Clearly, his efforts and energy had driven a similar growth for the Bulls. But if Jerry Reinsdorf ever considered a similar reward for Jordan, there is no record of it. It would have seemed logical to keep the immensely popular hero involved with the franchise, and it might have paved the way for Jordan to make yet another comeback in Chicago.
Bringing Jordan into Bulls management would have meant altering or lessening Krause’s role, if not his outright termination, considering the hard feelings between the two men. In 1999, those feelings were fresh in the minds of both Krause and Reinsdorf. They had had their faces rubbed in the circumstances again and again by the Chicago media over the 1997–98 season. Jordan was always right, and it seemed as if they were always wrong.
“We used to have a saying,” Krause recalled in 2012. “We said we could line up all the media at State and Madison streets, and Michael could have pissed on each one of them, pissed right in their faces, and they would all say, ‘Oh, the nectar of the gods!’ That’s how much he had the media in Chicago. He had complete control.”
The bitterness between the parties meant that letting Jordan join the Bulls as a minority owner was never a real consideration, regardless of how much money he had made for the stockholders.
“Jerry never talked to me about it,” Krause said in 2012 of Reinsdorf’s response to Jordan’s interest. “It was never mentioned.” Krause did recall the topic being raised by some in the media. “I kind of laughed it off because I know Michael,” Krause said. “He’s proven what kind of management skills he has.”
Krause also knew Reinsdorf quite well. “Jerry is a very stubborn human being,” he explained, adding that loyalty was a huge factor for Reinsdorf. The team chairman’s loyalty was reserved foremost for Bulls stockholders, Krause explained. Although Jordan’s efforts had made the stockholders quite wealthy, his role in management would be an entirely different matter, Krause said. “That could have been a bad fiduciary responsibility. I think Michael thought he would have it. Michael thought he was going to get everything. He didn’t know what the job was. He had no idea.”
Krause also indicated that hard feelings over Jordan’s final two contracts also remained a factor. “We had contract things with Michael that were not fun, that were bitter.” Some of those feelings stemmed from the way Falk treated Reinsdorf in those negotiations, Krause said. Krause hastened to add that he and Reinsdorf respected Falk, in part because he was so tough in negotiations. Such respect did little to soften the hard feelings for Jordan.
Jim Stack, who would later leave the Bulls to become an executive with the Minnesota Timberwolves, said that the question of Jordan remaining in Chicago was made more difficult by all of the years he had pushed for the team to acquire North Carolina players. “The other component of that is that Jerry Reinsdorf really trusted and believed in what we were doing as management,” Stack said of the team’s administration under Krause. “Jerry Reinsdorf had had a taste of what Michael was pushing on us with the Walter Davis thing and some other things he wanted to do. I don’t think Michael would have been satisfied with coming to the Bulls in some figurehead position. He would have wanted to be hands-on making the decisions. That would have been difficult. Even if Jerry Reinsdorf had wanted to bring Michael back, I don’t think it would have been in a position that Michael would have been satisfied with or accepted.”
Stack, who had worked closely with both Jordan and Krause, shuddered at the thought of them in the same front office. “There was no way those guys could have worked hand in hand,” he said. Jordan shouldn’t have been surprised by his rejection from Reinsdorf, observed reporter David Aldridge, who had long covered the NBA. “I never got the sense that Reinsdorf ever thought of Michael as an executive. I mean, you can tell when somebody’s being prepared to move into the front office. It doesn’t take much to figure that out. I never had the feeling that they were prepping Michael for that role. Never.”
Perhaps a case could have been made that Jordan’s continued association with the franchise would have been in the stockholders’ best interests. He was, in fact, the league’s one proven attraction, what Jerry West liked to call “a license to print money.” Jordan’s value was not only in the tremendous growth in the team’s revenue and value during the Jordan era, but also in the city of Chicago itself, especially the flourishing of the blighted neighborhoods around Chicago Stadium that had been transformed into a vibrant economic community, with the bars, restaurants, and other businesses that appeared with the opening of the United Center, “the building that Michael built.” Would Reinsdorf allow his anger to get in the way of doing what was in the best interests of the team’s stockholders and the city?
As for the idea that Reinsdorf “owed” Jordan anything in the wake of the team’s overwhelming success, Krause said simply, “We paid Michael a lot of money to play basketball.” Jordan’s final contract, which paid him $33 million per year, confirmed that assertion, except that the career earnings rankings for NBA players, released in 2012, offer a different view. On the list of the all-time NBA moneymakers, Jordan ranked eighty-seventh, just behind David Lee. Jordan’s career earnings as an NBA player were a relatively modest $90 million. The list reveals that Jordan’s success made it possible for the generation of stars that followed him—Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, and Shaquille O’Neal—to approach $300 million in earnings. Jordan had often pointed out that his success was built on the generation who came before him, who earned a relative pittance. He said it stood to reason that he would earn less than those who followed.
Yet Jordan also ranked far behind even his contemporaries. Patrick Ewing led the group of players from Jordan’s era, with $119 million in earnings. Scottie Pippen raked in $109 million, much of which he earned after leaving the Bulls. Hakeem Olajuwon earned $107 million, with Gary Payton, Reggie Miller, and Karl Malone all earning more than $100 million.
The record reflects that the Bulls extended no great largesse to Jordan in recognition of the wealth he brought the team’s shareholders. Lakers owner Jerry Buss, for example, paid $14 million to Magic Johnson upon his retirement, in part to express gratitude for leading the team to five NBA championships and helping to greatly increase the franchise’s worth.
Buss and Johnson, however, had what has been described as something akin to a father-son relationship, whereas the once strong Reinsdorf-Jordan relationship had suffered tremendously with the feud over Pippen and Jackson, to the point that Reinsdorf promptly spurned Jordan once he retired from playing.
Jordan’s income shortfall can also be explained by his attitude. He claimed always to be playing “for the love of the game.” Even later, when he returned to playing, he would do so for a minimal amount. He took great pride in earning his substantial wealth—more than a billion dollars by some estimates—“off the court.”
Jerry Reinsdorf almost certainly denied his partners yet more riches by declining to hire Jordan. Yet the team chairman was like most everyone else. He had had enough of the conflict and allowed Jordan to ride off into the sunset. “In the end Michael felt like there was still more gas left in the tank,” Jim Stack said. “But it ended with him having to walk away without a choice, which was really hard for him.”
Krause did request one final meeting with Jordan late in his career. The occasion had led Krause to think of his first meeting with Jordan fourteen years earlier, in the spring of 1985. After that came the foot injury, and from there the two men watched their differences multiply. “The animosity and all that really started to come into play then,” Sonny Vaccaro recalled. “And it carried on until it really got to be an ugly thing.”
“My job was not to be Michael’s ass kisser,” Krause offered.
Krause still felt the need for some sort of reconciliation or closure and hoped perhaps a meeting might help clear the air, so he asked him to come to his office at the Berto Center. He began by confessing that all of the years he had needled Jordan by telling him that Earl “The Pearl” Monroe was bett
er, he was not being truthful.
“You were better than him early in your career,” Krause said, “but I couldn’t tell you that.”
“I knew it,” Jordan replied, as if he had at last been supplied with a “gotcha” moment.
“He was like, OK,” Krause recalled of the moment. “It was very brief. Michael and I are never going to break bread. He remembers everyone who ever didn’t think he was going to be great. He remembers every negative story that’s ever been written about him.”
He would certainly remember Jerry Krause, even after he had landed elsewhere.
Chapter 37
THE WIZARD
AT FIRST JORDAN seemed headed to Milwaukee to become part owner of the Bucks. But Bucks owner Herb Kohl backed out of the deal at the last moment. As it turned out, Jordan’s new domain would be Washington, DC, where he connected with Ted Leonsis, the America Online magnate who had become a part owner of the Washington Wizards, once the infamous Washington Bullets. Jordan had looked in Charlotte, at the Hornets, but owner George Shinn was in the process of infuriating the fans in the basketball-crazy state, who deserted the franchise in droves. The Hornets would pack up and flee to New Orleans, leaving behind a city feeling thoroughly betrayed by the NBA experience.
Chicago Sun-Times columnist Jay Mariotti maintained that Phil Jackson, who coached the Lakers to the NBA title in 2000, wanted Jordan to join that team. The money was supposedly minimal, but it would have been an opportunity to be a part of a Lakers team that was poised to win more titles. Jordan supposedly declined, ostensibly because Washington was offering a piece of the team with the understanding that in time Jordan would become the majority owner.
Washington, as opposed to Los Angeles, was a city that had to be reminded that there even was an NBA experience. The Wizards/Bullets had established a well-crusted mediocrity that stretched back over two decades. The fact that Jordan connected with Abe Pollin’s team, with such a struggling franchise, came as a surprise to many. During the NBA lockout just months earlier, Jordan and the Washington owner had engaged in a bitter exchange witnessed by several players, among them Reggie Miller, who would later credit Jordan with helping the players turn the tide in the negotiations to get a better deal with the league’s owners.
“In ’98–99, we were having a meeting in New York and all the players were supposed to be there,” Miller recalled. “Michael Jordan supposedly had just retired. When we all got there, there was Michael Jordan getting ready to face off with some of the owners and the commissioner and he almost got into a shouting argument with the late, great Abe Pollin. Michael Jordan was going at Commissioner Stern and Pollin, talking about if you keep writing these bad checks to these bad players, maybe you need to give up ownership of your team.”
Pollin had complained about the difficulties of running a team.
“Then sell your team,” Jordan brashly told Pollin.
“Neither you, Michael, nor anyone else, is going to tell me when to sell my team,” Pollin shot back.
It seemed unlikely that the two would be able to work together. Jordan, however, was too valuable a connection for a team like Washington to turn down. It was easy to imagine His Airness bringing some luster back to the idea of professional basketball in the nation’s capital. “The buzz was incredible,” David Aldridge said of the announcement that Jordan would join the Wizards as a minority owner and basketball executive. “I remember like it was yesterday. The headline was above the fold, in the Washington Post. This was the newspaper that took down Richard Nixon. The headline above the fold was JORDAN COMING TO WASHINGTON. So it was big, huge.”
By the fall of 1999, when Leonsis began making the move to pull Jordan into ownership/management with the Wizards, the hard feelings had seemingly melted. Pollin was ebullient in his public statements about the game’s greatest player joining his team. The negotiated partnership between Pollin and Jordan was a merging of the old NBA with the new. Pollin, who owned a construction company, was in his early forties when he bought the old Baltimore Bullets in 1964. One of Pollin’s earliest employees was a portly young scout named Jerry Krause. They would remain friends and confidants for decades. Pollin would also grow close with a young lawyer working for the NBA named David Stern, who in 1984 would become the league’s commissioner.
Pollin was mostly connected to the old-line NBA, especially Detroit Pistons owner Bill Davidson, Aldridge recalled. “I think he had a great affinity for the older owners in the league, who maybe had an appreciation for what it was like to meet a payroll back when you weren’t sure how you were going to do it. And he certainly felt like a mentor for Stern. I know he had a good relationship with Jerry Krause and I know they talked a lot about a lot of different things.”
That high regard for Krause, however, wasn’t necessarily shared by the people who worked for Pollin, Aldridge recalled with a laugh during a 2012 interview. “There’s a lot of people in the Bullets organization who think Jerry may have overstated his role in drafting Earl Monroe, that sort of thing. When you had asked people about Jerry in the Bullets organization, there would be some eye-rolling and, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s the guy that discovered Earl Monroe.’ ”
Krause, however, remained a big part of Pollin’s “talk” network of owners and GMs around the league. Pollin and Krause were known to share opinions and a view of their respective teams in their discussions. It later became clear that the Washington owner had a certain view of Jordan long before he joined the Wizards franchise.
It appeared that the good news for both Pollin and Jordan was that they shared a similar trait: they were extremely loyal to old friends. Considering that in 2000 Pollin was entering his fifth decade owning the team, he had a lot of such friends, many of whom were on his Wizards payroll. Although his franchise had become one of the league’s sorriest operations, the first decade of Pollin’s ownership, in Baltimore, had culminated in Monroe’s leading the team to the 1971 NBA championship series, where they were promptly swept by the Knicks. Even with that success, ticket sales remained dismal in Baltimore, which pushed Pollin to follow through on his original plan to move the team to Washington. In 1973, he built the Capital Centre in the Maryland suburbs as the home for the Bullets and the pro hockey team he founded, the Capitals.
The seventies would be the high-water mark for the Bullets. With K. C. Jones as coach, they dominated the 1975 regular season only to be swept in the league championship series by the Golden State Warriors, a huge upset. Pollin soon turned to old Krause nemesis Dick Motta as coach, and the Bullets returned to the championship series in 1978 with young center Wes Unseld and star Elvin Hayes. There, they won the franchise’s only championship, beating the Seattle SuperSonics in seven games. For 1979, the two teams again returned to the NBA Finals, where Seattle claimed the championship, but the glory years would end there.
The owner had lost both an infant son and a teenage daughter to heart disease. That, perhaps, helps explain the close relationships he formed with Unseld, his center from the glory years, who would remain a Bullets fixture as a coach and executive, and Susan O’Malley, the daughter of a business partner and political ally, who became a longtime team executive in charge of marketing and public relations.
Among Pollin’s values, Aldridge observed, was the answer to the question, “How do you treat the people you work with?” Pollin treated his people extremely well, although his loyalty over time had worked “to the detriment of the organization,” Aldridge said. “I started covering the Bullets in 1988, and by 2008, if you went to a game, I’d say, maybe 60–70 percent of the employees were still there. You go, ‘What’s going on here?’ You certainly aren’t rewarding these people for success because the Bullets were a bad franchise. Maybe the Clippers were worse, but that’s not saying much.”
Another owner might have at least decided to change leadership to shake up the culture of the team. Not Pollin, Aldridge said. “You looked at it and asked, ‘Why are you keeping all of these people?’ Abe, he was an i
ncredibly loyal guy. He wouldn’t fire Wes Unseld, even though Wes’s record, if you looked at it, was not sterling. I mean, you’re talking about seven or eight years as the coach and then GM.”
In the best season that Aldridge covered the team, they finished 40–42, he recalled with a laugh. “That was the zenith of my years covering the Bullets. It was horrible. They were as bad as you could be for a long time. Were there a lot of reasons for that? Sure. And many of those reasons were not anybody’s fault, but the bottom line is the bottom line. The NBA is a results-oriented business, right? You knew that Abe was incredibly loyal. He was incredibly loyal to Susan O’Malley for a long time. He was incredibly loyal to Wes for a long time. Even the PR people never, never changed, until they left of their own volition. I don’t remember him firing anybody. Abe was loyal. And he expected loyalty in return, but I think, more important than that, he expected a certain amount of respect.”
Pollin had done much to earn respect in the Washington community. He gave substantial sums for relief for the city’s indigent population. His building of the MCI Center in downtown Washington in 1997 brought a dramatic and sorely needed surge of financing to revive the nation’s capital. Yet with basketball, he and his teams had largely been chumps. At least that was how they were seen around the NBA at the turn of the century. The owner believed Jordan’s involvement would help alter that image.
Michael Jordan Page 67