Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  “We’re going to New York, baby,” an exuberant Jordan said afterward.

  The energy from the win carried into the second round, where the Bulls went at it with coach Rick Pitino’s Knicks, featuring Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley, and Mark Jackson. With Jordan averaging 35 points despite playing with an aggravated groin injury, the Bulls took a surprising 3–2 edge into Game 6 in Chicago Stadium. Midway during the contest Scottie Pippen and New York’s Kenny Walker were ejected for a brief flurry of punches. It was a major blow for Chicago, and it came just as Jordan was working his way through a 40-point, 10-assist effort. The Bulls seemed to have things in their grasp with a 111–107 lead with just six seconds left. But the Knicks’ Trent Tucker hit a three-pointer, drew the foul, and completed a four-point play to tie it in a sequence that left Collins gasping on the sidelines, as if he couldn’t get enough oxygen. MJ now found himself hoping that he could produce yet another miracle, a sequel to his act in Cleveland. This time, John Paxson put the ball in play, and once again Jordan motored into the lane, where he was fouled, knocked down actually, with a couple of seconds to go. He made both, the Knicks missed a good look at the buzzer, and Collins found enough breath for yet another fist-pumping, back-slapping celebration at midcourt.

  Bad Boys

  Chicago was returning to the conference finals for the first time since 1975, when they lost to Golden State. This time they would face the Pistons, and once again the two teams’ history was fresh and angry. In an April game, Isiah Thomas had slugged Bill Cartwright and had been suspended for two games. Thomas said privately that he would have preferred to play New York even though the Knicks had been very successful against the Pistons, and Chicago hadn’t beaten Detroit all season. He was pushing his team hard to win its first NBA title, and he was concerned about the Bulls. Jordan was on an almost supernatural roll, having come up with brilliant performances to defeat Cleveland and New York.

  For Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals, Collins came out with Jordan playing Thomas. Jordan had gained some comfort at point guard, but this was the first time that Thomas had become his defensive assignment for long stretches. Jordan’s height and leaping ability proved something of a distraction on the perimeter. Thomas’s shots kept rimming out, which allowed Jordan to back off to let him shoot even more. If Thomas had been on target, Jordan would have been forced to come out farther and play him. Then Thomas could have driven by him, or had a clear path to push the ball inside to Detroit forward Mark Aguirre. But his misses from the perimeter left an impossible situation for the Pistons.

  Thomas made just three of eighteen shots that afternoon. “Anytime that he would drive I was in anticipation of that,” Jordan said afterward. “I wanted to make him shoot the outside shot, and he didn’t hit that today. That’s not to say I did an outstanding defensive job.”

  Detroit’s other great jump shooter, “super sub” Vinnie Johnson, was cold, too. The Pistons fell behind by 24 in the second quarter, but they pushed and shoved their way back and retook the lead midway through the fourth period. They couldn’t sustain it against Chicago’s defense, however, and the Bulls took a 1–0 lead in the series, 94–88. The loss ended Detroit’s twenty-five-game home-court winning streak and nine-game playoff winning streak. It also marked the first time in nine games that the Bulls had beaten the Pistons. The home-court advantage the Pistons had worked so hard for all year was gone in one afternoon.

  “It’s going to be hard to catch them on their heels like we caught them today,” Jordan told reporters. “But we have a good chance to win the series.”

  In the Detroit locker room, the reporters were packed shoulder to shoulder as Thomas remained in the showers longer than usual. The longer he stayed, the larger grew the crowd of reporters waiting to interview him. Finally he emerged, worked through the throng, and sat, his back to the wall, facing a ring of cameras, lights, and microphones.

  Just as the questions began flying, teammate Mark Aguirre parted the crowd and bent near to reach some lotion from a large dispenser. “Are we having grits tonight?” Aguirre asked, laughing, trying to break his friend’s obvious depression.

  Thomas gave a sickly smile and turned his attention to the microphones. One after another, in a calm measured tone, he answered all of the questions. The session went on for forty-five minutes, until the locker room was nearly empty, except for New York Post writer Peter Vecsey, who lingered, trying to extract something more from Thomas. What really happened?

  Thomas finished tying his necktie and sighed heavily. His worst fears about Jordan seemed about to come true. The Detroit guard looked sick. “This is a strange game sometimes,” he said.

  He grabbed his gym bag and headed for the door. As he hit the hallway, Mike Ornstein, a friend from Los Angeles, stepped up and took the bag. “Let me carry this for you,” Ornstein said and slapped Thomas on the back. They rode around aimlessly for several hours after that, Ornstein said later, and Thomas never said a word.

  In the press room, columnist Shelby Strother of the Detroit News summed up the situation. “He just might die of natural causes,” he said of Thomas.

  However, there would be no need for any obituaries. Two nights later, Thomas scored 33 and Dumars 20 to carry the Pistons to a 100–91 win, evening the series at one all. The scene then shifted to ancient Chicago Stadium, where the Pistons came out strong on Aguirre’s offense. They quieted the crowd, and with seven minutes left held a fourteen-point lead. But just as the fourth quarter seemed like Detroit’s time again, Jordan surged, and the Bulls charged back to tie it at 97, leaving the Pistons with possession and twenty-eight seconds on the clock. Thomas worked the ball on the perimeter, and with ten seconds left, Laimbeer stuck out his knee to catch Jordan with an illegal screen. The call returned the ball to Chicago, and Jordan took control at the other end, putting down the shot to give Chicago a 99–97 win and a 2–1 lead in the series.

  He had scored 46, the first time in the series that he had put together a solid offensive game. Knowing they couldn’t allow that to happen again, the Pistons decided to make Jordan play point guard like a real point guard in Game 4. They double-teamed him and forced him to pass.

  “When he puts his mind to it, you can’t stop him,” Thomas said of Jordan. “That’s the whole key. We’re hoping you can take his mind off of it.”

  As usual, Dumars had the primary responsibility with Jordan, but Vinnie Johnson and Thomas both took their turns, as did Rodman. Jordan shot five for fifteen in Game 4. As a team, the Bulls shot 39 percent from the floor. The Pistons shot 36 percent, but it didn’t matter. Thomas scored 27, and the defense helped Detroit tie the series at two all with an 86–80 victory.

  Afterward, Collins suggested to Jordan that he was taking too many shots and not hitting enough of them. Jordan responded with the sort of childishness that in another age would get a LeBron James excoriated by the press. In the Palace of Auburn Hills for Game 5, Jordan made his point by taking a mere eight shots from the floor. He made four of them for just 18 points, assuring another Detroit win, 94–85. It was the kind of job action that had driven Collins to privately tell Reinsdorf that the team simply could not win with Jordan. Yet the coach’s critics again noted that he was the one feeding the monster by tolerating Jordan’s every tantrum.

  Mostly unaware of the petty drama playing out between the coach and star player, the Chicago crowd was loud for Game 6 in the Stadium. The noise surged early in the first period as Pippen suffered a concussion when he caught a Laimbeer elbow while crashing the boards for an offensive rebound. Pippen suffered no permanent damage, but left the game for the hospital, where he stayed overnight for observation. There was no foul called. Later in the contest, the Pistons center went to the line as the entire building thundered a deafening chant, “Laimbeer sucks! Laimbeer sucks!”

  Thomas scored 33 points, as Chicago faltered despite Jordan’s 32. Detroit prevailed again, 103–94, to end the series. As Jordan headed toward the bench in the final seconds,
he paused to speak with Dumars. “He came by,” the Pistons guard said later, “and shook my hand and said, ‘Bring it back to the East.’ I said, ‘I don’t miss you, Mike. See you next year.’ There’s always a fear that giving your most, giving your best, may not be enough with him.”

  Jordan was angry and frustrated, but he wasn’t about to reveal his pain at the loss, Lacy Banks recalled. “He would say, ‘Don’t let folks know if you’re hurting. Don’t let other folks know your mind. You know as much about them as possible, but for them to know more about you is to give them an edge.’ He hid his frustrations, he hid his sadness, his disappointment, his agony.”

  In the Chicago locker room, Collins railed against what he called Laimbeer’s dirty play. Reporters immediately brought Collins’s colorful comments to Laimbeer, who replied that he didn’t even know Pippen had been injured until he ran to the other end of the court and looked back to see the trainers gathered around him.

  As the media crowd thinned out, filmmaker Spike Lee, who had just begun the process of adapting his Mars Blackmon character to the Air Jordan commercials he was directing for Nike, was making his rounds through the locker room. He paused in front of Isiah Thomas’s cubicle to take a few snapshots.

  “Spike!” Thomas said. “How ya doin’? I saw you on TV this morning.”

  Lee offered a sickly smile and exchanged the weakest of handshakes. Jordan may have had a huge financial edge with his Nike endorsements, but Thomas and Detroit still owned the Bulls. The Pistons would go on to claim their first title with a sweep of the Lakers in the next round, and the Bulls would face yet another bout of recrimination, turmoil, and change.

  They had suffered two straight setbacks to the Pistons, and a realization was slowly settling on the Bulls. “You couldn’t play Detroit in an emotional way,” John Paxson said in 1995, looking back. “You couldn’t because that’s the way they wanted you to play. They wanted to get you out of your game. We didn’t have the big banging bodies to play that way, and when we got angry that played right into their hands. Unfortunately, that was Doug’s emotional makeup.

  “Our crowd would play into that whole thing, too,” Paxson added. “And it never worked to our advantage. The Pistons were so antagonistic that it was just hard to maintain that control. It turned out to be a terrific rivalry for us, once we learned how to beat them. But for a while it looked like we were never going to get past them.”

  On July 6, 1989, Jerry Reinsdorf and Jerry Krause abruptly released Doug Collins, citing management’s “philosophical differences” with the coach. It was a stunning move, firing a popular young coach just weeks after he had advanced the team to the conference finals for the first time in fourteen years. The jolting nature of the firing spawned a rash of rumors. The whisper campaign had it that Collins had become involved with a relative of one of the team’s many owners. Krause acknowledged at the time that Collins had enjoyed an active social life—so active that Krause had to caution him to tone it down a time or two—but Krause said the rumors were patently untrue.

  Krause said Collins was fired for two reasons: One, his intensity had grown too strong and was grinding up both the coach and the team, and two, he lacked an offensive philosophy.

  Krause and Collins had clashed frequently over which players the Bulls should acquire, and at one point, the coach had reportedly gone behind the GM’s back to Reinsdorf to try to get him fired. The only problem was that Reinsdorf was said to care little for Collins and had hired him only on Krause’s recommendation. Collins’s power play proved to be unwise.

  “Doug didn’t get along with Jerry Krause, and on a day-to-day basis, that began to grind on us,” Mark Pfeil explained.

  “Most of the local media weren’t too surprised that Doug was fired,” Cheryl Raye-Stout recalled. “There was a lot of anger by the fans. They didn’t understand it. The Bulls had gone to Cleveland and won that series, and everybody thought, ‘Gosh, Cleveland should have won.’ The fans reacted bad, but there was so much tension. There was tension amongst the players; there was tension between Doug and management. It didn’t seem like it was gonna be long-term.”

  “Doug was extremely popular with the media,” Krause recalled several years later. “Everybody loved him except me. We were in the Eastern Finals against Detroit when I said to Jerry, ‘I want to let Doug go.’ Most owners would have said, ‘Wait a minute. You brought him in here. He’s your creation. He’s just won fifty games and got us to the Eastern Finals.’ Jerry didn’t say that. He said, ‘Why?’ And I told him I didn’t think we could win the world championship this way, and I thought this was a club that could win the world championship. That’s the only reason we let Doug Collins go.

  “No manager, no matter how strong he is, can fire the head coach without the owner’s approval,” Krause added. “When I first told Jerry, he said, ‘Who do you want to coach the team?’ I said, ‘I don’t want to make that decision until we decide that we’re going to let Doug go. Let’s decide Doug’s merits first.’ So we did that. After that, I said, ‘I want to hire Phil Jackson.’ I’d brought Phil on two years earlier as assistant coach. Jerry said, ‘Fine.’ ”

  “Doug’s a very emotional guy,” Jackson would later say. “He throws his heart into it, and from that standpoint he was very good for this basketball club. He was good at getting them directed to play with intensity and emotion. Then there came a level where they had to learn poise and control.” That would be Jackson’s assignment.

  The team had gotten better each year under Collins’s direction. Despite the ongoing conflicts, he did not see the move coming. “We brought Doug into the office,” Krause said, “and I think Doug thought he was going to talk about a contract extension. He had his agent with him. I said, ‘Doug, we’re going to have to let you go.’ The look on his face was shocking. We had our conversation with him, and I called Phil, who was fishing out in Montana. I told him, ‘I just let Doug go.’ He said, ‘What?!’ And I said, ‘Doug’s gone, and I want you to be the head coach. You need to get your ass in here on a flight today. Soon as you can. I got to talk to you.’ ”

  In a prepared statement, Collins responded to his release: “When hired three years ago, I willingly accepted the challenge of leading the Bulls back to the type of team this city richly deserves. I’m proud of the fact that each year the team has taken another step towards an NBA championship, and played with intense pride and determination. Words will not describe the void I feel not being a part of Chicago Stadium and this great team.”

  The firing produced no great complaint from Jordan, Sonny Vaccaro recalled. “There was never a point where I got a phone call, or even a conversation, where Michael said, ‘Well, Doug got screwed.’ To him, it was like business as usual.”

  “Everybody liked Doug,” John Paxson recalled. “The thing about it was, we had just come off of getting to the conference finals, of taking Detroit to six games. Our future was out there. The coach who had spent three years helping us do that was gone. That’s where you give Jerry Reinsdorf and Jerry Krause credit. They truly believed that Doug had been good for that team to a certain point, but that there had to be a different type coach to get us to the next level.”

  “I think he’s learned bitterly from experience,” Johnny Bach said of Collins, looking back in 2012. “Doug handled that well. You could see his influence, if you want to go all the way back to Michael’s third year in the league, from a young, fiery coach who sees so much and has passion. He was always after the officials and had a verbal strength, in that he was able to say what he saw. But the scene has to be good for you. In basketball you have to please a lot of people and you better win games. I think Doug had a lot to do with Michael growing. They were two people that were flaming, Michael with his game and ferocity, and Doug with his passion and with words. He could translate things in a torrid way.”

  Collins would later confide to friends that he thought Jackson had undermined him, although he never said so publicly. “That’s how Phil c
ame on the job,” Lacy Banks observed. “He was the dagger that Krause used to stab Doug Collins in the back.”

  “Doug had a lot of plays,” Jackson recalled in a 1994 interview. “There were forty or fifty plays we ran. We had a lot of options off of plays. We had five or six different offensive sets. You see that with a lot of teams. But that’s not where I came from as a basketball coach, and that’s not where Tex was philosophically. We believed in Tex’s organized system.” Krause later explained that he didn’t know if his new hire would use Tex Winter’s triangle offense. He was aware that Winter and Jackson had grown close while coaching the Bulls’ summer league team, just as he had hoped.

  “I brought Phil in and we talked philosophy,” Krause said. “The first thing he said was, ‘I’ve always been a defensive oriented guy, as a player with Red Holzman, and as a coach. That’s what you want me for?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘I’m going to turn the offense over to Tex, and I’m going to run the triple-post.’ ”

  Chapter 23

  THE DRIVE-BY WEDDING

  FOR MUCH OF the 1988–89 NBA season, Jordan had been able to keep the media away from the story of his new son, until he invited Sport Illustrated writer Jack McCallum to a gathering at his home. There McCallum saw Juanita Vanoy hauling around a plump, healthy baby boy. The Bulls were playing at home that night, and McCallum recalled that he was approached by press officer Tim Hallam, who told him that Jordan didn’t want anyone writing about the child. The request put McCallum on the spot. He had been allowed into Jordan’s inner circle, but he was a journalist. He didn’t want to break the news as the major story it was. Instead, McCallum mentioned it at the end of a piece he was writing that week.