by Phil Jackson
At first Dennis tried to skirt the rules, as if he were playing a game. One rule was that players had to show up for practice on time with their shoelaces tied and all their jewelry put away. Dennis would often appear with one shoe untied or a piece of jewelry hidden somewhere. Sometimes I’d give him a silly fine or make a joke about his appearance, and other times we’d just ignore him. I told him that it wasn’t me he had to worry about if he came late to practice; it was his teammates. Once he realized that none of us were really interested in his little rebellions, the problem went away.
One thing I loved about this team was that everyone had a clear idea about their roles and performed them well. Nobody groused about not getting enough playing time or enough shots or enough notoriety.
Jordan focused on being consistent and stepping up, when needed, to deliver a decisive blow. In early December, after scoring 37 points against the Clippers, he announced to reporters that he felt “pretty much all the way back now as a player.” He joked about being compared to his former self all the time. “According to some people,” he said, “I’m even failing to live up to Michael Jordan. But I have the best chance of being him because I am him.”
Scottie felt liberated not having to live up to the Jordan legacy anymore and gave an MVP-level performance in his new role as chief orchestrator of the action, which felt much more natural to him. Harper also adapted extremely well to his job as multipurpose guard and defensive bulldog. Meanwhile, Dennis exceeded all expectations. Not only did he master the system in a short period of time, but he also blended perfectly with Michael, Scottie, and Harper on defense. “We basically had four attack dogs in the starting lineup,” says Kerr, “and they could all guard four or five positions on the floor. It was incredible.”
Dennis played the game with such wild enthusiasm that he soon became a fan favorite. People loved to watch him hustle for loose balls and pull down rebounds to ignite fast breaks. Early in the season Dennis started dyeing his hair different colors and tearing off his jersey after games and tossing it to the crowd. The fans loved it. “All of a sudden,” he said, “I’m like the biggest thing since Michael Jordan.”
The fifth starter was Luc Longley, a seven-two, 265-pound center from Australia who wasn’t as mobile and explosive as Shaq but was big enough to plug up the middle and force other centers off their games. His backup was Bill Wennington, who had a good short-range jumper that he often used to lure his man away from the basket. Later in the season, we also added two other big men to the lineup, James Edwards and John Salley, both of whom, like Dennis, were former Detroit Bad Boys.
At first Toni Kukoc balked when I made him the team’s sixth man, but I persuaded him that it was the most effective role for him. As a starter he often had trouble playing forty minutes without getting worn down. But as sixth man he could come in and give the team a scoring boost, which he did in several key games. He could also use his exceptional passing skills to reenergize the team when Scottie wasn’t on the floor. Meanwhile Steve Kerr played a key role as a long-range scoring threat; guard Randy Brown was a high-energy defensive specialist; and Jud Buechler was a talented swingman. In addition, we had two backup power forwards, Dickey Simpkins and rookie Jason Caffey.
We had absolutely everything in place that we needed to fulfill our destiny—talent, leadership, attitude, and unity of purpose.
—
When I look back on the 1995–96 season, I’m reminded of another parable that John Paxson discovered about the emperor Liu Bang, the first leader to consolidate China into a unified empire. In W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne’s version of the story, Liu Bang held a lavish banquet to celebrate his great victory and invited master Chen Cen, who had advised him during the campaign. Chen Cen brought as guests three of his disciples, who were perplexed by an enigma at the heart of the celebration.
When the master asked them to elaborate, they said that the emperor was sitting at the central table with his three heads of staff: Xiao He, who masterfully administered logistics; Han Xin, who led a brilliant military operation, winning every battle he fought; and Chang Yang, who was so gifted at diplomacy that he could get heads of state to surrender before the fighting began. What the disciples had a hard time understanding was the man at the head of the table, the emperor himself. “Liu Bang cannot claim noble birth,” they said, “and his knowledge of logistics, fighting, and diplomacy does not equal that of his heads of staff. How is it then that he is emperor?”
The master smiled and asked them “What determines the strength of a chariot’s wheel?”
“Is it not the sturdiness of the spokes?” they replied.
“Then why is it that two wheels made of identical spokes differ in strength?” asked the master. “See beyond what is seen. Never forget that a wheel is made not only of spokes, but also of the space between the spokes. Sturdy spokes poorly placed make a weak wheel. Whether their full potential is realized depends on the harmony between them. The essence of wheel-making lies in the craftman’s ability to conceive and create the space that holds and balances the spokes within the wheel. Think now, who is the craftsman here?”
After a long silence, one of the disciples asked, “But master, how does a craftsman secure the harmony among the spokes?”
“Think of sunlight,” replied the master. “The sun nurtures and vitalizes the trees and flowers. It does so by giving away its light. But in the end, in which direction do they grow? So it is with a master craftsman like Liu Bang. After placing individuals in positions that fully realize their potential, he secures harmony among them by giving them all credit for their distinctive achievements. And in the end, as the trees and flowers grow toward the sun, individuals grow toward Liu Bang with devotion.”
Liu Bang would have made a good basketball coach. The way he organized his campaign was not unlike the way we brought the Bulls into harmony for the next three seasons.
—
The start of the 1995–96 season reminded me of Joshua fighting the battle of Jericho. The walls just kept tumbling down. Every time we moved to a new city, it seemed, something would go wrong with the other team. A star player would be injured or a key defender would foul out at just the right moment or the ball would bounce in the right way at just the right time. But it wasn’t all luck. Many of our opponents didn’t know how to deal with our three big guards, and our defense was remarkably skilled at breaking down offenses in the second and third periods. By the end of January, we were 39-3, and the players started to talk about breaking the record of sixty-nine wins held by the 1971–72 Lakers.
I was worried that they might get drunk on winning and run out of steam before we reached the playoffs. I considered slowing down the pace, but nothing seemed to stop this juggernaut. Not even injuries. Rodman injured his calf early in the season and was out for twelve games. During that time we were 10-2. Then in March Scottie missed five games with an injury, while Dennis reverted to his old ways and got suspended for six games for head-butting a ref and defaming the commissioner and head of officials. Still, we lost only one game during that period.
As we approached the seventy-game mark, the media hype was out of control. ABC News reporter Chris Wallace dubbed the team “the Beatles of basketball” and designated Michael, Scottie, Dennis, and me as the new Fab Four. The day of the big game—against the Bucks—TV helicopters shadowed our team bus all the way to Milwaukee, with crowds massed at the overpasses on the interstate holding up signs of support. When we arrived at the Bucks’ stadium, a crush of fans was gathered outside hoping to get a peek at Rodman’s hair.
Naturally, we had to make the game dramatic. We were so wound up by the time the game started that we fell apart in the second quarter, hitting only 5 of 21 from the field for 12 points. But then we slowly clawed our way back in the second half and won in the final seconds, 86–80.
The main emotion we felt was relief. “It was a very ugly game, but someti
mes ugly is beautiful,” said Michael. But his mind was already on the future. “We didn’t start out the season to win 70 games,’” he added. “We started out the season to win the championship and that’s still our motivation.”
We finished the season with two more wins, and Harper came up with a new Gershwinesque team slogan, “72 and 10 don’t mean a thing without the ring.” To inspire the players, I adapted a quote from Walt Whitman and taped it on their lockers before the first game of the playoffs, against the Miami Heat. “Henceforth we seek not good fortune, we are ourselves good fortune.” Everyone expected us to dance our way to the championship, and those are always the hardest kinds of games to win. I wanted the players to know that despite our remarkable season, the rest of the way wasn’t going to be easy. They would have to make their own luck.
And they did. We swept Miami and rolled over New York in five games. Next up was Orlando. To prep the players for the series, I spliced a few clips from Pulp Fiction into the game tapes. The players’ favorite scene showed a seasoned criminal, played by Harvey Keitel, instructing two hit men (Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta) on how to clean up a particularly gruesome murder scene. Midway through the proceedings he quips, “Let’s not start sucking each other’s dicks quite yet.”
Ever since we were humiliated by the Magic in the 1995 playoffs, we had set our sights on a rematch. In fact, we had rebuilt the team primarily with Orlando in mind. But the first game was anticlimactic. Our defense was just too overpowering. Dennis held Horace Grant to no points and 1 rebound in the first part of the game. Then Horace hyperextended his elbow in a collision with Shaq and was out for the rest of the series. We also shut down two other players who had hurt us badly the year before: Dennis Scott (0 points) and Nick Anderson (2). We ended up winning 121–83.
The Magic rebounded in game 2, but we broke their spirit when we erased an 18-point deficit in the third period and went on to win. They were also crippled by injuries to Anderson (wrist), Brian Shaw (neck), and Jon Koncak (knee). The only Magic players who posed any kind of scoring threat were Shaquille O’Neal and Penny Hardaway, but that wasn’t enough. The series ended, appropriately, with a 45-point scoring blitz by Michael in game 4 on the way to four-game sweep.
The odds against our next rival, the Seattle SuperSonics, winning the championship finals were nine to one. But they were a young, talented team that had won sixty-four games that season and could give us trouble with their out-of-the-box pressure defense. The key was to stop their stars, point guard Gary Payton and power forward Shawn Kemp, from building up momentum and outrunning us. I decided to put Longley on Kemp to capitalize on Luc’s size and strength, and I gave Harper the assignment of covering Payton.
At first it looked as if the series might be over early. We won the first two games in Chicago, buoyed by our defense and Rodman’s 20 rebounds in game 2, during which he also tied an NBA finals record with 11 offensive boards. But Harper reinjured his knee that night and had to sit out most of the next three games. Luckily, the Sonics made a tactical error after game 2, flying back to Seattle Friday night after the game rather than waiting, as we did, until Saturday morning to take a more leisurely flight. The Sonics still looked bleary-eyed on Sunday afternoon, and we were able to put them away 108–86.
At that point the debate over whether the Bulls were the greatest team ever became pretty intense. I ignored most of the chatter, but I was pleased when former Portland Trail Blazers coach Jack Ramsay said the Bulls had the kind of defense that “defies a period of time.” In my view, the team the Bulls most closely resembled was the 1972–73 New York Knicks. Like the Bulls, that Knicks team was made up largely of newcomers. The players were very professional and liked playing together, but they didn’t spend a lot of time together off the court. I told the Bulls early in the year that as long as they kept their professional lives together, it didn’t matter to me what they did with the rest of their time. These players weren’t that close, but they weren’t that distant either. Most important, they had a deep respect for one another.
Unfortunately the basketball gods weren’t cooperating. With Harper injured, it was harder for us to contain the Sonics’ attack, and we lost the next two games. Still leading the series, 3–2, we returned to Chicago determined to close out the finals in game 6. The game was scheduled for Father’s Day, which was an emotional time for Michael, and his offensive game suffered as a result. But our defense was insurmountable. Harper returned for the game and closed down Payton, and Michael did a brilliant job of holding Hersey Hawkins to a mere 4 points. The player who stole the game, however, was Dennis, with 19 rebounds and a lot of key put-backs on missed shots. At one point late in the fourth quarter, Dennis fed Michael for a backdoor cut that put the Bulls up 64–47 with 6:40 left. After the shot, Michael observed Dennis skipping downcourt, and they both erupted with laughter.
When the buzzer sounded, Michael gave Scottie and me a quick hug, darted to center court to grab the ball, then retreated to the locker room to get away from the TV cameras. When I got there, he was curled up on the floor hugging the ball to his chest, tears streaming down his face.
Michael dedicated the game to his father. “This is probably the hardest time for me to play the game of basketball,” he said. “I had a lot of things on my heart, on my mind. . . . And maybe my heart wasn’t geared to where it was. But I think deep down inside, it was geared to what was most important to me, which was my family and my father not being here to see this. I’m just happy that the team kind of pulled me through it because it was a tough time for me.”
That was a poignant moment. But when I look back on that season, it’s not the finale that stands out in my mind. It’s a game we lost to the Nuggets in February that ended our eighteen-game winning streak. They call that kind of game a “bookie’s dream” because we had flown to Denver from L.A. the day before and hadn’t had time to adjust to the altitude change.
The Nuggets were a sub-.500 team, but they shot 68 percent in the first quarter and built up a surprising 31-point lead. Many teams would have rolled over at that point, but we refused to surrender. We did everything: We went big, we went small, we moved the ball, we shot threes, we sped up the tempo, we slowed it down, and midway through the fourth quarter we went ahead on a pirouetting breakaway dunk by Scottie Pippen. Michael led the comeback, scoring 22 points in the third quarter, but this wasn’t a one-man show. It was an inspiring act of perseverance by everyone on the team. And even though we lost in the closing seconds, 105–99, the players walked away feeling they had learned something important about themselves. They learned that, no matter how dire the situation, they would find the courage somehow to battle to the very end.
That night the Bulls found their heart.
12
AS THE WORM TURNS
To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
SØREN KIERKEGAARD
Zen teacher Lewis Richmond tells the story of hearing Shunryu Suzuki sum up Buddhism in two words. Suzuki had just finished giving a talk to a group of Zen students when someone in the audience said, “You’ve been talking about Buddhism for nearly an hour, and I haven’t been able to understand a thing you said. Could you say one thing about Buddhism I can understand?”
After the laughter died down, Suzuki replied calmly, “Everything changes.”
Those words, Suzuki said, contain the basic truth of existence: Everything is always in flux. Until you accept this, you won’t be able to find true equanimity. But to do that means accepting life as it is, not just what you consider the “good parts.” “That things change is the reason why you suffer in this world and become discouraged,” Suzuki-roshi writes in Not Always So: Practicing the True Spirit of Zen. “[But] when you change your understanding and your way of living, then you can completely enjoy your new life in each moment. The evanescence of things is the reason you enjoy your life.”
Nowhere is this truer than in the game of basketball. Part of me longed for the great ride we had in 1995–96 never to end, but even before the next season started, I could sense change in the air. Little did I know that the next two seasons would provide me with some tough lessons on dealing with impermanence.
The summer of ’96 was a period of great upheaval in the NBA—the sports equivalent of musical chairs. Close to two hundred players switched teams as a result of a free-agency boom that year. Fortunately, Jerry Reinsdorf opted to keep the Bulls roster virtually intact so that we could make another run for a championship. The only players we lost were center James Edwards, who was replaced by Robert Parish, and journeyman Jack Haley, a friend of Rodman’s from the Spurs whose primary job was being Dennis’s minder.
The price tag for keeping the team together wasn’t cheap: The Bulls payroll that year was $58 million plus, the highest ever in the NBA. The biggest line item, of course, was Michael Jordan’s salary of $30 million. In 1988 Michael had signed an eight-year, $25 million deal with the Bulls that seemed like a big paycheck at the time but had long since been surpassed by several lower-level stars. Jordan’s agent had proposed a two-year, $50 million deal to Reinsdorf, but Jerry opted for a one-year deal instead and soon regretted it. The next year he would have to up Jordan’s salary to $33 million. Reinsdorf also worked out one-year deals with me and Dennis Rodman.