There was no question that at thirty-seven, Jordan was an elder statesman of the game, but by the time he began his romance with the Wizards in 2000, he still lacked management experience. He had been a high-energy basketball player whose sole method of assessing player potential was through personal confrontation on the court. While he had unprecedented experience playing the game and leading his teams, he had never assembled any sort of roster or even done coaching at any level.
Even so, Abe Pollin was desperate to upgrade his team and generate some buzz, which put Jordan in a strong negotiating position. Pollin agreed to certain concessions, but it was Jordan’s pushing for those concessions that apparently created the first hardening of feelings in the relationship even before it got off the ground. First was the issue of time. Jordan wanted only a part-time involvement, to allow room for his other business interests, including his obligations to shoot TV commercials. The schedule also cleared plenty of free time for his golfing and other interests. Contractually, he wanted an obligation of attending no more than about a half dozen games each season. He also wanted no heavy role in publicizing or marketing Wizards games. That proved difficult for the long-suffering team staff to swallow, especially given Jordan’s magnetism.
“It was a worldwide story,” David Aldridge explained. “I’m just talking about the impact of Jordan coming to Washington, in any capacity. As an executive, or as a player. It was just enormous. He would get standing ovations just when they would show a picture of him sitting in the owners’ box, there would be standing ovations. And it was like, ‘Wow!’ And he was like cringing, he didn’t want to do that, so he would go hide in his office, where they couldn’t see him.”
These conditions immediately chafed at the team’s long-term staff, particularly Pollin’s favorites. To aid in his executive duties, Jordan brought in old, trusted friends Rod Higgins, who had experience as a coach and executive with Golden State, and Fred Whitfield, who had worked for both Nike and David Falk. He also hired Curtis Polk, who had worked for years with Falk. The Wizards were loaded with bloated contracts for aging players, and Jordan’s people set about the work of ridding the franchise of those destructive deals. It was a textbook approach to rebuilding a franchise, but any real accomplishments would soon be lost in the acrimony that was to follow.
Jordan also brought in his old friend Johnny Bach, now in his late seventies, to assist the coach he had yet to hire. He tried to lure John Paxson to Washington from Reinsdorf’s staff in Chicago, but Paxson declined. He also tried to hire Mike Jarvis to coach. “Jarvis wanted too much money,” Aldridge explained. Leonard Hamilton finally agreed to become his coach, and the die was cast. There were smiles aplenty at the beginning, but Jordan and Pollin were clearly eyeing each other. Jordan observers wondered how his demanding nature and the attendant anger would play in the nation’s capital. As it turned out, there was conflict aplenty.
Jordan had spent years under the guidance of Phil Jackson, who had a knack for creating tension within an organization by nurturing an us-versus-them mentality between the team and management. Jackson had used that to great effect with the Bulls, until it became toxic, and he would do the same with the Lakers. The hard feelings in Chicago existed between Jackson and a substantial amount of the team’s staff. During the 1994 playoffs in New York, Jackson won praise for lightening his team’s mood by having them skip practice one day and load on a bus for a visit to the Staten Island Ferry. What wasn’t known was that a block from the team’s hotel, Jackson told the bus driver to stop and ordered the only woman on the bus, a veteran publicity assistant, to get off. The woman was humiliated by the move and soon left the team’s employment. It was one of several moves that led some staff members to resent Jackson.
“Phil was very good at that,” Krause offered. “He wasn’t the only coach to create that us-versus-them atmosphere between the team and the staff. A lot of NBA coaches do that to some degree. But Phil was good at it.”
Perhaps Jordan didn’t intentionally set out to create such an atmosphere in Washington as the manager of basketball operations, but that was what he had known in Chicago. Soon enough Pollin and his staff felt a divide and took umbrage.
“He wrote the checks,” David Aldridge said of the Washington owner. “You’ve got to have a certain amount of deference. People may think he’s past his prime and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, all those things, but he still owns the team. I tell you what happened, there was an atmosphere where, when Michael came in and he brought all of his people in—he brought Higgins and he brought Fred in and Curtis Polk and all those people—there was this sense of, ‘Okay, step aside. The real movers and shakers are taking over now. You just stay over there and be quiet and we’ll throw you a bone every once in a while.’
“I remember,” Aldridge said, “that it didn’t take very long before you started hearing things from people in the organization. You know, ‘Hey, Abe wants to have lunch with Michael.’ He hadn’t had lunch with him in two months or four weeks or whatever it was. And so, you would hear these things and you would go, ‘Wow! This is something he needs to keep an eye on.’ I think Michael’s people pushed the other people to the side.”
Susan O’Malley had gone to work for the Bullets and moved up through the ranks to become a team vice president. She had always been aggressive in terms of marketing the Bullets and then the Wizards. But because the team wasn’t good, she and the staff had settled into a pattern of marketing tickets not on the notion of seeing the Wizards play but by promoting the marquee players and teams that would come into town.
“That is what they did,” Aldridge said of the Wizards’ marketing staff. “They marketed the other team. ‘Come see the other team play because our team is not very good.’… When Michael resisted that, it caused some angst.”
Jordan took the old hard-line approach, similar to that of longtime Boston Celtics boss Red Auerbach, who believed that the strength of the team and how well it played should sell the tickets.
“Susan wanted to utilize Michael in ways that he did not like,” Aldridge observed. “He said, ‘I don’t want to be a show pony. I don’t want to come out and shake people’s hands.’ And that was a problem.”
After so many years in the spotlight, Jordan had also arranged to have tougher public relations practices that restricted journalists’ access to him. That, in turn, meant there would be no sense of intimacy with the media in Washington similar to the sway he once held with the media in Chicago.
He wanted to do less, not more, publicity and promotional work in his new capacity. His routine denials of O’Malley’s requests for his time began to erode the relationship as well. All it took was a few TV shots of Jordan exiting an arena parking lot in his car with Illinois license plates to emphasize a dramatic shift in the Jordan approach. Known as a relentless worker during his playing days, Jordan was now an absentee figure.
Aldridge and his fellow sports journalists tried to figure it out. “You know, Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon and I would have these debates all the time. Kornheiser said, ‘He’s got to be out front. He’s got to be a man of the people and hang out.’ I tended to agree with Wilbon, who used to say, ‘They’ve got TV sets in Chicago. It doesn’t matter where he is, as long as he’s doing his work.’ ”
In sports, it only matters if you lose, and Leonard Hamilton’s teams not only lost, they descended into open conflict, right on the bench. Hamilton would prove many times over that he was an excellent college coach, but even Johnny Bach couldn’t protect him from clashing with pro players. The nadir came in the middle of a game one night when Hamilton called for arena security to remove one of his players, Tyrone Nesby, from the bench after they got into a heated disagreement.
“Michael had his opinions on what he wanted to put together,” Johnny Bach recalled. “He never got really going because he had a college coach who had never coached in the pros. Things didn’t work out well.”
Looking for a way to get
the thing headed in the right direction, it occurred to Jordan one day that spring that the best way to help the organization might be to play, to come back and teach these young players about respecting the game and playing hard. That was how he had lifted the Bulls up from their misery. By playing. Yes, he was younger then, but he reasoned that now he knew so much more. Yes, he had gotten fat as an executive, and his knees were in terrible shape. But he could begin working with old friend Tim Grover, who now had an exclusive training facility in Chicago, where Jordan himself was an investor. Grover would get him back in shape.
Johnny Bach thought it was a terrible idea and immediately began trying to talk him out of it. “For the good of the franchise, he was trying to please Abe and play,” Bach recalled. “He knew we wouldn’t win in a big way.”
That was the thing that stunned David Aldridge. Jordan, who had always cared about winning, was going to put his reputation on the line, knowing full well that the team couldn’t win, not in the way that the public would expect. But he was willing to do that anyway, to get the franchise turned around. It was like baseball all over again; he was headed into something that was doomed from the start.
“I wanted him not to play,” Bach said. “I told him he had nothing to prove anymore in life. I saw the struggle he had with it. To try to play the type of game he’d always had. It didn’t come as easily. Fatigue would set in in practice. He had to work on the bicycle to get the tone he wanted in his legs. He struggled to make sure he could play. I thought he was taking on more than he could do. I’ve watched guys come back to the game, I’ve watched fighters come back to the game. I had seen DiMaggio struggling in center field. I had seen Joe Louis hammered out of the ring. There are very few people like Rocky Marciano. He won them all and he walked away. That’s what you have to do. I was hoping Michael would do the same thing. What more could he win? My whole hope was that he would perform well there in Washington. And he did. He averaged 22 points a game, and he filled the arena.”
Pollin was delighted at the news that Jordan was considering a return. He would bring tens of millions in revenue to the team and, better yet, Jordan would have to sign away his minority ownership in the team, since NBA rules did not allow a player to hold ownership shares while competing.
The original plan, in Jordan’s mind, was that when he was done playing he would take the minority shares back and complete a deal to buy majority ownership of the team. Jordan did not call Falk in to negotiate the deal. There could be no deal, no assurances. He would have to trust Abe Pollin to hold his shares, then return them to him when he was done as a player. Jordan, who was slow to trust after his experience in Chicago, agreed to trust Abe Pollin. He was the guy who never fired anyone, who kept all of his old associates around.
The Wizards completed another dismal season that year and later won the number one overall pick in the NBA draft lottery. Jerry Krause remembered flying home from the lottery, with Fred Whitfield and Rod Higgins on the same plane, some rows behind him. He was pretty sure they were laughing at him behind his back. “I remember thinking, ‘They’ll fuck it up,’ ” Krause recalled.
The league had not yet instituted rules that allowed players to be drafted only after they had played at least one year of college, so the field that year was filled with big teenagers. The Wizards took a six-eleven high school senior out of Georgia named Kwame Brown, who had been named the MVP of the McDonald’s All-American Game. The Bulls had two high-number draft picks, and Krause picked hulking Eddy Curry and Tyson Chandler. Jerry West, selecting for the Memphis Grizzlies, took Spaniard Pau Gasol.
“He was the best player coming out of that high school class by far,” Marques Johnson, the former UCLA great and basketball broadcaster, said of Kwame Brown. “I watched that game—17 points, 7 rebounds, 4 or 5 blocked shots in that McDonald’s All-American Game.”
“I knew all three of those kids, Eddy Curry and Chandler, too,” recalled Sonny Vaccaro, who still spent considerable time evaluating high school stars. “Michael asked me about it, and I thought Kwame was the best one.” At the very least, Jordan’s staff figured that Brown would bring energy, rebounding, and athleticism to the Wizards’ post game.
Jordan had also recruited Charles Barkley to begin training with him with the idea that they would return to the game together. Barkley agreed, which in retrospect probably should have been a sign for Jordan. There was no way that Barkley, an outstanding TV commentator who had gotten far fatter than Jordan after his playing career ended, could get back in good-enough shape to step on an NBA floor. The two of them evoked visions of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards attempting a comeback in short pants, smoking and joking in the layup line. But the Rolling Stones they were not.
While he was getting the old gang together, Jordan figured he’d include another golden oldie on the bill.
“All of sudden Doug was there,” Bach said. “I didn’t know he was coming.”
Doug Collins had traveled a good road since getting fired from the Bulls. He had done an interesting but unsatisfying job coaching the Pistons, then returned to TV to resume his role as arguably the best NBA game analyst and color man in the business. Now, the man who could never say no to Jordan was coming to Washington just when Jordan needed someone to tell him no.
Jordan declined to announce that he was returning, although he threw himself into the task of training with Grover in Chicago that summer. Even Collins didn’t know for sure what he was going to do. But the basketball public recognized the circumstances. There was Jordan, doing the drama queen thing one more time, a rumor about a return, a city dying for both relief and a new identity, and old guys with calculators rapidly figuring out how much they could make if he laced up those $200 sneakers one more time.
The atmosphere at Grover’s facility, Hoops the Gym, took on an electricity that summer, although it was mostly low wattage, nothing like ’94 or ’95 when Jordan was bouncing between baseball and basketball. There were no satellite trucks this time, only Sun-Times columnist Jay Mariotti hanging outside the gym in what was mostly a one-reporter vigil. Jordan walked gingerly past him on aching knees each day. They exchanged something close to pleasantries, but Mariotti could never extract a confirmation.
Jordan reached into his old bag of tricks to ramp up the atmosphere in the gym, plenty of trash talk and the promise of embarrassment if you weren’t ready to play hard. A number of friends and NBA stars joined in the games, ostensibly to help out, but they were also there to measure their games against his declining powers. Jordan was looking to confirm that he still had it, and what he saw and felt there gave him confidence.
One day Jordan, who had spent weeks hard at work getting back into shape, broke two ribs in a collision with Ron Artest. The injury set his conditioning back four weeks. Another man might have seen that as the sign to stop. Indeed, Barkley had already given up the fantasy. Jordan, however, was set to announce his return in September, only to delay it when the terrorist attack of 9/11 staggered the country. He waited respectfully for several days, then announced his return and the donation of his entire million-dollar salary for the season to the victims.
“Obviously, when I left the game, I left something on the floor,” Jordan told reporters in announcing his comeback. “You guys may not be able to understand that. After we won the last title, I didn’t sit down, ready to quit the game. I didn’t want to go through the whole rebuilding process at that time. If Phil had stayed there and the team had stayed intact, I would have still been playing.”
“I am returning as a player to the game I love,” he had said in a prepared release. “I am especially excited about the Washington Wizards, and I’m convinced we have the foundation on which to build a playoff-contention team.”
On the first day of October, he showed up for his press conference wearing black Air Jordan sweats, including a black hat with “JORDAN” stitched in red across the front. That same day the NBA released a $140 replica of his Wizards jersey for sale.
; Former Georgetown coach John Thompson was among a list of basketball figures who were immediately skeptical. “I’m worried for Michael—I’m happy, but I will say I definitely did not want to see him come back. I think the expectations are going to be so unrealistic based on the standard that he set,” he said. “Plus, all that stuff about him jumping from the foul line is over. His game is going to be on the floor now. We’re going to start calling him Floor Jordan.”
“If I fall, I fall,” Jordan, a can of Gatorade placed strategically by his side for the cameras, told reporters. “You get up and move on. If I try to teach my kids anything, it’s to have a vision and try.… If I do it, it’s great. If I don’t, I can live with myself.”
There was a generation of young, athletic players eager to take advantage of him in his advancing years, he admitted. “My head is on a block,” he said. “The young dogs are going to chase me around. Well, I’m not going to bark too far away from them either. I’m not running from nobody. If anything, it’ll be a great challenge.” Mostly, he wanted to avoid the sense of regret that had invaded his life since being forced to desert his game in Chicago. “There’s an itch that still needs to be scratched here,” he said. “And I want to make sure it doesn’t bother me the rest of my life.”
The token salary raised eyebrows. It meant that Jordan was making a $30 million gift to a team he no longer owned. Ready to greet his comeback were yet more authors doing books, especially Washington Post reporter Michael Leahy, who was also writing about Jordan for the newspaper. Where Bob Greene had enjoyed Jordan’s friendship and access while writing Rebound, his book about the baseball days and Jordan’s return to Chicago, Leahy and Jordan were soon engaged in a contentious association.
Leahy pictured a Jordan too egotistical and adrenaline-addicted to take proper care of his knees and conditioning. The broken ribs had set Jordan’s work back considerably. He limped through training camp, which he staged down in Wilmington, a nice treat for the old hometown. During exhibition season in late October, Leahy’s running account of the comeback tracked Jordan up at Connecticut’s Mohegan Sun casino the night before a game. Jordan, down $500,000 at the gambling tables, stayed till the sun came up and he had won his money back, plus about $600,000 more, all the while unaware that Leahy was providing a running play-by-play of the event for readers back in DC.
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