Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  “They respected Michael and his greatness so much, Chuck and Ronnie and those guys, I think it was the ultimate challenge for any coach to try to come up with a game plan to try to slow this guy down,” Dumars explained. “We were getting ready to play the Bulls one day in shootaround. One of my favorite coaches of all time, Ronnie Rothstein, our assistant coach, is about to show me what he wants. He said, ‘Here’s what Michael’s doing, and here’s what he’s about to do.’ He’s showing me, and Chuck stops him and says, ‘Hold on a minute. You ever guarded Michael? He does a pretty good job of it. Let him tell us how he’s going to guard him, how he’s going to stop him, and we’ll adjust to that.’ ”

  Like that, the Detroit staff had decided to build their plan on what Dumars thought. It was this ability to listen that made Daly a Hall of Fame coach. “They knew I was committed and passionate,” Dumars said. “I didn’t bring the frills. There wasn’t a whole lot of smoke and mirrors to what I did. They knew I was dead serious when I stepped out on that court. And I tried to establish that from the first day.”

  The Pistons also used Dennis Rodman and Isiah Thomas on Jordan, Brendan Malone explained. “But Dumars was the primary defender. He had such quick feet and was so dedicated to playing defense.”

  The coaches and Dumars decided that no matter what, they would not double-team Jordan early in the game, even if he was scoring 20 points in the first quarter. “I didn’t want him to see the double-teams early and figure them out,” Dumars explained. “So I only wanted to double him in the fourth quarter.”

  The coaches and Dumars also decided that they did not want to force Jordan to pass the ball early because they did not want his teammates to get comfortable catching and shooting.

  “We said, ‘For the first three quarters, look, man, if he’s rollin’ that’s fine, let’s just stay in the game and keep it close,’ ” Dumars recalled. “Now all of a sudden in the fourth quarter, the ball swings and his teammates have to start making shots. So I didn’t want any doubles until the fourth quarter.”

  The other primary element of the Jordan Rules called for Dumars to use his strength to force Jordan left toward the center of the floor when he had the ball. “I’m going to try and push him left every single time,” Dumars explained.

  “That’s where the Jordan Rules came in,” Malone recalled. “We took away all his trash, took away his drive by pushing him to the elbows, took away his baseline drive, and pushed him left. And when he got the ball down on the blocks in the post, we would come from the top and double-team him. That was the Jordan Rules. We did not want him to get to the baseline. On the wings we pushed him to the elbows. We pushed him on either wing to the elbow, and we would influence him to his left.”

  Anything less than the Jordan Rules would have meant defeat, James Edwards observed. “I mean if you didn’t scheme against him, he could drop 50 on you at any time. You had to try to slow him down the best way you could. You had to at least double-team him and make him pass it. You had to make it as hard as you can. You had to use two guys. You couldn’t guard him one-on-one. He was too good, too quick.”

  Asked about the Jordan Rules, Detroit’s John Salley once quipped, “It’s really two things. When Michael gets his hands on the ball, we all get down on our knees and pray. Secondly, we all go to church or synagogue before the game.”

  The Jordan Rules succeeded against Doug Collins’s Bulls so well that they became textbook for guarding athletic scorers. In the seventeen regular-season and playoff games between the Bulls and the Pistons over two seasons, Jordan’s average would fall by nearly 8 points to 28.3 per game. Most important, the Pistons would win fourteen of those games. The scheme helped Detroit break free in the Eastern Conference and win two NBA championships, but it also helped Chicago in the long run, by forcing Jordan and the Bulls to find an answer to Detroit’s muscle. “I think that ‘Jordan Rules’ defense, as much as anything else, played a part in the making of Michael Jordan,” Tex Winter said in 2004, looking back.

  Each year the Bulls were getting better, Dumars said. “It was like driving and looking in your rearview mirror. We’d say, ‘Man, they’re gaining on us. They’re coming.’ You could see them coming. It wasn’t long before that Ferrari went right by. Whoosh.”

  Most Valuable

  Jordan again led the league in scoring in 1988, this time with a 35.0 average, and for the first time he was named the NBA’s MVP. “It’s a thrill,” he said. The year before, he had been outpointed in the voting by Magic Johnson, who was on his way to leading the Lakers to back-to-back titles. For ’88, Larry Bird finished second with sixteen first-place votes to Jordan’s forty-seven. Jordan’s 3.2 steals per game also led the league, and he was named Defensive Player of the Year and a member of the All-Defensive team, fulfilling another of his goals.

  Krause, meanwhile, was named Executive of the Year, and Oakley again pulled down more rebounds than any player in the league, with 1,066. The biggest prize, though, was the Bulls’ first playoff series win since 1981, a 3–2 defeat of the Cleveland Cavaliers. In the first two games of the series, Jordan scored 50 and 55 points. No one in NBA history, not even Wilt Chamberlain, had scored 50 points in back-to-back playoff games. In the decisive fifth game, Collins decided to move Pippen into the opening lineup for the first time. Pippen replaced the ineffective Brad Sellers and scored 24 points. Krause was overcome afterward. “This is a baby from Conway, Arkansas, upon whom we’ve put tremendous pressure,” he told reporters.

  “When I played against Scottie last summer, I could see he had the skills,” Jordan said. “It was just a matter of, how do you get them out of him in a season? It took eighty-two games for him to do it, but he’s done it. And I think it’s going to help him for the rest of his career.”

  To celebrate, the Bulls donned T-shirts that said, “How do you like us now?”

  “We’re ready for the next round!” Jordan announced after the victory. At first, it seemed they were. They claimed the second game at the Pontiac Silverdome in their second-round series with the Pistons, and suddenly the Bulls had the home court advantage. But from there the Pistons zeroed in with their late-game defense on Jordan, and forced him to pass. They also resorted to their Bad Boy tactics. In Game 3, a 101–79 Pistons blowout in the Stadium, Jordan and Detroit center Bill Laimbeer scuffled. “I set a pick,” Laimbeer said. “I guess he wasn’t looking.”

  It was during this series that Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling phoned Jerry Reinsdorf and inquired about getting Jordan in a trade. Sterling badly needed the kind of player that would allow him to compete with the Lakers and Magic Johnson for the city’s attention. He could offer Chicago a slew of draft picks, including two of the top six of the first round. A deal wasn’t as far-fetched as it would seem in retrospect. Krause, who coveted draft picks like jewels, had begun to see that no matter how he built the team, Jordan would always get the credit for any winning. And Reinsdorf understood the criticism that the team could never win the NBA Finals with Jordan dominating the offense. The offer forced the Chicago front office to think about an alternative future without Jordan. With the right moves, it could be very attractive, Krause concluded. But Reinsdorf had already infuriated Chicago fans with his threats of moving the White Sox to Florida. Trading Jordan would have brought the wrath of the city down on his head. The owner knew he couldn’t do it, and the Bulls passed.

  Detroit took Game 4, and was in control in Game 5 when Jordan hit Isiah Thomas in the face with an elbow and briefly knocked him unconscious. Thomas was sent to the locker room but found the door locked. So he returned to the arena and later entered the game to provide enough edge to help the Pistons to advance, 4–1.

  Teams had focused almost exclusively on stopping him, Jordan would say later, looking back. “And doing that exposed certain weaknesses on our team.”

  Yet he didn’t see the solution coming.

  Just before the 1988 draft, the Bulls traded Oakley to New York for center Bill Cartwright,
a move that blindsided fans and players alike. Oakley was the team’s primary muscle, not to mention Jordan’s enforcer and closest friend on the roster. Cartwright, a seven-foot-one post-up center, had been plagued by foot injuries and was thought to be near the end of his career. The trade itself was bad enough, but the way it went down made it worse. Oakley was out on the town with Jordan, attending the Mike Tyson–Michael Spinks fight.

  “Oak was in Atlantic City with Michael at a fight, and I couldn’t find him to tell him about the trade,” Krause recalled. “He found out about it because somebody ran up to him at the fight and told him. He told Michael, and Michael went bananas. ‘How in the hell could Krause do this? He’s screwing up the franchise.’ Michael went nuts.”

  “We were in Atlantic City watching the fight,” Jordan remembered. “I was pretty upset about the deal, and also to have to find out about it that way.”

  Jordan’s wrath ignited the media and then the fans. Krause, who had taken great pride in drafting Oakley, was also deeply torn.

  “Charles was strong and tough and mean,” Johnny Bach recalled. “He was the hardest trade that we had to do because Jerry Krause not only loved him as a player, but I think he had a great affection for him as a person. And, to give him up and get Cartwright was almost against the grain. But the coaches really believed we couldn’t win without Bill Cartwright, so we made the trade.

  “It was traumatic for the team,” Bach explained, “but I think it just took us the next step up. Our defense was anchored by a real professional. Bill was good in the locker room. He was good in practice, and he earned the respect of the team because he could play Patrick Ewing straight up. We didn’t have to double Patrick Ewing. And that gave us a great deal of confidence. What made the trade so tough was that Michael looked at Oakley as a protector. Charles was ready to fly into any tangle. You hit Michael, you had to face Charles. But Bill, in his own way, toughened up the big guys we had and, in his own quiet way, Bill became very much of a terminator. Things stopped at the basket.”

  “It was a big gamble for this franchise, a huge gamble,” Tex Winter observed later. “We were giving up a young guy for an old guy, but we felt like we needed to start with a good post-up center, particularly someone who could anchor our defense.”

  The deal also opened up playing time for a rapidly improving Horace Grant. “We needed a guy who could clog the middle, and we weren’t going to win without one,” Jerry Reinsdorf said. “I also knew that Horace Grant was coming on and thought that he’d be a better player than Oakley anyway.”

  Grant’s superior quickness changed the defense. He and Pippen gave the Bulls two lightning forwards. With Grant on the floor, the Bulls could bring much more pressure to their defense. It would become a trademark. Bach took to calling Pippen and Grant “the Dobermans,” the attack players in the Bulls’ pressure, trapping defense. But at the time, the loss of Oakley soured Jordan’s mood just when pressure was growing off the court as well.

  Flight 23

  As spring became summer, Juanita Vanoy had informed Jordan that she was pregnant, which further inflamed the ire of his parents, who suggested that she had allowed the conception to happen to secure her hold on their son. It was not a happy time, Sonny Vaccaro recalled.

  Meanwhile, Jordan, in partnership with Nike, had opened a small chain of retail stores that were owned in part by his family. The Flight 23 by Jordan stores were to be run by James Jordan, Vaccaro explained. “They gave him something to make it look like he’s making a dollar that he’s not taking off his son. That was the general idea when it first happened. They said, ‘OK, let’s let James start a company. We’ll have a store in Charlotte, and we’ll have a store over here and over there.’ ”

  The enterprise also provided the Jordan siblings a share in the ownership. Their brother’s instant and overpowering wealth and fame had quickly trapped them in the impossibility of arranging some sort of normal life and employment. Ronnie, with his military service and his family, already had his life and career laid out, but the others found mostly complication at every turn. “You know how hard that must have been also,” Vaccaro observed, “to be the brother or the sister of Michael Jordan, with the mother and the father having to maintain a semblance of balance where he’s not just paying for everybody, which he basically ended up doing.”

  Sadly, the running of retail outlets only served to further exacerbate the family conflicts, particularly those between James and Deloris Jordan. Michael was engaged at every turn in his young life, from the immense challenge on the court to his many business dealings to his developing relationship with Juanita. Now he had to navigate a new level of intensity between his parents.

  With the press and a large crowd attending the grand opening of the Flight 23 by Jordan store in Charlotte, his parents engaged in an ugly dispute in a back room of the retail space, his older sister recalled. “While we all were entangled in their conflicts to a certain extent, it was Michael who was pulled into them mainly and being affected by them the most. It was he who was having to endure the private battles and step out on the platform of the world and smile, even when his heart was breaking. He once told me that the worst thing about his success was what it had done to our parents.”

  While the public saw James Jordan as a nice, hardworking man, Nike quickly discovered that he was a nightmare running the small chain of stores. He was known to do some drinking, and he dealt with crises by ignoring them. He also ignored bills owed to suppliers, Vaccaro recalled. “He wasn’t paying for the T-shirts and all that.” Beyond that, there was increasing evidence that he was philandering, which further fired the conflict with Deloris. “James was a scoundrel and he created a lot of the problems,” Vaccaro said. “It was horrible. He owed money and his kid was making zillions.”

  As a Nike representative, Vaccaro found himself in the middle of the conflict. “It was unbelievable,” he said, explaining that he met separately with James Jordan and then his wife, in hopes of resolving the issues. Word of the problems had gotten to Phil Knight quickly, and the Nike chairman wanted them handled.

  The Jordans came to a hotel in Beverly Hills where Vaccaro spoke to them separately. “I had a talk about the problem James was having,” he explained. “I represented Nike, because Phil could never get next to these people. I had to go down and negotiate what James was doing and then I’d go to Deloris.”

  Jordan dearly loved and was loyal to both his parents, which made their conflict almost unbearable for him. “But he didn’t take his father’s side when it came to Nike,” Vaccaro recalled. Jordan agreed with Phil Knight that Nike should buy out his parents’ interests as soon as possible. Otherwise, the family was headed for a public relations nightmare due to James Jordan’s mismanagement. The situation dragged out for three years while Jordan was engaged in his most intense battles with the Pistons.

  At first, James Jordan resisted giving up his ownership, Vaccaro recalled. “He wanted to be separate, but you couldn’t have a separate Flight 23 or whatever the hell he wanted to call it.”

  When it was finally made clear that Nike was going to take the stores back, James decided to take some of the proceeds from the sale and launch his own clothing company along with son Larry. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t long before that operation too was in trouble. That generated more conflict with Deloris Jordan and more headaches for their famous son.

  “The public never saw the pain and the problem that existed,” Sonny Vaccaro said. “I was in the middle of them when they were breaking away from Nike and James got involved in buying his own T-shirts. I was in the middle of all that.”

  “After the Flight 23 by Jordan catastrophe, he vowed that he would never have any business dealings with us,” Jordan’s older sister said of the experience.

  “It was worse than you or others may think,” Vaccaro agreed.

  What made it worse, they all realized in retrospect, was that the conflict took away Jordan’s family as a place where he could escape the p
ressures of fame, fortune, and competition. More and more, golf was becoming his means of escape. His other main discovery about his life was that even when he got away, his competitive urges and the adrenaline rushes they bred were still with him. He had long enjoyed small bets on all sorts of things, but especially golf. As the sanctuary of his personal life evaporated, he turned to golf for relief and to wagering to feed his craving for an adrenaline rush. And now that his life was larger, the bets became larger, too. What he didn’t fully comprehend at the time was that he was putting on the line his own good name, which he guarded so tenaciously in every other aspect of his life. He continued to groom his public image, while keeping his golf gambling secret, documented only in the strange hieroglyphics of his scorecard. Soon it was hidden so well that often one of his own golf partners would have no idea of the lofty level of wagering Jordan was engaging in. The issue with his gambling, Jordan would soon discover, was not so much what it was, but what it was perceived to be.

  Chapter 22

  FLYING HIGH AND DRY

  JORDAN WENT TO yet another “appreciation” event at Laney High during the 1988 off-season. During a break, he slipped outside for some fresh air. Dick Neher, his old Babe Ruth coach, snuck up behind him, grabbed him by the band of his trousers and underwear, and pulled up high and hard to deliver the kind of wedgie that only an ex-Marine could fathom. (It was perhaps Jordan’s ultimate Hanes moment.) Stunned and instantly angered, Jordan whirled around, saw who it was, and told him, “Dick Neher, you’re still the craziest white man I know.” That was quite a statement, considering Jordan’s relationship with Krause.

  During that 1988 off-season, Krause had arranged for Tex Winter and Phil Jackson to coach the Bulls’ summer league team and to use Winter’s triangle offense. The franchise’s main team had never used the triangle under Doug Collins, but the GM wanted Winter to teach Jackson the offense. The summer league team featured few of the players the franchise had under contract and focused instead on various free agents and rookies hoping to catch on with Chicago.