As it turned out, Game 5 became a case of celebrating too early, as the Bulls basked in their impending victory. To be fair, it was also Stockton and Malone making a case of their own for an 83–81 Utah win. Even Jordan admitted getting caught up in the anticipation. “I really didn’t have a tee time,” he told reporters, “because I anticipated drinking so much champagne that I wouldn’t be able to get up.” He was 9 for 26 from the floor and Pippen 2 for 16.
It was Kukoc’s 30 points on 11-of-13 shooting that gave them a chance to win it at the end, despite Malone’s 39 points. The Bulls got the ball back with 1.1 seconds to go, and during the ensuing time-out, Jordan sat on the bench taking in the situation, “inhabiting the moment,” as Jackson and George Mumford had taught him to do.
A few moments later, Jordan missed a falling-out-of-bounds shot, but that didn’t prevent his treasuring the moment. “I’m pretty sure people were hoping I would make that shot. Except people from Utah,” he said. “For 1.1 seconds, everyone was holding their breath, which was kind of cute. No one knew what was going to happen. Me, you, no one who was watching the game. And that was the cute part about it. And I love those moments. Great players thrive on that in some respects because they have an opportunity to decide happiness and sadness. That’s what you live for. That’s the fun part about it.”
With the series back in Utah, the Jazz had the same plan for Game 6 as for every contest: lay it on the line. They charged out early and seized control. Pippen, meanwhile, pulled up with horrendous back spasms and wound up back in the locker room, where a massage therapist literally pounded on his back trying to drive the spasms out. One team employee reported Krause standing in a corner of the room, almost transfixed, watching Pippen absorb the blows, eager to get back in the game to help Jordan.
“I just tried to gut it out,” Pippen said. “I felt my presence on the floor would mean more than just sitting in the locker room. I knew I was going to come back in the second half, but I just didn’t know how much I was going to be able to give.”
Pippen found a way to provide enough help to Jordan, who had fallen into another of his unstoppable trances. He would score 45, including the final jumper at the top of the key.
After the final shot, he stood there for all to see, poised, arm draped in a follow-through, perfect.
Later he wouldn’t want to give up the moment. Who could blame him? His bucket gave Chicago the win, 87–86.
“Things start to move very slowly and you start to see the court very well,” he said, explaining the last play. “You start reading what the defense is trying to do. And I saw that. I saw the moment.”
Stockton got one final shot, but Ron Harper hustled to help him miss.
Jordan and his coach then met on the court for one long, final embrace. They would never be so close again.
Jordan slept deeply and peacefully on the plane ride home with everybody else wondering where things were headed next. Jackson’s answer was to decline Reinsdorf’s offer to stay with the team, choosing instead to ride off on his motorcycle. The players and coaches closed out their experience with a private, emotion-filled team dinner in the days after the championship game. They all expressed their love and regard for one another, and the tears flowed.
Jackson later told the Sun-Times’s Rick Telander that he might have stayed on. “I did feel it was time to take some time off,” he said. “What would have changed things is if management had said, ‘Stay on until Michael is finished, until he retires.’ But they never suggested that.”
During the spring of 1996, he and his attorney, Todd Musburger, had suggested a five-year coaching proposal, but Reinsdorf turned them down, Jackson said. Next, the coach had suggested a two-year agreement at about $3 million per season. Again, Reinsdorf declined.
“We probably could have stayed intact one more year at least and made another run at a title,” Jim Stack said in 2012. “But the timing of the contracts, and then there were a lot of hurt feelings with the way Phil had sort of positioned the team against management. At the time, Phil was saying publicly that if Sylvester Stallone could make ten million a film, he couldn’t imagine how much would Michael be worth for eighty-two games a year. He really said some things that probably weren’t the most appropriate things to say publicly.
“I think Jerry Reinsdorf in particular had had enough,” Stack added. “The way they were taking care of Phil financially, I guess that didn’t sit that well with Jerry Reinsdorf. And all of those years that Jerry Krause had to deal with being outside the circle.”
Reinsdorf seemed to be betting that Krause could rebuild the team fast enough to keep the fans interested. He admitted that they almost broke up the team by trading Pippen in 1997. “We considered giving up a shot at the sixth title to begin rebuilding, and we would have given it up if we could have made the right deal,” Reinsdorf said. “The reason we considered breaking the team up is that we wanted to minimize the period of time between winning the last championship and getting back into contention with the next team.” In other words, he hoped to minimize the time between the Jordan era and the next act on the United Center stage.
“We now have very little to trade, very little to work with in rebuilding,” Reinsdorf said later and added, “Michael couldn’t care less about what happens [to the team] after he leaves.
“There’s never been a power struggle,” the team chairman said. “Phil never asked for Krause to be removed. It never happened. Phil never told me he thought we were a house divided. He said it was difficult to work with Jerry Krause but not impossible. Phil never ever said that. He did express the fact that it was very strained. I asked him, ‘Has anything changed? Do you want to coach another season?’ He said, ‘No.’ ”
Reinsdorf said that he returned to Chicago and asked one more time. “Wednesday night after the title we had our office celebration, I sat down with Phil and told him, ‘If you’ve changed your mind, we want you back.’ ” The offer was unconditional, and it stood regardless of whether Jordan returned, Reinsdorf said. “Phil said, ‘That’s very generous.’ I told him, ‘Generosity has nothing to do with it. You’ve earned it.’ He took a deep breath and said, ‘No, I have to step back.’ ”
Reinsdorf also said that he had assured Jordan that if he wanted to play, his one-year contract (in excess of $36 million) would still be there.
Although Tex Winter had long worried that Jordan’s fame was overshadowing the game, the star addressed that in the aftermath: “I think the game itself is a lot bigger than Michael Jordan. I’ve been given an opportunity by people before me. To name a few, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Dr. J, Elgin Baylor, Jerry West. These guys played the game way before Michael Jordan was born. Michael Jordan came on the heels of all that activity and with Mr. Stern and what he has done for the league, gave me an opportunity to play the game of basketball and I played it to the best of my ability. I tried to enhance the game itself. I tried to be the best basketball player I could be.”
In looking back, Steve Kerr recalled his favorite memory of Jordan and his final Bulls team. It involved a typical Phil Jackson assignment for his players as the 1998 regular season came to a close.
“Phil had this great moment,” Kerr explained. “It was the last day of the regular season and he told us, ‘Tomorrow, at practice, I want everybody to write down a few words about this experience you’ve had with this team. It can be anything, you can write a poem. You can just write a letter to your teammates. You can take some lyrics from a song that are meaningful. Whatever. But bring something tomorrow.’ Half the guys brought stuff, about half the guys forgot. I forgot. But Michael brought something and it was a poem that he wrote about the team.”
It was the ultimate triumph of Jackson’s effort over the years. Jordan, the game’s angry man and all-time badass, had written a poem. “It was shocking,” Kerr recalled. “What happened was, every guy ended up saying something, whether they read something or said something. Phil told me later that June, his wife, had told him
about this and suggested the idea. And so what he did was after each guy spoke, whoever had written something down had to crumple up the paper and put it into a big coffee can. It was like a Folgers can. Then when everybody was done, he lit a match and he lit the contents on fire in the coffee can. The lights were out and there was this glow in the room. And it was like, ‘All those memories that you guys just talked about, those are ours and nobody else is gonna see.’ He didn’t say that, but it was the metaphor. This is ours and they’re gone and they’ll forever live within us and nobody else will ever see ’em.”
Phil Jackson burned Michael’s poem?!
“I know, that thing would be worth millions right now, right?” Kerr said, laughing at the memory. “Michael’s poem was, what does this mean to you? What does this experience mean to you and where have you been and where are you going? It was so cool. In a legacy of powerful moments that Phil, you know, left with us, that was by far the most powerful one. I’ll never forget it. I was crying. A lot of guys were shedding tears.”
It had been such a long, hard, exhilarating ride being Jordan’s teammate, moments of supreme triumph interspersed with one sort of shell shock or another every single day.
“It wasn’t just Michael,” Kerr said. “It was the experience. We all knew that we were living through this era that was so special and we were so lucky to be a part of it. There were so many players and athletes and people who would have killed to have been a part of that. We were so lucky to have been a part of it, to go through this run, and it was ending. And we knew how special it was. And that was Phil’s genius was that he… that’s how he bonded our team. He made us communicate and he brought us together in so many different ways. And, it wasn’t going to happen without Phil, because Michael wasn’t going to make it happen himself, because he was above the rest of us. He was better than the rest of us and he wasn’t a guy, like Scottie, who was human enough to have those emotions and frailties that you could relate to. So, we couldn’t relate to Michael, but Phil brought us together with the different things that he did.”
Jackson had brought Jordan full circle, the Michael Jordan who had been that insecure adolescent, who went from being a star Little Leaguer to not even getting in the game the next season because he was too skinny for Babe Ruth ball, Michael Jordan who sat the bench, the lone black kid, always among the white teams, Michael Jordan whose father had given the impression of rejecting him, the driven Michael Jordan who had proved to his father again and again and again, night after NBA night, how valuable he was, in every way imaginable.
“That’s what made him a badass,” Kerr concluded, laughing, “was that he wasn’t just a talent. It was the understanding of it all, the work ethic, the game itself, the strategy involved. He got it all. He understood all of it.”
That, of course, only served to heighten the sorrow by season’s end, the six championships notwithstanding. All that he had been through—his father’s death, the humiliation of baseball, the infuriation of the trial, the alienation from his mother, his bitter negotiations with Reinsdorf, the silly battles with Krause, his frustration with Pippen—it had all passed. And there he stood, resplendent in basketball perfection, with no place to go.
PART XI
THE AFTERLIFE
Chapter 36
LIMBO
IN THE MINDS of so many, Jordan should have simply inhabited that final perfect tableau against Utah for the rest of his known life: standing there with the clock drained down, his right arm and wrist hanging like a question mark in follow-through, the ball floating toward the goal, the sea of faces in the backdrop caught in suspense. Air Jordan, unconquered and unbowed till the end.
There could be no better capstone, a career launched by one world-famous last-second shot, then after two dreamlike decades, to close it all out with another peak moment. Other famous athletes were known for their big moments, but no one had ever had so many of them, no one had made them seem so routine.
Then to have his career all come down to that grand finale in Utah?
Seemingly everyone’s inclination, including Jerry Reinsdorf’s, was to leave it alone. “Don’t do another thing,” they told him time and again over the ensuing months. “You’ve achieved perfection. How can you possibly improve on that?”
But that wasn’t possible.
Just a couple of days after the NBA Finals had ended so gloriously in Salt Lake City, never mind the grind of driving his Chicago Bulls to three straight titles, he was pressing to get on the links.
Jordan had spent hours playing a video game version of what was then his all-time favorite course, the Fazio designs at Barton Creek near Austin, Texas, with its stunning cliff-lined fairways, abundant waterfalls, and limestone caves. Now that another long NBA season was over, he planned to treat himself to the real course.
And this is where Keith Lundquist came into the picture. Jordan was coming to Austin that Monday to play a couple of afternoon rounds at Barton Creek. A couple of days earlier, he had phoned to see if Lundquist, a Texas golf pro, could hook him up to play Great Hills that Monday as a tune-up.
Great Hills was closed on Mondays, which would be a perfect time to accommodate Jordan and his party. So the club pro told Jordan he’d have things ready for him. He assumed that the star, now all of thirty-five, would welcome a leisurely pace to unwind from the NBA grind.
But that Monday, Lundquist’s phone rang at an absurdly early hour. Jordan was on the line, explaining that his private jet was landing and he was heading to the course. Lundquist blinked awake and looked again at the clock. Then he jumped out of bed and hustled to meet Jordan at the pro shop.
Lundquist arrived at Great Hills to find an expectant MJ on the practice tee, furiously driving balls into the darkness. Lundquist had been a pro for a while, but he had never seen anybody doing that.
When they shook hands, the pro felt his paw disappear into Jordan’s huge mitt. It was true, he realized. MJ was decidedly larger than life.
As light broke across the sky, Jordan and his foursome, which included former NFL receiver Roy Green, were off. His Airness was determined to get in as many holes as possible before appearing at a noon charity event.
Lundquist went along to usher Jordan over the course. “I told him where to hit the ball, the yardages, and the tendencies of the greens,” Lundquist recalled of that day. “He didn’t play particularly well on the front nine. It was just a few days after the championship finals in the NBA. He was smoking cigars and enjoying himself. The foursome had a little action out there but nothing heavy. He hit the ball exceedingly well, way beyond what I thought he could do. He can hit it. There’s no question about that.”
By the time he reached Great Hills’ challenging back nine Jordan was clearly getting it together, Lundquist said. “He showed great touch around the greens. His hands were enormous, and he had enlarged grips for his clubs. His hand-eye coordination was really good. It’s obvious that his athletic skill goes all the way across the board.”
By the back nine, club members had also discovered that Michael Jordan was on the closed course. An impromptu gallery of sixty or seventy quickly gathered. It was a development that greeted him nearly everywhere he played. Orlando attorney Mark NeJame once recalled gazing out the window onto the golf course outside his home one morning to see a cart tearing down the fairway. “A minute later, I saw at least fifteen carts racing each other down the course,” he recalled. “It was MJ in the first cart and fifteen members in hot pursuit trying to catch a glimpse of him.”
Jordan was personable and obviously accustomed to being followed around, Lundquist said. “He made a point during the round of coming over and chatting with me. He was using these Wilsons. I told him, ‘You could find better clubs.’ ”
Jordan agreed. “They pay the bills,” he said, referring to his endorsement deal with the manufacturer.
Richard Esquinas once observed that Jordan played golf like he played basketball, always forcing the tempo and trying to fin
d an advantage in it. That certainly seemed to be the case that day in Texas. Consuming hole after hole, the foursome clipped along at a strong pace, enough to tire anyone, thought Lundquist, who then tagged along to the charity event in the noon sun, where an animated Jordan engaged easily with the throng of children and adults. That afternoon, Jordan knocked off another huge helping of golf holes on the handsome Fazio courses at Barton Creek. He finished just in time to ride to San Marcos for a charity basketball game in the evening.
“He played every minute of the game that night,” Lundquist said. “He had to have been on the court at least two hours. I’d never seen anything like it.”
Afterward Jordan repaired to one of Austin’s fine restaurants, where he stayed well into the early morning, first carving up a steak, then smoking cigars and sipping expensive wine until it was time to run to the airport and jet away as dawn was again breaking in the Texas sky.
Jordan departed, leaving Lundquist to contemplate the otherworldly appetite that he had just encountered.
Perhaps retirement would work well for Jordan. He had the bank account, the private jet, and the immense curiosity and energy to stalk the known world in search of the perfect golf round. It sure sounded ideal to observers such as Lundquist, except for one thing: Could it possibly be enough?
Jilted
Jordan would later admit to feeling jilted by Jackson’s decision to leave the Bulls behind. A man of his word, Jordan had vowed to retire if Jackson wasn’t his coach. It was hard to measure the impact of his split with Jackson, explained a close associate of both men. “When you manipulate somebody, you get what you want. But when that person finds you out, finds out he has been manipulated, that leads to alienation. That will affect the relationship, no matter how strong it once appeared. That’s the consequence of manipulation.”
Michael Jordan Page 65