Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  The acrimony between the two men sharpened as Jordan headed into his second season. Many of pro basketball’s old hands thought that Krause seemed to be making the whole process unnecessarily difficult. “Michael was going to be the premier star in the NBA,” Kevin Loughery recalled. “You had the man to build around. You knew you were going to get better every year by adding parts. You have to have a star in the NBA to have a good team. When you have a star, you have the opportunity to put the other pieces in. Not only was he a star, he could do so many things. He could handle three spots, the point, the off guard, the small forward. I guess if you had to put him down low, he could do that. He could rebound, he could pass. A star who could do so many things. He wasn’t just one-dimensional like a lot of stars are. He made it easier to put a team together.”

  Among the new faces that Krause brought into training camp that year was George Gervin, the “Ice Man” who had starred for years for the San Antonio Spurs. He was one of the veterans who had participated in the All-Star freeze-out of Jordan, so the chemistry set the stage for some testy dynamics at training camp that fall. The team’s young star didn’t go out of his way to welcome Gervin, who knew if there was any bending to be done in the circumstances, he’d have to do it.

  “He was a young guy on his way in,” Gervin recalled of Jordan, then all of twenty-two. “He hadn’t proven his greatness at that time. He had shown potential to be great. But he was a young guy in the league trying to make a name for himself like most young guys coming up.”

  True to his MO, Jordan soon challenged Gervin to a game of one-on-one. “We played,” Gervin acknowledged, implying that he was no match for Jordan’s boundless energy. “We shot around. I was a veteran on my way out, so he was messin’ with the old Ice Man. He wasn’t messin’ with the Ice Man of old. You know what I’m sayin’? I knew that I was just there to contribute. I’d had my time in the life. I knew it was his turn, so I was just really playing out my last year in the NBA. He had his own style. Mike was a great athlete. He developed that jump shot later on in his career. I was a jump shooter and a scorer from the beginning. So we had different kinds of games. He jumped a lot. I glided a lot. I was like Fred Astaire. He was like a jumping jack.”

  The one-on-one broke the “Ice” between the two, but Jordan wasn’t about to allow Gervin into his inner circle. “I didn’t talk to him that much,” Gervin explained, adding that he suspected Jordan still smarted over the All-Star incident. “I had nothing but respect for him back then because I saw the drive that he had. Inside hisself. Not on the floor. I’m talking about the drive that he had to try to win. You could tell that by the practices and stuff. He didn’t let up. He had a hell of a drive in him, man. To succeed, man. And to win.”

  The older guard quickly saw the distinct line between Jordan’s inner circle and the rest of the team. “He was close to quite a few guys, Charles Oakley, Rod Higgins. We really wasn’t that close,” Gervin recalled. “But that’s just the way it was. You know, life is funny. The game is one thing, but the most important thing is building relationships. I think that was my greatest gift in my career is that I built some relationships with my teammates. I appreciated them and they knew it wasn’t all about me.”

  The circumstances with the Bulls early in that second season revealed a challenge that Jordan would have to face eventually. His elite circle of friends set up an immediate division within any roster he played on. You were either in his circle or you weren’t. The majority of his teammates, particularly in those early years, were kept at a cool arm’s length, on the outside looking in. Jordan needed his cocoon to survive, but at the same time he would have to learn that no man was an island, Gervin observed. “You gotta work not to be on that island. You gotta work hard at it, man.”

  The Bulls opened the schedule in the late fall of 1985 with three straight wins, but in the third game, against the Golden State Warriors, Jordan suffered a broken navicular tarsal bone in his left foot, an injury that had altered or ended the careers of several NBA players. Predicting he would be back quickly, he sat out the next game with what was reported as an “ankle injury.” It was the first game he had missed in his entire career, including high school, including even the broken wrist he suffered four weeks before his sophomore season opener at North Carolina.

  “I feel like a fan,” he told reporters the day after the injury at Golden State. “I can’t do a thing. I’ve just got to watch them and cheer along.”

  Then came the diagnosis. “After that, the year was a complete disaster,” Jerry Reinsdorf recalled. Jordan would miss the next sixty-four games. Around the league, veterans gave each other knowing looks. Jordan’s relentless, all-out style had finally caught up with him. “He had it all the time,” Gervin recalled, summing up the conventional wisdom. “That’s why he probably got hurt, because he played so hard all the time.”

  The news of the broken foot fell like an avalanche on Nike, who had just invested millions in Jordan. “I mean the whole game was going to be over,” Vaccaro recalled. “We realized that. Everything could have ended.”

  Jordan shared their fears. “I was a little bit scared,” he explained later. “I didn’t want to be bothered by anyone. I didn’t want the phone to ring. I didn’t want to watch TV. I didn’t want to hear music. I just wanted plain darkness because this was something for me to deal with, and it was very painful. For the first time, I had to consider doing something else besides playing basketball, and it was very different.”

  Once the reality of his injury settled in, his first thought was to go back home, an idea that was met with immediate disapproval. “Michael wanted to go back to North Carolina and rehab there,” recalled Mark Pfeil, the Bulls’ trainer at the time. “We were able to get that across to Jerry Reinsdorf and Jerry Krause and set up a program for Michael in Carolina. He rehabbed, worked on his degree, and had some peace of mind. That probably made Michael ready to compete when he returned.” Some observers, including several teammates, criticized Jordan for leaving the team while he was injured. Even though he had played in only three games, Jordan led the Eastern Conference in the fans’ All-Star voting that winter.

  “I was very frustrated, and at first I didn’t know how to deal with the situation,” Jordan recalled. “I walked away from it, went to North Carolina, worked on my degree and watched the team on TV. That’s the best way I could deal with it.”

  While in Chapel Hill, he sat on Carolina’s bench during games, which gave him the opportunity for the first time to sit back and observe the system that had molded him. As his foot began to feel better, he ventured into forbidden territory and began playing pickup ball, unknown to Reinsdorf or Krause. “I heard that much later, that after two weeks he was back on the court,” Krause recalled. “I don’t know if that’s accurate but I heard it. He never said he played. We had a meeting three weeks later on the phone. ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m much better.’ ‘The doctors still want you to rest. Come on in here in the next couple of weeks, we’re going to look at you again.’ This went on for two months.”

  “I knew he was playing down there because he told me,” Sonny Vaccaro recalled. “I’m paraphrasing here, but he said, ‘I’m going to go and see if this damn thing, this SOB, is okay. I’m going to see if I can do this. I need to be away from people and I know I’ll be protected.’ ” That knowledge both reassured and further terrified the Nike staff that had bet on his career in a major way.

  Without Jordan, Stan Albeck had to turn to Gervin as one of his main offensive options. Albeck had coached Gervin in San Antonio, so the Bulls switched to a set of plays to feature the Ice Man. “Stan tried the best he could under the circumstances,” recalled Chicago radio reporter Cheryl Raye-Stout. “Without Michael that team had a lot of guys who didn’t care. During the time-outs you had players like Sid Green who wouldn’t even go in the huddles.”

  “It was hard for Stan,” Sidney Green recalled in 1995. “Unfortunately, he had high expectations for the team and for Michael
. Once Michael went down, Stan had to change his whole game plan. He tried to build the whole team around George Gervin, but unfortunately George was on his last legs. But he still had the finger roll. Beyond George, we were all young.… You must also remember that that was the year Quintin Dailey had his problems, too.” Dailey had fallen into a spiral of missed games and late appearances. After he missed a game in February, Krause suspended him. For the second time in eight weeks, Dailey entered a drug treatment facility.

  “Quintin was late to another shootaround, and by then I knew he was messed up on coke,” Krause said. “We were waiting around for him to show up for the game, and Stan said, ‘I’m gonna play him if he shows up.’… I told him, ‘The guy’s done in a Bulls uniform.’ I made the decision then to begin looking for another coach.”

  The team’s lack of direction in Jordan’s absence indicated just how much of a load he had been carrying. The Bulls record stood at 22–43 in March when he told management that he believed his injury was healed and he wanted to return. “I didn’t want to watch my team go down the pits,” he later explained. “I thought I was healthy enough to contribute something.”

  His plans caught Reinsdorf by surprise and sparked another harsh confrontation with Krause. The owner and GM had serious questions about the risk of Jordan’s returning too soon.

  “The thing that got Michael and me off on the wrong foot,” Krause recalled, “was that he thought I said to him, ‘You’re our property, and you’ll do what we want you to do.’ I don’t remember ever saying it that way. He just misinterpreted me. I was trying to keep him from playing because he had a bad foot and the doctors were saying, ‘No, no, no.’ And Reinsdorf was telling him about risk. He was a kid who wanted to play. And I couldn’t blame him. But that’s where it all started because we said, ‘We’re gonna hold you back.’ We were all sitting in that room, and Stan wouldn’t do a damn thing to help. Stan could have helped us explain the situation to Michael, but he was being selfish. He could have stood with us and the doctors who said Michael wasn’t ready to play.”

  Krause recalled Jordan sitting there “with steam coming out his ears. He said, ‘You’re telling me I can’t play?’ ”

  The more they talked, the more Jordan’s fury grew. “Here you are dealing with big businessmen who make millions, and my millions are like pennies to them,” he later recalled. “All I wanted to do was play the game that I’ve played for a long, long time. But they didn’t look at it that way. They looked at it as protecting their investment, to keep their millions and millions coming in. That’s when I really felt used. That’s the only time I really felt used as a professional athlete. I felt like a piece of property.”

  “I was scared to death,” Krause said of the situation. “I didn’t want to go down in history as the guy who put Michael Jordan back in too soon.”

  Jordan sensed that management wanted to keep losing to improve the team’s position in the draft. “Losing games on purpose reflects what type of person you really are,” he told the Tribune, a comment that would resonate years later when he became an NBA owner. “No one should ever try to lose to get something better. You should always try to make the best with what you have. If they really wanted to make the playoffs, I’d be in there whenever we had a chance to win a game.”

  “It was like a soap opera,” Reinsdorf remembered in 1995. “We were too honest with Michael. We let him hear the report from the three doctors we consulted with over when he could come back. All three said the break had not healed enough. They said if he did play, there was about a 10 to 15 percent chance of ending his career. Michael was such a competitor. He just wanted to play. I thought he was entitled to hear what the doctors had to say. I never thought he’d risk his entire career. It just didn’t make any sense to me. But Michael figured that the 10 to 15 percent risk meant the odds were 85 to 90 percent that he wouldn’t get hurt. To me, it didn’t fit any risk/reward ratio. Here the reward was to come back and play on a team that had already had a bad year. Why risk your whole career for that reward? Michael insisted that he knew his own body better than I did. So we reached a compromise, that he would play gradually, just seven minutes a half at first.”

  Jordan vented his anger by almost single-handedly driving the Bulls through a reversal of fortune.

  “That’s the way Mike was,” Mark Pfeil explained. “If he didn’t think something was gonna hurt him, he’d focus past it and play. Sprains, groin pulls, muscle spasms, flu, Michael’s first question always was, ‘Is it gonna hurt me to play?’ If I told him no, it was gone. He’d focus past it.”

  “They put a limitation on how many minutes Michael could play,” Cheryl Raye-Stout remembered. “They literally ran a clock on how many minutes he could play. Stan would sit there and have to calculate the time. He was under duress the whole time with Michael’s return. There was some skepticism that the minutes limitations were there to help them get a lottery pick. That’s a question to which we’ll never know the answer.”

  In one game, Albeck played Jordan longer than he was supposed to, Reinsdorf recalled. “I told Krause to tell him not to do that again. Stan told us what he thought of that. The next game was at Indiana, and with twenty-five or thirty seconds to go, the Bulls were down by a point. Just then Michael reached the seven-minute mark, and Stan pulled him from the game. He pulled him just to show us how ridiculous he thought the seven minutes were, how arbitrary it was.”

  The Bulls still won the game on a jumper by John Paxson, but Reinsdorf was furious. Albeck had made him look foolish.

  “The one thing I could never understand,” Pfeil said, “was how could Michael practice for two hours, yet he couldn’t play but fourteen minutes?”

  “Michael’s minutes increased after it became obvious we could make the playoffs,” Reinsdorf said. “Finally, Krause went down at halftime of a game late in the season and told the trainer to tell Stan to play Michael as many minutes as possible. I shouldn’t have let him play at all that year. It was wrong.”

  God’s Disguise

  Jordan’s return to full-time status helped the Bulls win six of their final thirteen games. They finished 30–52, just enough to sneak into the playoffs with a late-season win over Washington.

  The eighth-seeded Bulls faced the top-seeded Boston Celtics in the first round. Led by team president Red Auerbach and coached by K. C. Jones, Boston would finish the year with a 50–1 home record. Larry Bird was in the process of winning his third straight MVP award, and the Celtics were moving through a period of four straight trips to the NBA finals, which would net them two championships. It was a great, great basketball team, with a frontcourt that included Bird, forward Kevin McHale, and centers Robert Parish and Bill Walton. They were all on a determined march to the franchise’s sixteenth championship.

  “It was a team,” Bill Walton remembered, “that could win any type of game, had a complete roster, brilliant coach, phenomenal leadership in the front office with Red, spectacular fans, perfect home court advantage. And it had Larry Bird, who was the greatest player I ever played with. Larry Bird, who was able to ignite the home fans more so than any other player I ever saw. And as great as Larry Bird was as a player, he’s an even better human being, a better leader. And as great as our visions and memories and dreams of Larry Bird are as a player, he was better than that. He was better because the game, the rules, the clock, the refs—it all put too many restraints on him because he was a creative artist. He was Michelangelo, he was Bob Dylan. He was the guy who saw things that nobody else did and then he was able to take that dream and that spark and turn it into action. There was nobody like Larry Bird.”

  Boston coach K. C. Jones had been perhaps the game’s greatest ball pressure guard, winning championship after championship alongside Bill Russell. Jones’s confidence was as supreme as his players’ that April. He saw no need to make any special effort against the ragtag Chicago Bulls and their young star coming off the injured list.

  “We really didn’
t have anything set up to double-team him,” Kevin McHale recalled. “We didn’t do anything. We just said let him score. And you remember the first game he went crazy.”

  Unburdened by double-teams, Jordan scored 49 points in forty-three minutes in Game 1, but Boston still squashed Chicago, 123–104.

  “This one-on-one defense is not exactly working for the Celtics on Jordan,” broadcaster Tommy Heinsohn said at halftime of that first game.

  Sharing the assignment against Jordan for that series were Dennis Johnson and Danny Ainge, both excellent defenders, and substitutes Rick Carlisle and Jerry Sichting.

  “After that first game we said we should probably double-team him or do some stuff,” McHale recalled, “and K. C. Jones said, ‘We’ll think about it.’ I mean they won thirty games. We won sixty-seven. There was no chance they were going to beat us.”

  Jordan had something else in mind three nights later before Game 2 in Boston Garden. “It was total silence in the locker room before the game,” Sidney Green remembered. “Michael was extremely focused, and we knew he was intent on doing something big.” The contest went to double overtime. In fifty-three minutes of playing time, Jordan took 41 shots and made 22 of them. The Celtics fouled him plenty, and he made 19 of 21 free throws. He also registered 6 assists, 5 rebounds, 3 steals, and 4 turnovers in the box score. His 63 points was the NBA’s all-time single-game playoff record.

  “That’s God disguised as Michael Jordan,” Bird said afterward. The comment would play for eternity in the Jordan highlight reel. For that single moment, he had frightened the cockiness out of the best team in basketball.