Blood on the Horns

by Roland Lazenby

  Despite his immense pride in his personnel moves, Krause seemed to have no great problem acknowledging his mistakes. For example, 1986 picks Brad Sellers out of Ohio State and Stacey King out of Oklahoma never panned out, and his trade for Dennis Hopson was a bust. Then there was the decision in 1996 not to sign first round pick Travis Knight, who became an immediate contributor for the Lakers.

  And even when players did work out, the general manager sometimes alienated them, as with Pippen. Although he was considered one of the five best players in the league, Pippen angered Krause and the team’s coaching staff when he refused to enter a 1994 playoff game against New York with the Bulls down a point and 1.8 seconds left. Jackson had called for the last shot to go to Kukoc, the Croatian import Krause had courted into coming to Chicago over the complaints of both Jordan and Pippen.

  Pippen, who had led the team to 55 wins and back into the playoffs despite Jordan’s abrupt retirement that season, was angered that he wasn’t given the privilege of the last shot, which he thought he had earned.

  The incident left Krause eager to trade his star forward in the aftermath, but it had been extremely difficult to find a deal that would bring a player of comparable value to the Bulls. Finally Krause had put together a deal with Seattle that would have brought power forward Shawn Kemp plus a draft pick that would possibly have given the Bulls Eddie Jones out of Temple. But at the last minute, Seattle’s owner backed out of the trade, and a series of news stories followed, revealing Krause’s plans. Pippen, who was already unhappy over his contract, was further enraged that the team planned to trade him. The incident touched off a running feud with Krause in the press that would simmer for years.

  In addition, Horace Grant, the team’s talented but mercurial free-agent power forward, had rebuffed Reinsdorf’s and Krause’s attempts to re-sign him. He departed for the Orlando Magic after a series of acrimonious press conferences, including one in which Reinsdorf called Grant a liar.

  The ensuing turmoil had left the fans eager to pump up the volume on their rejection of Krause.

  “Poor Jerry’s been kicked around from pillar to post by everybody, including me,” observed longtime Chicago sportswriter Bob Logan in 1995. “But he got what he wanted in life. He’s running the franchise. He’s got three championship rings. Yet I don’t think he’s ever spent a day where he’s completely satisfied. There’s always something else he wants, or something that doesn’t quite work out.”

  The relationship with Pippen certainly fell into that category. The star bristled at the idea that Krause “discovered” him. “How the hell is he gonna find me in the draft if I’m the fifth player picked?” Pippen asked. “If he ‘found’ me in the draft, I would have been picked in the second round, not the fifth player taken in the draft and not to the point that he had to work his way up to draft me from the eighth pick.

  “He’s such a down guy,” Pippen said. “I get drafted at fifth, then he wants to turn around and say, ‘Well, we have to pay you as the eighth pick, because we had the eighth pick. He pissed me off from the very first. He’s been a liar every since I’ve known him. But you know, when you’re young like that, you try to learn, to look, listen and learn, instead of being so vocal.”

  “That’s crazy,” Krause responded. “We traded up for him and paid him commensurate with the fifth spot.”

  The resentment Pippen and other players expressed about Krause was that in his boasting about deals he came across as a credit-taker, as if he was taking credit for their careers. “In a heartbeat” was how Jordan described Krause’s inclination to want credit for the Bulls’ accomplishments.

  Jordan was asked if he agreed that he and Krause would be linked in basketball history by their accomplishments together. “I disagree with that,” he said. “I know you’re looking at it in terms of the players who have been brought here, some of the trades. But those are not always what they seem. What we have to do—and when I say ‘we’ I mean the coaches and some of the players—we have to convince Jerry of certain things, to do those. It’s not always his intuition or his knowledge. Sometimes it’s someone else making the suggestion, but he’ll take the credit in the long run.”

  One team advisor said the players reminded him somewhat of children reacting to a destructive parent in a dysfunctional family. Sometimes children in a troubled family attempt to exclude the problem-causing parent from the family, so they cut off emotional attachment and “divorce” themselves from the offending parent.

  The players, the advisor explained, often looked at what Krause did, not what he said. For example, Krause may have said he didn’t want to break up the team, but his actions, his several attempts to trade Pippen, spoke louder to the players. Because the repeated trade attempts had deeply offended both Pippen and Jordan, their response was to essentially divorce the general manager from the family, in this case the team.

  “There’s the old saying that there’s three sides to everything,” Chip Schaefer said. “There’s the plaintiff and the defendant and the truth. Is Jerry the 100 percent architect of everything that happens with the Chicago Bulls? No, he’s got a staff, and he’s got help with his decisions. Phil coaches them, and the players ultimately have to play. There are stories of the Steve Kerrs, those guys who have called the Bulls themselves and said they’d like to come to training camp to try out. But does he deserve credit for many, many things? Certainly. I think what he is at heart, and what he always claims he is, which is really accurate, is that he’s a scout. He has the heart of a scout and the mind of a scout. To watch basketball and basketball tapes all day long, which would drive me crazy, he can do. He can be in a restaurant at 2 o’clock in the morning, after a full day of basketball, having a meal and live like that. That’s his lifestyle. It’s not mine, because I’d rather be with my family. But I think when things require tact and diplomacy and things like that, oftentimes that’s where he struggles. He’s not really what I would call a people person in a lot of ways.”

  Krause also took pride in finding the right administrative people to work for him and often referred to them as “my puppies.” It was obviously a term of affection for Krause, who had several longterm, loyal employees working for him, but it also indicated perhaps a lack of perspective.

  “The modus operandi of both Jerry Reinsdorf and Jerry Krause is that they like to find and hire people, kind of discover people and give them a chance,” Schaefer said. “I think you can see that with the White Sox. They could have hired Tommy Lasorda, but they went for Jerry Manuel, who nobody had ever heard of before, to be the team’s manager.”

  Their approach bred loyalty, or should have.

  “The Jerrys have this attitude that you should be loyal to us forever,” Schaefer said. “It’s not just enough to do your job and do it well. You’ve seen in print where Reinsdorf has said Jerry ‘found’ Phil in the CBA. Phil’s attitude is that, ‘Yeah, you may have found me, but then I’ve done my job, too.’ Krause’s attitude about Scottie is, ‘I plucked you out of Hamburg, Arkansas, and this is how you treat me!’ Well, the fact is that if he didn’t pluck him, somebody else would have plucked him.”

  It was Krause’s great misfortune to have a run-in with Jordan in his first few months on the job. One of Krause’s first personnel moves was releasing Rod Higgins, Jordan’s best friend on the team.

  “We traded Rod Higgins,” Krause said, citing the litany of moves that had angered Jordan over the years. “But we brought him back twice. Michael was upset about that. Trading Oakley. Getting Cartwright. He didn’t want Bill around. I got my job to do. He’s got his job to do. Walter Davis was another one. He begged me to take Walter Davis. I wouldn’t do it.”

  The “injury debate” was by far the worst of the issues, even though Reinsdorf said that years later Jordan admitted privately that he had acted foolishly. The Bulls opened the 1985-86 season, Jordan’s second year, with three straight wins, but
in the third game at Golden State Jordan suffered a broken navicular tarsal bone in his left foot, an injury that had altered or ended the careers of several NBA players. He would miss the next 64 games while the team sank in misery.

  But then in March, with the Bulls’ record at 22-43, Jordan informed the team that his injury had healed and that he wanted to resume playing. Immediately Krause, Reinsdorf and the team’s doctors questioned that decision.

  “I was scared to death,” Krause has said of the situation. “I didn’t want to go down in history as the guy who put Michael Jordan back in too soon.”

  “It was like a soap opera,” Reinsdorf recalled. “We were too honest with Michael. We let him hear the report from the three doctors we consulted with over when he could come back. All three said the break had not healed enough. They said if he did play there was about a 10 to 15 percent chance of ending his career. Michael was such a competitor. He just wanted to play. I thought he was entitled to hear what the doctors had to say. I never thought he’d risk his entire career. It just didn’t make any sense to me. But Michael figured that the 10 to 15 percent risk meant the odds were 85 to 90 percent that he wouldn’t get hurt. To me, it didn’t fit any risk/reward ratio. Here the reward was to come back and play on a team that had already had a bad year. Why risk your whole career for that reward?

  “But Michael insisted that he knew his own body better than I did. So we reached a compromise, that he would play gradually, just seven minutes a half at first.”

  “The thing that got Michael and me off on the wrong foot,” Krause said, “was that he thought I said to him, ‘You’re our property, and you’ll do what we want you to do.’ I don’t remember ever saying it that way. He just misinterpreted me. I was trying to keep him from playing because he had a bad foot and the doctors were saying, ‘No, no, no.’ And Reinsdorf was telling him about risk.

  “The doctors agreed there as an 80-20, 90-10 chance of him not being injured again if he played that year,” Krause said. “Jerry said to Michael, ‘Let’s say it’s 90-10. Do you know what risk-reward is?’ Michael said, ‘What do you mean?’ Jerry said, ‘Let’s take a bottle with 10 pills in it. Nine of them will cure your headache, but one of them will kill you. Would you take one of the pills? Now, is that risk worth the reward?’ And Michael still wanted to play. He was a kid who wanted to play. And I couldn’t blame him. But that’s where it all started because we said ‘We’re gonna hold you back.’”

  Jordan was infuriated by what he saw as a stall by Bulls management. “Here you are dealing with big businessmen who make millions, and my millions are like pennies to them,” he told reporters. “All I wanted to do was play the game that I’ve played for a long, long time. But they didn’t look at it that way. They looked at it as protecting their investment, to keep their millions and millions coming in. That’s when I really felt used. That’s the only time I really felt used as a professional athlete. I felt like a piece of property.”

  “It’s against the law to own another person as property, right?” Chip Schaefer said. “I mean that was abolished. I think that Michael Jordan is a proud man, and he’s a proud African-American man. Those comments don’t generally sit well with proud African-American men, to be referred to in that way. It was particularly politically incorrect to make reference to that. Michael, he doesn’t forget. Look at his whole thing with Sports Illustrated. They wrote a cover story on his baseball experience that he didn’t like one bit. Now he doesn’t read the magazine, he doesn’t talk to them, he doesn’t even recognize them anymore. He’s like part elephant. He doesn’t forget. He’s strong of mind and a little bit of a martyr when he wants to be. He’s like that. You don’t mess with him.”

  Jordan played that spring and went on to set his spectacular 63-point playoff scoring record against the Celtics in the first round of the playoffs, which the Bulls lost in a sweep. “Michael had a situation with Jerry that I knew nothing about,” Jackson said. “I wasn’t there. But it was the reason Stan Albeck was fired. It was the reason why some things happened early in his career. They told Michael he could not play. And at that time he lost respect for Jerry. He told him, ‘You don’t know my body.’ As a consequence, Michael has always kept the fact that he will play in any game he wants to play in his own contract. And he will train any way he wants to train in his own contract. He wants control of himself. He doesn’t want to lose that control in any way to this organization, basically because of that situation.”

  And that was the essence of the conflict between Jordan and Krause. “It’s all control,” Jackson said of Krause’s attempts to run the organization. The real net result of the incident was that it hardened Jordan’s disdain for Krause, leading the star guard to berate publicly many of the general manager’s personnel moves over the years. “Jerry’s gotta be his own man when it comes to picking talent,” Winter pointed out. “He certainly wants everybody’s input. Finally the decision has to be made, and oftentimes the decision he makes is not one that I might like or what Phil might like or what Michael might like. But we certainly are mature enough—we should be—to accept the final decision and then we’re all together on the thing.”

  Instead of seeking Jordan’s opinion on trades and other moves during his first years with the Bulls, Krause sought the opinions of Robert Parish in Boston or Brad Davis in Dallas, players he had known for years. “Michael Jordan was a very young player when he came here,” Krause recalled. “The first probably four or five years of my time here, there were two players that I talked a lot to about players, One of them was Robert Parish. The other was Brad Davis. Those relationships had built up over years.

  “I talked to players, but I didn’t talk to Michael because he wasn’t old enough to understand at that point. And they could tell me things because they had played against guys. And they could do it without hurting their own organizations. Neither one of them could hurt their own organizations.”

  With Jordan in obvious conflict with the GM, it wasn’t long before Bulls players began calling Krause “Crumbs” behind his back, implying that Krause often left evidence of a healthy appetite on his clothes. Before long, the Chicago media were reporting that it was Jordan who had made up the nickname. Krause, however, determined it was another player, and soon that player was no longer a Chicago Bull.

  The player who supposedly made up the name was Charles Oakley. “There are countless incidents related to food involving Jerry,” Chip Schaefer said. “He loves Charles Oakley, or so he says.”

  “Krause actually got the name Crumbs years ago when he was a baseball scout,” Reinsdorf said. “Other scouts gave him the name. Then Michael found out about it.”

  “There’s no question that he’s got some baggage,” Schaefer said of the general manager. “He just aches to be recognized. He’s an interesting guy because there are times you feel genuine … pity’s an awful strong word, but you feel that. Then there are other times that he’ll do things, and you won’t feel that way. You’ll feel that all the torment he gets is self-imposed. ‘You didn’t have to do that to yourself.’ Then other times you do feel compassion for the guy and wish things wouldn’t be the way they are.”

  By all accounts, Krause was a man of intense loyalty. Conversely, he could be unforgiving when he felt that someone had violated his trust and loyalty. The case of veteran assistant coach Johnny Bach was a classic example. “In essence, Johnny fired himself,” Krause said of Bach’s dismissal from the staff after the 1994 playoffs. “I told him many times that assistant coaches shouldn’t be holding press conferences. Assistant coaches should have lower profiles. We cautioned him about that time and again, yet he kept doing it.”

  “It was Jerry Krause’s relationship with Johnny Bach that created a very uncomfortable situation,” Jackson said. “It made this have to happen eventually. It had gone all wrong. It was bad for the staff to have this kind of thing because we had to work together.
<
br />   “Jerry basically blamed Johnny Bach for a lot of the things in The Jordan Rules. And there’s no doubt that Johnny did provide that information. Jerry felt that Johnny talked too much. And Johnny, in retrospect, felt that animosity that Jerry gave to back to him, the lack of respect, so Johnny refused to pay allegiance to Jerry just because he was the boss.”

  Krause said that in recent years he learned that Jackson actually provided far more information for the book than Bach. “Phil and the players had much more of a role than Johnny Bach,” author Sam Smith acknowledged.

  “Phil lied to me,” Krause said. “Phil actually got Johnny Bach fired.”

  “It was Phil’s idea to fire Bach,” Reinsdorf agreed. “Phil told me that the bad relationship between Krause and Bach had made things impossible. It was Phil’s idea. Nobody told him to do it.”

  “It had gone on for too long a period of time,” Jackson said. “I could have kept them apart, at bay from one another, I suppose for a while longer. But I didn’t like the fact that it wasn’t good teamwork. That was my staff and my area. I agreed to do it. I felt it was a good opportunity because Johnny had an opportunity to get another job in the league quickly. It worked out fine for Johnny, although I would just as soon have not put him through the disappointment, or have to go through the situation myself.”

  Krause said he had an almost tearful reunion with Bach in 1998 after learning the circumstances. Regardless, the situation had made a clear impression on Bulls staff members in 1994. Don’t cross Krause. And even if you haven’t, make double sure not to give the impression that you have.

  The Chicago media had long portrayed Krause as a non-athlete seeking to bond with the athletes he employed, yet always facing painful rejection. In 1991, when the Bulls finally defeated the Detroit Piston Bad Boys in the playoffs after years of trying and failing, Krause was deliriously happy as he got on the team plane after the game. “He comes in the front of the plane and he’s celebrating,” Jackson recalled. “He’s dancing, and the guys are going, ‘Go, Jerry! Go, Jerry, go!’ He’s dancing or whatever he’s doing, and when he stops, they all collapse in hilarity, this laughter, and you couldn’t tell whether it was with him or at him. It was one of those nebulous moments. It was wild.”