Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  Another Bulls employee with insight into the relationship said that Krause would never believe it, but Jackson had actually asked Jordan to ease up on the general manager. According to one witness, Jordan replied that he knew he shouldn’t go so hard but admitted, “Sometimes I just can’t help myself.”

  “I think they’ve visited about it,” Winter agreed. “Phil has talked to Michael about trying to accept authority a little bit more as it’s handed down from Jerry. I think Phil has helped a little bit in that regard. But on the other hand, sometimes I feel like he doesn’t help as much as he maybe should, to be honest with you.” Winter said that he told Jackson he needed to do more to ease the situation.

  “He seemed to let a lot more things hang out, Michael did at that time,” Jackson said of Jordan’s return to the Bulls. “More honest with his feelings, more outspoken. He would speak about things that he hadn’t before. But there’s always been that thing. Jerry will tell you, ‘I’m the one person who told him he couldn’t play, and Michael’s gonna hold that against me for the rest of his life.’ ”

  “I express myself more vocally now than I would have ten years ago,” Jordan said when asked about the incident after the playoffs.

  In the moments after the 1997 Finals, one team employee watched Jordan embrace Krause. “He grabbed him and he hugged him,” the employee said. “It wasn’t a quick embrace because it was the right thing to do at the moment. It was a hug, a heartfelt hug. And Michael hugged Krause’s wife, Thelma. She was just smiling. It was almost like family.”

  In the ensuing summer of confrontations and negotiations, there would be no more heartfelt hugs. In fact, it was pretty clear that the hugs were gone forever.

  The Last Time

  As always, the basketball court was one place where everything became lucid and clear for Michael Jordan. All the edges there were sharp and clean, walled in by the crowd noise and the fortress of his concentration on the task, especially in that final season. If every decision he made wasn’t perfect, it was close. He had reached a level of play that staggered the people who had watched him most closely over the years.

  Isiah Thomas, Doug Collins, and Bob Costas were broadcasting a game together that season when they concluded that they should simply stop talking about Jordan on the floor because everything he did was so good and correct and precise that nothing else could be said. It was quite possible that no one ever did anything better than Michael Jordan played basketball late in his career.

  His team was now in its seventh year using Tex Winter’s triangle offense. That brought order to the floor, but it was Jordan’s role in the offense that often sparked it to life. He could take a single step and move an entire defense. There was no one who knew Winter’s offense better than he did, perhaps not even Winter himself. Jordan always had a special kinesthetic sense, an ability to read the floor. The offensive system refined that sense by bringing order to the context. Jordan saw its limitations and figured out how to behave within them until he saw a better option.

  Jordan didn’t need the offense and often chose to go off on his own, but there were thousands of possessions where he used it to perfection. He worked constantly in the post, and the triangle made it difficult for teams to double-team him. So many times all he had to do was turn toward the baseline, away from the double-team, to find an open shot. He could get his shot any time he wanted simply by dribbling to places that no one else seemed to be able to go—or even to think to go. But the offense, when he used it, produced shots for him in bunches. And he was simply a splendid shot maker.

  “I coached him for three years,” Doug Collins said, “and to see the way this man still plays the game is incredible.”

  Even his opponents seemed eager to see what he was going to do next. At age thirty-five, he was in perfect condition, and for a time that season people began to consider the possibility that he might somehow be getting younger. The nine pounds he had lost certainly made him seem younger. Most other players lost the battle for youth, but he had found a plane where age seemed almost irrelevant.

  “The guy has an engine that never quits and never dies,” Isiah Thomas marveled.

  The beauty of Jordan on the floor stood in harsh contrast with the ugly conflict with the GM. After the hazing Jordan delivered on the bus in Utah, the conflict seemed to consume Krause. He would protest that none of it bothered him, but everything he did said otherwise. The abuse of Krause was one of a host of exchanges that had soured relations among Bulls players, coaches, and management. Then they had won the title, and Jordan had stepped to the podium during the celebration and called for Reinsdorf to bring Jackson and the players back for another run. The moment had offended Reinsdorf because Jordan had used the occasion to force his hand, rather than allowing the team chairman the opportunity to graciously make an offer.

  Jordan, however, knew that he had the emotion of the moment, that it would be the best time to make his play. He wasn’t going to sit back and let the issue be settled in the Bulls’ boardroom. But his public appeal for Reinsdorf to bring them back for another year set a pattern for the turbulent 1997–98 season, in which Jordan and Jackson would take their side of the issue to the public and Reinsdorf would fume in private.

  As far as a new deal for Jordan, the negotiations were relatively uncomplicated. He signed another one-year contract for more than $30 million. Jackson, on the other hand, argued bitterly with Krause over the value of a coach. Krause did not want to acknowledge that the salary for coaches was changing. Finally, in July 1997, Krause announced a one-year, $6 million deal for Jackson, but he emphasized that this would be Jackson’s last year with the team, no matter what—even if the Bulls went 82–0.

  “It was pretty obvious that Jerry mismanaged that press release and kind of let his own feelings out,” Jackson said later.

  “I certainly didn’t mean to say it with glee,” Krause acknowledged. “Sometimes I don’t do it right.”

  The GM did not identify exactly what had led to Jackson’s scheduled departure, but the relationship between the coach and general manager had obviously crumbled. “This is it,” Krause simply said. “Phil and I know it. We all know it.” Krause had set himself in opposition to the immensely popular Jackson. Things only got worse when training camp opened and Jordan announced that he would retire if Jackson was not retained.

  Suddenly, Jerry Krause had taken on two of the most popular people on the planet.

  The proclamation was senseless and it resonated throughout the season, with the public growing more fearful and irritated every day, bringing an intense heat down on Reinsdorf. The media and fans again began referring to them as “the two Jerrys,” the scoundrels who wanted to break up the Bulls. Krause wore the mantle as if born to it.

  The spark that set the entire house aflame came on media day, usually reserved for players and coaches to answer questions from reporters about the upcoming season. Krause, as he sometimes did, chose to engage the media as well. In response to a question, he made the remark that players don’t win championships, organizations do. He would later insist that he had used the phrase “players alone” don’t win championships.

  That may have been true, but subtle details often get lost when animosities degenerate into a slugfest. The GM should have known, after better than a decade of working with Jordan, that seemingly harmless things could set him off. In one sentence, Krause had become the LaBradford Smith of 1998.

  The reporters later told Phil Jackson what Krause had said. “He would say that,” the coach said testily.

  Krause had stirred the pot, but the real issue was Pippen. Jerry Reinsdorf’s refusal to pay him what he felt he deserved would endure as the one inexplicable facet of the team’s great tangle of conflict. “It was unfortunate,” Jim Stack said, looking back in 2012. “I think Scottie’s contract was the biggest issue, the fact that we weren’t gonna be willing to pay him what he was going to be able deservedly to earn. We were in a tough situation. Scottie had yet to ge
t a superstar contract. His deal was up in the summer of ’98. Scottie clearly wanted a multiyear deal. We just weren’t in a position to do that.”

  Simply put, Reinsdorf and his partners, who had made hundreds of millions off the Bulls in a short time, didn’t want to pay Pippen what other players of his caliber were earning, which was about $15 million a year. They had been paying him less than $3 million per year, far below his value. Pippen was key to Jordan’s success, but Reinsdorf wanted to trade him for cheaper assets. That would allow Reinsdorf to win the deal, but it was hardly the way to treat the best basketball team in history. The going price for Pippen’s services was forecast to run in the neighborhood of $45 million over three seasons. Reinsdorf was already paying Jordan better than $30 million per season and was determined to keep the team payroll, the largest in NBA history at that point, in line. Conversations with Krause and Reinsdorf kept turning to how they were going to pivot away from the Jordan era. They were so busy leaving it, they failed to comprehend what they had while they had it.

  This was obvious to Pippen, who was already prone to pouting. He had been injured and was supposed to have surgery right after the 1997 season ended. Instead, angry that the team wanted to dump him, he waited until late in the summer to have the surgery, which meant that he would be sidelined for weeks at the start of the season. Always a subtle reader of the team, Sam Smith detected that Jordan was also angry with Pippen. If so, it was obscured by his growing anger with Krause and Reinsdorf.

  Jackson knew that Krause’s bumbling move would provide perfect cover for Reinsdorf. It led the public to believe that the conflict was about Jordan and/or Jackson versus Krause, when it was really about Reinsdorf not wanting to pay Pippen. Jordan had not made himself available to the press on media day, but the next day, after the team’s first day of practice, he addressed Krause’s opening day comments. “I’m very consistent with what I’ve always said,” Jordan told reporters. “That’s what I mean. If Phil’s not going to be here, I’m certainly not going to be here.”

  What if Jackson goes to another team next season, a reporter asked. Would Jordan follow?

  “No,” he said. “Totally. I would quit. I wouldn’t say quit, I’d retire.”

  When asked whether Krause’s comments would affect the team on the court, Jordan replied, “Not unless Jerry plays. And he doesn’t play.”

  Pippen’s delayed surgery put immense pressure on Jordan. For the previous two years, Jordan’s performance on the court had kept the team together. As long as the Bulls won championships, he believed, Reinsdorf would not allow Krause to break up the team. But with Pippen out, Jordan now had to carry that burden by himself. In some ways, it was similar to the burden he carried as a Little Leaguer. When he played well, his parents were happier. It was perhaps a variation of one of the major themes of his life.

  Pure Naked Mind

  The Bulls struggled to be mediocre that fall, going 6–5 in November. They earned a seventh victory when Jordan scored 49 points, which allowed them to survive the Clippers in double overtime. Although injured, Pippen still traveled with the team, and two games later, in Seattle, he was inebriated as the team boarded a bus at the airport. On the bus, he attacked Krause verbally. There was immediate speculation that Krause, who already disliked Pippen, would use the incident as a reason to deal him before the league trading deadline in February.

  The mindfulness training provided by Jackson and George Mumford was aimed at teaching Jordan to be in the moment. He decided that if this season was going to be his last, he wanted to stay focused and enjoy it. By the week before Christmas his play had helped the team improve its record to 14–9. The Lakers came to Chicago that week, which provided him a better look at teenager Kobe Bryant, whom the media had cast as yet another “next Michael Jordan.” For years, the media had heralded a succession of young players touted as the next dominating superstar, until the role itself took on a name: “Heir Jordan.” In the early 1990s, Southern Cal’s Harold Miner had the sad misfortune of being labeled “Baby Jordan” and believing it. Ron Harper had even done his turn as the guy next in line, until he suffered a major knee injury. He recovered but was no longer the high flyer he had been. Grant Hill, too, labored under the hype as a Detroit Piston rookie in 1994, although time revealed he was a player more along the lines of Pippen. Jerry Stackhouse followed Hill into this mire of embarrassment in 1996, and in December 1997, it was Kobe Bryant’s turn.

  Jordan seemed to take great pains to issue a proper lesson to these pretenders to his throne. Yet Bryant seemed so similar to Jordan in key ways that he impressed even the reigning king. And like Ray Allen, Bryant had been studying videotape of Jordan for years, so much so that he was beginning to take substantial heat as a Jordan wannabe. Bryant, however, showed that night in Chicago that he could walk the walk, particularly when it came to doing a decent imitation of Jordan’s offensive moves.

  “He’s got a lot of ’em,” Jordan himself admitted.

  Lakers guard Nick Van Exel liked to joke that it could all be attributed to the Jordan highlight videotape that he lent to Bryant in the fall of 1996, just days after Bryant joined the team as an eighteen-year-old rookie out of Lower Merion High School in Philadelphia. That night it was clear that Bryant had spent plenty of time studying the tape, because he had just about all of Jordan’s moves down pat, even the famous post-up gyrations where Jordan would twitch and fake his opponents into madness.

  How would Bryant do matched up against Jordan? At the least, the question temporarily distracted the Bulls from their anxiety over Krause, Pippen, Jordan, and Jackson. His Airness drove the Bulls to a big lead in the first quarter that night, providing ample time in the second half for a Jordan-Bryant showdown.

  “Michael loves this stuff,” Ron Harper said of the meeting between the two. “[Bryant] is a very young player who someday may take his throne, but I don’t think Michael’s ready to give up his throne yet. He came out to show everybody that he’s Air Jordan still.”

  Jordan scored 36, and Bryant produced a career-high 33. It was a night for highlight clips with both players dancing in the post, draining jumpers from the perimeter, and weaving their way to handsome dunks. “I had that same type of vibrancy when I was young,” Jordan told reporters afterward. “It’s exciting to match wits against physical skills, knowing that I’ve been around the game long enough that if I have to guard a Kobe Bryant… I can still hold my own.”

  Jordan did attempt to show restraint, despite the urge to settle the one-on-one matchup. “It was a challenge because of the hype,” Jordan said. “But it’s also a challenge not to get caught up in the hype, not to make it a one-on-one competition between me and Kobe. I felt a couple of times that it felt like that, but I had to refrain from that, especially when he scored on me. I felt a natural tendency to want to go back down to the other end and score on him.”

  Of the generation that had grown up worshiping His Airness, Bryant appeared to be one of the best imitators, although their games were far from identical. “Defensively, I just have to get used to playing against a player who has skills similar to mine,” Jordan explained. “I try to pick a weakness and exploit it.”

  As they were going at each other in the fourth period, Bryant stopped the Chicago star to ask a question. “He asked me about my post-up move, in terms of, ‘Do you keep your legs wide? Or do you keep your legs tight?’ ” Jordan said. “It was kind of shocking. I felt like an old guy when he asked me that. I told him on the offensive end you always try to feel and see where the defensive player is. In the post-up on my turnaround jump shot, I always use my legs to feel where the defense is playing so I can react to the defense.”

  Jordan added that Bryant’s biggest challenge would be “harnessing what he knows and utilizing what he’s got and implementing it on the floor. That’s tough. That’s experience. That’s things that Larry Bird and Magic Johnson all taught me. There’s no doubt that he has the skills to take over a basketball game.”

>   Bryant, the son of former NBA player Joe “Jellybean” Bryant, was eager to impress. “Michael loves challenges,” he said. “He loves to answer the bell. But at the same time, my father always taught me growing up that you never back down to no man, no matter how great of a basketball player he is. If he’s fired up, you get fired up. You go out there, and you go skill for skill and you go blow for blow.”

  When he saw Bryant’s leaping ability, Jordan admitted to being a bit awed by the talent on display: “I asked Scottie Pippen, ‘Did we used to jump like that? I don’t remember that.’ He said, ‘I think we did, but it’s so long ago I can’t remember it.’ I felt like I was in the same shoes of some of the other players I’ve faced,” Jordan explained. “He certainly showed signs that he can be a force whenever he’s in the game. He has a lot of different looks. As an offensive player, you want to give a lot of different looks, so that the defense is always guessing.”

  “He’s a very smart competitor,” Bryant said of Jordan. “I could tell that he thinks the game, whether it’s the tactical things or little strategies he employs on the court. I’m checking him out and analyzing him, so that I can do the same thing. But he’s just better at it, because he’s been doing it a while. He’s very smart, very technical. You just don’t naturally acquire that…” Bryant paused at the thought. “When you have the talent to go along with that,” he said, “that’s what you call the whole package.”

  Despite the issues swirling around his team, Jordan continued his climb up the record books. In a December 9 win over New York, he passed Moses Malone (27,409 points) to take over third place on the NBA’s list of all-time scorers, having passed Elvin Hayes (27,313) just two weeks earlier. His impact was marked in other ways as well. A game against Phoenix on December 15 marked the five-hundredth consecutive sellout for the Bulls, the longest such streak in the league, and the foremost sign of Jordan’s value to the game.