by Sam Smith
And it was getting to him. He’d brought his scoring average up to 13.4 in 1989–90 and his rebounding to about 8 per game, including a fierce playoff run against Detroit in which he had six straight games with 10 or more rebounds. But he also wanted to share in the offense. He felt he worked so hard that he deserved a chance. Instead, Bach prepared him an edited tape of Buck Williams’s play. Williams was not a big scorer, but a hard worker who did the dirty work inside. The message was clear to Grant: You rebound and play defense and let others run the show.
Grant had thought everything would be okay when he signed a three-year contract extension at $2 million per year after the 1989–90 season. During the 1989–90 season, he was among the lowest-paid Bulls because he was still bound by his rookie contract, which he had signed when he was a backup to Oakley. But when he became a starter, he began to believe he was underpaid, and his frustration led to a late-season demand to be traded.
Grant is perhaps the least egomaniacal of the Bulls’ players and certainly the most popular. These were traits Jackson would use later in the season, for he knew the players always would rally around Grant.
Grant offered fans little of the fake celebrity of sport and much of the earnest reward. He truly stood for what the Wheaties box suggested: hard work, loyalty, trust, support, and modesty. He has remarkably soft features, with honest brown eyes and an open smile. He’s the most likely to say what he feels and react to what he hears or sees. That was especially true as the 1990–91 season unfolded.
When Grant came to the Bulls he was something of a wild colt. The team had to hire a cook for him during his rookie season to get him to add weight, for he was eating most of his meals at fast-food restaurants. But it was the late-night menu that frustrated the team the most. He was what’s called “a runner” in the NBA, a player who hits the night spots regularly in every city. The Bulls grew anxious about Grant’s habits and eventually would trade Sedale Threatt because they believed he was poisoning both Grant and Scottie Pippen with his late-night adventures.
Grant and Pippen had a bond that appeared unbreakable. They met at the NBA draft in New York in 1987, and when both were selected by the Bulls they became friends, if only for protection. Rookies still endure hazing in the NBA, even though Bulls coach Phil Jackson curtailed the practice when he replaced Doug Collins. Rookies no longer had to carry other players’ bags, but the veterans still played pranks on the rookies, and Grant and Pippen closed ranks after the veterans charged almost $1000 in food and gifts to their rooms one night.
The two became like Castor and Pollux, the twin heroes in Greek and Roman religion; they were giants in battle on the court, and patrons of adventure afterward.
They’d call one another up to a dozen times a day, even on game days. They purchased identical Mercedes SELs, Grant’s white and Pippen’s black. They drove the same demonstration cars for the same local sponsor. They lived within a few hundred yards of one another in the same North Shore neighborhood of Chicago. They were married within weeks of each other and were each other’s best man. They both have sons (this was not planned). They bought the same breed of dog. They share the same agent and they vacation together in the summer. They went out together at every road stop, and in the Bulls’ yearbook, when Pippen was asked, “Who would you take with you if you were going to the moon?” he responded: “Horace Grant.”
But Grant was undergoing some personal changes, and while the pair remained good friends, they drifted apart somewhat. Pippen got divorced and Grant began to fear he was next. “My wife and I were having a lot of problems,” he admitted. “And a lot was my fault. I wasn’t treating people right, especially my wife.”
So with her help, Grant began a conversion to Christianity.
“I was sliding spiritually,” said Grant, who would become a regular at pregame chapel services, which are available to all NBA players before games. “I knew I had to do something, so I personally gave myself to the Lord. I realized He gave me so much, but I wasn’t really giving back to Him all that I should. He gave me this talent to play professional basketball. He could have given it to so many others, but He gave it to me. I was abusing this talent and my body and that was not what He gave it to me for. The reason was to praise His name and be a positive role model for young people.”
For Grant that meant staying home. He quit the local nightclub scene populated by several of his teammates and began staying in his room on the road and reading the Bible. Pippen’s agenda was somewhat different, so they began to spend less time together. And Grant also began to look at his friend more critically. One question in particular kept arising in Grant’s mind: “Why was Scottie trying to be so much like Michael?” he wondered.
Pippen had become closer to Jordan, moving into his private berth on the team plane along with Cliff Levingston, who’d attached himself to Jordan like a fly to glue as soon as he joined the Bulls. But Pippen also had his contract on his mind, and after his near holdout he had decided he needed to produce statistics, for that’s what the Bulls would measure him by. “They talk about winning,” said Pippen, “but if I don’t score more, they won’t pay me. I’ve got to go for statistics this year.”
Pippen would begin to imitate Jordan’s play, as Winter had noticed, thus removing opportunities for others and setting up a developing conflict with Jordan over just who should be taking the shots.
“This team has got to move the ball,” Grant told reporters in Cleveland without mentioning any names, although the message was clear to his teammates. “We’ll have a lot to learn from championship teams like Boston, the Lakers, and Detroit until we do that.”
The Bulls romped through an easy 155–127 win over the Suns on December 4. It was their sixth straight win, all by wide margins, and it left Suns coach Cotton Fitzsimmons to remark, “At least it took them longer to blow us out than their last few opponents.”
The starters sat out most of the fourth quarter, leaving the action to reserves like Craig Hodges, Will Perdue, Scott Williams, and Cliff Levingston. But Jordan’s tongue was a little too sharp after the game. He had played part of the fourth quarter with Dennis Hopson, Stacey King, and B.J. Armstrong, and he complained to Pippen, “I hate being out there with those garbagemen. They don’t get you the ball.”
Hodges overheard the exchange. Though not a great overall talent, he took pride in his role.
“Hey, I ain’t no garbage player,” he told Jordan. “I was playing in this league when you were still trying to figure out how to put your pants on.”
“Hey, I wasn’t talking about you, Hodg,” Jordan interrupted, quick to extinguish Hodges’s fire.
The tension broke, but it remained close to the surface despite the winning streak.
The Knicks were next, and this suggested another easy win. The Bulls matched up well with the Knicks. They’d knocked them out of the 1989 playoffs when the Knicks were at their best, and now the Knicks were faltering in a halfcourt game with players developed for former coach Rick Pitino’s pressing style. They had little depth, the first two players off the bench this night being rookie Jerrod Mustaf and Brian Quinnett. And it was against Mustaf that Jordan would electrify the Stadium crowd again en route to a 108–98 Bulls victory.
Gerald Wilkins posted Jordan up for a jump shot, which usually infuriates Jordan. He hates to be isolated for a score and almost always comes back to go one-on-one with the player who does this to him. This annoys the coaches, because it means Jordan is going to ignore the offense, but they let it go because he usually scores. It’s most aggravating to his teammates.
“The difference,” says B.J. Armstrong, “is that in our offense, if your man goes at you, you can’t go back at him—you have to run the offense. But Michael doesn’t. Sure, he’s better than everyone else, but you just hate to watch him get to do that without anything being said, and then if you try, watch out.”
Jordan started dribbling near the three-point circle to the right of the free-thro
w line. He went through his legs once, twice, three times and back again, Wilkins trying to watch not the ball but Jordan’s eyes. Quickly, Jordan moved the ball to his left hand and flashed by Wilkins. It’s one of the moves that makes Jordan unstoppable. “He can get through cracks in the defense that other players don’t even see,” marvels John Bach. And with his explosive quickness off the dribble, few players can move their feet quickly enough to get in front of Jordan.
In his way was Mustaf, the athletic six-foot-ten-inch rookie. Mustaf jumped. Jordan jumped over him and slammed the ball, sending the Stadium fans into a frenzy.
On the bench, coach Phil Jackson smiled.
It’s difficult to read Jackson sometimes. He has an impish sense of humor and can be found sometimes drawing hangman’s nooses in his office before games while he watches “The McLaughlin Group” or “The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour.” He knows there’s no play in his scheme that calls for Jordan to dribble for ten seconds and then fly down the lane against four players and slam. But it was hard not to appreciate the spectacular athletic move, and as a former player he had some understanding of the imperative of payback.
Jackson has a great fondness for the Knicks—by which he means the old Knicks, the team he was part of. He owns perhaps the only reversible leather coat in the world with a Bulls logo on one side and a Knicks emblem on the other. His days with the Knicks represent a kind of basketball nirvana for him: the unselfish play, the bonding among the guys. Jackson even had a chance to return to the Knicks as an assistant coach when Rick Pitino was hired; he was still stuck in the CBA when Pitino offered him a spot, but he was too wary of the Knicks’ corporate ownership to sign on. He had clashed with management after Gulf + Western bought the Knicks and the personnel moves became more and more capricious. “These guys didn’t know anything about basketball, about men coming together and bonding their talents,” he said. “They’d say, ‘Let’s go get us Spencer Haywood. Uh-oh, he’s not working. So we’ll get ourselves a Bob McAdoo.’ We had built a team with Frazier and Reed and [Mike] Riordan and Jackson, basically unheralded basketball players. And from this unlikely group of players, second-round draft picks, you have a team. You don’t build a team by going out and getting stars.”
Jackson may have avoided corporate pressure, but the Bulls management had its own quirks. His name was Jerry Krause.
Jackson has dealt with Krause’s paranoia far better than any of the recent Bulls coaches. He’s sometimes had to leave his office to take phone calls at a public phone because Krause was concerned someone might overhear the conversation. He’s registered under false names at a Chicago hotel during the draft so only Krause could find him. He’s listened to Krause threaten to fire anyone on the staff who talked to reporters after supposed “inside” information appeared in newspapers, including one memorable occasion when the leak was something Krause himself had inadvertently let slip.
“Jerry Krause sees the NBA as a covert operation,” says one general manager. One of the team’s minority owners adds, “He goes into a closet to change his mind.”
So, despite having to handle the most dominant offensive force since Wilt Chamberlain, while working for the NBA’s version of Professor Moriarty, Jackson’s generally thrilled to have the job. “I’m having a great time,” he’d tell friends. “This is fun.”
And Jackson felt no different the next night, even though the Bulls lost for the first time at home in eighteen games through the regular season and playoffs, a 109–101 loss to Portland, as the Trail Blazers continued the hot streak that had put them out ahead of the league. It didn’t help that the Bulls’ bench faltered; Hopson scored just 1 basket while the Trail Blazers turned a 3-point lead into a 12-point margin in the second quarter when the reserves were playing. The Bulls led by a point late in the fourth quarter, but a weary Jordan, who put up 28 shots, committed a turnover and drove wildly into three Trail Blazers, his shot missing the mark. Clyde Drexler then beat Jordan downcourt for an easy basket from which the Bulls could not recover.
Jackson was diplomatic. It was a test, he said, and now the Bulls had an idea how much farther they had to go to play with the league’s best. Danny Ainge’s words were more direct: “We’re just a balanced team. Every night someone different steps up to carry us. We had more weapons.”
The next loss, against Milwaukee, would be harder. The Bulls had dominated the Bucks the last three years, eliminating them from the playoffs in 1990 and winning fifteen of the last seventeen games between them in the regular season. It drove Bucks coach Del Harris nuts. He almost always drew technical fouls in Bulls games, and although he tried to remain calm and diminish the game’s importance in the pregame meetings, his neck would stiffen and his words became more clipped when he discussed the Bulls. Jackson did the same thing when the Bulls prepared for Detroit; he went over every play Detroit ran in detail and so often that the players felt they knew the plays too well and were thinking about what Detroit might do rather than reacting to what they actually did. The Bulls were to Milwaukee what the Pistons were to the Bulls.
But Milwaukee was healthy for the first time in several years and had won ten straight at home. And with Frank Brickowski rebounding and giving the Bucks second chances, Milwaukee held off the Bulls, 99–87. Jordan scored 31 points, but he was out for key stretches and, despite playing thirty-nine minutes, he was angry with Jackson for keeping him off the floor. During games, Jordan rarely wants to rest, and it takes all of Jackson’s restraint to keep him off the floor; Jordan shouts out the names of players he wants to go in for. Jackson was certain that Jordan would wear down by the end of the playoffs as a result of the load he carried all season long, so Jackson had cut Jordan’s playing time to thirty-six or thirty-seven minutes per game.
Some of Jordan’s irritation flared after the game. A factor in the loss, Jackson told reporters, was the fact that the floor was slippery. When Jordan was asked about it, he denied it was any problem, and when someone started to ask B.J. Armstrong about it Jordan shouted across the locker room, “Don’t make any excuses.”
“I hate when P.J. does that,” Jordan said afterward. “We stink. That’s the problem.”
Part of the problem, Jordan thought, was the Tex Winter-inspired offense. During the game, Winter had said pleadingly to Jackson, as both Jordan and Pippen went on mad dashes to the basket, “They’re sabotaging the offense. They’ve got to pass the ball.”
Cartwright, an increasingly strong presence on and off the court, had his own views on the subject. He believed in Winter’s offense; Jackson was trying to get Cartwright the ball in a position where he could do something with it. But every Cartwright mistake was seized upon by Jordan. On this night, Cartwright took a pass down by the baseline in the third quarter and spun to the basket, but was called for traveling. The Bulls called time-out soon after, and as they walked back to the huddle, Jordan was furious with Cartwright.
“You’ve got to give me the ball,” Jordan demanded.
“But M.J., you had two guys on you,” snapped Cartwright.
“Yeah, but one was Fred Roberts,” Jordan shot back.
Jordan and Cartwright had crossed swords before, although by this season, Cartwright’s third with the Bulls, an uneasy truce had developed. Jordan could even joke about Cartwright’s flailing elbows, of which he’d been a victim in practice. Overhearing Cartwright talking about playing golf, Jordan once asked him if he’d ever elbowed any of the players in his foursome.
Cartwright could laugh about such remarks now, but when he first came to the Bulls, he didn’t anticipate the problems that would develop between him and Jordan, even though he quickly recognized their differences. While Jordan is demonstrative, Cartwright is remote. Jordan is congenial, Cartwright is seclusive. Cartwright wears a goatee stained with a splash of white and has a mysterious look about him: sad, with gentle doe eyes and a tiny head that often is enveloped in his large hands when he’s working out a problem. One such problem was how to d
eal with Jordan.
Cartwright was a star of some magnitude, the nation’s leading rebounder in his senior year at the University of San Francisco and the No. 3 pick in the NBA draft, just like Jordan, only five years earlier. He averaged 21.7 points and 8.9 rebounds and made the All-Star team as a rookie and added 20.1 points and 7.5 rebounds his second season. But it was his misfortune to join the NBA the same season as Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, and greatness would elude the seven-foot-one-inch Cartwright as if it were thick smoke: He could see it, almost smell it, but he couldn’t quite grab it. There were no Olympics for Cartwright, no team promotional campaign like the one the Bulls ran in Chicago for Jordan: “Here Comes Mr. Jordan,” the ads went, a takeoff on the classic 1941 film. New York didn’t exactly react that way for Cartwright, who has been described as having the grace of a berserk crane. Centers are the rarest of birds in the NBA, though, and Cartwright was one, even if he reminded few of an athlete. Cartwright didn’t even remind himself of an athlete. Sometimes he’d find himself marveling at Jordan or Scottie Pippen flying toward the basket for a slam and say to himself, “Wouldn’t it be something to be able to do that, to be an athlete?” Cartwright, as the man said in the Dirty Harry movie, knew his limitations. He also knew that his time would be short in New York when Rick Pitino replaced Hubie Brown as coach.
“Rick wasn’t looking for basketball players,” said Cartwright after leaving New York. “If you happened to be a basketball player, fine, but Rick wanted guys who can run and jump, athletes.”
Cartwright knew he didn’t fit into that category. But don’t tell him he’s not a basketball player. There is no forge of athleticism in his movements, but rather the determined precision of a craftsman. Cartwright knows the game. He studied hard under Hubie Brown those years in New York when his Knick teams got close to being great, once taking the Celtics to a seventh game in the Eastern Conference semifinals. But Cartwright always had his critics. He rarely dunks the ball or blocks shots or dominates on rebounds. He’s got an unorthodox jump shot in which he grabs the ball as if he’s holding an axe, goes into a downward chopping motion, brings the ball up behind his ear while twisting away from the basket, and then squares up and leans in. It was good enough to make him among the league’s best percentage shooters his first five seasons, when he averaged about 18 points per game. But he twice broke his foot, missed almost all of two seasons, and became a scapegoat for the Knicks’ problems after being replaced by the superior Patrick Ewing. But he never lost his wry wit or keen sense of observation. He’s a student of politics and government, a self-made philosopher whose father was a farm laborer and whose mother was a domestic, yet someone who espouses archconservative views. Not only does Cartwright favor capital punishment, for example, but he advocates public executions.