by Sam Smith
In the last few years, particularly because of his growing love for golf, Jordan had come to experience racism as he never had before. In his special place as an American icon and folk hero, he’d been able to transcend racial hatred and divisiveness. In the NBA, the way had been cleared for him by the likes of Julius Erving, and now a black superstar could be admired and adored as a national hero and treasure. Jordan was welcomed where black men didn’t tread, namely on the country-club circuit. He played on all the exclusive golf courses on Chicago’s North Shore and his appearances were cause for celebration.
Word would sweep the course that Jordan was playing that day, and when he’d arrive, the pro was usually there to watch his swing on the driving range and offer a free lesson; on the course, members would encourage him to play through to get a chance to see his much-talked-about game. Jordan had become a solid amateur, about a 6 handicap by 1990, meaning he’d shoot in the mid to high 70s. It wasn’t nearly good enough for him to become a pro, but Jordan liked to consider doing so as a fantasy and a goal. He was like a Moses on the course, the members parting as his group would come up behind them.
But actual membership was a different story. He had thought about joining a Jewish club near his home, and friends made private inquiries on his behalf. They were politely informed that, no, Jordan wouldn’t be welcomed as a member. Of course he could play any time he wanted but, well, there just weren’t any immediate openings. You know.
The realization had never really struck Jordan before: He couldn’t go somewhere because he was black. He never pursued the matter, but he clearly was hurt.
It was why he’d responded to a friend the way he did when the Illinois state lottery jackpot had grown to over $40 million in early 1990, and the players were laughing and joking in the locker room about what they’d do if they won.
“I’d retire at halftime,” he said with a smile. “I’d take my uniform off and just leave the court. And then I’d go open up a country club and post a sign that said, ‘No Jews Allowed.’”
The Mavericks tried to play the Bulls the way the Pistons do: They slowed the game to one of those traffic-jam paces in which the movement is bumper-to-bumper slow and the frustration level is high. At halftime, the Bulls were trailing 43–39 after scoring just 12 points in the second quarter. But there was no Rodman or Thomas or Dumars to continue the frustration. The Bulls hustled their transition game into gear and let Jordan begin to attack. He scored 15 third-quarter points and the Bulls pulled away to an easy 109–86 win, now just one short of the longest winning streak in team history.
But Indianapolis, their next stop, hadn’t been an easy place for the Bulls to speed through. They’d lost five straight there, mostly because they never could figure out how to defense Detlef Schrempf, and because Reggie Miller usually got hot against the Bulls at home. (He once said that all the NBA looked excitedly on Bulls-Pacers matchups because it was Air against Hollywood. No one was quite sure who Hollywood was, but everyone assumed it was the swaggering Miller.) Not having Horace Grant would hurt the Bulls. He was missing his second straight game with a sprained ankle and this would be a more difficult test for Stacey King. Dallas’s front line couldn’t score much, but the Pacers would go right at him.
Before the game, the locker room was lively with talk about Bobby Knight, the famous Indiana University coach. Some of the players were talking about NBA players now being permitted to play in the Olympics, and Pippen asked Jordan if he wanted to participate again.
“Why would I?” he responded.
“For your country and all that, I guess,” Pippen said.
“After playing a whole season you’re gonna be awful tired to start again with qualifying tournaments and exhibition games and all of that,” Jordan said.
And, Jordan said, his first Olympic experience, a gold medal in 1984, while exciting, had been difficult because of Knight.
“I don’t know if I would have done it if I knew what Knight was going to be like,” Jordan told the players, who were leaning in like kids around a campfire to hear a ghost story. “I’d heard about Coach Knight when I was at North Carolina, so I asked Coach Smith and he advised me to do it. I think all the coaches did because after playing for Coach Knight they knew you’d appreciate them more.”
Jordan said that time after time the team would be blowing out the opponent and Knight would come in raving at halftime. “It was like we were losing by thirty every game,” Jordan recalled. “And this one time with [assistant coach] George Raveling was unbelievable. Patrick [Ewing] was getting a little homesick and Raveling said he’d take him to see John Thompson [Ewing’s college coach] one night. Patrick gets in late that night and the next day in the game he’s not playing well and Knight’s screaming to Raveling on the bench and saying Patrick wasn’t playing well because of Raveling.
“He’s saying, ‘You MF [Jordan cannot get himself to say the words], it’s your fault he’s playing like shit. You kept him out late, you MF.’ And Raveling’s yelling, ‘F you, it ain’t my fault that he can’t hit a shot. F you.’ And the two of them, they’re cursing and yelling at each other on the bench all game and we’re winning, killing the other team, and they’re yelling at each other. I don’t think they talked for the next two or three days.”
It was also at the Olympics that Jordan became friendly with Charles Barkley, the Eddie Haskell to Jordan’s Wally Cleaver.
“We’re getting ready for the team picture,” Jordan went on, “and Knight comes out wearing these old wing-tip shoes and Barkley starts getting on him and asking him where he got his granddaddy’s shoes. Everyone falls over and Knight’s not laughing and Barkley’s still going on about those shoes. Knight said something about Charles being a jackass and started cussing. I’ve never heard anyone talk to Coach Knight like that. The next day was when he was cut.”
Assistant coach Bach had joined the group. As a student of military history and former naval officer, Bach was a great admirer of Knight. They had become friends when Bach coached at Fordham in New York City and Knight was coaching at West Point. Bach particularly reveled in Knight’s independence, even though it ran somewhat contrary to military protocol. It seems, Bach said, that every time some major or colonel would get on Knight at West Point, Knight would call General William Westmoreland in the Pentagon. Westmoreland was a big fan of Knight’s and a devotee of the sports teams at the academy and pretty soon there’d be a call from Westmoreland, the four-star general, to the colonel about his behavior and orders to leave Knight alone. “Finally, he’d pissed off too many colonels and Westmoreland couldn’t save him,” says Bach.
But one incident with Knight struck Bach. He’d gone to Knight’s house for a visit, and when he sat down Knight jumped up like the good host.
“John,” he said, “how about some coffee?”
Before Bach had a chance to answer, Knight was yelling for his wife to get Bach some coffee. But she was bathing the children at the time and said she couldn’t.
“It was amazing,” recalled Bach, who also had been something of a disciplinarian with his children, once dumping milk on his baby son when his son had spilled milk on him to teach the boy what it felt like. “He ran up to her and started shouting that he had a guest there and she damn well better get him coffee and he’s screaming and the kids are crying and she’s running for coffee.
“The thing was,” said Bach, the players grabbing their sides in laughter by now, “I didn’t want any coffee. But after that I figured I damn well better drink it.”
The game went about as well for the Bulls as the Olympic trials did for Barkley. As the Bulls expected, the Pacers attacked King right away with LaSalle Thompson, who exceeded his per-game average in the first quarter with 11 points. Grant, after a slow start, had become as important to the Bulls as Jordan or Pippen. He was desperately missed against the Pacers, who were playing better under coach Bob Hill. They were now using Rik Smits and Vern Fleming off the bench along with
Schrempf, and it was difficult for the Bulls to match up.
“We’re running to an early defeat,” Bach whispered to Jackson on the bench as the Pacers were on the way to a 24-point lead after three quarters. But Jackson believed in learning experiences. He wanted to see his team under duress and he wanted Jordan to remember Miller loading him up for 40 points. He wanted Jordan ready for the rematch in Chicago three weeks later.
Despite the 135–114 loss, the Bulls were six games up on staggering Detroit in the Central Division and in a virtual tie with Boston for the best record in the Eastern Conference. They were on a pace to win more than sixty games and would start a new streak against Milwaukee, winning at home by 18.
The day before the game, though, Jackson had a different battle in mind. The war in the Persian Gulf was close to being over, as the coalition troops had gained clear dominance over the Iraqis. The only question now was how much devastation would be brought upon Iraq. Jackson decried the entire war machine, for he remembered Vietnam well and knew that in war, truth becomes the first casualty, but Jackson had never found a good way to demonstrate his distaste for war. In his position, it would have been impolitic to oppose such a popular effort. Like Hemingway, he believed that no matter how apparently necessary or justified, war remained a crime. He argued long about it with Bach, who relished the allies’ strategy and happily drew attack patterns on the blackboard where opposing plays were usually drawn.
As the team sat ready to go over the Bucks’ plays and scouting report, Jackson decided the team was his only true forum left.
“Who wants the troops to go into Baghdad and go after Hussein?” he asked.
The hands of most of the younger players went up. Jordan, Pippen, and Grant particularly said the troops should go in and get Hussein.
In the corner, Hodges could barely contain his anger. Jackson, in a way, agreed.
Do you understand, he explained, that these are people who will never forget, the people who lose their father or a brother or a relative? They or their children or even their children’s children. Do you want to see, Jackson wondered, your son killed someday in an airplane explosion because we’ve made Iraq a terrorist nation from what we’ve done? Consider the terrorism that could be done in this nation. A guy with a bomb can just drive into the Lincoln Tunnel or walk into the Sears Tower and kill thousands. Is this what you want to see and have it affect your children or their children?
Jackson wanted them to think a little more about the consequences of war. Everyone did.
There were two things, perhaps more than anything, that united the Bulls. They were hardly a close group; they brought to mind the old Boston Red Sox motto “Twenty-five men, twenty-five cabs.”
But they also had talent and played exceptional halfcourt defense that produced a transition game that allowed Pippen, Jordan, and Grant to run and overcome the team’s weaknesses. They shot the ball extremely well, and they retained strong continuity, with Jordan, Pippen, and Paxson three of the four league leaders in consecutive starts.
And there were two major areas of agreement: The players disliked general manager Krause, and they mostly distrusted the team’s medical staff, not because they felt the staff was incompetent, but because, as they saw it, the staff favored management over players.
This conflict had already resulted in the departure of ten-year trainer Mark Pfeil to the Bucks after the 1989–90 season and had caused lingering resentment among several players. Hodges had complained almost the entire 1989–90 season about foot pain, and it wasn’t until after the season that the team asked him to be operated on. The same with Cartwright—he’d complained about knee problems, diagnosed as tendinitis, until he, too, had surgery after the season. Pippen had complained regularly in his rookie season about back pain, and it wasn’t until after the season that he had disk surgery. None of the tests administered by the medical staff ever revealed a problem until after the season, and the players grew increasingly concerned about the pattern. So when the team told Dennis Hopson to practice despite a painful toe injury, several players advised him to stay off his foot and get a second opinion.
And then there was former trainer Pfeil, viewed as another tool of management for his gruff ways. After ten years in the league, Pfeil had grown suspicious of the players and their perceived injuries. He generally believed the players to be malingerers and the players felt he refused to take their injuries seriously enough. It got so bad that for two seasons the players refused to vote him a playoff share.
“I remember the first year I was here I was thinking, ‘How could these guys be so cheap?’” recalled Bill Cartwright about the post-season playoff share meeting in 1989. “‘That guy’s with us all season and we’re going to shut him out?’ But these guys were saying he didn’t deserve anything and finally we all agreed to chip in a few hundred dollars for him.” By the next season, after his knee miseries, Cartwright was among the majority in efforts to deny Pfeil a playoff share. Cartwright had been in intense pain down the stretch and into the playoffs. He couldn’t sit with his knee bent for more than a few minutes. He couldn’t drive a car, and when he was in one he had to lie down in the backseat. Pfeil told him to take some pills and he’d be fine.
It was against this backdrop that Grant was being asked to return to play the Utah Jazz on Friday, March 8.
His left ankle remained swollen and he was concerned about the future. “I’ve seen a lot of guys go out with ankle injuries like this and come back too soon and make it worse,” said Grant. “I want it to heal completely.” The coaches, though, felt Grant was babying himself too much, particularly Bach, who had become Grant’s confidant on the staff.
But it was more than pushing Grant to get him to play through pain—a requisite, the coaches thought, for playoff toughness. The coaches feared the consequences of playing King against Karl Malone. In his three starts with Grant out, King had gotten 1 defensive rebound. The coaches were amazed as they watched the film. One defensive rebound in eighty-four minutes on the floor! “A two-year-old could get hit in the head with more rebounds than that,” Bach said.
This wasn’t lost on the players, either, especially Jordan. The day before the Utah game, some of the office staff came to practice with a carload of souvenir items for the players to sign. It was a twice-a-year routine; after practice, the players would gather in a circle, pass around balls and pennants, and sign each. The team would then auction off the items for charity. As the players sat signing, Jordan started talking.
“Listen to this,” he said. “You ever hear of a guy, six-eleven maybe and two hundred sixty pounds, a guy big and fat like that and he can’t get but two rebounds, if that many, running all over the damn court and he gets two rebounds?”
The players began trying to muffle laughter because it was clear whom Jordan was talking about.
“Big guy like that,” Jordan continued, “and he gets one rebound. Can’t even stick his ass into people and get more than that.”
“Fuck you, M.J.,” King finally said. “All you’re interested in is scoring and taking every shot. Maybe if you passed the ball to somebody else for a change instead of worrying about winning the scoring title, somebody else on this team could do something.”
“Big, fat, fat guy,” Jordan went on. “One rebound in three games. Power forward. Maybe they should call it powerless forward.”
Finally, King got up, muttering and cursing. He stormed into the trainer’s room and said to no one in particular, “I’m gonna kick his ass one day. You wait. My time will come and I’ll get him. I’ll shut his mouth.”
Both Jackson and Bach worked Grant over before the Utah game. “You don’t want a kid to get hurt,” said Jackson later, “but with this kid you need to push him to play through it.” Bach gave him a version of a Vince Lombardi speech on courage and Jackson told him at least to try it. If the ankle felt bad, he’d come out right away, promise. Good cop-bad cop in reverse. Grant didn’t know what to think. H
e said he’d play. Bach spliced into a game tape scenes of bodies lying dead on the beach from the TV show “China Beach.” It’s going to be a war, he wrote on the blackboard. Not again, coach, Paxson thought.
The Bulls couldn’t get much going early, falling behind by 2 points after a quarter, by 5 at halftime, and then by 16 midway through the third quarter as John Stockton found Jeff Malone and Thurl Bailey for open jumpers and Mark Eaton for dunks every time the Bulls dropped off them. Little was going right for the Bulls, and even what appeared good in the crowd’s view wasn’t. Early in the second quarter, Jackson moved B. J. Armstrong in at point guard and Stockton drove him to the basket and scored for a three-point play. Armstrong then came right back at Stockton and hit two jumpers, but the Bulls players were going berserk. The fans were cheering Armstrong while the players were screaming for Jackson to get him out of the game. “What the hell’s he doing, Phil?” Pippen yelled as he went past the bench. “Give up the ball,” Jordan screamed at him on the court. “Get him out of there,” Pippen was yelling. It was chaos. The Jazz went on a 10–1 run and Jackson finally lifted Armstrong.
“He goes back to the old playground Detroit,” Jordan lamented afterward. “He was scared in there and panicking. He just lost it when Stockton scored. That’s why John works better with us down the stretch. It’s the same thing in practice. Paxson hits a few jumpers on him and he goes right at him and gets away from what the team is doing. You can get away with it in practice, but not in the game.”