Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  Jordan and his staff had filled the Wizards roster mostly with journeymen players. Shooting guard Richard “Rip” Hamilton was the bright young talent in a mostly bare stable. He and Jordan would eventually clash, while Doug Collins struggled with a growing sense that he was letting Jordan down.

  Even so, Pollin’s fancy new building, now called the Verizon Center, was packed every night with Washingtonians who had long ignored the Wizards. Now they came out in droves to see MJ try to turn it around.

  Meanwhile, Leahy discovered the roster shell-shocked at what it meant to be Jordan’s teammate. The initial thought was that Kwame Brown might turn out to be an athletic young frontcourt player just as Horace Grant had been for Chicago. Asked during exhibition season if he had indeed drafted “a Doberman” like the one Johnny Bach had coached back in Chicago, Jordan frowned.

  “He’s got a lot to learn,” he said of Brown.

  Brown was a lighthearted kid from a troubled family when he stepped into camp with Jordan. He had smallish hands for a post player and almost no clue of how to please his new boss. Looking back years later, Brown would recall being so green at the time that he didn’t even know basic basketball terms, what it meant to set a pick or a screen. Jordan was there with a helping of his usual fire. Someone leaked to Leahy that Jordan had screamed at the new kid and called him a “faggot” in front of the team. It didn’t play well in the Post that week, nor later in Leahy’s book, When Nothing Else Matters.

  Krause, meanwhile, was working the phones, digging for information from his sources on the Wizards staff. “Kwame was an outstanding prospect,” Krause remembered. “I heard that Michael got on his ass so hard that he ruined that kid. His father was in jail. His mother was going to jail. He had all kinds of family problems. He was not the kind of kid you scream at. According to the people I knew on that club, Michael wrecked him.”

  Jordan’s competitive approach was jarring to Pollin’s longtime staff members, to say the least. In phone conversations, they commiserated with Krause, who had his own stories about dealing with Jordan. “The whole staff hated him,” Krause recalled. “I knew a whole lot of that staff. They would tell me, ‘Jerry, he’s garbage.’ Wes Unseld hated his guts. Unseld was a Pollin guy.”

  Brown would go on to play more than a dozen years in the league, a solid role player, never a star. “MJ didn’t do all that like people think,” Brown said in a 2011 interview, looking back on his tumultuous rookie camp. “It was really more the veterans and Doug’s coaching,” Brown said of his disappointing rookie season. “It wasn’t really yelling. It was more trying to coach me. There was a lot of things I didn’t know. I remember the terminology I didn’t know coming out of high school, things they were trying to teach me, things like blind picks, things I just didn’t know. If you draft a young guy out of high school you’ve gotta take time and understand that they don’t know the NBA terminology. You’ve gotta have guys there to develop young players.”

  Jordan’s staff plucked veteran guard Ty Lue as a free agent from the Lakers roster because he brought them speed and quickness at point guard. Lue developed an immediate rapport with Jordan, but they both knew Lue was going to have to slow things down a touch to accommodate an older star with bad knees.

  “The pressure was on him because he wanted to win so much,” recalled Lue. “He came back at the age of thirty-eight and put his legacy on the line and everything. I thought it was great. All you had to do with MJ was just play hard. If you played hard and gave it everything you had every night, he had no problem with you. Now if you came down, you lay down, and you weren’t playing hard, then anybody would have a problem with you if you do that. If you step on the basketball court, you should give it everything you got and that’s all he wanted.”

  Watching from afar were his former teammates. Now playing with the Portland Trailblazers, Pippen watched the games and box scores and talked on the phone regularly with Jordan. “I think he understands now since he’s gotten away from it, what he had in Chicago is no longer there,” Pippen confided one night early in the season. “It’s no longer there and will never be there. He’s not in that environment of good players and good coaches and teammates and people who understand him and understand how to play the game.”

  Jordan had little of that around him now, Pippen said. The time away had given them all time to think about what they had experienced in Chicago. Tex Winter had not only provided them with the all-important structure of the triangle offense, he had done unprecedented things, Pippen explained. “He is so attentive to the fundamentals and the details of the game. And he never wavers from that. Most NBA coaches, frankly, they get away from the fundamentals and the footwork and chest passes and shooting. They don’t want to take time with it. Tex is the opposite of that. He always said basketball is a game of habits.”

  It was hilarious to see Winter and Jordan going at it on many days, Pippen recalled. “Very comical. You had Tex loving to share a lot of his knowledge and Michael giving him a lot of shit. He’d say, ‘That ain’t gonna work in today’s game. Maybe in the forties and fifties, but not today’s game.’ But he knew. Tex and Michael really had a great relationship, though.”

  Jordan knew the value of Winter’s approach, Pippen said. That’s why the team’s two stars had been so willing to work at Winter’s fundamentals in practice each day. In fact, that determination to get better at the fundamentals would be their true legacy, Pippen predicted. “We accepted anything that would take us to the next level. We had a very positive mental attitude about what we had to do in practice, the fundamental things Tex wanted us to do, to make us better. We saw the things we could accomplish if we played hard, if we trained hard.”

  Beyond the fundamentals, it was Pippen’s experience of going against Jordan in practice that made him a great player. “I think it came from adjusting to him,” he said. “I learned how to pick my places when I could be in control and be dominant. Learning that helped me when I was on the court without Michael.”

  Likewise, the Bulls experience aided Jordan in coping with diminished athleticism as an older player, Pippen observed. “He can’t get to the hoop the way that he did even three or four years ago. But no one can really say that he’s lost a lot, because he can do so many other things. And the knowledge he has of the game is just so great. I don’t think he’ll have a problem scoring big points. He can still score. Winning will be the problem now.”

  Watching Jordan had invariably led Pippen to wonder what might have happened had the Bulls not been broken up. “I think we could have been pretty competitive if we had stayed together,” he said. “We would have had something there with our knowledge and experience. We would have still been very competitive.”

  In fact, it seemed quite possible that the Chicago Bulls might have won at least one more, if not two or three championships, if they had all treated one another just a little better. As it was, the Bulls without Jordan were struggling mightily. Saying Charles Oakley was always one of his favorites, Krause had brought the forward back to the team. Pippen said Oakley was unhappy to be back with the Bulls. “I talked to him yesterday,” Pippen said. “He told them, ‘If you all didn’t care about MJ and Scottie, I know you don’t care about me.’ ”

  As for the young Wizards, Pippen advised them to focus on learning from Jordan in practice. Steve Kerr agreed with that assessment. “It’s not a question of how he’s gonna play. You know Michael’s gonna get his numbers. He may not be on SportsCenter as often with the windmill dunks. The big question is, can he handle the losing? Can that team turn the corner? That’s gonna drive him nuts. He’s gotta teach them how to play, but I don’t know if he’s gonna be able to teach them. I think his competitive drive is gonna take over, and it has taken over. People don’t realize how difficult it is to play alongside Michael. You have to do all of your learning in practice because, in game situations, that’s where he tends to take over. And he wants them to play at his level.

  “It’s very to
ugh,” Kerr added. “It’s a matter of Michael and them getting to know one another, getting an understanding. It’s difficult for them to have an understanding of what’s a good shot. Do I defer to him? Do I just go on and play? It’s very difficult for them to know.”

  Indeed, Jordan would have problems with several of the players the Wizards were paying to play basketball. “You know,” Ty Lue said, “guys wasn’t playing hard every night. And you know when you got a guy like that who’s been competitive his whole life, a guy who will come back and play at the age of thirty-eight and come in here every morning early working on his game, last one to leave each day, playing through knee pain and knee injuries, you got a problem if you don’t play hard for a guy like that.

  “He was playing through his knees,” Lue explained. “His knees were messed up. He wasn’t used to the back-to-back games and had been off for a while. It was definitely tough on him. He never missed a practice, never missed games, he played through injury. I think that’s what hurt him the most. Like I’m out here giving you everything I have and some guys are not playing as hard as they could be.”

  The one thing that surprised them all was Jordan’s patience.

  Brent Barry, a guard with San Antonio at the time, had long studied Jordan. He was intrigued by the differences he saw in this third and final segment of his career. Still hard-nosed, Jordan had made himself into a teacher, Barry recalled. “The difference was just methodical. Just much more patient with possessions where he could basically dictate to the defense what it is that he wanted them to do in order for him to make plays. The plays that he was making at that time were not plays for him to score. It was plays to set up guys. It was plays to show some of the younger players in Washington, ‘Hey you can do this and when you have the ball, you can impact what’s going on in a certain possession by moving it, by moving yourself.’

  “He did so much more coaching later on in his career while he was on the floor to help out Doug and to help the young guys,” Barry explained. “His game just became more of a practice every night for those guys to watch, how effective you can be if you learn to do things fundamentally.”

  Slowly at first, then with gathering speed, things began to improve for the Wizards. Then, right before New Year’s, Jordan abruptly showed the first indication of a dramatic turnaround. He hit the wall and scored a career-low 6 points in a loss to the Indiana Pacers. The total ended his record 866-game streak of games scoring 10 points or more. He answered immediately in the next game, against the Charlotte Hornets in Washington, by scoring 24 in the fourth quarter and finishing with 51, just six weeks before his thirty-ninth birthday.

  “He kind of went back in time tonight,” Charlotte forward P. J. Brown told reporters afterward.

  He had made 21 of 38 shots from the field, and 9 of 10 free throws, with 7 rebounds and 4 assists in thirty-eight minutes of playing time. He could have broken Earl Monroe’s Wizards franchise record of 56, but the game was a blowout and Collins sat him for the final three minutes.

  “You think the guy’s got a little pride?” Collins said. “He had a tough night in Indiana, and I think he was going to come back and show who he is.… I’ve seen this guy do some unbelievable things, but at age thirty-eight to do this tonight is incredible.”

  He had made fadeaway after fadeaway and even a dunk. “It’s been a long time since someone said that I was hanging in the air,” Jordan said. “I felt real good in the first half. My rhythm, my timing was perfect, and I had the defense guessing. It was one of those nights.”

  The last time he had scored 50 in a game was in the spring of 1997, when he rang up 55 in the playoffs against Washington.

  The next game, he just missed turning in another big performance. “It was just incredible,” David Aldridge recalled. “He almost got 50, back-to-back nights. I saw both of those games. And he was pissed after the second game. It was so funny.”

  New Jersey forward Kenyon Martin came into the second game telling the press that he wanted to cover Jordan. “I remember Kenyon Martin saying, ‘I want him. I want to guard him,’ ” Aldridge recalled. “And Michael schooled him. You know, he had nothing. He’s doing this on guile and smarts and just knowing the game. He’s got no physical ability left… and he’s got no hope, and he almost scores fifty! It was unbelievable.”

  Aldridge recalled that on press row he leaned over to Jay Mariotti and said, “Are you watching the same game I’m watching? Do you know how incredible this is, that this guy is doing this here?”

  Jordan began to build the confidence among his teammates, to the point that he had them believing they could make shots many of them had never made before. Beginning in December and running through the All-Star Game, the Wizards rang up a 21–9 record. That would be the high mark for Michael Jordan’s Wizards, however. His knees became a factor, and the team really didn’t have the players to sustain the momentum. Resentment had been brewing since training camp with some players, partly over Jordan’s imperial bearing, and partly over the fact that he was an owner, not on paper but in reality, who had handpicked his old coach to run the team. Beyond that, there was a growing yet largely unarticulated conflict with Rip Hamilton, the team’s best young scorer.

  That January, in the midst of it all, Juanita Jordan filed for divorce in Chicago, and soon a reporter from the Sun-Times showed up in the Wizards’ locker room to question Jordan about the split. Interview sessions with Jordan, dating back to Chicago, had always focused on basketball issues. Now, it was incongruous, painful for some, to witness the confrontation, which came after a win over the Los Angeles Clippers. The reporter asked if his divorce was inevitable. “None of your business,” Jordan shot back. A Washington publication offered a detailed account of his attempts that same night after the game to make a play for a woman in a Washington nightspot, with help from members of his entourage, including Tim Grover.

  He was named an All-Star that February, but his appearance is mostly remembered for a missed dunk. On April 2, he scored his career low, 2 points, in a 113–93 loss to the Lakers. Two days later, the team announced he would miss the rest of the season due to knee troubles. The Wizards finished out of the playoff race, with a losing record.

  “The first year was tough,” Johnny Bach recalled. “The second year was tougher. It was much harder to keep that tone and maintain those minutes on the floor. And still teams were playing with that kind of dedication in trying to stop Michael. The game is a physical one. I think he had done far more than anyone else. Because he had been so good before, his scoring 22 points a game wasn’t satisfactory to him or to the public.”

  The Wizards traded Rip Hamilton to Detroit for Jerry Stackhouse in the off-season, and Jordan made ready to compete again in the fall of 2002. “That last season was just… wow! I mean, it was bad as you can imagine,” David Aldridge recalled. “And I think, again, it reinforced among some people the notion he’s been a terrible executive. And he did pick the roster.”

  The plan for the second year was for Jordan to play reduced minutes while serving as the sixth man for the team. “All during that preseason he said the same thing over and over,” Aldridge recalled. “He was going to be the sixth man. He was going to let Stackhouse be the guy. And he would come in and clean up with the second-team guys, and I remember thinking, ‘That makes a lot of sense!’ In fact, I picked him to be the sixth man of the year, just based on that. Because, I thought, a reduced Michael Jordan, going up against bench guys, is going to score 16 to 17 a game. It made all the sense in the world. And then, like, two weeks into the season, it ended. I don’t know if it was his ego or if he just didn’t think Stackhouse was good enough. He just put himself back in the starting lineup.”

  The move brought complaints that Doug Collins once again couldn’t stand up to the team owner wearing the uniform. “I defended Doug,” Aldridge said, “in print and on TV, saying the very thing, ‘You put your coach in an impossible position by just deciding you’re going to start again.’ I nev
er will understand why he did that, because it made so much sense for him to come off the bench. It really made a lot of sense. It would have reduced his minutes, reduced the wear on his knees, if he’s playing twenty-four minutes a game instead of thirty-seven. I think it would have worked. But he just could not sit there and watch.”

  Jordan’s conflict with the recently traded Hamilton came to the fore when the Wizards met Detroit that next season. “When he traded him to Detroit, Rip was kind of mad about that,” Ty Lue recalled. “We’re playing Detroit in a game, and Rip is going extra hard. He’s talking trash at MJ, and MJ’d be like, ‘It wasn’t personal, Rip. I’m just trying to play.’ Rip was still talking stuff, so MJ said, ‘Listen, Rip, how are you going to talk trash to me when you’re wearing my shoes? Like you have Jordan Brands on your feet. So how are you going to talk trash?’ We all laughed at that. It was just business. I think he liked Rip. I thought he just tried to get a more aggressive scorer in Jerry Stackhouse, a guy who could put it on the floor, who could create his own shot, draw a double-team, and just put the team in the best position to win. That’s what I thought he was trying to do. Wasn’t anything personal.”

  For his former teammates and coaches, a bigger event was his first game against Pippen, early that December. “It will be hotly contested, believe me,” Tex Winter offered. Although each scored 14, the game wasn’t close. Pippen’s Trailblazers won 98–79. “I know Pip, and I know he wanted to come out and play well,” Jordan told reporters. “Believe me, I wanted to come out and play well too. His horses were ready, and my mules were sick. I have to take some razzing for the time being.”