Was that because Wennington was suspected of being a Krause stooge? It was a question that Wennington had pondered. But he decided it was a question better off left alone.
Before the season, he had been set to sign a two-year free agent contract with the Indiana Pacers, playing with two of his college teammates at St. John’s, Chris Mullin and Mark Jackson. It would have been a good situation playing for new Pacers coach Larry Bird, but Wennington’s agent had given the Bulls a courtesy call before the Indiana deal was signed. Suddenly, Wennington found himself back in Chicago on a one-year deal. Now, with his playing time diminished, he wondered about his prospects for next year.
He wasn’t alone in that regard. Virtually all the players and coaches wondered about next season. Would the situation eventually affect the team’s playoff chances?
Rodman, in one of his rare utterances, pronounced that it wouldn’t. “We have a lot of turmoil on this team,” he said, “but when we get on the court everything is fine.”
“We talk about it,” Steve Kerr admitted. “But the nice thing is, we don’t let it affect our play.”
In a strange way, the circumstances, the sense of being besieged by management, could have a positive effect on the Bulls performance, Kerr said. “Maybe it gives us all an edge. I think that’s a possibility subconsciously. We certainly don’t talk about it. We don’t say, ‘Let’s go do it for us.’ But maybe it does give us an edge.”
The undermanned Nets were playing fiercely on this night, and the Bulls were all thumbs. Pippen and Kerr missed shots. Burrell made a bad pass. Backup center Joe Kleine threw his massive body on the floor for a loose ball, but then he made a bad pass, and the Nets were headed the other way.
Jordan returned to the game with roughly six and half minutes left in the second period and New Jersey holding a 29-28 lead. Moments later, the Nets moved up 33-30, and their confidence was tangible. They squatted low in their defensive stances, with the notion that they could take this one.
Kukoc, however, hit a trey with three minutes left in the half, and from that a glimmer of life sparked in his weary teammates. Chicago forged a 37-35 halftime lead and seemed poised to take over in the third.
Jordan began the period hunkered down on defense, facing New Jersey’s Kerry Kittles. The Bulls star was obviously struggling offensively, but Jordan had never shown qualms about turning to the game’s lesser arts. After all, as he often pointed out, “Our offense sells tickets, but our defense wins games.”
Kukoc flicked a slick behind-the-back pass to Rodman for an easy two. Moments later, Chicago’s ball movement produced another Kukoc trey that put the Bulls up, 42-37, then up two more when Harper scored on a fast break run by Pippen. Earlier in the season, when Pippen was out with a foot injury, the Bulls got no transition buckets, but after his return those baskets came in sweet bunches, usually off of his excellent defense.
Jordan knifed inside for a jam to push the score to 46-37. Then the Bulls worked the offensive boards, another of their staples, for a Kukoc putback. From there, their defense owned the period. When Harper hit two free throws to make it 51-39, the look in the Nets’ eyes was all but extinguished.
Phil Jackson called this scenario “cracking the case,” when the Bulls’ defense kept the pressure up until the opponent folded under the impossibilities. A Pippen trey boosted the lead to 54-41 with five minutes to go in third. The Nets had made just three for of their 12 shots from the floor for the period, and that was when they get a shot. For the most part, Pippen and company were feeding off New Jersey’s passing lanes, nibbling away at the opposition’s hope until there was none at all.
From there, every Bulls play established its own aesthetic. Jordan rose up in the midst of a triple team and zipped a pass to Rodman underneath. Another easy two.
Moments later, Rodman collected his eleventh rebound, a retrieval of a missed Jordan free throw and drew the delight of the crowd as well as a foul. Then Pippen’s defensive presence forced yet another turnover, and the ensuing break produced two Kukoc free throws and a 60-43 lead. The Nets were completely marooned in doubt. Even when they got a shot they missed. Finally, point guard Sam Cassell could only smile at his team’s ineptitude in the face of Chicago’s half-court pressure. Mercifully, the period ended, 67-45. The Bulls had outscored Nets 30-10.
Jordan opened the fourth period at the free throw line, and the building was afire with cameras, yet another in a season of Kodak moments. With just under eight minutes left, Jordan laced in a jumper to give him 17, and Jackson decided that was enough. Still riding the emotion of the onslaught, the crowd loudly showered appreciation on Jordan and Rodman coming off the floor.
On the bench, Rodman bummed a stick of gum from a reporter on press row, popped it in his mouth and waited out the conclusion to a game that had become an agonizing parade of fouls and free throws. As he did, the house organ piped out, “If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands.”
Meanwhile, some dweeb a dozen rows back in the end zone was yelling, “Jordan, can I have your Gatorade towel?”
Jordan didn’t hear him. Arms folded, he stretched back in his seat and chomped his gum during a time out. Jordan gazed around the arena, taking in every detail of the evening show as a Bulls promotions crew used an air gun to fire balled-up T shirts into the crowd’s upper deck. By waving their arms to call for noise, the crew had various sections of the arena performing like trained animals. Obviously savoring the moment with a smile, Jordan took his time surveying the 21,000 happy faces packed in around him.
“I was just enjoying the moment,” he said later, “just enjoying the fun.”
Yes, he acknowledged that he was in a high stakes game of poker with the remains of his career on the table. He would love to play another year, or three, he said, but that’s only if Jackson remained coach.
“I don’t know what the date is that Michael should leave the game,” Jackson said. “He may leave this year and go happily into retirement. He may have second thoughts this summer and decide he’s not through playing and come back and play. That doesn’t matter.
“I’ve encouraged him to play until he feels he’s played it out. I think it’s real important for him to do that. That shouldn’t be a decision based on whether I coach or not. It should be based on whether he can play or not.”
Jordan was asked if he knew about the unhappy end to the career of Laker great Jerry West, who got into a nasty fight in 1974 with Jack Kent Cooke, then the Lakers’ owner. West had wanted to play another season or two and easily could have, but he retired abruptly during training camp in 1974. “No one ever had to pay me to play basketball,” West said in an interview 20 years later, the bitterness obvious in his voice. “But Mr. Cooke’s manipulation made me not want to play for him. My relationship with Mr. Cooke was acrimonious because the negotiations were a game to him. I knew that. It was very frustrating.”
Jordan had often made a similar comment, that he would play the game even if there was no pay.
“I never knew that,” Jordan said upon hearing how West’s career ended, how the Laker great remained bitter decades later. “Will I have the same feelings?” Jordan asked. “Is that what you’re asking me? I can’t say that. It hasn’t ended yet. Hopefully, it doesn’t come to that.”
Pippen, too, badly wanted to remain a Bull but saw little chance of that happening.
“I don’t think public opinion is gonna rule it,” he said. “But it would be great to keep this team together. No one wants to turn and walk away. We’ve had too much satisfaction. We’re having too much fun to sort of throw it all in the wash. But that’s how they’re going to run their ball club, and there’s nothing that we as players can do but turn the other cheek and go the other way.”
“Lose? I don’t lose. I win. That’s my job. That’s what I do.”
—The Devil’s Advocate
2: “Let’s Go, Millionaires”
Perhaps the most amazing thing about Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls was that they didn’t come apart sooner. After all, the NBA is a horrific grind of a business. It is a competitive environment that routinely churns out high-priced failures and burned-out relationships.
The Bulls, however, had been nothing if not sinewy over their decade of glory. Jackson, for example, had more tenure at his current post than any other coach in the league, except for Utah’s Jerry Sloan. And Krause had been the team’s chief basketball executive since 1985. The reason they hadn’t parted sooner was probably because they’d been too busy giving their all to the demanding Jordan, the most unique taskmaster in the history of the game. Without question, it was his competitive fury, his presence, that drove the entire franchise. It reached from the lowliest employee to the organization’s board room.
“As fine a coach as Phil is, so much of it is just this unbelievable trickle down from Michael Jordan,” said Chip Schaefer, the Bulls’ trainer since 1990. “As much as has been said and written about him athletically, it still hasn’t been enough. People are sick of realizing it, but it’s like, ‘No, no. Do you really realize what this guy is? Do you really realize what this guy is? I don’t think you do.’”
Tex Winter recalled the fall of 1985 when he first joined the team and began observing Jordan up close. The first thing he felt was intimidation, Winter said. Never mind that he was 63 at the time and owner of one of the best coaching reputations in America. Never mind that Jordan was a mere 22-year-old heading into his second professional season.
“I was in such awe of Michael that I was hesitant about even talking with him,” Winter recalled. “I watched him a great deal and learned a great deal about watching him and his mannerisms. But it took a couple of years before I felt comfortable even visiting with Michael a whole lot.”
Likewise, Jackson recalled the anxiety he felt upon taking over as head coach in 1989 and the strong urge he felt to please Jordan with his preparation and approach. It wasn’t the kind of anxiety that kept him awake at nights, Jackson says. But it was intimidating.
One of Jordan’s traits was a biting sense of humor that he used to chide teammates and staff members who didn’t seem diligent enough in rising to his stringent competitive standards. And when the sense of humor didn’t seem to work, Jordan never hesitated to singe them with his anger.
“He really thoroughly enjoys himself and enjoys his teammates,” Winter said of Jordan. “He pokes an awful lot of fun at them, even to the point sometimes that he can get pretty vicious, even to the point that he’s insulting and ridicules them. But they seem to accept that because he does it in sort of a humorous manner. They come back at him. And he doesn’t mind. The trouble is, they don’t have the ammunition he has. And that makes a big difference. He loves that, and they know that he loves that. He gets a big charge for some reason out of belittling people and putting them down. I think he does it because he feels it challenges him to be better.”
“I can be hard when I want to be,” Jordan acknowledged when asked about the matter, adding that his sense of humor was one of his main tools in coping with the rigors of a season and the playoffs. “It would drive me crazy if I didn’t have it.”
In his 52 seasons of coaching pro and college basketball, Winter said he’d never been around a personality as complicated as Jordan’s.
“Personality-wise, he’s a study. He really is,” Winter said. “I’m really sorry that I … I guess I don’t have the intelligence to grasp a lot of things that makes Michael tick, that make him what he is. I think I analyze him pretty good, but he is a mystery man in an awful lot of ways, and I think he always will be, maybe even to himself.”
Without question, Jordan possessed tremendous personal charm, wit, and intelligence to accompany his legendary athletic skills. But it was the competitive drive that set him apart. Chicago sports broadcaster Jim Rose gained rare insight to this once when he played in a charity basketball game with Jordan against several other NBA stars. Rose had covered the team since Jordan’s early seasons and knew of his competitive demands, so the broadcaster had literally spent weeks practicing for the game. And he was a good amateur player, but during the game he missed an open layup, which sparked Jordan’s fury.
“You’re not black enough,” Jordan supposedly barked at Rose, deeply offending the broadcaster, so much so that Rose immediately fired the ball at Jordan. There I was, the broadcaster thought later, trying to take Michael Jordan’s head off with the ball!
Jordan himself was chagrined that he made the remark and later apologized. But the incident was revealing to Rose in that it showed just how badly Jordan wanted to win at everything, how intuitive he was in knowing which buttons to push to get through emotionally to his teammates.
“He did it all in good fun,” Rose said. “Michael doesn’t like to lose at all. I missed the layup. I got mad and threw the ball at him and stormed off the court. Michael doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. He’s a wonderful person, but there are some times when his competitiveness takes over.”
Steve Kerr remembered gaining a similar insight upon Jordan’s return to the game in 1995 after spending most of two seasons attempting to play professional baseball. Upon his return, Jordan had found a Bulls team with many new faces, most of whom had no idea what it took to win a championship. “I had heard stuff about him,” Kerr said, “but I hadn’t experienced it first-hand. I was surprised how he just took control of the entire team’s emotional level and challenged every single player in practice to improve and never let up on anybody.”
Jordan’s approach was a revelation that left Kerr thinking, “Maybe this is what it takes to win a championship. This guy’s been through it. He’s won three of them. If this is what it takes, then it’s well worth it.”
“I remember very vividly the year he came back and played in the spring,” Schaefer recalled. “There were rumors for weeks about his coming back. I frequently go and have dinner with various players. I have a nice relationship with a lot of these guys. I was having dinner with Larry Krystkowiak and Luc Longley and Steve Kerr, guys who hadn’t played with Michael before. These guys were so excited about the prospects of playing with him, like kids almost in how they felt about it. I remember sitting there and listening to those guys and thinking, ‘Boy, you have no idea how hard it is playing with him.’ Guys were so excited about playing with him, but they had no idea how hard it was going to be.”
“His personality raised the level of our practices each day, which in turn made us that much better,” Kerr said.
Yet it also led to a fight between Kerr and Jordan that next fall in training camp. “It was a case of practice getting out of hand,” Kerr recalled, “just a lot of trash-talking and their team was just abusing us. It was during training camp. Michael was coming off the comeback when he hadn’t played that well in the (1995) playoffs, at least as far as his standards were concerned. He was out to prove a point and get his game back in order. So every practice was like a war. And it just spilled over one day.”
It was the first and only fistfight in Kerr’s life. “We were barking at each other, and it got out of hand,” Kerr said. “He threw a forearm at me, so I threw one back at him, and he kind of attacked me from there.
“He was just letting us know how they were kicking our ass. I knew they were kicking our ass. He didn’t have to tell me about it. Why wouldn’t that piss me off? It’s natural. Other guys were pissed off too. He just happened to be guarding me at the time.”
Since their fisticuffs the two have had a great relationship, Kerr said.
“That attitude,” Jackson said of Jordan, “that tremendous competitiveness, sometimes makes it tough to be a teammate, because you see that tremendous competitiveness is gonna eat you up everywhere. It’s gonna eat you up playing golf with him next week, playing cards with him next month.
That attitude of arrogance is gonna be there. It’s not always the best for personal connections and friendship. But it certainly makes for greatness.”
“I suspect that Bird was the same way,” Schaefer said, “and I know from observing countless Laker practices during my time at Loyola Marymount that Magic was a bitch at practice. You drop one of his passes, you miss a layup, you miss an assignment on defense, man, if eyes could kill, that’s the way it was.”
Former Bulls guard John Paxson, a broadcaster with the team, agreed. “Michael is easily the most demanding athlete I’ve been around,” Paxson said, reflecting on his days on the team. “I don’t want any of that to sound like there’s something wrong with that, because there’s not. But if you showed weakness around him, he’d run you off. He was always challenging you in little ways. The thing you had to do with Michael Jordan is you had to gain his confidence as a player. You had to do something that gave him some trust in you as a player. He was hard on teammates as far as demanding you play hard, you execute. So there had to come some point where you did something on the floor to earn his trust. That was the hardest thing for new guys coming in, and some guys couldn’t deal with it.”
“He took Steve Colter right out of here,” Krause said of Jordan. “Blew him right out of here. Colter couldn’t handle Michael and was gone. Dennis Hopson couldn’t handle Michael. I made a trade figuring Colter was strong enough, but he wasn’t.”
Blood on the Horns Page 4
