Jordan’s agent, David Falk, wanted a substantial contract to reflect Jordan’s contribution to the Bulls and the game. “As I know it, no numbers were ever talked about until I was into the game,” Jordan revealed. “No one wanted to put the numbers out on the table. Everyone was jockeying to see who was gonna put the first number out, which we were not gonna do. We had a number in our heads, but we really felt like it was the Bulls’ place to tell us what our net worth was. And to do it from an honest state, not influenced by David, not influenced by me. Just what they felt I’d meant to the organization.”
Finally exasperated at Reinsdorf’s reluctance to make an offer, Jordan was pulled into a conference phone call with his agent and Reinsdorf. At the time, he was playing golf. But he told Reinsdorf that if the team wanted to re-sign him it would be a one-year deal for better than $30 million. And that Reinsdorf had one hour to agree.
“At the time they were negotiating I was in Tahoe for a celebrity golf tournament,” Jordan explained. “And we had some conversations with New York (the Knickerbockers). And we were gonna meet with them right after we met with Reinsdorf, and I think that was within an hour’s time. David wanted the Bulls to make their offer and discuss it before we go down and have a conversation with New York. But (Reinsdorf) knew he had a window in terms of the conversation with New York.”
“That’s cold,” Krause would later say of the timing. “Michael’s the one who made the statement.” The team chairman was wounded. According to associates, he had assumed he had a personal relationship with Jordan. After all, hadn’t he extended the opportunity to Michael to begin a pro baseball career with the White Sox? Hadn’t he always made the effort to make clear his respect for his star player? Associates later said that Reinsdorf began to think Jordan had faked their friendship to take advantage of him, something Reinsdorf denied.
Reinsdorf said Jordan’s memory was faulty on the negotiation, which came in a conference call with Falk in Washington and Jordan on the golf course in Lake Tahoe. “I proposed a two-year deal at $45 million. It had some structuring and some service clauses in it,” the team chairman said. “They countered at two years for $55 million, 30 for the first year and 25 for the second. Michael was on the phone and said, ‘You guys ought to be able to work it out. I’m getting off.’ Falk and I had several conversations that evening and he wouldn’t move from his proposal. I thought the $30 million was ridiculous, and I didn’t want to commit to two years.”
It was then, Reinsdorf said, that Falk mentioned that he was set to begin talks with Dave Checketts of the Knicks and that Jordan might wind up there. “I thought, ‘I can’t believe Michael would play in New York. I can gut this out,’” Reinsdorf recalled. Falk then suggested that if Reinsdorf didn’t like the two-year deal, they could go one year for $30 million. “I didn’t think it had to be done that day,” the chairman said in explaining his displeasure over the threat to go to the Knicks. “It annoyed me.”
But he realized he had no choice. He had to accept the terms.
“I was not happy with the $30 million deal,” Reinsdorf said. “The reason I went along with it was that Falk had convinced me we needed to end the negotiations on good terms. I thought I had made a fair offer, $45 million for two years. I thought they were pushing it.”
Jordan, though, could have asked for far more and enjoyed the support of public opinion that he deserved every penny. But in agreeing to the deal, Reinsdorf supposedly made a comment to Jordan that would further damage their relationship. According to Jordan, Reinsdorf said he would live to regret giving Jordan the $30 million.
“Michael is bitter at Jerry,” explained one Bulls employee, “because when Jerry agreed to pay him the $30 million, Jerry told Michael that he would regret it. Michael stood in the training room one day the next fall and told all his teammates, ‘You know what really pissed me off? Jerry said, ‘You know what Michael? I’m gonna live to regret this.’
“Michael said, ‘What the fuck? You could say, You deserve this. You’re the greatest player ever, you’re an asset to the city of Chicago and the organization. And I’m happy to pay you $30 million. You could say that, but even if you don’t feel that way and you’re going to regret it, why are you telling me that?’ Luc was standing there and said, ‘Really? Jerry told you he was going to regret it?’ Michael said, ‘He told me that. I couldn’t believe my owner told me that.’”
“That creates tremendous bitterness,” the team employee said.
“I said I ‘might’ live to regret it,” Reinsdorf later admitted. “If I said anything I said I hope I don’t live to regret this.”
Jordan recalled: “Actually, he said, ‘Somewhere down the road, I know I’m gonna regret this.’ It demeaned what was happening. It took away from the meaning of things. The gratitude seemed less because of that statement. I felt it was inappropriate to say that.”
The team chairman had reportedly made a similar comment to John Paxson a few seasons earlier. Paxson, who had spent several seasons working under a contract that paid him relatively little, had finally earned a substantial pay raise. Reinsdorf agreed to an increased contract but upon signing the deal told the hard-working Paxson, “I can’t believe I’m paying you this kind of money.”
Although Paxson, now a broadcaster with the team, declined comment, sources with the team confirmed that he was angered and insulted. Both Jordan’s and Paxson’s negotiations were typical of a management mentality where Reinsdorf and Krause wanted to “win” every contract negotiation with every player. That desire to get the best of the players in contract negotiations erased any good feelings between players and management, a former player said. And it usually resulted in an ill mood from Krause or Reinsdorf whenever they “lost,” the player said.
“Aren’t you supposed to try to win contracts?” Reinsdorf asked. The chairman said his comment to Paxson was misconstrued. The team could have signed Paxson for about $800,000 but waited until after he had turned in an excellent playoff performance, which meant they had to pay him $1.2 million. Reinsdorf said he was referring to the money he had lost by hesitating. He noted that not taking Jordan’s offer for $55 million over two years was another boner. “That was a big mistake. That cost me 8 million bucks,” he said, referring to the fact that he signed Jordan to another one-year deal in 1997 for $33 million.
“They really just are not very good people-people,” Chip Schaefer said of the two Jerrys. “Even Reinsdorf. I’ve heard him fall short there. We have our season-ending dinner and banquets and things like that. And he’ll get up and talk. A favorite target for him to poke fun at is Irwin Mandel, our VP of business affairs. Irwin is a wonderful guy, a great family guy. We all love him. Reinsdorf will poke fun at him about something. It will be this inappropriate, really mean-spirited sort of thing. Jerry Krause wants to be that way, too. It’s like they don’t have a very good sense of humor. They’ll try to poke fun at somebody or use a joke, and they’ll kind of lay bombs, like they don’t know what to do. They’ll just make the guy feel like shit. If you actually think that about John Paxson, don’t say it. I think Jerry Reinsdorf probably meant it tongue in cheek, but how is this supposedly savvy business guy capable of saying something so inappropriate or so insensitive to a guy who prides himself on being a great athlete doing the best he can for you? How could you say something like that? It’s not a funny joke.”
“He’s loyal, he’s honest,” Phil Jackson said of Reinsdorf. “He’s truthful. His word means something. But there’s something about going in and trying to get the best every time. Winning the deal. When it comes to money, to win the deal.
“He has actually said those things, according to people I’ve been close to,” Jackson said of Reinsdorf’s comments, “and those things really hurt. Because most everybody really likes Jerry Reinsdorf.
“But,” Jackson added with a laugh, “Jerry is Jerry. Jerry is … Jerry doesn’t spend mone
y freely, even with himself. He wants value for money. Who doesn’t? The salaries that have happened in the past 10 years have been real difficult for owners to swallow. Large money. It’s an amazing amount of money. I understand it. I’m not spending that money, but if I had to spend that money … Sometimes you’re seeing a lot of money coming in, and then the ones going out are even bigger. You say, ‘I wonder if the stuff coming in is going to match what’s going out during this period of time.’
“It’s a step of faith all the time for them to do it,” Jackson said of Reinsdorf and Krause handing out large contracts. “But every time they’ve taken that step, there’s been a reward for them. They’ve gotten more money to come in. And so it’s kind of like this faith proposition. The more you seed, the more you’re gonna reap.”
In the final analysis, it comes down to faith in the NBA itself, Jackson said, “and faith in the people in this organization.”
The conflict between Jackson and Krause was murkier. Reinsdorf pointed out that the two men actually had very few differences in regard to basketball philosophy. Their disagreements were more personal in nature, the team chairman said.
“It’s the methods, not the philosophy,” Jackson agreed. “It’s how things are done.
“Jerry and I lost our cooperative nature a couple of years ago, and it was just through the hardship of negotiations,” Jackson said. “I just felt that the negotiating wasn’t done in a good manner. But negotiations can be difficult. Coaches and general managers, when they get caught up in it, sometimes get on the other sides of the fence from each other. That happened to us a little bit, and it’s been tough to mend the bridge.”
In February of 1996, word circulated through the organization that contract talks between Jackson and Krause had turned sour. Some staff members worried that Jackson would have to leave the organization. Krause and Reinsdorf were so close that Jackson would obviously lose a power struggle, one long-time Bulls employee observed.
“Two years ago, we had a couple of negotiating things that weren’t good,” Jackson recalled. “And Jerry (Krause) would talk to my agent and then call me up and say, ‘Phil, there’s no way we can do this.’”
The contract talks, sometimes emotional and acrimonious, dragged on into the playoffs, right in the midst of the NBA Finals, the league championship series between Chicago and the Seattle Super Sonics. “There was a situation in Seattle that was unfortunate,” Jackson recalled. “There was all this stuff going on about coming back. I was caught in the middle of this thing. Michael was in the last year of his contract at $4.5 million or whatever he was making. We had a couple of other guys in that situation. We had a 72-10 season that year. And we were in the Finals, and there was a lot of press going on about it, and there was some bad tension about the division of the labor here.”
Jackson was conducting a team practice at Key Arena in Seattle between games of the championship series, and Krause and some of his assistants had decided to come to practice and conduct a work session in the arena. During the Finals, each practice session was followed by a 30-minute session of media interviews during which reporters were allowed onto the court to question players and coaches.
About 12:30 that day, the NBA public relations staff people notified Jackson that his team’s media session was over. The NBA liked to closely control the scheduling on these events, because the league didn’t like to leave one team waiting for the other to leave the floor, the coach pointed out.
Upon being notified the Bulls’ interview time was up, Jackson used his trademark shrill, fingers-in-the-mouth whistle to get his players’ attention and announce, “OK, everybody on the bus.”
“The bus was right off the court,” Jackson recalled. “So we wait five minutes, and Jerry doesn’t show. And I drive out. The team bus leaves, and Jerry was irate at this situation. He didn’t call me, but he called my trainer and everyone else. Well, one of the things is, I always call the shots on that. I’m the guy that runs the bus and the plane and that kind of stuff. It’s the team. I left him behind in that situation. Now, whether he got caught with the press or what else…”
“It was the day after Game 4,” trainer Chip Schaefer recalled. “By all intents and purposes I think everyone felt that they should have been on a plane heading back to Chicago trophy in hand and hung over from a night of partying. But we weren’t. There we were back at the Key Arena practicing to prepare for Game 5, and the series was not over yet. So people were in a little bit of a terse mood that day. I was actually back in the training room working on a couple of guys as practice wound down. They had their mandatory media session after that. I was the last or one of the last persons on the bus that day because I had been busy packing up my medical case.
“I sit right behind the driver when Jerry’s not there,” Schaefer explained. “When Jerry’s there, he sits behind the driver, and Phil sits in the first seat across the aisle. I got on that day, and Phil told the driver to go ahead and leave. I knew Jerry had come over on the bus, but for all I knew he had arranged to do an interview or was going to have lunch with someone. I had no idea what he was doing. I remember turning behind me to Clarence Gaines and Jim Stack, Jerry’s two assistants, and I asked them if they knew anything about him having a ride. They just shrugged their shoulders, totally noncommittal about it, and I remember turning back to those two guys and saying, ‘If he doesn’t have a ride back, I know who’s gonna get blamed for this,’ knowing full well that it would be me.
“The bus goes back to the hotel,” the trainer recalled, “and I’m in my room working on Longley and Kukoc later, and my phone rings. I pick it up, and Jerry just launches into me, just launches into me. It was an expletive-laden tirade. He was on the same floor of the hotel as me, and I don’t like being spoken to like that, especially on the telephone. So I hung up the phone and walked right down to his room and knocked on the door. He was still having a fit, and I looked at him and said, ‘If you’re gonna yell at me, yell to my face. Don’t yell at me over the telephone. I don’t like that.’ He couldn’t look at me. He just looked at the floor and said, ‘I don’t have time for this,’ and kept yelling about how it wasn’t right the bus left him. I said, ‘I agree it wasn’t right, Jerry. I agree.’
“He wanted to apologize the next day,” Schaefer said of Krause. “He got on the bus the next morning muttering something about ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to shoot the messenger.’ He had called several people when he got back to the hotel to vent his frustration, and the first schmuck to pick up the phone was Chip Schaefer, so I took the brunt of it. I don’t think he meant anything for me directly. He was furious at the situation. I have taken the brunt like that over the years sometimes when he gets frustrated. I have a temper I suppose if you push me hard enough, but I can work with people. We all have our point, though. I don’t like being yelled at. I don’t like being treated like a child or like a peon.
“That moment in Seattle in 1996 was certainly an event in my relationship with Jerry,” said Schaefer, who was scheduled to leave the team after the 1998 season. “That event affected our relationship. It’s like the old thing about forgiving and forgetting. People who work close with him, like Jim and Karen Stack (Krause’s assistants), they’re able to say, ‘Oh, that’s just him,’ and he can behave in a certain way. And they can brush it off. But everything changes when it happens to you. I think people are accountable for their actions. I don’t think you can behave in a certain way and have everyone else say, ‘Oh, that’s just the way he is,’ and tolerate it. Why should I tolerate it?”
“I didn’t appreciate what he did,” Krause said of Jackson. “He never sent anybody for me. And I was standing there talking to somebody. You know what? That’s all passed. That doesn’t affect me. I hadn’t even thought of that, OK? We’re just at the point, where I think it’s like divorce. Some people wake up in the morning and their children are gone. They got nothing in common. They should
get divorced. We’re probably at that stage.”
The general manager’s riding on the bus was already an issue that Jackson had raised. The coach’s decision to leave his boss behind rather than keep the players waiting would quickly become a factor in both their negotiations and their relationship.
“With the negotiations that were going on at the time, that was kind of an overload situation for him,” Jackson said of Krause. “And at that point, when we came back to Chicago and we won, I saw Mr. Reinsdorf heap all the praise on Jerry in the final announcement.
“They started doing a spin on the fans being so great in Chicago. The reality is that Michael had come back and proven a tremendous point. He had retired and spent a year and a half away from it. Then he’d come back and had a failure of a return in 17 games. The ‘95 season was not successfully finished. We had lost to Orlando, which was one of the most difficult spots for Michael to be in.
“Then for our team to win the championship on a 72-10 year was just an absolute pie a la mode,” Jackson said. “I don’t care where the credit should have gone for whomever. But it was just an obvious slap in the face of the team. It was just like a pure snub.”
Angered, Jackson said he considered leaving the Bulls. “The players all came to me,” he recalled, “and said, ‘Don’t leave us. Don’t go. Find a way to come back. Because we’re all here. Scottie’s here. Michael’s gonna come back.’”
Reinsdorf would later say that Jackson turned down a five-year contract offer from the team. Jackson said if such an offer was made, it was made in passing, not as a written offer. Jackson recalled that “Mr. Reinsdorf said, ‘Tell me if I’m right or wrong. From what I understand, you want to coach this team if we provide the personnel that would make it a championship team, Scottie and Michael and so forth. Because if that’s the case, we’d like to offer you a five-year contract. And you’d go ahead and coach here and help us rebuild.’ And I said, ‘I need a break. That’s really nice, but I need a break.’
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