Blood on the Horns

by Roland Lazenby

  “You could tell,” Jackson said. “All you had to do was see the videotape of when I signed this year. It was pretty obvious that Jerry mismanaged that press release and kind of let his own feelings out.”

  “We should have just let the press release go, but Jerry met with the press,” Reinsdorf said. “He said he wanted to explain it, but it came across that he was happy about it being Phil’s last year. And he was happy about it, because he and Phil weren’t getting along. Then we start reading things throughout the year about how we’re pushing Phil out.”

  “I certainly didn’t mean to say it with glee,” Krause said. “Sometimes I don’t do it right.”

  “We have an investment in blood. Think of it as spiritual currency.”

  —The Devil’s Advocate

  5: Open Season

  Jerry Reinsdorf is a reserved man given to grand statements. One of his statements is the new Comiskey Park where his White Sox play. Another is the United Center. Easily the most emotional statement of Reinsdorf’s career in business and sports was the Berto Center, the Bulls’ fancy practice facility in suburban Deerfield named for Sheri Berto, Reinsdorf’s longtime personal assistant and friend who died in 1991 at age 40. The Bulls finished out the 1991-92 season wearing a patch on their uniforms in her honor.

  For the old Boston Celtics, the place that summed up their mystique was Boston Garden, which was something of a basketball temple, with the ball echoing off the chipped and aged parquet floor and the 16 championship banners hanging in the rafters.

  Since Chicago Stadium was razed, the place that came closest to that type of expression for the Bulls was not the United Center but the Berto Center. The real fun of coaching the Bulls, said Tex Winter, was practice “where we get to work with the greatest players in the world.”

  Indeed, Michael Jordan was the greatest practice player in the history of the game, which in turn had made the Bulls the greatest practice team. The setting for these exercises in greatness was the Berto Center. “This is our domain, this is our sanctuary,” Winter said. “I think that this facility has been a real factor in our having the kind of team we have.”

  “It’s easily the greatest practice facility I’ve ever been in,” said Jud Buechler, pointing out that after the Bulls built the Berto Center other NBA teams began following suit, mainly because pro basketball clubs have become like college teams in the sense that they must recruit free agents. The best players covet the best training facilities. “I remember the first day I walked in that building coming from Golden State four years ago,” Buechler recalled. “It gave me a feeling like, ‘Wow!’ I remember thinking, ‘I got to do whatever it takes to make it here because this is as good as it gets.’”

  Winter would never reveal it himself, but it was he who designed the practice gym, including the fact that the playing floor was placed over a rubber surface to provide extra protection against foot and leg injuries. “I told him I didn’t care what kind of money he spent, I wanted the best practice facility in the world,” Krause recalled of his instructions to Winter. Indeed, the exact cost of the facility, estimated to be between $5 and $7 million, could not be determined by the team because so much was added as the construction went along, Krause said.

  In addition to Winter’s work on the gym and floor, strength and conditioning consultant Al Vermeil designed the weight room, the coaches put together their ideas for their offices, and Karen Stack, Krause’s longtime assistant and a star at Northwestern during her playing days, put many other touches on the building.

  The Berto Center offered every imaginable aid or device for training and competition, from a state-of-the-art weight room to an indoor track, even a lap pool for rehabbing injuries. “It’s an ideal facility for a basketball player to get a workout,” said Bulls rookie Rusty LaRue, who spent many hours alone in the building working on defensive slide drills and other facets of his game. “To have the opportunity to have the weights, the medical equipment and the pool and the sauna and all that right there as well as the court, it’s really ideal. You got it all in one place. You got your track there to do your running, whatever you want to do.”

  Yet the most significant of these enhancements was the atmosphere itself, a result of Karen Stack’s influence. On the first level, the main hallway into the gym featured a giant mural photograph of fans faces during the 1993 league championship series in old Chicago Stadium. One fan held up a sign that read, “We Will Defend What Is Ours.” Each day as they came and went, the players could feel the expectation in those faces. It was a subtle yet powerful reminder of the tremendous loyalty the Bulls enjoyed from their supporters, a loyalty they earned each day on the practice floor.

  “We get along well,” Steve Kerr, a gym rat who had spent many hours alone in the Berto Center grooming his free throw technique, said of the building. “I love the Berto Center. I’ve been on four different teams. In Phoenix, I practiced in a Jewish community center. In Orlando, I practiced in a public recreation center. And in Cleveland, I practiced in a fifth floor gym in the Richfield Coliseum that had asbestos on the walls, so believe me, I appreciate this.”

  In his comings and goings, Kerr often paused to study the mural of the fans. “I can tell you all those faces,” he said. “I love that picture. It just captures the atmosphere of the old Stadium and the championship game. You got all the signs, people holding up NBC signs. I love that picture.”

  Inside the gym, toward the northeast corner of the building was a glass case, where the company hardware, the five NBA championship trophies, glistened under spotlights. With a flip of a switch, those trophies were put on display for the players as they practiced.

  “You get character from those trophies and banners,” said Bulls center Joe Kleine, who spent much of his career with the Celtics, “because you know that those things aren’t just decoration. Those things were earned.”

  “It just has a championship feel,” Buechler said, “because they got up the pictures of the guys who won championships, guys like Pax and Bill Cartwright. And the trophies. It’s a place where you want to go. You want to go there and work.”

  Despite the ethic it inspired in the players, the building still served as something of a thorn in the Bulls’ relationships. “There are events that happen in the course of life that are like pebbles in a pond, that sort of ripple off of it,” trainer Chip Schaefer said. “As wonderful a facility as the Berto Center is, I think a lot of it started with the building of the Berto Center in 1992, when people were all forced to really be around each other a lot more. Prior to that, when we practiced at the multiplex, there were people who worked downtown, which meant there wasn’t as much contact. I don’t think Phil and Jerry saw each other as much. Once the Berto Center was built, we all had to be together every day, and I think that may have well been the start of it.”

  Before that, Krause and his staff were housed downtown on Michigan Avenue, 35 miles from Deerfield, where the team practiced and worked out.

  “There was no one activating event,” Schaefer said. “I think it was a series of events. If you have personalities that don’t exactly mesh, then familiarity breeds contempt. If you don’t care for somebody, but you’re around them twice as much or three times as much as before, then you notice everything.

  “The building was a wonderful thing to have for the players and stuff,” Schaefer explained, “but at the same time, once you build that facility, you have people who are essentially 9 to 5 people with regular hours working with people who aren’t 9 to 5, people who may have gotten in at 3 o’clock in the morning the night before who then come in at 8:30 or 9 and work till one or two. Then you want to go home and catch up on your sleep for a half hour or maybe see your family for a little bit. You’ll walk out the door, and the people who are there from nine to five kind of feel like, ‘He’s leaving at 2 o’clock.’ It creates and awkward situation.”

  Onc
e asked what was the greatest misperception of a pro basketball team, Schaefer was ready with an answer: “The time. I get amused when I hear a radio update for read something in the paper about the fact that we don’t play until Friday, and the report will say, ‘The Bulls are off till Friday,’ like we’re all sitting around doing nothing or I could jet off and play golf for three days at Hilton Head. We’re working all day, almost every day, and it’s a grind.”

  And so several things factored into the Bulls’ problems, the personality conflicts, the misperception about time, the lack of communication. As the trainer explained, the Bulls became something of a “house divided,” and division fell along the lines of Krause’s people, who came to be known by the code word “the organization,” meaning the scouts and various administrative people, and “the team.”

  “The ‘team’ is the group of people you see on the bench during a game,” Schaefer said. “But I never wanted it to be that. It was kind of a shame. I think people are going to look back years from now and say, ‘What a shame. What a shame that we all couldn’t kind of rise above it.’”

  THE SCREEN

  Another vital aspect of the Berto Center was the privacy. For much of the NBA’s history, its teams have left their practice sessions open to the media, mainly because pro basketball always seemed to be a struggling business in need of any attention it could get. That situation began to change with the popularity that Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and Jordan brought to the game in the 1980s. Jordan’s popularity, in fact, swelled so suddenly that it threatened to overrun his team. To keep a safe distance from hungry fans and to keep a circle of family and friends around him in his early years in the league, Jordan soon took to traveling with an entourage. The problem was, that also distanced him from his teammates, a situation that Phil Jackson sought to remedy when Krause named him head coach in 1989.

  “I was anxious about having a good relationship with Michael,” Jackson recalled. “I was anxious about selling him on the direction in which I was going. You knew what Michael was going to give you every single night as a player. He was gonna get those 30 points; he was gonna give you a chance to win. The challenge was, how to get the other guys feeling a part of it, like they had a role, a vital part. It was just his team, his way.

  “He had such hero worship in the United States among basketball fans that living with him had become an impossibility,” Jackson said. “Traveling in airports, he needed an entourage to get through. He had brought people along on the road with him. His father would come. His friends would come on the road. He had just a life that sometimes alienated him from his teammates. It became a challenge to make him part of the team again and still not lose his special status because he didn’t have the necessary privacy.

  “So I knew that we had to make exceptions to the basic rules that we had: ‘OK, so your father and your brothers and your friends can’t ride on the team bus. Let’s keep that a team thing. Yeah, they can meet you on the road, but they can’t fly on the team plane. There has to be some of the team stuff that is ours, that is the sacred part of what we try to do as a basketball club.’

  A big part of Jackson’s drive to create breathing space for Jordan and the team was to close off practices from the hungry Chicago media. When the team moved into the Berto Center, Jackson further enhanced the privacy by placing a large, retractable screen over the windows to the press room in the building.

  “I got a curtain for our practice facility, so that practice became our time together,” Jackson explained.

  “Phil wanted the cover on the press room,” Krause said. “That was totally his. I got blamed for it as usual.” It was, to some reporters, more of Krause’s personality, more of the secrecy of “the Sleuth.” In reality, it showed that for all their disagreements, Krause and Jackson had a striking ability to think alike on certain issues.

  “It was just the 12 of us and the coaches, not the reporters and the television cameras,” Jackson offered. “It wasn’t going to be a show for the public anymore. It became who are we as a group, as people. Michael had to break down some of his exterior. You know that when you become that famous person you have to develop a shell around you to hide behind. Michael had to become one of the guys in that regard. He had to involve his teammates, and he was able to do that. He was able to bring it out and let his hair down at the same time.

  “We made efforts to create space for him within the team,” Jackson said. “If we hadn’t done that, the way he was going to treat us was that the rest of the world was going to overrun us, if we hadn’t done things the right way. So we said, ‘Let’s not all suffer because of his fame. Let’s give ourselves space and exclude the crowd.’ I guess I created a safe zone, a safe space for Michael. That’s what I tried to do.”

  The result of this effort was that the Berto Center became a shuttered enclave for the team and the organization, including Krause and his assistants. Upstairs, overlooking the floor, were the administrative offices of the coaches and general manager, which served as the inner sanctum for the team. There were the meeting rooms, the film rooms, the offices where the Bulls’ plans and strategies for competition and personnel moves were concocted.

  The media, of course, were kept at an arm’s length with a series of electronically locked doors, but still it was a comfortable arm’s length. The Berto Center press room was a cozy, well-lighted working facility, with cubicles for reporters and a bank of phones.

  In this and so many other regards, the Berto Center was an extension of Reinsdorf’s personality. He was intensely private, yet a person who treasured the relationships with the people who worked for him, the kind of boss who relished kicking his feet up on a desk and enjoying a cigar with one of his trusted employees (although this was not something Reinsdorf felt comfortable doing with his players). His car was a drab, late-model Cadillac, which created something of a contrast when parked in a loading dock at the United Center alongside the fancy vehicles of his highly paid athletes. His taste in dress ran to the same drab browns and muted plaids. He hardly ever inhabited a slickly tailored power suit. Instead, he maximized the casual, down to the point of spending a day in the office in his easy clothes.

  “Another thing worth pointing out about Jerry Reinsdorf,” said Schaefer, “is the extraordinary generosity he’s shown all five of the title years for flying our entire staff to wherever the Finals are held and putting them and their families up in these absolutely luxurious accommodations, funding these extravagant dinners and recreational events. I have a friend who works for the Utah Jazz. I ran into him in summer league, later in July after the ‘97 Finals, and he said he just couldn’t believe how Reinsdorf put us and our families up in Deer Valley in Park City for a week in this resort. He just couldn’t believe that. He countered that the Jazz owner, Larry Miller, flew maybe one 25-year service veteran secretary to Chicago for a weekend where she had to pick up half of her hotel. There was no comparison at all. Those are the things that are unspoken about Jerry Reinsdorf.

  “In Chicago, people compare him to Bill Veeck,” Schaefer added. “Jerry Krause worked for both of these men, and Krause speaks of his great love for Bill Veeck. Yet Veeck and Reinsdorf are like night and day in their management styles. Veeck was out there with his peg leg in the middle of the bleachers, drinking a beer with fans. That was his reputation in Chicago, as a real man of the people. I think spiritually Reinsdorf shares an appreciation of the common people with Veeck. Reinsdorf just can’t quite pull it off. He doesn’t know how to do it, or something. It’s almost weird.”

  Reinsdorf, rather, was still that shy Brooklyn kid, which wasn’t entirely negative. After all, the troubling stereotype in sports is that of the meddling owner, who in his eagerness to be around the players, gets in the way of the organization, trying to make coaching decisions when he doesn’t have the expertise to do that. In basketball, Reinsdorf had been just the opposite of that, to the degree that wh
ile he allowed people to do their jobs, he had also made himself too distant. The players rarely if ever saw him, and as a result, there were virtually no relationships there, no emotional connections that can be so important in helping to overcome the cynical atmosphere of pro sports. On the other hand, Reinsdorf’s allowing the team to breathe had certainly been a big factor in the winning of five championships.

  “Jerry Reinsdorf is the most loyal person that I’ve ever met, particularly to the employees that have done well for him,” said longtime Chicago radio reporter Bruce Levine. “Sheri Berto was his confidant and one of his very best friends. What more proof do you need than naming a building after her and making sure that her family is taken care of.”

  Perhaps it stood to reason that a man who cherished his privacy and close relationships would have a disdain for the process of public relations. Unfortunately, that would come to be viewed as one of Reinsdorf’s failings. He loved baseball and had expended much energy in the running of the White Sox, but his involvement in baseball had created one public relations disaster after another. By Reinsdorf’s own admission, his early threats to move the team out of Chicago if he didn’t get public cooperation in building a new Comiskey Park became the bedrock of his negative public image. In the wake of that came his role in the ugly relations between baseball’s owners and its players. Added to that were the machinations over his tinkering with the White Sox roster.

  For years, Reinsdorf had led the charge in fighting against the game’s escalating salaries. Then, when it became clear that the fight had been lost, he turned around and gave a massive contract worth tens of millions to the snarling Albert Belle, one of the game’s least popular players. The move stunned many people, including Phil Jackson, who saw giving Belle a $55 million contract as one of Reinsdorf’s few mistakes. “Maybe,” Jackson said, “Albert Belle for $55 million was kind of like a gut reaction, a knee-jerk reaction, a slap in the other baseball owners’ faces, saying, ‘OK, you guys didn’t want to go my way, so I’ll beat you by bidding this amount of money for this slugger, if that’s what you want, bidding wars.’