan and Cartwright ran deeper than most observers realized. Much of it stemmed from the Bulls’ acquisition of Cartwright in a trade for Charles Oakley, Jordan’s last good friend on the team. Cartwright wasn’t a great rebounder or shot blocker, but he was still a smart, effective center, and in the 1991 playoffs Jordan finally offered him some grudging credit. Adlai Stevenson, talking about journalists, had once said that they do not live by words alone, although sometimes they have to eat them. Jordan would chow down heavily on his words about Cartwright, but he wouldn’t sit at the table alone. “You guys,” Jordan told reporters when asked whether he regretted the negative remarks he’d made about the trade for Cartwright, “didn’t know either.”
One player Jordan did want on his team was Walter Davis, the high-scoring sixth man for Denver. Davis had been something of an idol for Jordan, who hadn’t been very highly sought after in high school. The five-foot-ten-inch Jordan hadn’t made the varsity at Laney High School in Wilmington, North Carolina, as a sophomore. He started to gain some recognition after his junior year at the meat-market summer camps where college coaches do their scouting. Jordan was interested in UCLA, but he didn’t hear from the school. He thought about North Carolina State because of David Thompson, who was to kids then what Jordan is now: a high-flying basketball magician who could excite the crowd with his daring moves. But Jordan eventually decided on the University of North Carolina, whose symbol was Davis. Where Thompson represented the flamboyance of State, Davis’s professionalism and cool demeanor reflected the integrity of UNC. Jordan spoke of Davis often when he first arrived in Chicago, although he stopped dropping his name after Davis’s flings with cocaine. But one thing Jordan learned at North Carolina was loyalty. Coach Dean Smith always told his players to stand up for their own, and Jordan was always trying to get the Bulls to trade for someone from his alma mater.