Blood on the Horns

by Roland Lazenby

  Jackson admitted the situation left him uneasy. “The only downside of this whole thing, in my mind’s eye, is the fact that if Michael Jordan’s not ready to retire, we’re taking one of the greatest players, or heroes, that we’ve had in our society and limiting what he can do,” the coach said. “We’re deprived of seeing someone extremely special go out the way he wants to go out, in the style he wants to go out, because we’ve never seen someone of his age with the superstar status that he’s had. I don’t know of another sports hero in our history who has been able to play at this level at this age. Michael has just destroyed the concepts of what we think of as normal, of what a man his age should be able to do.

  “So that’s the only downside in this whole thing,” Jackson concluded. “Jerry Reinsdorf and I have a good relationship. Jerry Krause and I understand each other. We may not have as close a relationship as we used to, but we understand each other. I know he’s got a direction he wants to follow, and he knows I’ve got some things on my agenda.”

  Jordan had led the Bulls to five championships over the past seven seasons, and it seemed a good bet that the team could claim yet another title in June. Most important, he had done all of this with a high-flying style and charisma that had made it possible for the league to rake in billion after billion in television rights revenue, ticket sales and merchandise licensing fees from across the globe.

  What Jordan’s presence had meant to the NBA, to his team and to the struggling city of Chicago was almost beyond description. Before he arrived in 1984, the Bulls were a sorry franchise considering the possibility of relocating to another city. They had a terrible practice facility and played in decrepit Chicago Stadium before embarrassingly meager crowds. The roster was riddled with cocaine abusers, and winning half of the season’s 82 games seemed an impossibility. In the middle of Jordan’s rookie season, the team, which had lost money throughout its two decades of operation, was sold for a mere $16 million, and most of the money was immediately turned over to a Wisconsin businessman who had won a judgment against the team’s owners.

  Selling the team was a move the former owners would come to rue because Jordan’s arrival in the city as a rookie ignited an unprecedented interest in pro basketball and a swift transformation of the Bulls and the league. Fourteen years later the Bulls were arguably the most successful professional sports franchise in the world, worth $350 million or more. A sign of this success was the streak of more than 500 consecutive home sellouts, the longest in the NBA, dating back to 1988.

  The Stadium, long a landmark on Madison Street, was razed to make way in 1994 for the United Center, the fancy new $175 million building just across the street that the Bulls shared with the National Hockey League’s Chicago Blackhawks. The early sales of tickets and corporate suites at the building had gone so well over the building’s first four seasons that a substantial portion of the Bulls’ debt for the construction had already been retired. However, the spring of 1998 had brought the first signs that Jordan’s threatened departure could have a dramatic effect on the team’s revenues and perhaps even its long-term value.

  If Jordan left the team, how fitting it would be if no fans showed up for the opening of the 1998-99 season, Pippen said. “That would send them a message.”

  “But they’re all right,” he said of the team’s financial standing. “They got the place sold out.”

  Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. One problem in particular was the renewing of the lucrative skybox contracts by corporate clients. One third of the Bulls’ skybox leases were up for renewal. Anticipating perhaps a messy end to the Jordan era at the end of the 1998 season, the team abruptly moved up its schedule for renewing those contracts from the summer to spring.

  The team’s corporate clients, however, were reportedly reluctant to renew until they knew the team’s position on the return of Jackson, Jordan and Pippen. A sign of the difficulty was the fact that the team soon offered a 15 percent discount enticing customers to renew.

  “The best timing would have been last year for the boxes,” said Jackson, pointing out that if the franchise had made a transition to new players, a new coach and a post-Jordan era in 1997 it could have been better for business, because fans and corporate clients would have been able to see just what kind of team the Bulls would put on the floor in the wake of the Jordan years.

  “The people buying the skyboxes are in it for a longer haul,” observed Terry Armour, who covered the team for the Chicago Tribune. “They want to know, and they have to know, down the stretch who the hell is gonna be here.”

  The Bulls, however, had won the 1997 title, and immediately afterward Jordan issued a public appeal to keep the team together for yet another year and yet another run at a championship. Reinsdorf was said to have been annoyed by that plea, not so much because the key players and coaches were retained, but because Jordan had usurped Reinsdorf’s opportunity to make the gesture. The situation made it appear that Reinsdorf was bowing to the outpouring of public opinion, something he detested, not out of a disregard for the public, but because his experience had taught him that the popular move in the business of sports could also be the fallible one.

  “Michael chose to make his statement the night we won the championship,” Reinsdorf said in a private interview for this book. “I was just annoyed that he made it that night. That should have been a night of celebration, not a night of campaigning for the next year.”

  Despite the irritation and the cost, Reinsdorf knew the popular move was the only move. He re-signed Jordan, Jackson and teammate Dennis Rodman to one-year contracts worth nearly $50 million with the stated goal of winning a sixth Bulls championship.

  Nevertheless, the season had brought a terrible public relations climate for both Krause and Reinsdorf, neither of whom possessed strong public relations skills. Behind the scenes they sought the counsel of public relations consultants to devise ways to improve their battered images. Reinsdorf’s answer, obviously, was to wait in hopes that the situation would answer itself.

  “Both Jerrys are their own worst enemies,” a team source conceded. Reinsdorf often refused to play public relations games, and Krause, for all his success as a scout, had a record of one disastrous encounter after another in the public arena.

  “(Krause) doesn’t have a lot of them (public relations skills),” Jackson said. “Jerry Reinsdorf knows this. They’ve really tried to monitor this man. They’ve tried to become spin experts in a lot of ways. They’ve got a strategy, and they’ve got people they’ve hired that they pay a lot of money to manufacture a good spin on the Bulls. I want to see the Bulls have success in many ways. But every time they keep kicking themselves or stubbing their toe by doing these kinds of things to the community.”

  Indeed, the marvel was that not only could Jordan continue performing at a championship level, but he could do so while waging a battle for control of the team. “Michael is such a professional, such a player first, that he puts it in the background,” Kerr said. “Michael doesn’t mess around. He plays.”

  Yet Jordan could display world-class public relations skills to rival his athletic abilities. And he was obviously using them subtly and effectively to counter Krause’s efforts to fire Jackson. “He’s obviously a PR machine with all of his endorsements,” Steve Kerr said of Jordan, who earned tens of millions off the court endorsing products. “His image is obviously very important to him. And I think, in one regard, that means that he doesn’t want to look like the guy who’s trying to take over the organization … He’s very savvy.”

  Asked if Jordan presented an awesome opponent for Krause and Reinsdorf, Kerr smiled and said, “I think it’s safe to assume Michael has the majority of support from Bulls fans on this whole issue.”

  “He’ll never lose,” agreed the Tribune’s Terry Armour. “He is so revered in Chicago, around the world, in the NBA, there’s no way Michael could lose. At the end of
last year, when he was at the podium, he pissed Jerry Reinsdorf off when he said, ‘I want everybody back.’ You know Jerry Reinsdorf and Jerry Krause are saying, ‘Damn, Michael does this, and there’s no way we can look good on this.’ Michael has built Chicago into the sports town that it is. Michael will never lose a PR showdown.”

  Just as he faked out opponents with his flashy post moves in the pivot, Jordan had shown an ability to get Krause leaping at the wrong time. In February, while the team was in Utah on a West Coast road trip, Krause made headlines in Chicago by telling Chicago Tribune columnist Fred Mitchell that this was definitely Jackson’s last season with the team.

  It was a gigantic mistake, said Armour. “When we were in Utah that’s when Krause said, ‘We’d love to have Michael back, but if Michael wants Phil back, it’s just not gonna happen.’ On that road trip, every stop we went to, somebody in a different city said, ‘Hey, Michael, is this your last year?’ He’d say, ‘Oh yeah, it could be. If Phil’s not coming back, I’m not coming back. So I’m treating it like it’s my last one.’ I think Krause just got fed up with reading it and said, ‘OK, I’m gonna strike now and I’m gonna say, ‘You know we want Michael back, but he’s not coming back under Phil.’ Krause did that just to kind of start the public relations thing.”

  Bulls fans recoiled at Krause’s insistence, which only strengthened Jordan’s standing. It was as if Jordan and Krause were playing poker and Krause had unwittingly flashed his cards. “He’s bluffing them, and Michael’s bluffed them before,” Armour said. “Hell, Michael’s the consummate poker player, too. He knows what to do. He knows how to play all kinds of games with these guys.

  “I think he’s having fun with it. He likes to make Krause—I don’t know if it’s so much a Reinsdorf thing—but he likes to make Krause sweat.”

  After Krause’s comments opened the door for Jordan to blast management to a global media gathering at the All Star Weekend in New York in February, Reinsdorf wisely called for a moratorium on publicly discussing the issue. It was the best move he could make, short of trying to explain the tangled conflicts.

  “All talk about retirements, replacements or rosters changes are premature,” the chairman said in a statement released by the team. “This management brought this coach and these players back this season to try to win a sixth NBA championship. With half the season and the playoffs still ahead, that should be everyone’s total focus. That’s my focus. Period.”

  The personality conflicts aside, perhaps the most difficult challenge facing the Bulls was the mind-boggling economics of the NBA itself. In fact, the league’s owners had just voted to tear up the collective bargaining agreement negotiated just two summers ago, meaning they had to renegotiate a new agreement with the players association. Facing re-signing young, unproven free-agent stars to long-term guaranteed contracts in excess of $120 million, the league’s owners decided they needed to rework their labor agreement. As proof of this, the owners had suggested that as many as 17 teams could lose money in 1998, despite the fact that the league’s annual revenues, driven by Jordan’s stardom, had ballooned to better than $2 billion.

  With a veteran roster, the Bulls had been able to avoid the gamble of huge, long-term contracts for unproven young players. Instead, Reinsdorf had agreed to spend nearly $70 million on player and coaches salaries in hopes of winning a sixth title in 1998. But the future of the franchise was not mortgaged. “I’m pretty sure they’re still making money, though not as much,” Jordan said of the circumstances.

  Reinsdorf conceded that the Bulls remained profitable despite the gigantic payroll, an indication of just how much the team had raked in during the seasons when Jordan and Pippen both earned less than $4 million. Yet, even if Jackson and Jordan and Pippen and Krause worked out their differences, the real pinch would come with the 1998-99 balance sheet. With Jordan, Pippen, center Luc Longley, forward Dennis Rodman and several other key players as free agents, keeping the team together would require a payroll bloated to $80 million or more. This would not be the happiest of circumstances for the Bulls’ secondary owners, some of whom were said to be clamoring for a dividend check.

  To say the least, the financial pressures on Reinsdorf seemed substantial. “At some point,” said the Tribune’s Terry Armour, “the investors are asking Reinsdorf, ‘What the hell is going on?’ There’s a lot of pressure from all angles to keep this thing going, but eventually it’s gonna dissolve. It’s gonna dissolve. Their thing is to make it as painless and as inexpensive as possible.”

  The timing, however, was not favorable. July 1, 1998, loomed as the date that the Bulls would supposedly have to secure a retirement letter from Jordan. If they didn’t, his $33-35 million contract for 1997-98 would count against the team’s salary cap, thus making it virtually impossible for the Bulls to sign new free agent talent. With that scenario, the team faced the terrible prospect of having to renounce the greatest player of all time. “I’m not gonna wish bad things on people,” Jordan said when asked about the circumstances. “For the sake of the fans in Chicago, I hope they don’t pay the price. But if it happens, then they will. But I don’t want to wish bad things on the public, the people in Chicago.”

  The circumstances left a bad air hanging about the club, but the players continued to make light of it. They talked daily about theirs being a team capable of shrugging off controversy and going about its winning ways. “There’s more bullshit flying around this team than a dairy in a tornado,” said center Luc Longley, an Australian. “There’s always something going on. Dennis is always doing his thing, or something’s going on. Michael’s retiring, or Jerry’s making noise. We’ve had more controversy or circumstance around this team in the last three years, so we’ve had a lot of practice at putting things out of our minds.”

  But as the spring unfolded, the Bulls were beginning to understand that conflict had eaten its way into the cracks of a team that over the two previous seasons had shown an incredibly strong chemistry. Jackson had constantly preached against divisiveness, yet even he felt it. The coach said that Krause used certain players to keep him informed of the team’s inner workings. “He has guys on the team that he kinda has in his pocket who will rat on me in certain situations,” Jackson said.

  Were the circumstances breeding a paranoia in the minds of Krause and Jackson and Reinsdorf? Kerr seemed shocked when an interviewer suggested that someone on the team would be funneling information to Krause, as Jackson had suggested. All of the players feel a tremendous loyalty to Jackson, Kerr said.

  “Phil is a player’s coach very definitely,” Tex Winter agreed. “It’s very obvious that the players love him. Any time that you can get a superstar like Michael Jordan going to bat for the head coach the way he has, even to the extent to say that he’s not going to play anymore unless he plays for Phil, you’re not gonna find that very often. That’s a wonderful relationship. It’s an indication of how Phil has cultivated that relationship. Phil has a tremendous relationship with most of the players. Some of them probably like him better than others. That’s just natural. But he likes some players better than others. That’s human nature. Coaches do that.”

  “What’s happened over the last couple of years,” observed team trainer Chip Schaefer, “is that the Bulls have become a house divided, and you were either Jerry’s guy or Phil’s guy, whether you wanted to be or not. I think it was a situation where Phil had his coaches, Jerry had his scouts. Jerry had his secretary, Phil had his. As much as I get along with and work well with Al Vermeil (the team’s strength and conditioning coach), as Jerry and Phil kind of fell out there was this perception that Al was Jerry’s guy and I was Phil’s guy. Sometimes what I think happens, because they’re being combative, they draw people close to them, whether you want to be or not. There were times on issues that Phil pulled me to him when in fact I may well have wanted to remain neutral on that issue. I’m trying to remain neutral, like Switzerland, and I ju
st can’t. I’m getting pulled to one side or the other and it’s really difficult.”

  Despite their allegiance to Jackson and Jordan and the success that brought, many Bulls players felt some loyalty to Krause, or at least a respect for his position and the power he held over them. After all, it was he who had brought them there, rescued them from the Clippers and the Warriors and other points of exile around the NBA to come to Chicago to play a role as an extra in Michael Jordan’s Traveling All Star Revue.

  At the close of the season, all but Ron Harper, Toni Kukoc, Keith Booth and Randy Brown would be free agents. And it was Krause who would decide whether they were offered a contract to return.

  Understandably, most players didn’t want to discuss the circumstances. “I refuse to answer on the grounds that I’m a free agent this summer,” Longley said when asked about the issue.

  The bad blood between Jackson and Krause had made for uneasy circumstances, Toni Kukoc said. “I don’t know how that thing’s gonna end up. But I think it’s not good for our team.”

  It was Krause who campaigned long and hard to lure Kukoc to Chicago from Europe. But Kukoc said, “I think more of Phil than I do Jerry. But it does bother me a little bit. Playing for a team like this, I was always focused on the team. I pretty much have a good relationship with everybody in the organization.” Under the circumstances, that wasn’t always easy, Kukoc acknowledged.

  The idea that somebody on the roster was viewed as a spy for Krause was particularly troubling to reserve center/forward Bill Wennington. “I’m nobody’s boy,” he said.

  What worried Wennington was that he’d never been the kind of player to do a lot of smooching up to coaches. A Canadian, Wennington had been taught that players were players and coaches were coaches and that it was wrong for a player to initiate a personal relationship to improve his standing on the team. As a result, Wennington wasn’t as close to the coaches as some teammates who put an effort into such a relationship. In the past that was never much of an issue. But with Jackson and Krause at odds, Wennington began to wonder. He sometimes noticed unusual patterns to his playing time; it seemed that his minutes on the court came in strange intervals.