Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  The Bulls fell into a deep hole in Game 6 back in Chicago, down 17 points late in the third quarter. Then Jackson pulled his regulars and played Bobby Hansen, B. J. Armstrong, Stacey King, and Scott Williams with Pippen. Hansen stole the ball and hit a shot, and the rally was on with Jordan on the bench leading the cheers.

  With about eight minutes to go, Jackson sent him back in, and the Bulls powered their way to their second title, 97–93, bringing the Stadium to an unprecedented eruption, the first pro championship won in Chicago by a Chicago team since the 1961 Bears won the NFL title at Soldier Field.

  “The final against Portland was a dramatic night for us and all Chicago fans,” Jackson recalled. “We came from 17 down at the end of the third quarter to win the championship. What followed was an incredible celebration.” The Bulls retreated to the locker room to engage in the usual ritual, spewing their champagne, wearing their new hats backward. Meanwhile, their fans remained upstairs in the Stadium, thundering on in celebration. “The team had gone down to the dressing room to be presented with the Larry O’Brien trophy by David Stern and Bob Costas,” remembered Bulls vice president Steve Schanwald. “Jerry Reinsdorf and Jerry Krause and Phil Jackson and Michael and Scottie stood on a temporary stage and accepted the trophy. But we didn’t have instant replay capability, so the fans were not able to share in that moment. Up in the Stadium, we were playing Gary Glitter on the loudspeaker, and the crowd was just reveling in the championship.… I went down and asked Jerry Reinsdorf if we could bring the team back up. He said, ‘It’s all right with me, but ask Phil.’ ”

  Jackson put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Everything got quiet. “Grab that trophy,” he said. “We’re going back up to celebrate with our fans!”

  Jordan grabbed the trophy, and the team followed him back upstairs. As they came through the tunnel, the game operations crew blasted “Eye in the Sky” by the Alan Parsons Project, the Bulls’ intro music.

  “All of a sudden the crowd just exploded,” Schanwald recalled. “It was a 10,000–goose bump experience. All of a sudden some of the players, Scottie and Horace, and Hansen, those guys got up on the table so that everybody could see them in the crowd. Then Michael came up and joined them with the trophy, and they started dancing.”

  Jordan held up two fingers for the crowd, then flashed three, and the roar was deafening. Jackson enjoyed the scene for a time, then retreated back downstairs to reflect quietly alone. “Things had been up and down,” he said later, “but we had had this one goal together, and despite our differences, we had focused on that one goal. I told the guys, ‘A back-to-back championship is the mark of a great team.’ We had passed the demarcation point. Winning that second title set us apart.”

  A few days later in Grant Park, Pippen again told hundreds of thousands of people that Chicago was going for a three-peat. The crowd cheered in response, but before Jordan could contemplate another title run, there was another little matter he had to deal with.

  Chapter 28

  ALL THAT GLITTERS

  THE SMART PLAY might have been for Pippen and Jordan to decline their invitations to play for the United States in the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. Krause hoped for as much. He wanted the Bulls’ superstars to rest over the summer. They both agreed to play, however, and Jordan soon found himself enmeshed in the Dream Team, the first US Olympic team to include the best of American professional basketball. The group in red, white, and blue would be feted across the globe like mythical superheroes. Perhaps it was good for basketball, but it says much that their most competitive moment in terms of the game itself would come in an intra-squad scrimmage. They made chumps of everybody else and did a great deal of showboating in the process, reducing the supposedly hallowed Olympic contests to pointless, mismatched affairs. Jordan knew all of this heading in and wasn’t shy about saying it.

  “When you look at the talent and the teams we’re supposed to play against, it’s a massacre,” he had said months before the event. “It should never be close. We taught them the game of basketball. We’ve got people who have the ability and the height. We’re talking about the greatest players that play the game now and the team is the best team that’s ever been put together. Who’s going to beat us? The Japanese? The Chinese? They can’t match up to the athleticism we’re going to have on this team. Not to mention the mental advantage we’re going to have here with Magic, or whoever’s gonna play the point. You have Stockton, Barkley, me, Robinson, Bird… come on. These are the people that the Europeans look up to, so how can they beat us? If any game is even close, it will be a moral victory for Europe.”

  Blowouts had been a regular feature of previous Olympic basketball games, even when the United States relied solely on amateur players. Now, American professionals were lining up to be paid between $600,000 and $800,000 each for their much-hyped appearances. Surely, if the “Olympians” weren’t already narcissists heading into the event, they would emerge with egos larger than many of the countries they faced. The US Olympic committee discreetly approached each player about donating his salary back to the cause. Jordan readily complied. Some others, who weren’t raking in his Nike cash, hesitated, then gave all or part of it back. And the casinos in Monaco, where the team made a promotional visit on the eve of the Olympic Games, certainly took a share, too.

  Jordan used the team’s training camp in La Jolla, California, to resume his golf challenge with Richard Esquinas. Playing between and around practices, he was able to reduce his gambling debt to $902,000. Esquinas would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Jordan’s Olympic teammates were aware that he was wagering. “But everybody knew not to come near the question of how much,” Esquinas said.

  Jordan made most of his gains on the last day that they played, June 25, at La Jolla Country Club.

  Esquinas joined Jordan one evening for a card game in Magic Johnson’s Torrey Pines hotel suite, a hundred bucks a hand, with pots that got up to as much as four thousand. Clyde Drexler and Pippen were among the crew, as were several collegians from the scrimmage team, including Bobby Hurley, Chris Webber, and Eric Montross. None of the collegians had the bank to join in the game, which made them the targets of Jordan’s and Johnson’s jibes. Esquinas recalled that every time Jordan put money in the kitty, Johnson would needle him about his “tennis shoe” cash. They may have become friends, but Johnson, it seemed, would never be able to get over Jordan’s Nike deal, the gift that kept on giving.

  Soon enough some girls showed up to distract the card players, and the evening would prove to be one in a run of party nights for the Dream Teamers. Esquinas’s days with Jordan, however, had come to an end. They would continue to wrangle over the golfing losses, with various estimates suggesting that Jordan paid somewhere between $200,000 and $300,000, some of it in a series of $50,000 checks written by Juanita Jordan. Esquinas would bide his time, plotting a way to bring the matter to Jordan’s attention one final time.

  The Olympics afforded the NBA’s top stars their first real opportunity to spend time together and to get to know each other better. The group quickly learned of Jordan’s indifference to rest. Throughout the experience, he would stay up long hours, smoking cigars, playing cards, hanging out, anything to avoid rest, leaving Charles Barkley and others shaking their heads in wonder.

  “It was,” said Chuck Daly, the team’s coach, “like Elvis and the Beatles put together. Traveling with the Dream Team was like traveling with twelve rock stars. That’s all I can compare it to.”

  The Americans played fourteen games on their way to winning the gold, and their smallest margin of victory was 32 points. The subtext for the gathering was the continuing rivalry of Michael and Magic. Despite his HIV-positive status, Johnson had made the roster, yet another highlight in the emotional sequence of events that marked the protracted end to his playing career. He seemed intent on asserting his continued dominance as the game’s best, never mind that his Lakers had lost convincingly in 1991. He and Jordan traded barbs over who
was tops, then settled it during an intra-squad scrimmage when the team stopped over in Monaco before heading to Barcelona. It was closed to the press, but the competition featured one team led by Johnson and the other by Jordan, detailed in Jack McCallum’s book, Dream Team, celebrating the event—and its excesses—twenty years later. Johnson’s “Blue” team, featuring Charles Barkley, Chris Mullin, David Robinson, and Christian Laettner, jumped out to a big lead, with Jordan and Johnson jawing away at each other. Jordan’s team, with Scottie Pippen, Karl Malone, Patrick Ewing, and Larry Bird, managed to storm back to win over a furious Johnson, who grew angrier afterward as Jordan serenaded him with the song from his Gatorade ad: “Sometimes I dream… if I could be like Mike.”

  “It was the most fun I ever had on a basketball court,” Jordan would say later.

  Magic Mike had conquered the hero of his youth for a final time.

  The affair had turned heated, but in the end, even Johnson, the natural-born leader of the assemblage, had to acknowledge that his time had passed. And Jordan had asserted once again that he was the king of the NBA hill.

  Team USA claimed the gold with a 117–85 win over Croatia on August 8, 1992. “They knew they were playing the best in the world,” Daly said afterward, in part as justification for the mismatches. “They’ll go home and for the rest of their lives be able to tell their kids, ‘I played against Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson and Larry Bird.’ And the more they play against our best players, the more confident they’re going to get.”

  The lone sticking point for Jordan had been Reebok’s sponsorship of the team, which forced him to wear the logo of his business competitor, a matter he addressed by draping an American flag over the Reebok insignia during the ring ceremony. It was something neither demanded nor contrived by Nike, Sonny Vaccaro said, but Jordan’s solution delighted company officials and demonstrated the depth of his legendary loyalty.

  One day not long afterward, Jordan and Pippen sat on the Bulls team bus talking about their Olympic teammates and the games. “Just imagine,” Pippen told Jordan, “how good Clyde Drexler would be if he worked on fundamentals with Tex Winter.”

  Like so many NBA players, Drexler was operating mostly off his great store of talent, absent any serious attention to the important details of the game. Jordan had been surprised to learn how lazy many of his Olympic teammates were about practice, how they were deceiving themselves about what the game required.

  One of their highlights had been their determination to shut down Croatian star Toni Kukoc, Krause’s “find” who was scheduled to join the Bulls for the 1993–94 NBA season. Kukoc was befuddled and embarrassed by the way they defended him during their competition. It was the same treatment that Jordan had leveled on every acquisition or rookie that Krause had brought to the team, but in the midst of Olympic play some thought it seemed strangely out of place, none more so than Krause himself.

  At home, awaiting Jordan, was his subpoena to testify in Slim Bouler’s criminal trial in North Carolina. He would be asked to explain why Bouler, a convicted cocaine dealer, was in possession of a $57,000 check from His Airness. Jordan had first told authorities the money was a business loan, but under oath on the stand, he confessed it was for poker and gambling losses from one of the weekends at his Hilton Head home. He was not asked about the other three checks found in the briefcase of Eddie Dow, the bail bondsman who had been murdered during a robbery in February.

  Jordan had publicly acknowledged his lie in an interview with a Chicago newspaper several days before the trial began, saying he was “embarrassed to say it, at first, but the truth’s got to come out.”

  On the stand, he explained that he lost the money playing $1,000 Nassau with Bouler and others at Hilton Head, although Jordan denied that he had been the victim of hustlers. “It was just bad golf in a three-day period,” he said. David Stern called Jordan to New York to discuss his activities and the company he had been keeping. Later, at a press conference, Jordan suggested that the men tied to him through the checks weren’t actually friends but mere acquaintances who had boasted of their activities with him. The paper trail was real, however, and growing.

  As the season was set to open, the NBA issued a reprimand of Jordan for gambling on golf and keeping unsavory company, which left him somewhat contrite during training camp. He told reporters he wouldn’t quit gambling but he would lower the stakes. “Winning is great, but when you lose that amount and get all the abuse I got, it ain’t worth it any longer,” he said. “I think people can accept my losing forty or fifty dollars. It’s easy to relate to. A twenty-dollar Nassau is something I should stick with.”

  Twenty-dollar Nassaus involved betting a limit of twenty on the front nine, twenty on the back nine, and twenty on the total score for eighteen holes, making for a bet that would not exceed sixty dollars total.

  The season ahead brought a welcome diversion from his time on the witness stand. He and the Bulls would try to win a third straight title, something that had not been done in almost thirty years, since Bill Russell and his merry Celtics won eight straight championships in a period when the NBA had only eight to ten teams.

  The Jordan Rules had captured him reflecting on his impending retirement and gave fans a glimpse of Jordan talking of stepping away from the pressure sometime in the next five years. He couldn’t quite see the road ahead yet, and anyhow, he had a championship to win. But in that moment, no one had any idea how hard the coming year would be.

  The Phoenix

  Phil Jackson’s mind seemed to work in snapshots. One was a Jordan dunk over Miami’s Rony Seikaly in the first round of the 1992 playoffs, memorable as a throwback to Jordan’s brush-high-against-the-rafters sort of stuff from his earlier days. “That was just an awesome slam over Seikaly that was one of those kind where he had to power over the top of everybody and look down at the basket,” Jackson recalled as the 1992–93 NBA season was set to open.

  It brought back memories for Jackson of a time before Jordan ruled the world. Things had changed that much for them all over a matter of just twelve months. They had gone from people who couldn’t win it all to dominators. “He used to do it for photo opportunities,” the coach said of Jordan’s dunking, as if he were talking about some entirely different creature. “He did it for the entertainment value. He did it for the in-your-face effect. Now it’s more or less a high-percentage shot. He has enough posters floating around.”

  With the transformation Jordan had undergone, the dunk against Miami now seemed like one of his final unrestrained moments. It wasn’t just that Jackson had changed Jordan’s thinking about his approach to the game. It was also the effect of his off-court activities and the stress that Jordan had heaped on himself, atop all that others had piled upon him. “It bothered me last year in the playoffs and at the end of last season,” Jackson observed, still trying to process the team’s run to two championships. “I could see that he was running dry. It got a little bit old and basketball usually doesn’t get old for him many games out of the season. But it felt as if it did, particularly when there were so many things happening on the outside and he became the focal point of everyone’s perception of the athlete, what happens when things go wrong, the White House, The Jordan Rules. A multitude of things that happened off the court affected him.”

  The coach addressed the issues in a talk with his star, telling him that his love for the game, his ability to find intrigue and freshness in it, had to be renewed for the Bulls to survive the grind of trying to win a third straight championship. A host of mileposts lay in their immediate path, among them Jordan’s thirtieth birthday just weeks down the road. He had to find a measure of joy in returning to the court, Jackson said.

  The Trib’s Melissa Isaacson visited the issue with Jordan on the brink of the season. “It has to be fun,” he told her. “I have to enjoy myself.”

  That had become easier with the recent birth of his third child, Jasmine, a bright-eyed baby girl. His sons were a pair of grinning bea
r cubs, into everything and reminding Jordan of the good ol’ days with his brother Larry.

  His main hope was that all of the off-court headaches were behind him now, that all he would have to consider this season would be his family and the game. That proved to be wishful thinking. Sam Smith’s revelatory book had set the agenda for the end of his career, an agenda that was now being hastened by the off-court issues.

  Jackson took some comfort in the fact that Jordan still had three years left on his contract, which might allow him to see beyond the current headaches.

  Asked by Isaacson how he would know he had reached the end of his playing days, Jordan replied, “When guys I used to go past start going past me.… I want to always stay ahead of my competition, to always have the upper hand.”

  His game would have to continue to evolve, but one thing remained steady: he wanted to hear no talk of reduced playing time. The entertainer in him remained very much alive. “I still have the desire to create,” he said that November. “That’s part of me. Always will be.”

  Yet he was well aware that the way teams had begun to defend him would limit the acrobatics of his previous seasons. Since the Bulls had moved to the triangle, he had spent considerable time developing his post-up moves because the offense continued to offer him interesting ways to work closer to the basket, behind the defense, where it became harder to double-team him. The process of watching him adapt the offense to his own game fascinated Tex Winter. Jordan obviously understood how it reconfigured the floor. He could read where the opportunity lay like no other player who had come before him, which even allowed Winter to see his beloved triangle in new and different ways.

  Jordan also understood instinctively that the changes would require a re-education for his fans and the basketball public. He had seen the public’s misreading of the end of Julius Erving’s career and wanted to avoid that for himself. “When Dr. J retired, everyone said ‘Yeah, he should get out of the game, he’s old,’ ” Jordan explained. “But Dr. J was still a good player. It was just that people, from years of playing against him, knew some of his tendencies and tried to push him into situations where he couldn’t be as creative as he used to be. He was taking what the defense was giving him.”