Blood on the Horns

by Roland Lazenby

  “It obviously wasn’t a well thought-out decision,” McDill said, “because the Bulls aren’t going to trade a player just because he wants to be traded. It’s not like they were gonna get what they wanted for him in value, when a player announces he wants to be traded. At the time he was angry and had things he wanted to say, and I’m sure he wanted to stir the pot a little bit. Which he did.”

  Indeed, Pippen’s comments made headlines across the country. “I ain’t coming back,” he had told McDill. “I want to be traded. I want to go to Phoenix or L.A.” Even worse, he had insinuated he was malingering, saying, “Maybe I’m healthy” now.

  “He hasn’t said anything to me,” Krause said when asked about the comments. “We spent a lot of money to bring everybody back and try to win a championship. I don’t know anything about it.”

  Pippen told McDill his anger had boiled over a September letter Krause faxed him warning him not to play in his own charity game in the United Center. “He said he would fine me. Can you believe it?” Pippen said.

  “It was a league mandate that I send that letter,” Krause said.

  The good news for the Bulls was that they got a second straight road victory, 103-88, that Sunday against the Kings, and their defense showed some real teeth. Randy Brown, a former King, had a strong game, and Kukoc scored 18 to help Jordan with the scoring burden.

  But the team training room was the scene of another ugly exchange between Krause and Pippen and Jordan before the game. “Something happened in Sacramento in the training room,” Schaefer recalled. “Jerry walked in the training room, and they said something. Michael and Scottie were in there, and he came in and they started going at each other. They get into these sparring things over drafts. Michael likes to poke fun at Jerry over his claims of drafting and finding Earl Monroe and different people like that. Michael gave a little jab that day at Krause for claiming that he discovered Scottie. Something was said that kind of set Scottie off.”

  Jordan had always found it amusing that Krause claimed to have discovered Monroe, a Hall of Famer, when the Bullets took him with the overall number two pick in the 1967 draft. Krause, though, took immense pride in being what he figured was one of the first scouts to spot Monroe playing for Winston-Salem State. Krause said coach Gene Shue and other members of the Bullets front office weren’t as enamored of Monroe, but Krause said he persuaded them to take the high-scoring guard by offering to give up his salary for months until Monroe showed that he was indeed a worthy draft pick.

  “I think that whole thing with Michael stems from Earl Monroe,” Krause said. “I used to needle him. I used to say, ‘Someday you might be as good as Earl Monroe. You remind me of Earl and Elgin. You’re a combination of Earl Monroe and Elgin Baylor, and you might be as good as both of them someday. Earl did it on the ground. You’re doing it in the air. Elgin was the first one to do it in the air. You remind me of him.’ And then every time after that, ‘He’d say, ‘That fuckin’ Monroe.’ Then, he’d say, ‘Where’d you take, Monroe? Second in the draft? Big fuckin’ deal?’

  “Well, he has no comprehension of what it took to get Earl Monroe,” Krause said.

  Again, these spats might seem almost foolish to outside observers, but when their egos and personalities collided, Krause and Jordan and Pippen were a volatile mix.

  With an 8-5 record, the Bulls set out for Seattle, the scene of their strangest hour. On the flight up, they partied to celebrate another win. Although the news of Pippen’s comments had yet to hit the streets, he partied a bit too much, perhaps over his recent freedom of expression.

  “It was a trigger to a very big event this year that was rather embarrassing,” Jackson said. “Unfortunately for the players, it was an opportunity for them to unload against Jerry. It set about a mechanism between the two of us. It was embarrassing. I had to discipline the players about it, or else. And risk losing by standing in between (them and management) on what they considered an affront to their world. Or I could sit there and incur the embarrassment that followed. For the most part, I pulled them aside and talked to them personally about it. Not to do this because it’s embarrassing to the whole bus basically.”

  When the team landed in Seattle, there were two buses waiting to carry them to their hotel, one for the players and coaches and one for the broadcasters and staff people. Krause chose to ride the team bus.

  “Scottie began his tirade right after that,” Jackson said. “That was the thing that sprung it all open.”

  Obviously intoxicated, Pippen began yelling at Krause about signing him to a new contract or trading him. The harangue went on and on and turned increasingly uglier.

  “Why don’t you trade me?” Pippen screamed.

  “I finally turned around,” Jackson said, “and grabbed a bottle of beer and held it up to Pippen and pointed to it like, ‘Beers. You’ve had too many beers to drink.’ Joe Kleine thought I was toasting him. He said, ‘Were you toasting Scottie? I’ve never seen anything like that.’ I said, ‘No, I was holding up a beer and pointing at it, saying, You’ve had too many. You better quiet down. I didn’t want to have to get up.

  “This is beyond what normally goes,” Jackson said. “I didn’t like it at all. Jerry said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I can take it. Don’t worry about it at all.’”

  “With Scottie, that meant nothing to me,” Krause said later. “He was drunk, and he thought the best way to get out of here was to piss me off more.”

  “These days and age, if you stare at a guy something can be said,” Ron Harper said of the incident. “I think that Scottie was just letting some of his frustrations out. So he said some things.”

  “It was the venting of his frustrations,” Jordan agreed. “I think it’s devastating the relationship between the two of them. I don’t think Scottie can ever overcome that.”

  Asked later about his conflicts with Krause, Pippen replied, “I can’t say exactly where they come from. We don’t have any type of relationship. There are a lot of little things that have gotten to the point where they’ve turned into things that are big.”

  “I’m not quite sure what cracked in Seattle,” Chip Schaefer said. “I’m not sure it was alcohol. I don’t know if it was a combination of things. Something snapped hard. We all know it was an accumulation of the trade stuff.”

  “That’s something that we will never understand,” Jordan said later when asked about Pippen’s relationship with Krause. “How that relationship formed and bridges were burned. The situation deteriorated even more when I was gone from the game and then even more when I came back. That’s one thing I can’t comment on. But we all have differences with management and certainly with Jerry Krause. Some of us can deal with it in different ways. Believe me, when I step on the basketball court, the last person I think about that I’m playing for is Jerry Krause.”

  Certainly part of the situation was Pippen’s anger and bitterness over the contract he had signed in 1991. Considered one of the NBA’s 50 greatest players ever, Pippen was ranked 122nd on the league’s 1998 salary list. He had put the financial issues aside and focused all his energy on making the team a winner. He had done this thinking the team would eventually reward him. But instead the signals he received every summer from Krause’s actions was that the team continually shopped him around in trades. The one thing that Pippen really wanted, beyond pay commensurate with his ability, was the respect and honor of staying with one team his whole career.

  “Scottie has always held a real good idea about his place in basketball history,” said McDill, who has covered the team for more than a decade. “And he thinks a player who stays with one organization his entire career has a better reputation after they’re done than a player who gets traded. He’s always wanted to be one of those guys who gets to play his entire career with one team. But in this situation he’s being pushed out in a lot of ways.”

  “From m
y standpoint, I would love to have finished my career in Chicago,” Pippen said. “It’s a great tribute. And to go out on your own and not be forced out of the game.”

  That, in part, was his motivation for putting aside his feelings about his contract. But he felt Reinsdorf and Krause had responded to his show of good will and effort by again trying to trade him. “I had accepted the fact that I was fairly underpaid and that with the way the new collective bargaining agreement was done, it was something I was gonna have to deal with,” Pippen said. “It was a process, something I was gonna have to deal with. So, you know, just go ahead and play the game.”

  “He definitely wants the respect, and he deserves it,” Jordan said of Pippen. “I think the thing that pisses him off more is that at no time did they ever put me on the trading block. And the things that he’s done, they put him on the trading block.”

  “Babe Ruth was traded twice,” Krause responded. “Wilt Chamberlain was traded. There have been very few guys through the years who haven’t been traded.”

  (Krause didn’t note that their teams suffered terribly after Ruth and Chamberlain were traded.)

  “Scottie Pippen was a great player,” Krause said. “He was one of the few players who truly excited me. He’s still a fine player. But, as far as trading anybody goes, I have learned that the organization has to come first. Now, Michael can never be traded. But I would have to add that any deal we’d ever talked about was somebody who would have to be a knockout for us.”

  As for Krause, his biggest irritation was what he saw as Pippen’s whining over the 1991 contract. At the time, Pippen was coming off a serious back injury and wanted a long-term contract to protect his future. Sitting in his office during an interview, Krause recalled, “I sat right here with Scottie Pippen and said, ‘Don’t sign this seven-year contract. Don’t sign it. It’s stupid.’ He said, ‘No, I want the security.’ So I said, ‘Then don’t come back to me.’

  “The players can tell you this,” Krause said. “When they’re ready to sign a contract, I take the pen out of their hands and say, ‘Look, we fairly negotiated this. Your agent did a fine job. We did a fine job. But if you don’t like this, don’t sign the damn thing. Give me the pen back. Because what I don’t want you doing is coming to me next year or the year after, because we ain’t going to renegotiate. You sign it, you live with it. You have two bad years, three bad years, we live with it. You have three great years, we live with it the same way. Don’t come back to me.’

  “I’ve never had a player give me the pen back,” the GM said.

  Pippen’s 1991 deal also included a large portion of the money deferred. Krause said that by 1994, when it became apparent that Pippen had agreed to an inferior deal, the player asked to move the deferred sum into current dollars. “Scottie came to us,” Krause said. “They had a lot of money deferred in that contract. They came to us and wanted the deferred money brought up to current, and it was quite a bit of money. And we said, ‘All right, this is the end of the talk till the end of the contract. I’ll never talk about this again. It’s over. I’m done.’ We brought the deferred money current, and three weeks later he was talking like a magpie.

  “So you can understand,” the GM said, “why I have hard feelings at times. And the money we brought up to current was in seven figures.”

  He also pointed out that the Bulls had given “Rabbi trusts” to both Pippen and Horace Grant early in their careers. Those trusts or deferred annuities didn’t count against the salary cap at the time and were later ruled illegal by the league. But Pippen’s and Grant’s remain in effect because they were grandfathered in before the league’s ruling, Krause said. “Twenty to 30 years down the road, they got annuities coming in. They’re like tax free annuities, because they’re not taxing. The organization loses money on the deal, because the organization pays the taxes on it. Other general managers for other teams say they won’t do it anymore because it now counts against their salary caps. But we did it for Scottie and Horace. We were so good to players that the league outlawed it.”

  Pippen said that in place of the money, he would have been pleased with a simple “thank you” from Krause or Reinsdorf. But neither man ever expressed their appreciation for Pippen’s leadership role with the team while Jordan was gone from the game or for Pippen’s unselfish approach once the superstar returned in 1995.

  “Not to this day,” Pippen would say later. “I would think you would do that. That’s good manners. But this team has gotten so much success. It’s like Krause said, ‘It’s this organization that’s been able to win, not just the players.’”

  In fact, he had not spoken to Reinsdorf in several years, since a chance encounter at a White Sox game three or four summers before the incident in Seattle.

  So the anger had built in Pippen until the alcohol emboldened him to unleash it on Krause in Seattle. As it was, Pippen might have been able to undo some of the damage the next morning when he again encountered Krause on the team bus headed to practice.

  “Good morning, Scottie,” Krause said.

  “Go to hell, Jerry,” Pippen replied.

  Upon hearing that Pippen had made trade demands to the media, Jackson tried to make light of it, knowing that the emotional Pippen was capable of misspeaking, particularly if reporters were gouging his sensitivity with questions. “I think he’s just joking the press, personally, and throwing a barb out there,” the coach told reporters that Tuesday in practice.

  “We know that he’s not happy with his contract,” Jordan said. “He didn’t have to go public, but he did. I’m not shellshocked by anything that happens. This organization is at a crossroads. The future is in front of them. Sometimes, decisions get made for business or personal reasons and not basketball.”

  Then Seattle forward Vin Baker weighed in on the issue. “He is one of the top three or four players in basketball,” he said of Pippen. “The Bulls couldn’t have won all those championships without him.”

  “I’m not surprised he wants to be traded,” Harper told reporters. “He feels they are not loyal to him and he has been loyal to them. He has played hurt; he has won five championships. He feels they should come out and do something for him.”

  Pippen responded to Jackson’s comments by saying he was not just trying to make things interesting. “I think I’ve been treated very unfairly by this organization and … it’s gotten to the point now I don’t see myself carrying on with it,” Pippen told reporters. “I would rather leave things as I can remember them as a player and go on. It’s very difficult. I have a lot of respect for teammates and fans in Chicago. I’ve enjoyed my 10 years playing (there). I never saw the day when I would have to turn the other cheek, it just sort of came to that.”

  He was asked what he would do if Krause didn’t trade him before the league’s February trading deadline. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll come to that bridge when I cross it.”

  “You never close doors,” Krause told reporters that same day in response to questions about his plans. “However, we spent a tremendous amount of money to bring this team back intact. It would take a knockout deal for us to trade any key guy on our team. If somebody doesn’t knock us out, I’m not going to trade Scottie.”

  “For Scottie’s situation,” Jackson said later, “everything kind of broke. The venom kind of broke, and he said, ‘I can’t play for this team anymore.’ He had crossed a bridge with the organization. It was very disappointing. And it took him a while. We had to come back here and really work with Scottie.”

  “That doesn’t mean you have to leave the team,” Jackson told him.

  “Scottie thought he had shown himself the door, because he had had too much to drink,” the coach explained. “It was over the edge.”

  The team returned to Chicago just before Thanksgiving, and Jackson arranged for the team’s therapist to spend some time with Pippen counseling him o
n his anger. Over the break, Pippen phoned Jackson late one night for a long discussion during which the coach realized that Pippen seemed fairly set in his position not to play for the Bulls again. The coach knew that the team couldn’t be successful without Pippen, that changing his mind would take the best efforts of a variety of people, including Jordan, Harper, Jackson himself and several teammates.

  “Unfortunately, it took him a while,” Jackson said. “He wasn’t ready to play for another two months. And so it was a situation where he had time to cool out, to look at it and say, ‘Well, my options aren’t very good. I really don’t have another place to go, and this is the right thing to do.’”

  “We let Scottie be Scottie,” Harper later said, “and let him grow into what he will put himself into. We all are by his side.”

  Part of the strategy, though, included Jackson and Jordan openly expressing their displeasure with Pippen’s position. That Monday, December 1st, the coach and star player both suggested that they felt betrayed by Pippen’s demands. “It’s all right to hold it against Scottie,” Jackson told reporters. “We care about Scottie, but we’re going to hold this against Scottie because he’s walking out on us, there’s no doubt about that. Some things are personal and some things are public. Publicly, we like Scottie, but personally there’s always going to be a … residual effect of having gone to bat for Scottie.”

  Jordan had already told reporters the previous Saturday that he was “disappointed, very disappointed, that (Pippen) hasn’t been able to put aside his dealings with management.”

  Jackson and Jordan said they wouldn’t have returned to the team if they had known Pippen was going to leave. “There is that kind of feeling: ‘Hey, we came back to do this job together and Scottie ducked out the door,”’ Jackson said.