Blood on the Horns

by Roland Lazenby

  The exchange led to a friendship between Krause and Hasselman, who was portly and had never played the game. Krause wondered how someone like that could be a scout, and Hasselman passed along this secret: “You don’t have to be a chicken to smell a rotten egg.”

  It would prove to be the revelation of revelations for Jerry Krause. He later attended Bradley University and worked his way into a spot as the student assistant to Braves basketball coach Chuck Orsborn. His duties were to chart offensive and defensive plays, and that proved to be a major training ground for his scouting days. He also managed to hang on with Bradley’s baseball team, where his relationship with Hasselman grew.

  After college, he found his way into a series of scouting jobs for a variety of pro and semi-pro teams. It was a hard life, 280 nights on the road each year for roughly $100 a week, but Krause consumed it with relish. Later, he would joke about naming his unwritten autobiography One Million National Anthems. Wherever they played a game, he tried to be there, hanging out in the locker room, talking to coaches, watching and charting players. He wore a snap-brim hat and a raincoat and was obsessively secretive, so they began calling him “Sleuth.”

  He even wandered way up to the University of North Dakota in the 1960s to meet a young coach named Bill Fitch and to scout a rawboned forward named Phil Jackson. “He’s not what you would consider an athlete,” Jackson pointed out in 1995, “and even back then, 30 years ago, he was an unusual fellow to be out there scouting a basketball player.

  “But Jerry has done whatever it took to get to the top and hold his position. That’s why he has such a great knowledge of the game, from A to Z. He did whatever it took, from going and getting the sandwiches and coffee, to whatever, just to keep hanging around the game and learning. And he’s always been able to pick out talent. He was down there at Kansas State when Tex Winter coached there in the ‘60s, hanging out with Tex the way he would later hang out with Bighouse Gaines at Winston-Salem State. He’s always had an eye for people who are dedicated to what they do.”

  Nobody ever outworked him. Krause smugly operated by his “two cocktail rule.” While other scouts were having two cocktails, he was down the road, seeing another game, searching for that great undiscovered talent to send up to the big leagues.

  One of his first big scores was a scouting gig with the old Baltimore Bullets. He said he advised the Bullets to draft a fine young small college player named Jerry Sloan and later pushed to his bosses in Baltimore to select Earl “The Pearl” Monroe, out of little Winston-Salem State.

  Those early successes, however, didn’t buy Krause any seniority. The scouting circuit was a hard road in those days, and Krause soon left the Bullets to join the Bulls in the late 1960s shortly after they had entered the league as an expansion team. But a poor relationship with Bulls coach Dick Motta meant that Krause had to move on after a couple of seasons in Chicago. The next stop was another expansion team, the Phoenix Suns.

  People would marvel that with his countenance he could be so effective as a scout. Krause would answer them with Freddie Hasselman’s wisdom: “You don’t have to be a chicken to smell a rotten egg.”

  His first really big break seemingly came in 1976 when wily old Bulls owner Arthur Wirtz lured him back to Chicago as the team’s general manager. It was quite a promotion, and it was in his hometown, which puffed Krause up with pride. Yet within weeks he got caught up in an amazingly silly turn of events. The Bulls were looking for a coach, and DePaul’s Ray Meyer told reporters that Krause had offered him the job. Krause insisted he had done nothing of the sort, but somehow the incident got blown up into a local media firestorm. Abruptly, Wirtz fired Krause, turning his triumphant homecoming into public humiliation, and it forever shaped his view of the media.

  His skill as a scout meant that he quickly landed on his feet. The Lakers hired him and watched in amazement as he found them a little-known guard named Norm Nixon. But White Sox owner Bill Veeck, who had known Krause for years, persuaded him to return to Chicago and baseball in 1978. Krause’s toughness and acumen were already well established in 1981 when Reinsdorf put together an investment group to purchase the baseball team. The new team chairman soon grew to admire the plucky scout, and four years later, when Reinsdorf put together a group to buy the Bulls, Krause was his first choice to run the organization, despite the fact that the team’s previous owners and management had loathed him.

  “Jerry’s been around forever,” said one Bulls employee. “He knew all the coaches, the assistants, the scouts in the league. The previous Bulls administration despised Jerry. They had all these stories and tales and ripped him all the time. Lo and behold if he didn’t come back here and get the job as general manager.”

  His resurfacing in basketball amazed many people, including Orlando Magic executive Pat Williams, who had known Krause for years and had worked with him in the early Bulls days. “Part of the saga of the Bulls is the incredible scent, the life of Jerry Krause,” Williams said. “It’s phenomenal. He starts out in Baltimore, then gets hired and fired in Chicago. So he’s out, and he ends up going to Phoenix. He bats around and ends up with the Lakers. He ends up working for me in Philly. He’s hired back by the Bulls, and Arthur Wirtz ends up firing him after a few months on the job. He’s gone, just gone, and he wheels out of that, and he battles his way back and works for Reinsdorf. His life story and what happened to him is phenomenal. He’s a hard worker who has really paid his dues. He may make a mistake but it won’t be from a lack of effort.”

  “I would run into Jerry in the early ‘80s when he was still scouting baseball,” said Bruce Levine, a radio reporter who had covered Chicago sports for many seasons. “Jerry was known in the scouting business as just a very tough cookie, very similar to what he is now. Very intense. A guy that would spend 15 hours a day going to baseball games. College games. High school games. Professional games. I’ve developed a large group of scouts who are friends of mine in baseball. They all admired Jerry. Some of them didn’t understand him. But they all admired his work ethic.”

  Many of the people competing against Krause as scouts in baseball were former players and coaches, people of standing in the game. Krause, on the other hand, came from no where, so he had to outwork them, had to fight through the circumstances with a fierce, unflinching determination.

  “Jerry is a great success story,” Levine said. “If you can get by the little peccadilloes in his personality, the guy is just a tremendous worker who has tunnel vision on getting whatever project or thing he’s doing done. That’s the only thing on his mind. That and fishing and his wife. Those are the three things. He’s just a totally dedicated person. I have nothing but good things to say about him, although there are days he will walk by me, just like he walks by other people. Not out of rudeness, but in the sense he has other things on his mind. I still find him to be a very amazing executive who has never gotten enough credit because everybody assumes Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen would have won by themselves anywhere they went. That’s a great argument, but I don’t believe it.

  “This is a guy who loves challenges, just like Michael Jordan,” Levine pointed out. “Krause and Reinsdorf both do. They all love challenges, and they’re all very competitive. I think Jerry in his heart would love a chance to rebuild this from the ground up and show people that it wasn’t a fluke, that it wasn’t just Michael Jordan.”

  Reinsdorf knew why he was booed at public appearances. He was also part owner of the White Sox, and back in the 1980s, when he was trying to get a new Comiskey Park built, Reinsdorf threatened to move the Sox to Florida. As it turned out, Reinsdorf said, he decided to accept about $10 million less per year to keep the Sox in Chicago, but the city’s sports fans were slow to forgive or forget.

  Krause’s public image drew lightning for entirely different reasons, Reinsdorf said. Mainly, Krause had the drive and demeanor of a pit bull. “He has his foibles, I understand that
,” the owner said. “If I could make him 6-feet-2, thinner and better looking, I would do it. I think he’d be even more popular. And if he could learn to bullshit the press, I think that would make him more popular. I’ve told him many, many, times, ‘Why can’t you be more like Roland Hemond (the longtime White Sox general manager)?’ Roland Hemond was the master of making the press happy without telling them anything.”

  Krause, however, would never consider such an approach. He once worked as a newspaper copy boy and had entertained thoughts of being a sportswriter (he worshiped legendary Chicago newspaperman Jim Enright, “The Monsignor”) but Krause had a deep distrust of the media.

  There was little question that his attitude toward the press had worked against him. “Jerry’s never been able to project a good personal image,” Jackson observed, “and that’s been the thing that’s destroyed his public persona as far as the audience goes here in Chicago. They see him as someone like the mayor. The mayor always gets booed in public. Jerry represents that kind of guy. He has to do a lot of the dirty jobs. The fans remember the dirty jobs, and they remember his comments. What has happened with Jerry is that he has alienated a lot of sportswriters, and the sportswriters form the public opinion.

  “Jerry Krause is an enigma to the athletic world,” the coach said. “So it’s everybody’s challenge to define him as a person. He’s a Damon Runyon-type character who is undefinable. But Jerry’s a watchdog. He keeps the press away, he keeps the public away, he keeps company policy always. He’s ever vigilant at mind control and spin control to the point that it wears people out. He has a tendency to alienate people. I don’t know if there’s ever been a story done on him here in Chicago where he hasn’t had a conflict with the writer.

  “He’s willing to call people up on the phone and challenge them. ‘Why did you say this?’ And, ‘That’s a lie!’ And, ‘You missed the point!’ He’d done that to the point where he’s sort of made himself an unlikeable character.”

  “It’s just a shame that it’s such an antagonistic relationship between the media and Jerry,” Chicago radio reporter Cheryl Raye, who has covered the team for about a decade, said in 1995. “It’s sad, when he gets booed at a ring ceremony. There’s no reason for it. I couldn’t believe it … Some people just need a villain, and Jerry fits their profile.”

  “Jerry’s style may not be liked by the media, but it’s highly effective,” said a Bulls employee. “He’s so preoccupied with winning, he can’t pull out of it sometimes. Which leaves him walking by people, as if he doesn’t see them. And he probably doesn’t.”

  Actually, Krause had maintained what appears to be a good relationship with the current group of writers covering the team, including John Jackson of the Sun Times and Terry Armour of the Tribune. “In my personal dealings with Jerry Krause, I’ve never had a problem,” Armour offered. “He’s been honest with me. I’ve heard people say that he’s a liar, you know. I’ve never had him lie to me about anything. I talk to him off the record a lot. I like dealing with him. But, I’ve told him this in private, too, it doesn’t come across to the public.”

  Because Krause was so set in his ways, Reinsdorf held little hope that his image would ever improve dramatically. Besides the superficial things, though, there was little that the team’s chairman wanted to change about Krause, even his occasional personnel mistakes.

  “All general managers make mistakes,” Reinsdorf said. “Jerry’s incredibly loyal, but the main thing is that he gets results. He gets results because he works very hard, and he has a good eye for talent.”

  He also wasn’t afraid to make unpopular and seemingly unorthodox moves to make the team better. In fact, some observers have made a case that the Bulls won their championships largely because of Krause’s peculiar vision. When he was named to his post in 1985, the Bulls were considered not much more than an undisciplined young superstar and a collection of questionable players.

  “Like everybody else, I was in awe,” Tex Winter said of seeing Jordan in practice for the first time in the fall of 1985. “He was a high wire act at that particular time. I often said back then it was more a degree of difficulty, a gymnastic feat, with Michael in those days than it was a matter of basketball.”

  “I had a brutal start,” Krause has said of his first months running the Bulls. “I had nine players I didn’t want and three I did. I wanted Dave Corzine, I wanted Rod Higgins, and I wanted Michael. The rest of them I couldn’t have cared less about. And they were talented. All of them were very talented. But it wasn’t a question of talent.”

  “Jerry took away a lot of things that this franchise didn’t need,” Jackson admitted. “It didn’t need certain types of people on the club. He had a certain idea of what type of person he wanted. He brought in character, or what he liked to think of as character. Good solid people. People who wanted to work hard.”

  Krause’s first draft pick was little-known Charles Oakley out of Virginia Union, a move that was roundly booed. Yet Oakley immediately showed his worth as a power forward and became immensely popular in Chicago. Still, that didn’t stop Krause from trading him a few seasons later for New York Knicks center Bill Cartwright, another move that was pilloried. Although he had a dubious medical history, Cartwright showed that he was just the low-post defender the Bulls needed to become a championship team.

  Perhaps Krause’s two biggest moves were the hiring of veteran Winter, who designed the Bulls’ famed triple-post, or triangle, offense, and the development of Jackson as a NBA head coach.

  Krause fired three coaches before finding the perfect leader for the Bulls in Jackson, and each firing was accompanied by a public outcry for Krause’s head.

  FINDING PHIL

  Jackson had had some success in the CBA, but most NBA general managers would never have considered him head coaching material. “I thought I was ready to be an NBA coach at age 35,” Jackson recalled. “I had served two years as an NBA assistant in New Jersey. But I really didn’t have a clue then, and I know that now. So I went to the CBA and had some success, but still nothing came in my direction. I had no mentor in the NBA. My coach when I played with the Knicks, Red Holtzman, had retired and was out of the game. Although Dave DeBusschere, my former Knicks teammate, was a general manager, he had no control over my destiny as a coach. Jerry Krause was like the only person that really stayed in touch with me from the NBA world. And he had just gotten back in it. But that was my connection. Jerry had seen me play in college, and we had a relationship that spanned 20 years.”

  Jackson himself was known as something of a strange duck during his playing days with the New York Knicks. In Maverick, his 1975 autobiography written with Charlie Rosen for Playboy Press, Jackson recalled his exploration of 1960s counterculture, including candid accounts of drug use. The book was also an excellent basketball tome as well as a personal story of spiritual growth. It was not, however, the type of book commonly associated with a head coach or authority figure.

  “The only thing in that book that’s an embarrassment for me today,” Jackson said, “is that people have picked out one or two phrases and said, ‘This is who Phil Jackson is.’ Sportswriters in the past have seized on one experience with psychedelic drugs or some comments I’ve made about the type of lifestyle I had as a kid growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s. I’ve tried to make sure people don’t just grab a sentence or phrase to build a context for someone’s personality.”

  “I’ve never read the book,” Krause once said. “I didn’t need to. I knew about Phil’s character. Besides, I’d hired other colorful personalities before.”

  Yet perhaps no one quite so colorful as Jackson. Shortly after coming to the Bulls in 1985, Krause called Jackson to interview with new Bulls head coach Stan Albeck for the job of assistant coach.

  “I was coaching in Puerto Rico,” Jackson recalled, “and I flew up directly from San Juan. It was a quick trip. I had to drive into San
Juan and catch a morning flight. When you live in the subtropics, you get a lifestyle. I was wearing flipflops most of the time. I wore chino slacks, because of their social standards down there, and a polo shirt. I had an Ecuadorian straw hat. Those hats are really expensive. They’re not like a Panama, which costs 25 bucks. It’s a $100 hat. You could crush proof it. As a little flair item, I had a parrot feather that I’d picked up at a restaurant. I had messed around with a macaw in the restaurant and pulled a tail feather out and stuck it in my hat.

  “There was a certain image I presented. I had a beard, had had it for a number of years. I was a little bit of an individualist, as I still am. I have a certain carriage about myself that’s going to be unique. I just came in for the interview. I don’t know how it affected Stan Albeck. Stan was a good coach. He’d been around and had some success.

  “Stan and I had a very short interview. It wasn’t very personal, and I knew right away that Stan wasn’t looking to hire me, although Jerry Krause had locked us in a room and said, ‘I want you guys to sit down and talk X’s and O’s.’ Stan found a different topic to talk about.”

  “Stan came back to me after the interview,” Krause recalled, “and said, ‘I don’t want that guy under any circumstances.’ When we brought Phil in again to interview for the assistant’s job two years later, I told him what to wear. And to shave.”

  Krause fired Stan Albeck after a season, then hired Doug Collins and brought Jackson in as an assistant. In 1989, when he fired Collins, Krause promoted Jackson. “One of Jerry Krause’s greatest decisions that he gets no credit for was finding Phil Jackson in the CBA,” observed Reinsdorf.

  Krause was likewise criticized for drafting Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant in 1987, but the two developed into tremendous talents, another major factor in the Bulls’ growth into a championship team. Krause was particularly proud of the fact that he traded up picks in the draft to select Pippen that year.