by Sam Smith
While the names cut down on the phone calls and demands, there was no way to eliminate completely the distraction Jackson had alluded to before Game 1: the demand for tickets. This was one more area where Jordan’s fame and the resources that come with it served to drive a wedge between him and his teammates.
Jordan could do wonderfully unselfish things like bringing all his teammates to center court for the presentation of the MVP award in the Stadium, or sharing his slam-dunk contest winnings with his team, as he had done several years back. Another gracious gesture would follow the Finals: The Disney people had contacted both Jordan and Johnson, wanting the winner to declare his intention of “going to Disney World” after the final game. Both agreed, but Jordan said he would only do it if the commercial featured the whole starting five. Each would get $20,000 instead of $100,000 for him.
But he loused it all up in the locker room before Game 3. The ticket squeeze was severe, even for the players. Many had numerous friends and family members in for the Finals and couldn’t even buy tickets. Paxson couldn’t get one for his father; Cartwright couldn’t buy one for his oldest friend. Jordan had obtained more than two dozen from the Bulls and other sources. They’d asked him to be discreet, but instead he spread the tickets out in front of himself in the locker room in a rather grand display, sorting them out for different friends and family while stuffing them into envelopes to be taken to the gate by the ball boys. The procedure went on for about a half hour as player after player glared right through Jordan.
It was an angry Bulls team that would take the floor that night.
The Laker surge at home that the Bulls anticipated would come, but not until much later. The Bulls were hitting their shots early and started to look more for Paxson. The Bulls had identified two further ways to thwart the Lakers. One was against Byron Scott. He’d shot well in the playoffs, so Jackson instructed Paxson to play him close. This generally wouldn’t scare anyone, since Paxson can be beaten off the dribble, but Scott doesn’t finish plays to the basket well; he’s best at taking the pass off a double-team for his jumper. Paxson’s defense, which was tougher than even the Bulls coaches expected, seemed to throw Scott off balance. He would shoot 0 for 8 in forty-three minutes in Game 3.
Then there was Johnson. He likes to play a zone defense, dropping off his man, in this case Paxson, and clogging the lane to stop the drives of players such as Jordan and Pippen. He’d been allowed to do it effectively in Game 1, and the Bulls’ hot shooting in Game 2 made the Lakers’ defense nearly irrelevant. But Jackson felt that making Johnson play Paxson was crucial, and it was time to stop sparing Jordan’s feelings. He put together a tape after the first two games showing Johnson cheating over to the middle and leaving Paxson.
“M.J.,” he said before Game 3, “you’ve got to see who’s open. You’ve got to find Paxson. He’s open. You’ve got to get him the ball. It’s something we’ve got to do.”
The message, delivered to Jordan in front of the whole team, was having another positive, bonding effect. The players were beginning to feel some sense of equal justice. “Phil did a great job of staying on everyone in the playoffs,” Paxson would say later.
Jackson would update the tape after Games 3 and 4 and show it to Jordan again with the same message. He’d show Jordan setting up in the post, the defense collapsing, and open shots developing that Jordan passed up. He’d show Jordan at virtually every spot on the court missing Paxson. Jordan went along, and in the end Jackson would say, “Michael at some time became capable of giving up more of the spotlight and the ball. He understood this is what it took to get to the Finals and win.”
The Bulls led 48–47 at halftime, but the game was about to turn.
Jackson had kept Jordan on Johnson, with Jordan still pushing Johnson and making him work hard for position. After halftime, though, Pippen said he wanted another try on Johnson and the two switched without consulting Jackson. The change would prove disastrous. The Lakers had been waiting for the move as Jackson had sensed, and Johnson quickly hit Divac, now defended by the much smaller Jordan on the switch, three times for baskets. Jackson called a time-out and was furious.
“What the hell are you guys doing out there?” he stammered, staring at the two. “Let’s get back the way we were.”
But the momentum had swung hard to the Lakers. Perkins drove and scored. Divac, emboldened by his success, scored on another pass from Johnson and then hit a jumper. The Lakers led by 67–54 with 4:46 left in the third quarter. Time-out again.
Jackson simply said the Bulls had to get a basket and designed a play for Paxson to go to the hoop. It worked. The Lakers, with the usually docile Forum crowd hooting and screaming, held on to their double-digit lead, but the Bulls strung together 6 straight points to close the quarter as the Lakers committed 3 straight turnovers. The lead was down to 6.
Dunleavy dared not take Johnson out. But Johnson was tiring, as was Worthy, whose ankle was starting to throb, limiting his movement to the boards for rebounds. He would score 12 points the rest of the series. “We felt,” Jackson would say later, “that come the fourth quarter we would have the edge in conditioning, that they would be tired.”
It was happening. After Perkins opened the fourth quarter with a driving hook, the Bulls scored 8 straight points to tie the game at 74 with 8:42 left. And suddenly Levingston would prove worth that season of investment.
First he blocked Perkins. Then he rebounded a Scott miss. Next he stole a Johnson pass. Finally he tipped in a Grant miss to make it 88–84 Bulls with 3:10 left.
“He was the glue that held us together,” Jackson would acknowledge later.
It was the moment Levingston had long waited for. A few years back in the playoffs, he’d helped sink Atlanta in a memorable conference semifinals series against the Celtics by missing a wild shot. He hadn’t played much all season, but that was becoming something of an advantage; his was a fresh body to match up with weary Lakers. “It’s been like a fairy-tale year,” said Levingston. “It was a good beginning to come to a team like the Bulls, but a bad middle. It’s looking like a happy ending.”
But the Lakers weren’t done quite yet, even though the Bulls, on their way to a massive 46–29 rebounding advantage, got four chances on one possession before finally scoring to take a 90–87 lead with 1:07 left. Perkins scored, Jordan missed, and Divac, drawing Pippen’s sixth foul, stumbled into the lane and put up a wild shot that went in for a three-point play and a 92–90 Lakers lead with 10.9 seconds left. Divac jumped into Johnson’s arms, but there was much more to come.
Despite Jordan’s failure in Game 1, he remained the greatest last-second player in the game. Jackson decided to take full advantage: Rather than take the ball at halfcourt after the time-out, Jackson told Jordan to take it full court so he could size up the floor and find his shot. Jordan wove his way downcourt against Scott without the Lakers showing much of a double-team; Divac would come too late. Jordan simply worked Scott into position about fourteen feet away from the basket, pulled up, and dropped in the tying score with 3.4 seconds left. The Lakers wouldn’t get a shot, and the game moved into overtime, the Lakers’ big third-quarter lead a bitter memory.
Overtime was the last thing the tired Lakers wanted. The game was tied at 96 after the first half of the five-minute session, but Jordan then put in his second daring reverse driving basket, Grant rebounded a Jordan miss for a basket, and Jordan was fouled for a pair of free throws while Perkins clanged a couple of jumpers off the front of the rim. The final score was 104–96.
The Lakers staggered off the court. The thirty-one-year-old Johnson had played a whopping fifty minutes, and Perkins, thirty, had hung around for fifty-one minutes. Scott, thirty, had gone scoreless in forty-three minutes and Worthy, thirty, was limping while Pippen and Grant, both a bouncy twenty-five years old, had grabbed as many rebounds as the entire Lakers’ starting five.
“Those old legs can hurt you,” Cartwright would agree with a laugh late
r when reporters raised the question of age.
All game long, Arsenio Hall had been taunting the Bulls from near their bench, waving a Lakers jacket at them. When the buzzer sounded, Levingston, who had 10 points off the bench, turned and stuck a finger at Hall.
“In your face, Arsenio,” Levingston shouted. “In your face.”
Missed amid the shouting over Jordan’s game-tying shot Friday was his reentry. Jordan landed hard on his right toe and felt a shooting pain. It was not unlike what he’d felt almost six years earlier when he’d broken his foot. He always carried a fear of such an injury with him, despite his acrobatic forays to the basket and often reckless play. He returned to the bench and said he might have broken the toe, but it would feel better as the overtime progressed and the scare seemed gone. Bulls’ doctor John Hefferon examined it and said Jordan wouldn’t even need X rays. Just swollen, he said, although the next day at practice, when Jordan took off, Hefferon would be bombarded with questions: “Will he lose the nail?” asked one TV reporter breathlessly. “Is it mostly black or blue?” asked another. These would be just a few of the dumb questions raised during the week, the two stupidest probably being when Jordan was asked if he had the most famous tongue in the world, and Cartwright was asked to comment on Phil Jackson getting a double off Satchel Paige when he was in high school and Paige had a barnstorming team that came through town. Hefferon answered the questions asked him as if they were serious. “Fifteen minutes of fame,” he said later. “Got to take it seriously.”
The Bulls knew the questions were more serious than Jordan’s injury.
“Where’s M.J.?” Pippen had roared Saturday morning when the Bulls boarded the team bus at the Ritz-Carlton for the media session and brief practice.
“He’s not going,” PR man Tim Hallam said. “He’s injured.”
“Oh, man, I’m hurt, too,” moaned Pippen. “I got to get out of here. My arm, no, my hip is hurtin’, no, my back, Tim. Tell Phil I can’t make it.”
Jordan had told Jackson that morning he didn’t want to practice or talk to the media. “I’ll cover for you,” Jackson said, “but you’ve got to stay in your room. You can’t let anyone see you go out.”
Jackson never checked to find out where Jordan was that day, although the league was threatening to fine the Bulls for allowing Jordan to miss the media session. Jackson had told the players to try to rest, eat well, and lead a sedentary life in L.A. But after Game 4, Jordan played thirty-six holes of golf Monday and another eighteen before practice Tuesday morning. He was still relying on his youth and athleticism to carry him, and it still would, but the coaches wondered just how much longer Jordan could get away with his life-style off the court. They had begun to see subtle signs of slippage in his game, and he was developing a recurring tendinitis.
Suddenly, the Bulls were celebrities, even in Hollywood. Pippen had gone off with Jimmy Sexton to look for some clothes. They’d decided to go to Beverly Hills. “They see celebrities there all the time, so we won’t be bothered,” Sexton told Pippen. But Pippen ended up signing autographs for a half hour and never could get enough time to look for clothes. A Japanese company had approached Hodges; the firm would pay $100,000 to any Bull to come to Japan to give basketball clinics for a week, and it would be $550,000 if that Bull was Jordan. The players mostly spent their time lounging lazily by the pool amid the palm trees, taking turns doing interviews with the TV crews in from Chicago against the backdrop of the boats in the marina. It was a mild, breezy week, the temperatures cooler than when the team had left Chicago a few days earlier. The players were no longer thinking a team had to lose one of these things before it could win, as the rule seemed to be.
When the Bulls arrived at the arena Sunday afternoon for the 4:00 P.M. start of Game 4 (NBC was trying to get as many games of this glamorous matchup as it could into eastern prime time), Pippen dressed quickly and went out to shoot. It was his habit now to be the first on the court before games. But security guards had the court blocked. The Lakers were going through a full practice. It seemed an act of desperation to the coaching staff, and Bach recalled an NIT game in which Abe Lemons had his team scrimmage at halftime after a poor opening half. Jackson remembered Hubie Brown in New York putting his team through similar rigors.
Pippen scored first for the Bulls, then Paxson hit a jumper and a three-point field goal, and then Cartwright hit two jumpers on the way to a team-high 9 points in the first quarter. The Lakers would storm the boards for 7 offensive rebounds in the quarter, but the balanced Bulls attack kept them within 1, 28–27, after one quarter. The Lakers, it would turn out, had taken their best shot.
Johnson took a rest early in the second quarter and the Lakers never recovered. They shot just 25 percent in the period and scored 16 points. Worthy was now in severe pain and would play just one more quarter in the series. Hodges came in and knocked in a pair of jumpers and Scott Williams hit a bank shot as the bench erupted in high fives. But Williams was mostly there to help bother Perkins, who would finish with an ignominious 1 for 15 as the Bulls played to his left hand and he missed shot after shot. It would be a moment of personal glory for Williams in the shadow of his own personal horror; the house where his father had shot his mother and then killed himself was just a few miles from the Forum. (Williams would occasionally go out onto his balcony at the Ritz and look toward the house, but he didn’t want to go back there, and he refused to speak about his old neighborhood.)
Jordan scored 11 points while Levingston added 5 rebounds as the Bulls went to halftime leading 52–44. The Lakers had to win or face going down 3–1, a hole from which no NBA team had ever climbed—a ditch, Dunleavy would call it later—to win a Finals. And they were starting to lose sight of the light at the top.
Jordan sensed the third quarter was the time for the Bulls to jump on the Lakers. He saw that Johnson was particularly animated as he led the Lakers out of their locker room. When the Bulls’ starters gathered in a circle for the start of the second half, Jordan said, “Magic’s disgusted with them. Let’s go!”
Jordan was right. Johnson cajoled and pleaded throughout the third quarter for his team to get something going. But the Bulls hit their first 5 shots to take a 14-point lead. “C’mon,” Johnson yelled, “doesn’t anybody want to play?”
“We’ve got ’em,” Jordan thought.
The Bulls’ defense was now suffocating the Lakers. They scored just 14 points in the third quarter and left the court to boos, trailing by 16, their one-time express train stuck in the yards, their players wearing the expressions of bored commuters.
The Lakers opened the fourth quarter with 7 straight points, but Perkins then missed a pair of jumpers, one a three-pointer after a Bulls turnover, and the Lakers would never recover. Hodges drove and put in a wild leaner and Jordan hit a jumper to get the Bulls back up by 13. And then Paxson thwarted every other Lakers hope: He hit a twenty-one-footer on a pass from Pippen after the Lakers scored 5 straight pints to energize the crowd, and then a twenty-footer after Divac drove and put in his own miss. With the Bulls ahead 91–79 with two minutes left, Jordan blocked a Perkins shot and then leaped into the second row to try to save the ball. An unnecessary move, though one with a message: We’ll even outhustle you, baby. The Bulls won going away, 97–82.
The team of the eighties, the kings of the fast break and the Magic show, had been buried. The Forum was deathly quiet. There was something great happening, but there would be no applause. The Lakers’ 82 points were a Finals low for them since the NBA adopted the twenty-four-second clock in 1954. They were the fewest points a team had scored in any Finals game in a decade. They were the fewest points the Lakers had scored in a playoff game in three years. The Bulls were now holding their playoff opponents to 91.6 points per game, an all-time low. Every Bulls starter had taken at least 10 shots, led by Jordan’s 20. And Jordan had 13 assists, so not only was he leading everyone in scoring but he had as many assists as Magic Johnson. Jordan was especially enjo
ying that, even if Johnson would eventually nose him out in assists after Game 5.
It was over and everyone knew it, and Craig Hodges braced himself for the coming charge. It had almost become a ritual now, and, in fact, the players had started to feel sorry for Hodges: Early in the playoffs, Krause had been going around the locker room yelling, “Fifteen, fifteen,” for that was the number of games a team had to win to be champions. No one paid much attention, but the likable Hodges played along, and when Krause would come into the locker room after wins, Hodges would yell “Thirteen” or “Twelve” or “Ten,” as the countdown kept going. Krause liked that and was now running into the locker room and charging Hodges like a wild rhino.
“Hoooodddddgggyyy,” he would wail. “Twoooooo.”
“He’s comin’, Hodg, he’s comin’,” Armstrong began yelling.
“Look out, Hodg,” Grant was squealing. “Here he comes.”
The door burst open and Krause was there, yelling: “Hooooodddddggggg.” And now he was charging the naked Hodges.
King was making squealing sounds like a pig.
“Oonnnnnneee, Hooooodddggg, oooonnnneeee,” Krause yelled on the run.
The antics continued on the bus back to the hotel.
“Hey, P.J.,” Jordan yelled mockingly from the back. “I ain’t goin’ to no White House. I didn’t vote for that guy. I know you didn’t vote for him.”
Jackson said he hadn’t voted for George Bush either, for Jackson said he wasn’t really a member of any organized political party—he was a Democrat.
“Well, you won’t go either, right, P.J.?” Jordan yelled. “You’ll join me. We ain’t going to no White House.”