by Sam Smith
“Phil’s always playing with your head,” said Craig Hodges.
In his first season, Jackson started giving books to players at the start of the team’s annual two-week November road trip. This season he would give the novel Glitz to high-priced, fast-talking Stacey King, Tar Baby to rookie Scott Williams, and The Great Santini to Will Perdue. Michael Jordan received Song of Solomon and the aging Bill Cartwright got Things Fall Apart. Jackson considers himself a guide for these young men as well as a coach, and given the long duration of the NBA year, he tries to break up the routine. That’s why the team took a bus trip from Seattle to Portland, instead of flying, because Jackson thought they’d enjoy the scenery. Instead, they all slept. He’d occasionally administer psychological tests during bus and plane trips, although most of the players would invariably scribble aimlessly while listening to their headphones. Jackson sometimes wondered if he could reach a generation that didn’t understand how Thoreau could live by a pond but not own water skis or snorkeling equipment. The players often considered Jackson too didactic.
“I have to spend a lot of time thinking about people,” says Jackson. “I remember my dad thinking in terms of the congregation, and it was the pastor’s responsibility to remember everyone, sort of like a shepherd with his flock, and I believe that about a team. You can’t think of them as just players for a coach, but you have to think of them as a group and relate to them that way, even without words. Sometimes just a wink or a pat on the shoulder will do it.
“Basketball is a very fragile thing because as coaches we can do everything and prepare everybody and have everyone physically ready and still if there’s not the group reflex and reaction at the right moment, if you don’t have that oneness of the group, it starts to be five starters on the floor. That bond, that unity, is a very fragile thing. It’s really almost something holy, which is where the word whole comes from in a sense. So you’ve always got to try to do things to break down the routine.”
But Jackson wasn’t a goofy innocent. He could make backs straighten and stiffen with his messages.
Like his game films. After the Bulls had fallen behind two games to none in the 1990 playoffs against Detroit, Jackson decided he’d edit the game film himself for the next day’s meeting. First there was Joe Dumars slashing by Jordan for a basket. Then came a snippet from the movie The Wizard of Oz, with the Tin Man talking about not having a heart. The players laughed loudly. Then Bill Laimbeer was drifting off a screen for an easy lay-up past Scottie Pippen, followed by the Scarecrow pining for a brain. More laughing, but not as much, and finally Isiah Thomas drove down the lane untouched past John Paxson, Bill Cartwright, and Horace Grant, and the Cowardly Lion was wishing for courage. There were still some giggles.
“He’s telling us we’ve got no heart, no courage, and no brains,” snapped Paxson to a suddenly deathly quiet room.
“One of my functions, as I see it, is to try to enlarge their lives in an intellectual-athletic combination,” says Jackson. “This is a human behavioral laboratory, but not like white rats and lab research. You know, ideas lead to buildings and bridges. I like to think about these people and visualize their being better players through schemes, and how to encourage and motivate them through bringing them to look at film and game critiques. If you spend time wishing you had other players and scheming to get rid of them or not being loyal, either you end up hating them or they end up hating you, and that cannot be productive.
“I love the action of the game, the stimulation of a competitive event and being thrust into a situation where a person has to survive by making inituitive decisions, sort of riding on the edge like a surfer,” says Jackson. “To make the right decisions at the right time and respond to competitive pressures and needs is a tremendous feeling. I always looked at basketball as a temporary thing, but that macho man-to-man aspect and the group interaction almost makes it a form of a higher plane. It takes you out of the mundane space of life, and sometimes I wish that we could play in a gym without any people and try to play the perfect game where you don’t make any mistakes and maybe if there’s a mistake it’s of omission, not commission, and everything is done at the right moment, at the right time, and each decision is the right one and everyone can ride that decision-making wave.”
As the team headed out west for a seven-game trip, Reinsdorf was questioning everyone’s decisions. He had been sure that with the team’s off-season pickups, the Bulls had a chance to win a title this year, yet they were playing miserably. So he called Jackson on the road to ask what was wrong.
“My teams always are slow-starting teams,” Jackson explained to Reinsdorf. “Even in the CBA. I like to put guys out there and let them find their roles, let them find out how they’ll react in times of stress, leave them on the floor sometimes to see what they’ll do in situations. I like them to be able to find their space out there.”
Jackson had told the players as much in meetings. He suggested he might even experiment with them, in a sense, leaving them out on the floor and in jeopardy in tough situations. He might not throw them a lifeline time-out to see how they could get through. It would build the kind of bond he sought. His assistant coaches weren’t so sure. Bach, at times, thought Jackson a little strange, and Winter had his doubts, too.
Despite his assurances, even Jackson was getting a little concerned; not only was the team feeling the weight of great expectations, but there were outside factors as well. Both Paxson and Cartwright would be free agents after the season, and the Bulls had seen fit to offer neither a secure deal. They’d offered Cartwright a one-year extension at $1.5 million, his 1990–91 salary, which he’d rejected. Two years before, when the Bulls had acquired Cartwright, the coaches had agreed he’d be good for two solid seasons, and then perhaps one more, before, as Bach likes to put it, “he’d be an elephant looking for a graveyard.” But Cartwright had surprised them all. The surgery on both knees in the off-season had gone well, and he was moving better than at any time in the past two seasons. And Perdue looked as if he would never be able to provide more than a few backup minutes.
As for Paxson, the Bulls didn’t plan to ask him back. It was agreed that now that he was thirty his skills would soon start slipping, and Krause wanted Armstrong to be the starter by the end of the 1990–91 season. Also, the team needed the money that they might have given Paxson to pay Kukoc. And should they get Kukoc, Paxson would easily be expendable. Reinsdorf had given Paxson a $200,000 bonus the previous season, recognizing that at $320,000 he was vastly underpaid for a starting point guard. He liked Paxson and was willing to go for a new deal, but his basketball people, especially Krause, insisted against it. Reinsdorf would let them decide. And then there was Pippen, searching for a new contract and upset at being the sixth-highest-paid player on the team.
The biggest issue, though, remained Jackson’s attempt to weave Jordan into a coordinated, egalitarian team game and still win. He needed the team to win a game that Jordan didn’t dominate.
The Bulls opened the trip in Salt Lake City against a backdrop of natural splendor and spiritual reminders, the Mormon church and the spectacular Wasatch range dominating the area. Winter always was on the doorstep here, and the craggy mountains showed a carpet of snow. The two-week November trip, the longest of the season, often began here and branded on the team a reminder that it was just the beginning of a long, dreary season. But the Bulls would be getting a break. The Jazz had been to Japan for a two-game opening set with the Phoenix Suns that had left coach Jerry Sloan feeling as if they were on their fiftieth game of the season instead of the fifth. His team was slumping badly already and he’d thrown the owner out of the locker room in a fit of rage not long after the team’s return. He lamented to the Bulls coaches before the game that he was certain to be fired soon. Sloan no longer delighted in defeating the Bulls as he once did, having been fired by them during the 1981–82 season after a reasonably successful run as coach. He was, perhaps, the franchise’s biggest star bef
ore Jordan, and the only player ever to have his number retired. His ferocious approach to the game had made him a success as a player, but it seemed to doom him as a coach: He had once thrown a chair at one of his players, Larry Kenon, for being too lethargic on the court. He’d hooked on as an assistant with the Jazz and eventually became head coach when Frank Layden stepped down. His teams had great success against the Bulls with their halfcourt power game behind Karl Malone.
It was an excruciating game. Both were good shooting teams—Utah had led the league the previous season at 50.5 percent to the Bulls’ 49.8 percent—but neither team would shoot even 40 percent on this night as the game slowed and became a wrestling match. Utah was one of the toughest teams in the league, as befitted Sloan’s rugged image. Early in the game, Horace Grant, who’d started wearing prescription goggles in the preseason to correct a vision problem, tossed the goggles away; Karl Malone kept pushing them off and then going up for a rebound while Grant fumbled helplessly to get them back on straight. “If he killed someone on the court I wonder whether they’d call a foul,” Grant moaned afterward.
But it was a happy locker room after Jordan hit a long fallaway jumper at the buzzer to give the Bulls an 84–82 win, once again bailing the Bulls out on a night when the team was faltering. Pippen and Grant combined to shoot 5 for 25, but Paxson was solid as usual, if not spectacular, and had come through with a late jumper that had tied the score and set up Jordan’s heroics. Jazz owner Larry Miller also remembered a game a year earlier in which Paxson had scored 27, although the Jazz scored 7 points in the last 40 seconds to win by 1.
“You shot the ball well,” said Miller, who was bouncing around the Bulls’ locker room to the surprise of the players.
“You know, I’m a free agent,” Paxson responded quickly.
The exchange left Paxson in a gregarious mood, and later in the hotel lounge he was explaining how he was going to change his uniform number.
“I’m getting number ninety-nine,” he cried. “Then maybe I won’t get called for so many fouls because the refs won’t be able to figure out how to flash nine-nine.”
Paxson laughed, but his reputation with the referees was no laughing matter to him. He is slower than many of the guards he faces, so he often gets beaten and ends up fouling. His reputation for being a slow player who doesn’t jump well had created an attitude among many referees that if there is contact, it was initiated by Paxson. And it doesn’t help that Paxson has been considered a marginal player throughout most of his career.
Because there is so much improper contact in the NBA, referees tend to make their calls on the fouls that have some impact on the game. But as in every other aspect of the NBA, a star system exists. Players like Jordan are called for violations less often than players like Paxson, who are called for fouls less often than rookies. Understandably, Paxson resents being considered just a step up from rookies.
During one game, referee Hue Hollins tooted his whistle and Jordan, thinking it was on him, spun around. “Don’t worry,” Hollins said, “I’m not going to make the call on you, Michael.” Whereupon he turned around and shouted: “Five [Paxson], hold.”
“You get tired of all this star stuff,” says Paxson. “I know I can play pretty good defense, and then if I’m a step to the side it’s a call. I know I ought to keep my mouth shut, but when you’re out there those things bother you.” And more often than not, Paxson complicates the situation by loudly pleading his case.
“He’s got a reputation for challenging the referees,” notes Jackson, “and they don’t like it. So he probably needs to take the calls and live with it.”
But were Paxson to do that, he likely wouldn’t survive in the NBA. In fact, had he ever done that in his life, he wouldn’t even be in the NBA.
Even John Paxson doesn’t really know where his toughness comes from. But it’s there, a hard shell that allows him to bounce off the floor and play with injuries that would put other players out for a week. His stubbornness has defined his career; it made him an NBA player. Paxson’s father, Jim senior, played in the NBA for a few seasons back in the 1950s; he was 6-6, pretty big in those days, and did reasonably well, averaging almost 10 points per game for the Cincinnati Royals, the fourth-best scorer on the team behind Clyde Lovellette, Jack Twyman, and Maurice Stokes, all three All-Stars.
But playing in the NBA didn’t mean much money or fame then. Al Bianchi, then playing for Syracuse, remembers trips to Fort Wayne in which the train didn’t go through downtown, so they’d have to get off thirty miles north of the city. Someone would arrange for teenagers to pick them up in four or five cars, and the team would ride into town with the kids and reward them with a few bucks and some tickets. There were eight teams in the league and nobody counted on the future.
And so when Jim junior was bom, Jim senior had decisions to make. He didn’t know then that his oldest son would go on to break his basketball records at the University of Dayton and become a star NBA player at Portland, the first player in team history to score more than 10,000 points, before finishing his career with the Boston Celtics. At the time, his wife was having medical problems and he didn’t want to be on the road, so he quit after two seasons and became an insurance agent.
While many NBA players grew up with just one parent and others struggled mightily, Paxson lived a simple middle-class suburban life in Ohio: neat house with a fence around it, kids, church, and a basketball hoop. The players often refer to Paxson as “the nine-to-five pro” because of his businesslike life-style. While many of the players go to nightclubs, even when the team’s at home, Paxson can more often be found wheeling his son around a mall. On the road, if he can’t find some old friend from Notre Dame, he delights in room service and a TV movie. Even his groupies are wholesome: When Paxson is trailing along in Jordan’s wake, it’s the eleven- and twelve-year-olds who are usually screaming for his autograph. “At least someone notices,” he says.
His thin, fine brown hair flops down Prince Valiant style and his blue eyes are soft and inviting. He shaved his mustache a few years back, and now his upper lip forms a slight snarl when he smiles. But he is all-American all the way, from his reliable backyard jumper to his high school sweetheart of a wife, whom he used to take on hayrides, to two sons for whom the word moppets was practically invented.
Growing up, John was the runt of the family, three years younger and smaller than his brother Jim. Because his birthday fell just before his school’s enrollment, he was always one of the youngest and smallest kids in class, so he didn’t make the teams. But his parents decided to let him repeat the eighth grade. He went to a small military school in Rolling Prairie, Indiana, and when he returned to the Dayton school system he found himself playing against kids his size. He became a top player at Archbishop Alter High School in Kettering, Ohio. “I never would have become a pro player if I hadn’t done that,” he insists.
Paxson played his college ball at Notre Dame, where he averaged 17.7 points per game as a senior and made some second-unit all-American teams (he was a first-team academic all-American) and was chosen in the first round of the NBA draft by the San Antonio Spurs. But he never got much of a chance to play; George Gervin and Johnny Moore were already there, and John Lucas and Alvin Robertson were brought in during his first two seasons. The Bulls picked him up as a free agent before the start of the 1985–86 season, but he would remain haunted by the team’s own doubts about his abilities.
First he would back up Kyle Macy, and then Steve Colter, before finishing the 1986–87 season as a starter with an 11.3 scoring average, his career best. But then the Bulls brought in Sedale Threatt and he started, then Rory Sparrow and he started, then Sam Vincent and he started, then Craig Hodges and he started. But when the 1989–90 season opened, Paxson was starting, and he would continue to do so throughout the season. By the start of the 1990–91 season, the team was privately talking about starting B.J. Armstrong, but they stuck with Paxson. Hodges was now down to fifth guar
d, and all the others were long gone.
“It is satisfying to know,” Paxson was saying early in the 1990–91 season, “that after all these years and all these guards I’m still starting.”
Paxson is a realist; he knows that you can have a long career in the NBA by accepting your limitations and finding a role. More important, he learned better than anyone else that the only way to remain a starting point guard with the Bulls is to satisfy Jordan. The Bulls always say that to play the point opposite Jordan you have to be a great shooter; since Jordan always draws double or triple coverage, the tandem guard has to be able to hit the jumper. Paxson can do that. But so could Threatt, Macy, Vincent, Hodges, and Armstrong, and yet Jordan regularly said he most preferred playing with Paxson. The difference was that Paxson was the one who most deferred to Jordan on the court. Many wondered whether Jordan would be able to play with a great, penetrating point guard like Kevin Johnson, whom Krause always said he was trying to obtain. But Johnson needs the ball to be effective; Jordan demands to have the ball in his hands, and his corrosive glare has worn down those who have tried to ignore him. And Paxson knows that. His first pass upcourt is usually to Jordan, and then he drops off into a spot-up shooting position, ready if called upon.
Paxson’s son, Ryan, once said to his father after watching a game on TV, “Daddy, you don’t shoot the ball too many times.”
“Get used to it, son,” Paxson answered.
But if Paxson learned how to deal with the Bulls on the court, he never did off the court, particularly during the 1989–90 and 1990–91 seasons, when he remained among the lowest-paid starting guards in the league. “I guess my big problem was I was always too realistic and dwelled on what I couldn’t do rather than how important I was,” said Paxson. “Other guys would say how they couldn’t be replaced. I knew I could. But so could they.” Paxson had settled for a three-year deal ending in 1991 that paid him about $330,000 per year. He negotiated it without an agent, but the Bulls proved a little too shrewd for him. They held out a carrot, saying that after he retired they’d make him a TV announcer, a possibility that seemed more and more remote as the 1990–91 season went on. And Paxson had already decided he’d like to return and work at Notre Dame in some capacity.