Everywhere he went, people asked if he was really going to quit if the Bulls didn’t bring back Jackson. “I’m just taking it game by game,” he said time and again. “Whatever happens, happens. Nobody knows what it’s going to be.”
He took on Ray Allen and Milwaukee January 2 and scored 44, shooting 15 of 22 from the floor. He burned the Knicks for 44 in the Garden a week later, but he was always burning the Knicks. He turned in six 40-point games in three weeks, including dumping 45 points on Houston and his buddy Charles Barkley. “If he beats you, he lets you know,” Barkley said of his trash talk. “And he stomps you when you’re down.”
Having seen that side of Jordan for three years, both Toni Kukoc and Luc Longley were asked that spring to reflect on their difficulties as Jordan’s whipping boys. His criticism could be tough, Longley admitted. “But he does let up. He’s gotten better about it as he’s gotten to know me. He understands what different guys can tolerate, respond to. It was heavier early on. But he knows me better now, knows what I can and can’t do. I don’t get tired of it at all. It’s part of the dynamic of this team.”
Kukoc, though, said he wouldn’t mind at all if Jordan decided to put a sock in his mouth. “Sometimes, those things you can take hard right away,” the Croatian forward said. “They might not always be pleasant and good to hear.” When Jordan turned harsh, Kukoc said, he’d wait to calm down, then go tell him that it was too much. And Jordan was always willing to listen. “He has no problem talking about things, discussing things,” Kukoc said. “I wouldn’t give it back to him. I’m not that kind of person that can go kind of hard. I’m gonna wait five or ten minutes and try to talk to him about things.” Both teammates acknowledged, however, that Jordan presented a singleness of purpose that was hard to dent.
He continued to search for emotional ploys to help him produce 40-point games. As he aged, the younger players seemed to do the trick. That spring he reserved 40-point games for Gary Payton in Seattle and Michael Finley in Dallas. The week of his thirty-fifth birthday in February, he again took on Bryant in the All-Star Game in New York and again won the duel.
The trading deadline passed in February without Krause dealing Pippen, who had returned from injury, as the Bulls marched ahead to claim their last prize. They encountered appreciative crowds throughout the spring. It didn’t matter where they played, the buildings all sparkled for Jordan as a zillion flash cameras snapped final photographs of Air Jordan in action. He had long ago learned to ignore camera flashes during his free throws, but there was a new urgency to it now. He had played a role in founding the age of basketball as entertainment, and tens of thousands of fans paid homage to him each game night. Hundreds more, sometimes thousands, gathered outside the arenas. Outside his hotels. In the streets, hoping to catch a glimpse as Jordan and his teammates exited their bus. Countless others sent him tributes, filling a succession of storage rooms with cards and letters and flowers and gifts and requests. Even at the age when the athletic skills of most players begin to show dramatic erosion, he was once again leading the league in scoring, averaging better than 28 points a game, and although he had come to rely on his excellent jump shot in recent seasons, Jordan could still display the leaping ability and confounding body control that amazed spectators and drove television ratings. He’d shown that he was still capable of taking over virtually any game, an ability that few, if any, of his younger opponents would ever come close to displaying.
“Can Michael play any better?” longtime Bulls photographer Bill Smith asked one night before a game. “Is this 1987? How can he walk away? I have a hard time accepting it.”
“We’ve been through this a thousand times, and nobody can really figure out what the plan is,” said Steve Kerr, acknowledging that management’s moves had left him and his teammates stumped. “In Chicago, everywhere we go, people are asking us, ‘How can they possibly think about breaking this team up?’ And frankly, we don’t have any answers for that.”
In February, while the team was in Utah, Krause made headlines by reiterating to Chicago Tribune columnist Fred Mitchell that this was definitely Jackson’s last season with the team, bringing the controversy back to the surface. It was a gigantic mistake, said the Trib’s Terry Armour. “When we were in Utah, that’s when Krause said, ‘We’d love to have Michael back, but if Michael wants Phil back, it’s just not gonna happen.’ On that road trip, every stop we went to, somebody in a different city said, ‘Hey, Michael, is this your last year?’ He’d say, ‘Oh yeah, it could be. If Phil’s not coming back, I’m not coming back. So I’m treating it like it’s my last one.’ I think Krause just got fed up with reading it and said, ‘Okay, I’m gonna strike now and I’m gonna say, ‘You know we want Michael back, but he’s not coming back under Phil.’ ”
“I think Krause just wants control,” Pippen said. “He wants to win a title without Michael. And he wants to win one without Phil. And me. Just to be able to say he’s great at what he does.”
“Why,” Jordan asked, “would you change a coach who has won five championships when he has the respect of his players and certainly the understanding of his players to where they go out and play hard each and every day? Why? I think it’s more or less a personality conflict, and that has a lot to do with it. It certainly can’t be because of [Jackson’s] job and what he’s done with the players and the respect he’s won from the players. His success as a coach is certainly impeccable. I don’t think that can be questioned. I think it’s more personal than anything.”
After Jordan blasted management at a global media gathering at the All-Star Weekend in New York, Reinsdorf wisely called for a moratorium on publicly discussing the issue. It was the best move he could make, short of trying to explain the tangled conflicts.
“All talk about retirements, replacements, or rosters changes are premature,” the chairman said in a statement released by the team. “This management brought this coach and these players back this season to try to win a sixth NBA championship. With half the season and the playoffs still ahead, that should be everyone’s total focus. That’s my focus. Period.”
The fight degenerated into an ugly exchange of low blows. Jackson let it be known that one of the issues involved Jordan’s routine of going to the bathroom right before games. Krause always seemed to visit the restroom at the same time, which angered the star, who saw it as a violation of his privacy. Then it was leaked that Jackson had pulled a boneheaded move that year, buying underwear for a girlfriend that he mislabeled in shipping. The package was returned to his office, where an assistant, thinking it was for Jackson’s wife, forwarded it to their house. The ensuing blowup meant that Jackson spent the season living out of a Chicago hotel room.
Jackson’s players rallied round him in the crisis, which led Krause to suggest that the coach was using the situation to his advantage. “Phil is a player’s coach very definitely,” Tex Winter agreed. “It’s very obvious that the players love him. Anytime that you can get a superstar like Michael Jordan going to bat for the head coach the way he has, even to the extent to say that he’s not going to play anymore unless he plays for Phil, you’re not gonna find that very often. That’s a wonderful relationship. It’s an indication of how Phil has cultivated that relationship.”
“Jerry wants to be the most powerful person in the organization, and it’s hard for him to allow Michael just to be Michael,” Jackson said. “Michael doesn’t want power. He wants to be one of the players. But he wants a person who’s not gonna boss him around or shove him around or squeeze him into corners and do those types of things. That’s what it’s all about.”
As the playoffs neared, Jackson seemed to feel a tinge of guilt that his conflict with Krause would contribute to Jordan’s career ending prematurely. “The only downside of this whole thing, in my mind’s eye,” the coach said, “is the fact that if Michael Jordan’s not ready to retire, we’re taking one of the greatest players, or heroes, that we’ve had in our society and limiting what he can do. We
’re deprived of seeing someone extremely special go out the way he wants to go out, in the style he wants to go out, because we’ve never seen someone of his age with the superstar status that he’s had. I don’t know of another sports hero in our history who has been able to play at this level at this age. Michael has just destroyed the concepts of what we think of as normal, of what a man his age should be able to do.
“So that’s the only downside in this whole thing,” Jackson concluded. “Jerry Reinsdorf and I have a good relationship. Jerry Krause and I understand each other. We may not have as close a relationship as we used to, but we understand each other. I know he’s got a direction he wants to follow, and he knows I’ve got some things on my agenda.”
Jordan’s teammates marveled that he was able to continue performing at a championship level with the future of his career in doubt. “Michael is such a professional, such a player first, that he puts it in the background,” Steve Kerr said. “Michael doesn’t mess around. He plays.” Yet Jordan’s public relations skills rivaled his athletic abilities, and he used them to counter Krause’s efforts to fire Jackson. “He’s obviously a PR machine with all of his endorsements,” Kerr said of Jordan. “His image is obviously very important to him. And I think, in one regard, that means that he doesn’t want to look like the guy who’s trying to take over the organization.… He’s very savvy.”
“There’s more bullshit flying around this team than a dairy in a tornado,” said Luc Longley. “There’s always something going on. Dennis is always doing his thing, or something’s going on. Michael’s retiring, or Jerry’s making noise. We’ve had more controversy or circumstance around this team in the last three years, so we’ve had a lot of practice at putting things out of our minds.”
When it came time to play the season’s last game in Madison Square Garden in March, Jordan put on a pair of his early Air Jordans and didn’t let the fact that they were too small stop him from scoring 42 on Jeff Van Gundy’s team. Then he did it again for good measure, scoring 44 points on the Knicks in Chicago the last day of the season.
Interviewed before that last game, Magic Johnson said of Jordan, “I thought I was the most competitive person I ever knew, until I met Michael.”
Jordan had taken Krause’s pronouncement from media day and kept it right there in front of him. “Players don’t win championships.…” Or, as Tim Hallam, who had worked with him for years, described it, “That’s a strong-willed motherfucker right there.”
Sixth Sense
Ultimately, the only hope the Bulls had to keep the team together was to win again. Anyone who saw Jordan play down the stretch that spring knew that he stood a good chance of forcing the agenda one more time. As things worked out, it would come down to Utah again, although the Indiana Pacers, now coached by Larry Bird and led by Reggie Miller, almost derailed the reunion. In the Western Conference, the Utah Jazz had hummed along, just ahead of Chicago in the race for home-court advantage if the teams made it to the championship series. Utah stumbled first, with a key road loss in Minnesota, and Chicago claimed the best record in the league. The Bulls, however, also faltered. They lost in Cleveland, then defeated Orlando and became the first team in the league to win sixty games. But then the Pacers came to the United Center and challenged the Bulls physically, and won handily, 114–105. In the aftermath, the Bulls lost again, this time on the road in Detroit, and finished the season at 62–20. That left them tied with Utah, except that the Jazz had won both games against Chicago during the regular season.
Reggie Miller fired the Pacers as they pushed the Bulls through a grinding seven-game series in the Eastern Conference finals that spring. Chicago prevailed only by virtue of home-court advantage. After defeating Indiana on Sunday, May 31, the Bulls practiced in Chicago on Monday, then jetted to Utah for a rematch with the Jazz for the league championship.
Utah coach Jerry Sloan continued to operate by his dictum: “It’s a simple game if you go out and lay your heart on the line every night.” John Stockton and Karl Malone epitomized that ethos. The guard and power forward had long been a pick-and-roll machine. Stockton would become the league’s all-time assist leader, and Malone would become just the third player to score better than 30,000 points. The Jazz always put up a nasty fight, battling every way possible, and there were always plenty of accusations that Stockton was a dirty player, but Jordan admired them both. To prove it, he longed to beat them again. But it was never about mental devices when he faced the Jazz. Just buckle your chinstrap and see who’s best.
In Game 1, the two teams clawed their way to overtime, but in the extra period Stockton victimized Kerr on a late shot in the lane to give the Jazz a 1–0 lead in the series. As was their trademark, Jackson and his staff made their adjustments for Game 2, which involved spreading their triangle offense and opening the floor up for easy baskets by their cutters. In the first half, the triangle had never worked better.
“Tonight it really shined bright for us,” Jud Buechler said. “It’s an offense designed for everyone to touch the ball, to pass and cut. And the guys did that tonight, instead of going to Michael every time and posting up. Early on everyone got involved, and that really helped out for later in the game.”
“The first half was beautiful,” Winter agreed. “We followed through with our principles a lot better. Got a lot of cutting to the basket. And Michael gave up the ball. He was looking to feed cutters.” But the old coach let his frustration show. “The second half we abandoned it, aborted it,” he said. “We tried to go way too much one-on-one. Michael especially forced a lot of things.” If the Bulls had stuck with their scheme they might have won by a dozen, the coach figured. But Jordan had delivered a win against Indiana in Game 7 by going to the basket and drawing fouls. He attempted to do the same in Game 2 against Utah, but the officials weren’t giving him the calls. Instead, Jordan wound up on his back while the Jazz scooped up the ball and headed for easy transition baskets. Suddenly a 7-point Chicago edge had turned into an 86–85 Utah lead with less than two minutes to go.
“I don’t know what it is,” Winter said afterward, shaking his head. “Michael, he’s got so damn much confidence.”
Jordan pushed the Bulls back ahead, 88–86, with a layup with 47.9 seconds left. But moments later, with the game on the line and the score tied at 88, Kerr got open for a transition three. “I missed the shot and the ball went right to me,” said Kerr. “Lucky bounce. As soon as I got the ball, I saw Michael underneath and just flipped it to him.”
Jordan finished, was fouled, and made the ensuing free throw to send the Bulls to a 93–88 win, the victory they needed to wrest away home-court advantage.
Back in Chicago, after a practice, Winter admitted that where he once held out hope that the team might remain intact he now saw that as the remotest of possibilities. “I don’t think it’s necessarily a shame to break it up,” he said. “It’s too bad that has to be, but you have to have changes. And it could be well timed.” He didn’t sound convinced, but it was Krause’s main talking point. Winter had figured the Bulls would struggle to win the title in ’97, yet here they were a year later, in solid position again to rule the league. If the team returned, it would likely be too far past its prime to meet expectations in 1999, the coach reasoned. Jordan continued to surprise, but Rodman seemed to be wearing down, and getting stranger. Pippen had back troubles, and some observers worried that he was checking out mentally. But Jackson had always been a man to renew his teams. Keeping the key parties together would take some therapy. But only Reinsdorf could heal the relationship between Jackson and Krause, Winter said. As it would turn out, the team chairman made an attempt late in the process, but by then it just wasn’t possible.
“Perhaps we could have enjoyed it more if we could have appreciated it,” Jackson said.
During the playoffs, the coach confided that despite the hard feelings, he and Krause would always be bonded by their mutual success with the Bulls. But Jackson said there was almost no chance
of his return. He said he had tried to make it clear to Reinsdorf in 1997 that it was virtually impossible for him and Krause to keep working together. The implication was that the team chairman had faced a choice, the coach or the general manager, and had sided with Krause. But the coach was seldom one to close off options.
“If it comes down to a chance of Michael playing and not playing, then my responsibility would be to him and to the continuation of his career, and I would have to consider it,” he said. “I have to be a person that is loyal to the people who have been loyal to me. I feel that conviction. The only thing that would take me basically out of the mix would be my own personal well being, my own personal physical and emotional health in dealing with this.”
Pippen, Harper, and Jordan made their best argument by overpowering Utah’s guards in Game 3 in the largest rout in NBA history. The performance reiterated how absolutely dominant the Bulls could be as a team and Pippen could be as an individual defender. The Chicago bench closed out the proceedings for a 96–54 victory. The margin was so great that a cross-country flight that had radioed in for a game update for a Utah fan had to call back a second time to confirm the score. Utah coach Jerry Sloan expressed surprise when he was handed a box score. “This is actually the score?” the Utah coach said. “I thought it was 196. It sure seemed like they scored 196.”
With that one game, Jordan and his Bulls had made their case against Krause’s plans to rebuild. They weren’t too old, and Pippen was too special a player to toss away in a trade. “I almost feel sorry for them,” Jackson said privately in discussing how Krause and Reinsdorf’s agenda had been shattered and how they might come to be viewed by Chicago sports fans.
It would be Rodman’s free throw shooting, usually an adventure, that settled Game 4. He hit four in the closing seconds to go with his 14 rebounds to seal an 86–82 Chicago win and a seemingly insurmountable 3–1 lead in the series.
Michael Jordan Page 64