Blood on the Horns

by Roland Lazenby

  You could argue that Krause had moved through a career of nebulous moments. Jackson said that in years past, Krause would approach him about making a pep talk to the team. “He’d say, ‘What if I go down to the bus and say to these guys, ‘We gotta get this one tomorrow.’ How do you think that’ll make them feel?’” Jackson said. “I’d say, ‘Jerry, I don’t know. I don’t think that will really work.’”

  Usually Krause would be good about checking with the coaching staff on player issues. But Jackson said that when Krause was at his worst he would charge right in and confront certain players. “The thing that happened with Pippen (the drawn out public infighting in 1994 and ‘95) was avoidable,” Jackson said. “The things that have happened in the past were avoidable. Somehow or other they got pushed to greater limits. But that’s part of who Jerry is. He wants to directly confront when he feels that there has been a problem. He wants to challenge and overrun people and be brusque. He’s very brusque and sets people on edge just by walking into the locker room sometimes. We’ve had to talk to him about his manner in the locker room. On the other hand, Jerry keeps his space very well. He doesn’t overrun us, the coaches. He allows a coach to do what he wants to do as far as strategy and how he wants to handle the players. Jerry has a very good attitude about protocol.

  “He’s just a very unusual guy.”

  In part, Jordan’s treatment of Krause had been a response to the outbreak of hostilities between the general manager and Pippen. Although Jordan had occasionally taunted Krause in the past he took a much more aggressive approach after he returned to the game in 1995.

  “He seemed to let a lot more things hang out, Michael did at that time,” Jackson said. “More honest with his feelings, more outspoken. He would speak about things that he hadn’t before. But there’s always been that thing. Jerry will tell you, ‘I’m the one person who told him he couldn’t play, and Michael’s gonna hold that against me for the rest of his life.’”

  “I express myself more vocally now than I would have 10 years ago,” Jordan agreed.

  “Michael’s now in a position where he can hammer him more,” observed another team employee. “In the past, Michael was at a level where he couldn’t quite do that. Now Michael’s the most powerful person in sports, and he can do whatever the hell he wants. He feels a lot easier showing how he really feels. He felt a lot of the same things in ‘91 and ‘92 and ‘93, but he realizes now that he can say them. I mean, you’re talking about the greatest individual, the greatest team player in the history of sports.”

  However, Levine, the longtime Chicago radio reporter, said he would be hard-pressed to think of any circumstances that would bring anybody to judge Jordan harshly. “To portray Michael as anything but a terrific guy for what he’s been through, I think is incorrect,” Levine said. “Personally, he’s done me favors. He’s done other media people favors over the years. I remember back in ‘89, ‘90, ‘91, he would come out to Children’s Hospital every Christmas, without any publicity. I would ask him to come out, and he would come out and tour the hospital, just walk through the whole hospital going from room to room and child to child. It was a very touching thing.

  “Would he do that now?” Levine asked. “I wouldn’t ask him now because he’s too big. But that’s the type of guy he is. He’s a giving person. There’s no question he’s also takes advantage of who he is. But who wouldn’t? I’ve seen other sides of him, but for a superstar whose time is demanded and begged for by everybody, he’s tremendous. He’s a tremendous person, because he knows that people don’t deal with him as a person but as an object. He’s very much like a very beautiful woman who can’t get by the fact that people focus only on her exterior. Because people are so taken by what she is on the outside and what she is physically, just the same as Michael has become the biggest superstar in sports since Muhammad Ali. He can’t go anywhere without people wanting something from him.

  “He’s gotten a pass from a lot of media people in the sense that if we’ve heard bad stories we haven’t always followed them because he’s been so good to us personally,” Levine said. “Is he a perfect person? No, he’s not perfect. But he’s been so giving of himself on and off the court, to charities and to people that if I heard a bad story about him, then I would go to him. And I have gone to him and told him what’s out there on numerous occasions just so he knows that it might get out.

  “Does Michael break the law? No, Michael doesn’t break the law. Does he hurt other people? No, he doesn’t other people. The only thing Michael ever does is drive 120 and gets stopped by policemen. When they see who he is, either he gives them an autograph or they let him go because they can say to their friends that night that they let Michael Jordan go.”

  Without question, Jordan was changed by his father’s death in 1993, evidenced in part by the way he was forced to change his dealings with the media. “Up until then, he was the most unaffected superstar, because he wouldn’t allow (the fame and fortune) to get to him,” Levine said. “He would still sit in the locker room before the game and stretch out with us and talk for a half hour or 40 minutes about everything but basketball. He would stretch out on the floor, and we would just sit for 45 minutes and talk about everything. We’d have fun. He’d ask questions. He’s a very inquisitive, a guy who wanted to learn about things. He was still learning about life and educating himself. But once the situation occurred with his father and the way the media portrayed that funeral, he never had the same feeling for media again. He distrusts most media, even people like myself who are peripherally friends with him. It just changed. He became hardened by it to a certain extent. He’s still very gracious with his time, but the fun kind of went out of it for him and for us. I think we lost a lot out of it, too. We had a friend-type of relationship with him. Now, all that exists is just the interview process. There’s no time for the friend part.”

  While Jordan may not always had the warmest regards for Krause or for a teammate who shirked his competitive responsibilities, the star displayed an uncommon drive to reach out in a special way to virtually every child or handicapped person he encountered. There were stars who when necessary forced themselves to do charity work for public relations effect, but with Jordan it was obviously a natural connection, wherever he went. “To me the test of what a person is all about is how they react around children and old people,” Levine said. “And when Michael sees a child, he always gives them a big smile and shakes their hand or gives ‘em a hug and takes a picture. That’s the essence of Michael Jordan, he’s still just this big kid.”

  Over the years, Jordan had made a lasting friend of Carmen Villafane, who was wheelchair bound. “They’ve been friends for years,” said Cindy Kamradt, the United Center’s guest services manager. “He buys her season tickets every year, and he never ever says anything about it. He has a number of charitable things he does on the side, away from the publicity, for which he never seeks publicity.”

  “We always wait for Michael to interview him when he gets out of his car at the United Center,” Levine said of the outpost manned by Chicago media many game nights. “We were waiting this past Christmas. And the first thing Michael did was go into his trunk and pull out this huge gift wrapped for Carmen. He gave her a kiss and a hug and said Merry Christmas. And she gave him a gift. Those types of things are seen because we’re peeking in on Michael’s life. Obviously we’re peeping Toms on some of his private life. That’s what Michael’s all about. He cares for her as a person. The human side is there. A lot of high profile people and stars who are out there all the time, they lose their humanity, and Michael has never lost it.”

  The difficult irony for Krause was that while Jordan had obscured, even challenged, his accomplishments as a general manager, the Bulls star had also made them possible. Not surprisingly, Krause had mixed feelings about Jordan’s abrupt retirement following the shooting death of his father James in 1993. Yes, Jordan’s presence
was an incredible force for the Bulls. But, as Pippen alleged, Krause also relished the opportunity to build another championship team without the superstar.

  “I think Jerry’s stuck on the fact that no matter what he does or has done, the fact that he didn’t draft Michael Jordan hangs over his head,” said a Bulls staff member. “He has brought every single person into this organization, from Tex to Phil to Scottie to Toni to Ron Harper. All of them ballsy moves and trades. But he’ll never get the credit he wants.”

  “Jerry and I have talked about it,” Krause told a reporter in 1995. “Hell, yeah, we want to win after Michael because there is a certain vindication in it and there is a certain personal thing in it. Yeah, I mean, I have an ego. I don’t think that it is huge, but it ain’t small. And I think I’m good at what I do, and for one time I want the world to say that I won, and it wasn’t because of Michael.”

  Reinsdorf said that he was visiting with Jordan in Las Vegas in 1997 when the star told him, “I have to reluctantly admit that Krause has done a good job.”

  “I said, ‘Why don’t you say that publicly and save him a lot of grief?’” Reinsdorf recalled. “Michael said, ‘I just can’t bring myself to do it.’”

  In the moments after the 1997 title, one team employee watched Jordan embrace Krause. “He grabbed him and he hugged him,” the employee said. “It wasn’t a quick embrace because it was the right thing to do at the moment. It was a hug, a heart-felt hug. And Michael hugged Krause’s wife Thelma. She was just smiling. It was almost like family.”

  Within weeks, though, the Bulls would be engulfed in another summer of confrontations and negotiations, and there would be no more inclination to hugs. It could be argued, in fact, that the hugs were gone forever.

  “Everything is not enough.”

  — Townes Van Zandt

  4: Summertime Blues

  It wasn’t so much the grind of the seasons that had worn down the relationships among Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls. Instead, most of their strife was acted out during the summers, in the heat of contract negotiations, when things were done and said that left all the major parties offended. They all may have been rich and famous, but that didn’t mean they were immune to getting their feelings hurt. Oftentimes, just the opposite applied. The bigger the ego, the deeper the bruise.

  That seemed especially true of the Bulls each offseason.

  “The summertime is when all that stuff erupts with Michael,” Steve Kerr observed. “We win the championship, and he goes to the podium and makes his plea for another crack at it. That infuriated management. Then it goes on all summer.”

  The situation hadn’t been helped by the fact that Jackson, Jordan and Rodman had all been running on one-year contracts since 1996, which meant that each summer required another round of negotiations, another session of charged battles. “It’s put an edge on everything, towards the end of the year for the last two years,” Jackson said in 1998.

  “The last two years it’s been exacerbated,” Krause agreed.

  Reinsdorf and Jordan had enjoyed over the years what appeared to be a warm relationship. As the 1990s unfolded and it became increasingly clear that the player salaries in pro basketball were headed to almost bizarre heights, Jordan was said to be understandably bothered by the fact that he was signed to a contract that paid him in the range of $4 million annually while a dozen or more lesser players in the league were being paid twice that. At the same time, Jordan was far too proud to ask for a renegotiation. Where other athletes had routinely pouted and fretted and demanded renegotiations, he wanted no part of that. His answer was to live up to the deal he had signed in the highest fashion. Yet when he abruptly retired in the fall of 1993, there were the inevitable insinuations that he did so in part because of his contract. In 1994, a reporter asked if he could be lured back for a $100 million deal. “If I played for the money,” he said testily, “it would be $300 million.”

  Actually, considering the billions his special performances had brought to the league coffers, the number wasn’t entirely out of reason. With Jordan away from the game and television ratings falling, some NBA owners had informally approached Reinsdorf about the possibility of enticing the star back to the NBA with group funding from the league. Such a notion was unprecedented, but then again Jordan’s impact on the game was also unprecedented. The idea of the league paying Jordan, though, was never pursued beyond informal discussions, Reinsdorf said.

  In the summer of 1993, just after the Bulls had won their third straight championship and before his abrupt retirement that fall, there had been speculation in the Chicago press that Jordan’s one-year playing contract could zoom to the $50 million range. That speculation all but disappeared with the murder of Jordan’s father and the star’s subsequent decision to leave basketball that October of 1993.

  The Bulls continued to pay Jordan despite his retirement, which, according to one of Reinsdorf’s associates, was a gesture of loyalty from Reinsdorf to Jordan. “I just wanted to give him a bonus, that’s all,” Reinsdorf said. “I never thought he was coming back. People doubted that he could play in the pros, but I thought he would have eventually made the White Sox as an extra outfielder.”

  In basketball, Reinsdorf and Jordan had been partners in the most lucrative sports/entertainment venture in history. The problem was, Jordan as a player was barred from having any real equity position in the relationship. As a result, Reinsdorf was management, and Jordan was labor. The labor costs were fixed, while the profit percentages were soaring for those with a piece of the action. Jordan, of course, was making his tens of millions off the court, using his overpowering image to hawk a range of commercial products. In a way, that position created a comfort for him. His outside income so dwarfed his player contract that he could say that he didn’t play the game for money and say it with a straight face.

  Still, his relatively meager player contract created an inequity with Jordan. And when he returned to the game in 1995, he returned under his old contract, which meant that the Bulls’ payroll itself remained well under $30 million and that the team could continue raking in tens of millions in profit. That, of course, was in addition to the tremendous growth in equity Jordan’s brilliant play had helped create for the team’s owners. Reinsdorf’s ownership group had purchased the club during Jordan’s rookie season for about $16 million, then watched its value grow to better than 20 times that over the ensuing decade.

  So there was easily the strong sense that Jordan was “owed.” And that wasn’t a feeling held just by Jordan and his representatives but by virtually anyone who had anything to do with the NBA.

  If the notion wasn’t entirely clear, Jordan emphasized it when his play and leadership drove the Bulls to their incredible 72-10 regular-season record over the 1995-96 season, culminated by a 15-3 run through the playoffs for the team’s fourth championship. With the close of the campaign, Jordan’s long-term contract finally expired. So then the real trouble started.

  Days after the championship celebration, David Falk, the star’s representative, and Reinsdorf began discussing his new contract. At first, the meetings were cordial. Reinsdorf recalled that he, Falk, Falk partner Curtis Polk and Jordan met in Falk’s suite at the Ritz Carlton in Chicago, where they smoked cigars and joked “like a bunch of kids.” Jordan kept ordering obscenely expensive bottles of wine and charging them to Falk, which had them all laughing. “We talked at great length how we had been together all these years, how we had struggled, how we had a great relationship. We all said we didn’t want a negotiation, but just to talk it through and come up with the right number,” Reinsdorf said.

  At the time, there was a league moratorium on discussing figures which wouldn’t be lifted for a few weeks. In the interim, they could talk but not about specific numbers. Jordan suggested that when discussions started in earnest, Reinsdorf should come up with a number. “I don’t want to do that,”
Reinsdorf told him. “That’s the ultimate negotiation.”

  In a private interview for this book, Jordan laid out his approach: “What I instructed my representative was, ‘Don’t go in and give a price. I’ve been with this team for a long time. Everyone knows what this market value may be, or could be. If he’s true to his word and honest in terms of our relationship, listen to what he says before we offer what our opinions may be.’ Falk’s instruction was to go in and listen, never to negotiate. Because it shouldn’t have come to a negotiation. We didn’t think of it as a negotiation. We felt it was an opportunity for the Bulls to give me what they felt my value had been to the organization.”

  Jordan, however, was also well aware of Reinsdorf’s reluctance to turn loose money. The star believed a drawn-out negotiation would only demean what he had accomplished for the Bulls. So Jordan and his advisors entertained offers from the New York Knickerbockers.

  Would Jordan have given up the Bulls for the Knicks?

  “Yes,” he said.

  In fact, the Knicks had supposedly put together a few million in base salary for Jordan to be augmented by a mega-million personal services contract with one of the Knicks’ affiliated companies. When he learned of the deal, Reinsdorf reportedly phoned the league’s front office to demand an opinion on the legality of the move. The Bulls chairman was supposedly threatening a lawsuit to block the Knicks, but reportedly a high-powered source at the NBA counseled Reinsdorf against the futility of filing suit against his popular star and the Knicks.