Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  The Bulls resumed their pursuit for chemistry after the All-Star Game and continued to search out a feel for the offense. In late March they launched into a nine-game winning streak that was ignited by Jordan’s all-time best scoring performance, 69 points in an overtime win against Cleveland. He also took in a career-high 18 rebounds that night. He made 23 of 37 field goal attempts from the floor and 21 of 23 free throws. He also had 6 assists, 4 steals, and just 2 turnovers in fifty minutes of playing time. As stupendous as it was, Jordan’s outburst hardly fit the ideal of Winter’s ball-sharing offense.

  Like nearly everything else, Jackson used it as a teachable moment, Johnny Bach recalled. “Michael had a huge night of scoring. I know Phil used that. It was presented the way Phil could present things. It was, ‘You’re this good, but you’re going to have to make a couple of our other players better.’ ”

  Jordan might not have heard the message from any other coach, but there was something in Jackson’s approach that began to get through. It began with his remarkable patience and apparent serenity, evidenced first by his ability to sit calmly during games and watch the action. Bach marveled at the difference between Collins and Jackson. “This guy would be worn out. Sweat was pouring off of him, veins were bulging,” he said of Collins. “Doug had given every ounce of his energy. Phil on the other hand had this ability to sit there through the evening. He could walk off afterward and nod to people. He might have reached that same fever pitch as Collins had during the game. Phil had reached that pitch internally, but he never showed it externally.”

  Bach especially admired Jackson in the heat of games. “Phil was at his best in that cauldron,” he said. “Like the psychologist that he is, he’s going to find a very different approach to solving problems. He will not get in your face and say, ‘Let’s get this settled now.’ ”

  Both Bach and Winter would find themselves pushing him to call time-outs during stretches when the team was obviously struggling. “Phil would just look at me,” Bach remembered. Both Winter and Bach decided they would request a time-out twice, and if Jackson didn’t respond they would stop pushing. “He has this strength, this resolve,” Bach said, “to endure whatever the results are.”

  Jordan had quickly come to identify with Jackson’s calm. In that respect, Jackson reminded him of Dean Smith. Rick Fox, who also played for Smith and later for Jackson, agreed that the two were much the same in their on-court demeanor, except for the profanity that decorated Jackson’s speech.

  Jackson rarely raised his voice in dealing with his team after games. He was often consoling after losses, focusing on their effort. He would later sit with Winter for hours, studying videotape of each game and planning practices and adjustments.

  “He is a hands-on manager, but with a different approach in every way,” Bach explained. “It’s deeply psychological. It’s from the heart, except that he’s able to separate it from his emotions. He’s sort of a mystery to the players because he is not predictable. He doesn’t overreact, or sometimes even react at all. Yet he has a firm hand. The great strength of Phil is that he is always very aware of what is happening. He could see things on the bench, or in the locker room, but he never moved too quickly to fix things. He would only do that after he had thought about it. Then he would do just what was needed to calm the situation and the problem.”

  Because he didn’t have to make play calls constantly, the triangle also contributed to Jackson’s calm. “You see coaches running up and down the sidelines all the time making a play call, which to me, especially in playoff series, plays into your hand,” Paxson observed. “If you scout well, you know how to defend against those set plays. Phil sold us, then made us believe the more subtle you are on your offense, the more successful you’re going to be. You can do some damage if you’re reading the other team’s defense and reacting rather than worrying about calling some play that the coach wants from the sideline.”

  Detroit Once Again

  The win streaks propelled them to a 55–27 finish, good for second place in the Central Division behind the sixty-win Pistons, the defending world champions (who defeated the lakers for the 1989 title). Almost every night, Jordan had led them in scoring, but Pippen had emerged as a threatening defender who could also run the offense like a point guard. Few teams had a means of matching up with him, particularly when they also had to worry about Jordan. Once again Jordan harvested another batch of honors: All-NBA, All-Defense, and his fourth consecutive scoring title. Plus he led the league in steals.

  The Bulls lost to Detroit in the last game of the regular season, their third straight defeat at the hands of the Pistons, which sent Jackson’s team into the playoffs with Jordan harboring hard feelings about some of his teammates’ inability to contribute to the cause. Pippen was playing well, and Jordan’s feelings softened in the first round as Chicago dumped Milwaukee three games to one. In the next round, against Philadelphia and Charles Barkley, Jordan was nothing short of overwhelming. He averaged 43 points, 7.4 assists, and 6.6 rebounds as the Bulls advanced in five games, despite the fact that Pippen’s seventy-year-old father died during the series, and he missed a game to fly home to Arkansas for the funeral.

  “I never played four consecutive games like I did against Philly,” Jordan would say later.

  For the third straight year, the Bulls’ season would be defined by a bruising battle with the Pistons, once again in the conference finals. In essence, it was the big exam for Jackson’s new style of play.

  Recalling the playoffs the year before, when Bill Laimbeer knocked him out of Game 6 with an elbow to the head, Pippen said, “There were times a few years before the flagrant foul rules, when guys would have a breakaway and [the Pistons] would cut their legs out from under them. Anything to win a game. That’s not the way the game is supposed to be played. I remember once when Michael had a breakaway, and Laimbeer took him out. There was no way he could have blocked the shot. When you were out there playing them, that was always in the back of your mind, to kind of watch yourself.”

  As Jordan predicted, his developing friendship with Dumars did nothing to dull the competition between their two teams. The Pistons continued to flaunt their much-ballyhooed “Jordan Rules,” which were really just simple common sense: Force Jordan to give up the ball. Gang up on him as much as possible, knock him to the floor. And make things really ugly. The matchup always seemed to inspire the worst sort of paranoia among the Bulls—both players and coaches—who seethed over videotapes the Detroit coaching staff had sent to the league offices suggesting that Jordan was benefitting from too many unwarranted foul calls. Earlier in the playoffs, Detroit’s John Salley had pointed out for reporters that the Pistons were a team and the Bulls were a one-man show. “There’s not one guy who sets the tone on our team,” Salley remarked with a smile. “That’s what makes us a team. If one guy did everything, we wouldn’t be a team. We’d be the Chicago Bulls.”

  Indeed, Jordan’s own teammates were quite aware of the difficulty of playing alongside their leader. As former teammate Dave Corzine had once pointed out, if anything went wrong for the team, it was never Jordan’s fault. Somebody else always took the blame. Despite the best efforts of the coach to install the ball-sharing triangle, Jordan still dominated the club, to the point that Craig Hodges and others referred to him as “The General.”

  True to form, the Pistons slammed Jordan around in Game 1 of the 1990 conference finals. Detroit hit only 33 of 78 from the floor, and one of those was an Isiah Thomas lob pass to John Salley that inadvertently went in the basket. As always, the Pistons’ hell-for-leather defense saved them. “It was more like a rugby match,” Phil Jackson said glumly.

  The key effort for Detroit was 27 points and plenty of defense from Dumars. He slowed Jordan to 34 points. The rest of the Chicago starters scored a total of 31, which was enough for a blueprint Bad Boys win, 86–77, and a confirmation of Salley’s snide remark.

  Jordan got banged up after flying high into the lane in the
first quarter. A group of Pistons led by Dennis Rodman laid him down on the floor, bruising his hip. “I think I had my legs cut out from under me,” he said afterward. “And if so, I don’t know who did it. I think it’s the type of injury that could linger.”

  It did linger, at least into the next battle. The Pistons snatched a 43–26 lead in the middle of the second quarter of Game 2, while Jordan opened stiffly. Chicago trailed 53–38 at the half, when Jordan entered the locker room, kicked a chair, and stormed at his teammates, “We’re playing like a bunch of pussies.”

  Chastised, they returned to the floor in the second half with much more energy. And Jordan finally warmed enough to put the Bulls back in front, 67–66, at the 8:24 mark of the third period. But it was short-lived. Dumars finished with 31 points on 12 of 19 from the floor, giving the Pistons a 2–0 series lead with a 102–93 win. Meanwhile, Jordan made just 5 of 16 shots to finish with 20 points. Immediately afterward, he ripped into the Bulls for their uninspired performance and left the locker room without speaking to reporters. He would later suggest that his criticism was directed at himself as much as his teammates.

  The writers gathered around Dumars in the Detroit locker room and asked him how he had stopped Jordan. The Pistons guard paused and looked up at the ceiling, as if searching for help. You don’t stop Jordan, he explained. The obvious answer was that for the first two games, he had gone at Jordan offensively, and lit him up. At least that’s what Jordan’s irritated teammates pointed out privately. But at a practice following the first two losses, Jordan grew infuriated when he thought Pippen and Grant were goofing around and failing to take the situation seriously.

  For much of his tenure in Chicago, Johnny Bach had painstakingly edited and produced the scouting videotapes of opponents that the coaches showed before each playoff game. The assistant coach often spliced in war movie clips to illustrate basketball points, but Jackson himself wanted to take over the job from Bach that first season. He illustrated the videotapes during the Pistons series with clips from The Wizard of Oz. He took a clip of Dumars zipping past Jordan on a drive, then spliced in a shot of the scarecrow. After another mistake, Jackson showed a shot of the cowardly lion, and after another, the tin woodsman, all to the amusement of the players, until John Paxson pointed out that the coach was basically insinuating his players had no heart, no courage, and no brains.

  Fortunately, this negative tenor eased in Game 3 in Chicago Stadium. Jordan defended better, scored 47, and got enough help from his teammates for a 107–102 win. Isiah Thomas had broken out of a 5-for-21 shooting slump to score 36, but the Bulls won the rebounding battle, 46–36, and second shots gave them the edge, and a victory.

  At one point in Game 4, the Bulls held a 19-point lead, but Dumars scored 24 points and again led the Pistons’ charge. Twice the lead was cut to three, but the Bulls made 18 of 22 free throws to maintain their edge. While the Pistons outrebounded the Bulls 52 to 37, they couldn’t sink baskets, hitting only 29 of 78 attempts. On a bad ankle, Detroit’s Dennis Rodman had 20 points and 20 rebounds, but Jordan delivered bigger, with 42 points, and Chicago’s other four starters finished in double figures in a 108–101 Bulls win.

  Suddenly the Bad Boys, who liked to keep the pressure on the opponent, found themselves facing a must-win situation at home.

  Both James Edwards and Bill Laimbeer shook off their slumps for Game 5 and helped the Pistons take a 3–2 series lead with a 97–83 win as Dumars held Jordan to 22 points. Sick with fever and a cold, the Detroit guard had played 38 minutes. “With Jordan, there’s nothing you can do but work, hope, and pray, and Joe did all three,” Chuck Daly said. Dumars played the series with the sort of heart for which Jordan would later be lionized, but his performance would become almost forgotten in sports history.

  Jordan’s message seemed to have gotten through to his teammates, however. The Pistons returned to Chicago, held Jordan to 29 points, and still lost Game 6 in a blowout. The Bulls forced the Pistons into 25 percent shooting in the third period and expanded a three-point edge into an 80–63 lead to open the fourth. Detroit lost 109–91. And like that, the Bulls had forced a seventh game.

  “We are more driven than ever to win this thing,” Jordan declared.

  Game 7, however, quickly turned disastrous for Chicago. Paxson was nursing a badly sprained ankle, and Pippen developed a migraine headache just before tip-off. “Scottie had had migraines before,” trainer Mark Pfeil explained. “He actually came to me before the game and said he couldn’t see. I said, ‘Can you play?’ He started to tell me no, and Michael jumped in and said, ‘Hell, yes, he can play. Start him. Let him play blind.’

  “Horace Grant kind of backed up a little bit in the game, too,” Pfeil added. “It was more a matter of maturity than wimping out. It took a certain period of time before they would stand up and say, ‘Damn it, I’ve been pushed in the wall enough.’ Scottie played with the headache, and as the game went on he got better.”

  The Bulls, however, did not. The second period was particularly awful, and Chicago never recovered. The Pistons advanced with a blowout, 93–74.

  “My worst moment as a Bull was trying to finish out the seventh game that we lost to the Pistons in the Palace,” Jackson recalled. “There was Scottie Pippen with a migraine on the bench, and John Paxson had sprained his ankle in the game before. I had to sit there and grit my teeth and go through a half in which we were struggling to get in the ball game. We had just gone through a second period that was an embarrassment to the organization. It was my most difficult moment as a coach.”

  Furious with his teammates, Jordan cursed them yet again at halftime, then sobbed in the back of the team bus afterward. “I was crying and steaming,” he recalled. “I was saying, ‘Hey, I’m out here busting my butt and nobody else is doing the same thing. These guys are kicking our butt, taking our heart, taking our pride.’ I made up my mind right then and there it would never happen again. That was the summer that I first started lifting weights. If I was going to take some of this beating, I was also going to start dishing out some of it. I got tired of them dominating me physically.”

  With each Chicago loss in the playoffs, critics had grown more convinced that the Bulls were flawed as a one-man team. “They kept running into Detroit and it didn’t look like they had any idea of how to beat Detroit,” recalled journalist David Aldridge. Some observers pointed out that it had taken Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West, and Oscar Robertson years to lead teams to the NBA title, and perhaps Jordan fell into the category with those players. Others wondered if he weren’t headed for the same anguish as Elgin Baylor, Nate Thurmond, Pete Maravich, and Dave Bing, all great players who never played on a championship team.

  Jordan was infuriated by such speculation and the criticism. He was literally nauseated by the losses each year to Detroit.

  Losing to Isiah Thomas was very difficult. In some ways, however, the burden of the loss fell on Pippen. Everyone, from the media to his own teammates, had interpreted the headache as a sign of faintheartedness. Lost in the perspective was the fact that the third-year forward had recently buried his father.

  “I’m flying back from the migraine game,” recalled Cheryl Raye-Stout, “and who should be sitting across from me but Juanita Jordan. And she says, ‘What happened to Scottie?’ I said, ‘He had a headache.’ She goes, ‘He had a headache?!’ And she just shook her head.”

  After his biggest games, Jordan liked to save his shoes and store them for posterity. After the Game 7 loss, he wanted no mementos. “The last time they lost to the Pistons, we were all checking out of the hotel room and Scottie was in there with him,” recalled Lacy Banks, who often claimed Jordan’s game shoes as a donation to auction off for the local heart association. “He said, ‘I don’t want any of this stinky stuff. Here, Lacy, take these ol’ stinky shoes. I don’t want to see them anymore.’ ”

  Mostly Joe Dumars would remember the pain on his face at the end of Game 7. “I saw it in his eyes,” Dumars said. “He
came and shook hands and quietly said, ‘Congratulations, good luck.’ I remember seeing the hurt and disappointment in his face. I saw a deep hurt.”

  It was going to take far more than Phil Jackson’s burning sage to purify Jordan and his Bulls. Jordan wasn’t sure what would be needed, but he knew that it was he who would have to force the agenda.

  “With Phil we lost again,” Mark Pfeil recalled. “After that, Michael said, ‘Hey, now we’ve gotta go over the top, and I’m gonna take us there. If you don’t want to be on the boat, get off.’ ”

  Chapter 25

  THE GOD OF BASKETBALL

  IT WAS THE odor of piss that somehow still played on Sonny Vaccaro’s mind years later.

  They were in a godforsaken bathroom on a US Army base in Germany in late August 1990. Michael Jordan was about to play against himself in basketball for about two thousand troops packed into a tiny gym. He had not wanted to make a trip, which took him away from golf and from Juanita, now five months pregnant with son Marcus (who would be born on Christmas eve). But here he was in Europe, thanks to Vaccaro’s moxie and guile, which had begun to wear dangerously thin with Nike chairman Phil Knight.

  The world was on edge as the Gulf War had just gotten under way, but Jordan had his own reasons not to pack up and head to Europe for ten days that summer. The Game 7 loss to the Pistons in May had cast a certain mind-set over the entire Bulls roster and brought surprising focus to the off-season. The anger had sparked a constructive optimism among his teammates, and Jordan wanted to be able to seize that moment.