Blood on the Horns

by Roland Lazenby

  That might have been a knee-jerk thing.”

  Besides, that knee-jerk response, there had been little that Reinsdorf had done that could be classified as a true blunder, Jackson said. “He just doesn’t make mistakes.”

  At the same time, many of the owners initiatives have been misinterpreted or misunderstood by the public, largely because Reinsdorf seemed to disdain the process of communicating with the fans of the teams he managed. Nothing illustrated this better than a 1998 letter to the Chicago Tribune from a disgruntled White Sox fan. Just because Reinsdorf was from Brooklyn didn’t mean he knew anything about baseball, the fan wrote.

  “I don’t care about public relations,” had been Reinsdorf’s patent answer on these issues. What Reinsdorf appeared to mean was that he didn’t care about popularity contests, or the process of ingratiating himself to the media. He shared with Krause a low regard for standards of journalistic integrity. But that disdain for the process had often come across as a disregard for the fans, his paying customers, and their response to Reinsdorf and Krause had been the boos ringing in the rafters of the buildings Reinsdorf worked so hard to build.

  “He gets a bad rap, because he’s such a tough businessman and a good businessman that people cannot separate the two,” said Bruce Levine. “They can’t separate the tough businessman from the good person. He’s made some tough decisions. He’s made some wrong decisions just like everybody does. But he’s been a great Chicagoan. He’s brought the two newest stadiums to Chicago, the United Center and Comiskey Park, where before that, the last stadium that was built for professional sports was 1929.”

  Quite clearly, to Reinsdorf, public relations was a foul, even dishonest, business. Loyalty, on the other hand, was a concept that extended beyond life itself. That, in turn, helped explain the bond he shared with Krause. For nearly two decades, Krause had been a loyal and trusted assistant. Where Reinsdorf’s White Sox experience had been paved with frustrations, his and Krause’s efforts with the Bulls had returned him gold. They had pushed on together, through one hostile public environment after another, always taking immense satisfaction in the aftermath that they were right, that the public perception was nonsense.

  “When we win, I have a thing,” Krause said. “I hug Thel, and I hug Jerry. The nicest thing that ever happened to me was when we won the first one in L.A.”

  It was 1991, in the cramped locker room area of the Forum, Krause said. “In that sweaty little room that we were in, we were huggin’ and thinking of each other. And that’s what this whole thing has been. I hugged him and said, ‘This one’s for you.’ And he hugged Thel and said, ‘This one’s for Jerry.’ We were just like on the same page. It made me feel so good that night that we were thinking about each other.

  “It’s a special relationship, because we struggled to get that damn first one,” Krause said of his 13 years running the team with Reinsdorf. “Seven years it took us, and we busted our asses to get that thing. He had so much faith in me. Jerry Reinsdorf had more faith in me than anybody in my life, and it’s a special relationship there.”

  “Krause and Reinsdorf are a management team,” Bruce Levine said. “They communicate together. Jerry Krause has the basketball knowledge. Jerry Reinsdorf has the business knowledge. And together, they have not gotten enough credit for being one of the great teams themselves, handling this thing and making it into the Beatles of the 1990s.”

  It was through his baseball connections that Reinsdorf learned in 1984 that he might have a chance to purchase the Bulls. He had grown up in Brooklyn, where his industrious father worked alternately as a mechanic and a cabbie and ice cream truck driver before settling into a business buying and reselling used sewing machines. In Brooklyn, “being a Dodgers fan was almost a religion,” Reinsdorf explained, and he worshipped just as hard as every other kid on Flatbush Avenue. He was also a Knicks fan (Carl Braun was his favorite player), and later in life, even after he had finished law school and was well on his way to amassing a fortune in real estate investment in Chicago, he would hold in awe the Knicks teams of the early 1970s coached by Red Holtzman. As Reinsdorf built the market value of Balcor, his real estate investment company, he realized that he might be able to live the ultimate businessman’s fantasy: owning a major league sports team.

  In 1981, Reinsdorf and partner Eddie Einhorn purchased controlling interest in the White Sox from Bill Veeck. They soon began an aggressive revamping of the team, structured around Carlton Fisk, which led to a divisional championship in 1983. A year later, Reinsdorf was in New York having dinner with New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who was also a minority owner of the Bulls. Reinsdorf told Steinbrenner he would love to own and operate the NBA team in Chicago.

  Lester Crown, another of the Bulls’ ownership group, phoned Reinsdorf in September 1984 and told him Steinbrenner had relayed the conversation. “He asked me if I was serious,” Reinsdorf recalled, “because some of the other owners in the Bulls really wanted to get out and that we should talk about it. I met with Lester, and he said that he and Lamar Hunt didn’t want to sell, but that 55 to 58 percent of the team was available to purchase. I worked out a deal with Lester in October of 1984 before Michael Jordan had played a game.”

  But they couldn’t consummate the deal because the Bulls were embroiled in a lawsuit with Marv Fishman, a Wisconsin businessman who had attempted to buy the team many years earlier and had been rebuffed. Soon, the Bulls owners settled the suit and closed their deal with Reinsdorf. Pulling together a group of 24 investors, Reinsdorf bought 63.7 percent of the team. “I will be visible, I will be seen,” Reinsdorf said in announcing the sale. “I will be actively involved with this franchise … I have a theory about how to run a basketball team, and I’ve always wanted an opportunity to run one.”

  Upon taking over Reinsdorf was both stunned and elated to discover that the team had never bothered to employ a season-ticket sales force. He told Krause, “Oh, boy, look what I’ve found!”

  “The state of the franchise was terrible,” Reinsdorf once recalled. “The practice facilities were terrible. The offices were terrible. They were dingy. The team charged employees for soft drinks if they wanted them. Morale was terrible. The franchise was understaffed. It wasn’t that the people running the Bulls were bad, but they all had other things to do.

  “I just didn’t like the whole culture of the organization,” Reinsdorf said, “and I didn’t like the way it was being coached. I felt we had to break from the past, and I wanted someone as a general manager who believed what I believed in. I believed very strongly in two things: 1) A championship team is built around defense. You must remember this was at a time when the NBA was at a peak for points being scored, but very few teams really played any defense; 2) I wanted the offense not to be isolations and one-on-ones. I wanted all five guys participating and sharing the ball. I wanted the Bulls to duplicate what Red Holtzman had done with the Knicks.”

  Reinsdorf announced in late March 1985 that he was replacing Bulls GM Rod Thorn with Krause, who would become the vice president for basketball operations. “I want a team that will play Red Holtzman basketball,” Reinsdorf said in announcing the changes. “An unselfish team, one that plays team defense, that knows its roles, that moves without the ball. Jerry Krause’s job will be to find the DeBusschere of 1985 and the Bradley of 1985.”

  “I wouldn’t have taken the Bulls job had it not been for Jerry,” Krause once explained. “Michael or no Michael. I had worked with Jerry with the White Sox for several years. I had turned down chances to come back in the NBA during that time. I’d had a couple of strikes against me, and I didn’t want to come back unless I knew I could work for an owner I felt comfortable with and that I knew would back me and do the things that needed to be done.”

  “Krause was atop the scouting hierarchy at the White Sox,” Reinsdorf said, “and I had gotten to know him. There had to be a cultural change in the
Bulls’ organization, and Krause believed the same things I did.”

  Putting Reinsdorf’s grand vision of Red Holtzman/ Knicks basketball into effect would take years and numerous personnel moves. Krause’s first was to fire Kevin Loughery as coach. Then he turned his attention to cleaning up the roster. Reinsdorf made other changes beyond Krause’s personnel moves. He hired a platoon of season ticket salespeople and produced a new source of revenue. He upgraded the team’s broadcasting contracts and moved the team’s practice facility from a dingy gym named Angel Guardian to the Deerfield Multiplex. (In 1992, the Bulls moved on to the new Berto Center.)

  By 1988, the team had given up flying commercially and had begun using a charter service, mainly to avoid the hassle of taking Jordan through public airports. Combined with Jordan’s brilliance and the new atmosphere in the league and the changes brought by Reinsdorf, the Bulls’ fortunes began to rise, if not dramatically, at least perceptibly. “Michael’s first year started slowly,” explained longtime team vice president Irwin Mandel. “The first year we sort of stopped the financial skid. It took a little while to become profitable. Then the numbers started to look real good his second year. I was very excited that finally, the light at the end of the tunnel had arrived. Each week he was becoming more and more popular. There was the feeling that next year he’s going to be even more popular. This is a guy who’s bringing excitement here, bringing the fans back. He’s going to make us successful and popular and profitable.”

  “It was a no brainer to make the organization better,” Reinsdorf said. “It probably was one of the worst in sports. That part was easy.”

  MEDIA DAY

  On many days, the reporters covering the Bulls would wait in the press room until the curtains covering the window to the gym were raised, signalling practice was over. Often, when they would go into the gym to attempt interviews, the reporters discovered that Jordan, Pippen and most of their teammates were gone, leaving only Jackson to answer their questions.

  Yet there was always one day out of the year when reporters were granted wide access to the team. That day was appropriately titled “media day,” and it came at the opening of training camp, a time when the team’s players and coaches were made available for photographs, video shoots and interviews.

  Anticipation usually ran high on media day, but most of the questions were mundane queries about the upcoming season or what players and coaches did for their summer vacations. Yet, with the brewing controversy, media day for the Bulls in 1997 was far from mundane. Radio, TV and print reporters from across the Chicago area were curious about the increasingly public rift between Krause and Jackson. After all, in his press conference signing Jackson, Krause had emphasized that this was definitely the coach’s last year with the team.

  Some team employees had hoped that Krause would see the futility of discussing these issues and that the general manager would avoid media day altogether, thus avoiding the questions and more controversy. Instead, Krause came down from his office in the Berto Center and walked out onto the floor amidst the dozens of reporters gathered there. Very quickly, the GM would find himself in a swirl of trouble by making comments that would cast him as the man who was “splitting up the Bulls.”

  Afterward, some team employees could only shake their heads because many of the ensuing heartaches and headaches could easily have been avoided.

  What made matters worse was that Krause and Jackson were in the middle of a personal feud that had boiled over in the weeks leading up to the opening of training camp. “The way it started was his daughter got married,” Jackson said. “And in a kind of unfortunate turn of events, he and his wife didn’t invite us to the wedding. Which is fine. I understand that. But there are people on our staff that they invited and people in the organization that were invited.”

  What particularly upset Jackson was Krause’s invitation to Iowa State coach Tim Floyd, long touted as Krause’s favorite choice as Jackson’s successor. Over the years Jackson had been known to dub his competitors with tweaking nicknames. For example, he once referred to New York Knicks coach Jeff Van Gundy as “Van Gumby.” And in the spring of 1998 he made a smiling reference to Utah Jazz center Greg Ostertag as “Osterdog.”

  Jackson also had a nickname for Floyd—“Pinkie.”

  “Pinkie Floyd was there,” Jackson said of the wedding. “It was an occasion that Jerry Krause used as a business opportunity to bring Floyd to meet everyone.”

  The Krauses further deepened the snub by explaining it to a newspaper reporter. “Thelma (Krause’s wife) spoke of it this year,” Jackson said. “It was in the paper. The big deal was, ‘Phil’s a professional. He’s an office worker. We didn’t invite all of our office workers.’”

  Thelma Krause told the Sun Times the wedding was an intimate affair. “We do not have a social relationship,” she said, explaining that she and her husband weren’t invited to Jackson’s 50th birthday party.

  “The reality is that Jerry is all professional,” Jackson said. “He’s all business. There is no personal. He’s business 24 hours a day.”

  The late September wedding snub soon led to a blow-up between Jackson and Krause at the Berto Center. “He kind of was hanging around the coaches’ offices acting friendly,” Jackson recalled. “And he walked in the office where we were just kind of joking around as an office group. So I just stood up and walked out. He was acting like nothing had happened.

  “I just walked out and went down and checked on the players,” Jackson said. “When I came back upstairs, his secretary came in and said, ‘Jerry wants to see you in his office.’ And I said, ‘Tell him he can come see me in my office.’ And I went in my office. Then she called back said, ‘He wants you to know that you are to meet him in his office and that he’s still the boss here.’ So I went in his office and told him, ‘Don’t come around and act friendly and everything else when you know that you’re not friendly.’ He said, ‘Well, I didn’t invite Frank (Hamblen, assistant coach), and I didn’t invite (Bulls VP) Steve Schanwald.’

  “I said, ‘Well, you crossed a bridge right there by your definition, by your snub or whatever else. Believe me, I don’t care. But when you invite the next coach that’s coming in and you use that as an opportunity to introduce him to the people in the community and to the owner and stuff, and then tell me it’s not business, it’s personal.’

  “Then he came back,” Jackson said, “with how Pinkie Floyd had been his friend for five or six years. I said, ‘Sure, Jerry, I know he’s your friend.’ I’ve been in that same position where Floyd is. One of his puppies. He’s been watching him for a while.”

  Very quickly, the discussion escalated into an argument, Jackson said. “It went from there to ‘Well, that’s why I wanted to have the owner meet you. We wanted to make sure you understand this is your last year. I don’t care if you win 82 games or not. This is your last year.’ That kind of shut the door for me. I said, ‘OK, the big deal is that we get along.’

  “We had an ensuing fight that lasted about 10 minutes, and it was pretty loud and pretty boisterous,” Jackson said. “But at the end we settled down. And he said, ‘This is what the owner was gonna tell you. Instead of him telling you, I will tell you what he was gonna tell you. Make sure that the drift of your thing comes out that this is the way that it has to be. And make no doubt about it that this is our intention that this is your last year.’ And I said, ‘Jerry, I’ve known that it’s been my last year since Mr. Reinsdorf came to Montana and we talked about it.’ And we went through a few things that had been a hardship. And we aired a lot of things that had to be aired, and we’ve been much better since that time. There had been animosity and we were coming apart, so we kind of cleared the air.”

  Later, just before media day, Krause read some comments Jackson had made to reporters in which the coach seemed to be waffling about his status with the team. “He called me up to the office that
day,” Jackson recalled, “and he said, ‘I want you to get this straight. This is indeed your last year. We want to get that straight to the media. We don’t want any of this hedging.’”

  THE ORGANIZATION

  At first only two or three reporters gathered about Krause on the Berto Center floor on media day. But then their number grew until nearly 20 or more encircled him. The GM began by discussing the effects of the NBA’s new labor agreement, how unsettling it was, how it would take three years or more to understand how it would affect the economics of the league.

  Then one reporter asked him which free agents the Bulls might be interested in signing. “We’ve never told anybody who we’re interested in,” Krause replied. “I never would tell anybody that. So it’s all rumor. You guys have to write something and announce something and have something to talk about on talk radio and all that stuff. You gotta have something to do. You gotta make a living. That’s part of the function of the media. And it’s part of my function not to tell you who we are interested in.”

  Another reporter asked if the upcoming season would have a sense of finality? “All I’m concerned about, I want to win this year, and go and do what we have to do this year,” Krause said. “Then myself and the scouting staff and the organization will take care of the future. We’ll do our planning and do our organizing and the things we have to do regarding the future. But right now we want to concentrate on what we have to do this year to win with this team. That’s why we brought everybody back. To make another run at it.”