Blood on the Horns

by Roland Lazenby

  “I think that Jerry feels like as general manager he should be able to make the decisions as to whether he’s going to be on the bus or not,” Winter said. “That is one of the sore spots as far as Phil and the players are concerned. Maybe as a coach, Phil in this case feels that the general manager shouldn’t be on the bus early in the year. I think Phil has said on occasion that he doesn’t think other general managers do that. And Jerry says he thinks they do.

  “So what do you do?” Winter said with a laugh. “If Jerry wants to be on the bus, I think that’s his prerogative. Unfortunately, if the players do respond negatively, or a player even, particularly of Michael Jordan’s status, responds negatively to it, well then it’s something that maybe Jerry should take into consideration and maybe say, ‘Well, it’s not that important to me.’”

  Most general managers don’t hover around their teams, Jordan said. “That was our whole argument from day one,” he said, pointing out that Jackson has tried for three years to get Krause to relent. “That shows you how much power he has,” Jordan said of Jackson. “We don’t want to feel like we’re under a microscope the whole time while we’re working. That’s very important. I think that helps the team grow.”

  “That’s Michael’s opinion,” Krause said. “That’s not mine. Obviously Michael hasn’t been able to push me away. For good reason.

  “But I came here out of baseball,” the GM added. “All baseball general managers travel with their teams. That’s very normal … I find that to be effective at what I do, I have to see players on the road, OK? I don’t have to visit with them every day or talk to ‘em. But I have to watch ‘em on the road, because I judge our team a lot by what goes on on the road, OK?”

  Krause admitted that he was one of the first, if not the first, GM in pro basketball to travel so closely with his team. Today, he said, many other GMs now travel regularly with their teams. Krause pointed out that he traveled with the team only until early January each season, then went off to scout college games to find new talent. “But you know how I feel about it?” he said. “It really doesn’t matter. When somebody criticizes me for that, I say, ‘Wait a minute. I’ve got to do my job the way I know how to do it. That’s the way I know how to do my job. If a player can’t handle me being on the team bus, he shouldn’t be on that bus.’ Michael can handle it. He handles it fine. It doesn’t bother his play.”

  Krause acknowledged that his investigative nature (which had led to his nickname “the Sleuth”) was part of the reason Jackson and the players didn’t want him traveling with him, because he might collect information about their personal lives on the road. Since he arrived on the job in 1985 and found the roster populated with partiers, the general manager had made it his business to be aware of off-court activities. He had talked frequently of trading guard Sedale Threatt in 1988 out of fear that his liking for a good time off the court might influence younger Bulls players.

  Asked if it was a question of maintaining a proper distance from the team, Krause said, “Michael is the only player I’ve known who’s come up with that. Part of that is that there’s other things involved, too. A player can have a lot more freedom if I’m not around, in the sense that you can do what you want to do and not be worried about whether I’m walking the hall. I’m coming up late or something. I’m not talking about Michael. I’m talking about anybody. But the point being that on the road I don’t eat with the players; I don’t play cards with ’em; I don’t do any of that stuff with ’em. I never have. I do my job the way I see fit, and I resent the fact that people say I shouldn’t be doing this because Michael says it. I say, ‘Well, wait a minute now. It ain’t been too bad, what I’ve done.’ I resent … I shouldn’t say resent. What’s more, if I’m gonna do my job, I’m gonna do my job my way.”

  “He likes to see the players and how they react in certain situations,” Jackson said. “There have been some situations that have set the players on edge. Michael is always the last one in the bathroom. It’s kind of a pecking order between the taping table and the bathroom. With him going in the bathroom, and Jerry’s still in there in the players’ locker room in the bathroom using the toilet when Michael’s getting ready for the game and he’s the last one in there.”

  It sounded immensely loony, that the ultimate superstar of the NBA and his general manager were at odds over a little potty time. But the situation was more complicated than that. Like many great athletes, Jordan was a prisoner of his superstitions. The Lakers’ Jerry West wouldn’t wear green as a player because the team lost so many times to the Celtics. Beyond that, he had an involved list of superstitions. West would travel by the same exact route each game night to the Forum, where before tipoff he went through an elaborate ritual that even included positioning torn gum wrappers around his locker.

  While perhaps not so intricate, Jordan had his own ritual. “He’s a routine guy,” Chip Schaefer said. “He’s the last guy to get taped, then he gets the game notes and goes in the bathroom before Phil talks. He comes out, he stretches, he snaps his warm-up bottoms on the same way every time. He stands in the same place for the National Anthem, right behind me or in front of me depending on which way we’re facing. He’s the last guy to get the resin on his hands before they go onto the floor. He gives two pats of the hand in front of Johnny Kerr, our broadcaster. It’s very much a routine thing, from the Carolina practice shorts underneath his Bulls shorts to all the things. He’s like that.”

  The Bulls had emphasized meditation in recent seasons, and Jordan used the time before each game to clear his mind. Jordan was a master of concentration, and the purpose of this pre-game time was to fix that focus. In a world that constantly besieged him for his time and attention, his pre-game moments were his time to be alone, unless, of course, Krause was there. No one else on the team would have dared to invade Jordan’s solitude, but Krause seemed oblivious to it, Jackson said.

  The GM said that the bathroom incidents were rare, that Jackson’s even bringing them up was an outrage. “That’s Phil,” Krause said. “Phil’s the ultimate narcissist. He tries to make himself look big by making other people look small.”

  Jackson said the bathroom conflict was just one of many smaller conflicts between the star and general manager that had added up over the years into a big one. “It’s with those type of things, where Jerry doesn’t know boundaries,” the coach said. “That’s really what irritates the players almost more than anything, even more than the way he has dealt with the team, the trading and not trading of players, the rumors and everything else. Just his intrusion into the society where he doesn’t belong. He just shows a lack of the idea of boundaries as to where to the players stop and management begins. Those are the things you don’t like to bring up, but these are the things that just alienate Jerry from the team, his behavior.”

  In 1995 Jackson used the word “brusque” to describe Krause, and it set off many of the fireworks that burned in their relationship three years later. “I used that word one time, and he called me into his office,” Jackson said of Krause. “I told him when he brought me in his office, ‘That’s about as nice a word as I can use, Jerry.’ Jerry doesn’t have a good idea, or doesn’t know what his presence does to people. He’s not aware of it. Other people are aware of his presence. It’s just a lack of an idea what his image or his presence brings to the table, which is also a space in which he doesn’t have boundary definitions.

  “I talked to Jerry when I took the job. I talked to Jerry in subsequent years about this really being a problem,” Jackson added. “One of the things that’s a great measure of an individual is how he treats people when he has nothing to benefit by it. Jerry comes up failing all the time in that territory. This is one of the things we talk about. What is important in life and what isn’t. So Jerry has sort of run to the end of the rope with the guys.”

  Still, there were longtime Bulls employees who had the utmost regard for Jackson
and Jordan yet maintained a loyalty to Krause. They respected the general manager for the difficult stances he had taken over the years in pursuing the vision that he and Reinsdorf had for the team. The problem, said several of these employees, was that Krause seemed to harbor an unrealistic urge to “be one of the guys.”

  “He can’t be one of the guys,” said an employee who thought highly of Krause. “It’s hard to be on the bus and around these guys all the time. And then he’s got to decide on their livelihoods and their contracts? I think he’d get a lot more respect if he weren’t around the players all the time. He can see them during the holidays, at the Christmas party, even talk to them once in a while if he has something to say, but otherwise he should stay away. He can watch them from afar to evaluate the team. They don’t even have to know he’s there.

  “If they have a problem, they should be able to go see him and respect him, instead of giving him shit on the team bus or avoiding him.”

  “Hopefully we’ve done some right things around here,” Krause said. “What we’ve tried to do is just be straight. I think what’s gone wrong, from a public standpoint, with Jerry’s reluctance to talk and my reluctance to talk publicly, a lot of things have gotten misunderstood. We’ve tried to take the high road all the time, and guys are going the low road on us.”

  Clinging to his optimism, Winter hoped time would cure the situation. “A lot of times I don’t think these youngsters have enough respect for the position an individual holds,” the assistant coach said. “In a way, it’s sort of immaturity on their part. They’ll grow out of it as they grow older.”

  The question that immediately came to mind was, would they grow older as Bulls?

  “I bet,” Jackson said in late March 1998, “if everything was said and done and we won the championship and minds were changed with everybody in the organization, and Reinsdorf said, ‘This team has to come back,’ it would be difficult to get the players to do that.”

  ANCIENT INJURIES

  The friction between Krause and Jordan had evidenced itself in many ways over the 13 years since Reinsdorf took over the team. They boiled to something of an emotional head in early November 1994, when Jordan had “retired” for the first time and the team held “A Salute To Michael,” a ceremony to retire Jordan’s number 23 jersey in the United Center. It was night the team unveiled a bronze statue of Jordan in action, called “The Spirit,” just outside the building.

  The event quickly became something of a nightmare for the Bulls’ staff. The trouble, it seemed, began when NBA Entertainment took control of the event away from the Bulls to make it into a nationally broadcast program for Turner Network Television. As first envisioned, the “retirement” was to be a night of intimacy and warmth involving Jordan, his coaches and teammates, and the fans. Instead, NBA Entertainment turned it into a dimly conceived TV special in which every line was scripted. Rather than a memorable evening with the Chicago crowd that had followed Jordan’s every jump stop on his rise to greatness, the session unfolded as a vapid showcase of television business connections.

  Instead of a circle of friends, there was a “cast,” including broadcaster Larry King and actors Craig T. Nelson, Kelsey Grammer, Sinbad, George Wendt, Woody Harrelson and Robert Smigel, all of whom had little or no real connection with Jordan and the Bulls. The show moved from one hollow segment to another. The script writers had effectively removed any emotion from the format, except for odd moments when the crowd grew impatient with the awkward silliness of this staged event.

  Sadly, the only impromptu moment of the evening was one of profound embarrassment, especially for Krause. When he and Jerry Reinsdorf were introduced, the crowd of 21,000 booed lustily. “C’mon, now,” Jordan chastised the fans. “Both Jerrys are good guys.”

  It was an uncomfortable moment, but not unprecedented. At virtually every rally or celebration of the Bulls three straight championship seasons from 1991 to 1993, Krause had been the target of merciless booing from Chicago crowds. Never mind that by just about all accounts his personnel moves factored heavily into their success, the fans took a special delight in deriding him.

  This night, however, was perhaps the worst for Thelma, Krause’s wife of many years. She began crying, and Krause himself grew furious. For years, he had ignored the booing and hardened himself to the fans. “I learned long ago that when we won, Michael would get the credit,” Krause has explained, “and when we lost I would get the blame. I knew that. It was something I accepted.”

  But this was different. The booing had finally gotten to his wife, and she was openly weeping. “One of the really sad moments that I’ve seen before,” Chip Schaefer said, “was at the retirement function for Michael at the United Center when Jerry was roundly booed, and Michael had to say, ‘Don’t be hard on him.’ I could see from where I was sitting Thelma Krause just broken down in tears over it. That was really sad, really sad. I felt genuine pity for him and his family at that moment. Here was a night supposed to be a celebration for one of the great athletes in the history of the world. Here’s this guy being treated that way.”

  Later, Dean Smith, who coached Jordan at the University of North Carolina and remained one of his mentors, sought to console Thelma Krause. Smith pointed out that it was nice of Jordan to speak up for Krause. The comment sparked the pent-up anger and emotion in the GM’s wife, and she told Smith in clear terms what she thought of Jordan’s effort. It was too little, too late, she said angrily. Then she proceeded to give Smith a piece of her mind.

  Smith and Jordan had often been at odds with Krause over the years, particularly when it came to the Bulls’ personnel decisions regarding University of North Carolina players. Both Jordan and Smith had lobbied long and hard to get Krause to draft Joe Wolf in the first round of the 1987 draft, and their efforts had created a tension-filled draft day dilemma for Krause. But then Reinsdorf told the general manager to “go with his gut” because his instincts on personnel had served the franchise well. So Krause selected Horace Grant, who developed into a key player in the Bulls’ first three championships. Wolf, meanwhile, went on to become an underachieving career role player. After the draft, Krause recalled, “Dean Smith called me and ripped my rear end, literally. ‘How could you do that, you dumbell?’ Literally. And Michael said, ‘What the hell? You took that dummy!?!’ And for years that’s what he called Horace, dummy. To his face. Dummy. Right to his face. Unbelievable.”

  So Thelma Krause had no compunction about telling Dean Smith off that night. Krause himself didn’t seem to mind it too much either.

  THE SLEUTH

  The nature of Krause’s conflict was readily apparent. There was the NBA, the domain of giants, and there was Jerry Krause, all of, say, 5-5 and 220 pounds. It was an incongruity that seemingly escaped no one, least of all Krause himself, who had been known to refer to himself in the third person as “the little sonofabitch.”

  Could it be any other way?

  If you were 5-5 and you wanted to rule in the land of giants, you had to be willing to battle every day. You had to climb up on whatever stack of metaphors you could find and stare down a roster of Goliaths, huge men with huge egos. Approach it any other way and you could very quickly wind up serving as somebody’s mascot. You could wind up getting your head rubbed for good luck or picking up towels in the locker room. Krause knew this, because he’d been there.

  He wasn’t entirely alone, of course. There were a smattering of undersized coaches working the league, led by Cleveland’s Mike Fratello and Philadelphia’s Larry Brown. Plus, pro basketball seemed to have found a role for a number of tiny ballhawks from Spud Webb to Muggsy Bogues. Before them, there was little Barney Sedran, the guy who could lace up those long jump shots in the days before the hoops even had backboards. Barney, by the way, is a Hall of Famer.

  They all were admired for their chutzpa.

  All, perhaps, except Krause.

 
Then again his circumstances were singular. He didn’t have Muggsy’s speed or Spud’s springs or Fratello’s Napoleonic persona. Before he was the Bulls’ general manager he was a baseball and basketball scout and before that he was a charting assistant and team manager, a stats and towels guy. While he did play baseball in high school, he was a third-string catcher, the type of guy who found his niche warming up pitchers and was happy to have it. The kind with the attitude that, “I may be the warm-up catcher, but I’m gonna be the best warm-up catcher in the city.”

  That desperation to overcome his physical liabilities seemed to drive Krause to an athletic fanaticism. Games absorbed his life. Even if he couldn’t play them, he wanted to be around them. The son of a Russian jewish immigrant, he grew up in Chicago, and in media interviews over the years, he recalled being a distinct minority in his own neighborhood, where he was called “kike” and “sheeny.” After those interviews some people who knew Krause at the time came forward to question if he hadn’t perhaps overstated the circumstances. Regardless, one of the beacons on his landscape was Jim Smilgoff, the legendary baseball coach at Taft High School. Not only was Smilgoff a mean, tough competitor, he was Jewish. Needless to say, Jerry Krause worshiped him. When Krause’s family moved to another neighborhood, Krause recalled that he decided to ride his bike eight miles each way each day so he could continue at Taft playing for Smilgoff, never mind that he would never be more than a warm-up catcher.

  It so happened that Krause had a high school teammate who was a good enough pitcher to attract pro scouts, including a short, portly bird dog for the New York Yankees named Freddie Hasselman, who quizzed the warm-up catcher about the prospect. It was then that Krause discovered being a warm-up catcher was a good way to get to know the big-league scouts, who would hang around the batting cage quizzing him on the strength of the pitcher’s arm and other issues.