Blood on the Horns

by Roland Lazenby

  “It would have made a big difference in terms of me and Phil and a lot of other players,” Jordan said.

  Jackson recalled for reporters that Jordan had come out of retirement in 1995 due in part to Pippen’s great urging. “I don’t think Michael forgets the fact that when Scottie was here alone in ‘94 and ‘95, that he was … saying, ‘Come on back, come on back, Michael, and help me out with this load,”’ Jackson said. “So I’m sure Michael’s going to get back at Scottie, hold his feet to the fire.”

  Resolving the issue could take six weeks or more, the coach pointed out, and the team could become greatly affected by the distraction.

  A little more than a week after Pippen’s explosive verbal attack against Krause, Latrell Sprewell of the Golden State Warriors ignited a media firestorm by attacking coach P.J. Carlesimo and choking him at practice, then leaving the building only to return later and throw punches at the coach. The entire incident, Sprewell said later, was aimed at forcing the team to trade him.

  The Pippen incident was far too private for any of his teammates to discuss publicly. Still it seemed obvious that Jordan was speaking subtly to his teammate when reporters asked him to comment on the Sprewell incident.

  “I’ve been angry at coaches,” Jordan said. “I’ve been angry at people. I’ve been able from the teachings and learnings of my background to control myself. Each and every person is different. I’m not saying I haven’t been angry enough to think about doing certain things. But also I’ve been smart enough to think about the alternatives that action would cause. Some people do lose their cool. Some people don’t think about those alternatives, the repercussions of their actions.”

  The hopeful sign, for Dennis Rodman at least, came that Wednesday when the Bulls traveled to Boston to play the Celtics and Pippen went along for the ride. “He’s here tonight because he still wants to be part of the team,” Rodman told reporters.

  Asked if the situation was a distraction, Rodman replied, “It can’t be. We’re grown men playing a game, and we’re getting paid lots of money. We have to be able to put the distraction aside and go out and work. If Scottie doesn’t come back, that’s his choice. You have to live with your own choices. For me, my choices paid off. Some people might not like the choices I’ve made, but they’ve definitely paid off. It’s a different situation with Scottie.”

  One of Pippen’s ways of dealing with the anger was to pick up the phone and call Reinsdorf for their first chat in a couple of years. “He just wanted to be traded,” Reinsdorf said. “He said he hated Krause. He couldn’t even refer to him by name. He kept calling him ‘your general manager.’”

  Reinsdorf said he told Pippen that Krause hadn’t been shopping him around in trades but merely listening to other teams’ offers.

  “I talked to him for about 20 minutes, and he was supposed to call me back but he never did,” Pippen revealed later. “He just sort of talked his way around some things. I’m still waiting on that call.”

  “It’s a test, right?” “Isn’t everything?”

  —The Devil’s Advocate

  8: December’s Children

  Over the years, Michael Jordan had entertained a succession of young players touted as the next apparition of his greatness. The media heralded the coming of one after another until the role itself took on a name—“Heir Jordan.” As the original rebuffed each and every one of the imitators and successors year after year, the process took on a strange feel, sort of like a convention of Elvis impersonators in Vegas.

  Still, the NBA from its earliest days had been a business that survived on star power. Even before the Jordan era there had been a mentality of “who’s next?” As Jordan neared the end of his career, that question only intensified.

  In the early 1990s, Southern Cal’s Harold Miner had the sad misfortune of being labeled “Baby Jordan” and believing it. Grant Hill, too, labored under the hype as a Detroit Piston rookie in 1994, although time revealed he was a player more along the lines of Scottie Pippen. Jerry Stackhouse followed Hill into this mire of embarrassment in 1996, and in December 1997, it was Kobe Bryant’s turn.

  This time around, though, Jordan himself did a doubletake at the similarities. Chicago reporters noted that the 19-year-old Bryant even had the demeanor of a young Jordan in his interview mannerism. But the real comparisons came from Bryant’s game itself. Not the defense, and certainly not the competitive maturity. Bryant was, after all, only 19.

  But the offensive moves were another story.

  “He’s got a lot of ‘em,” Jordan himself admitted.

  Los Angeles Lakers guard Nick Van Exel liked to joke that it could all be attributed to the Jordan highlight videotape that he loaned to Bryant in the fall of 1996, just days after Bryant joined the team as an 18-year-old rookie out of Lower Merion High School in Pennsylvania. “I gave him a highlight tape of Mike, and I ain’t seen it yet. That was last year,” Van Exel said, laughing.

  Over the first few months of the 1997-98 season it became clear that Bryant had spent quite a bit of time studying the tape, because he had just about all of Jordan’s moves down pat, even the famous post-up gyrations where Jordan would twitch and fake his opponents into madness.

  In fact, the young Bryant was doing such a fine job in only his second season in the league that, heading into the matchup with the Bulls, many observers were touting him for the Sixth Man Award. Through the first two months of the season, when the Lakers were hampered by injuries to center Shaquille O’Neal, Bryant had scored at a clip of better than 19 points per game, the top average of the NBA’s non-starters.

  As a result, his flashy play generated a substantial amount of hype for the Lakers’ mid-December visit to the United Center. How would Bryant do matched up against Jordan? That question offered a bit of comic relief to a Bulls team still laboring under the anxiety of the Pippen question.

  In truth, the real issue for the Bulls was their difficulty scoring. The Lakers were a young, athletic team that flaunted a wicked running attack. The Bulls, meanwhile, still lacked the transition game that Pippen’s defense brought them. As a result, they got no easy baskets and few easy wins.

  Fortunately, just before the Lakers arrived Chicago got a preliminary test against another running team, the Phoenix Suns, and promptly whipped them in the United Center, one of the first signs the Bulls had begun to find a way to adjust to life without Pippen. It was obvious they would never get near a championship level without the star forward, but they could still compete.

  The Lakers made that discovery just moments into their meeting with Chicago. Van Exel admitted there was a certain look in Jordan’s eyes that told them the contest would be decided early. Indeed, the Bulls controlled the tempo, established a limited transition game and iced the Lakers by the end of the first quarter, which was fine with the United Center fans because it meant they could sit back and watch the individual duel between Jordan and Bryant.

  “Michael loves this stuff,” Ron Harper said of the meeting between the two. It was a scenario that Harper knew well. As a young, high-flying star for the Cleveland Cavaliers in the late 1980s, Harper was considered an early Jordan heir, until a knee injury forced Harper to remake his game. “(Bryant) is a very young player who someday may take his throne,” Harper said, “but I don’t think Michael’s ready to give up his throne yet. He came out to show everybody that he’s Air Jordan still.”

  While the outcome was a 20-point win for the Bulls, the contest between master and student generated a few sparks. Jordan scored 36, and Bryant produced a career-high 33. It was a night for highlight clips with both players dancing in the post, draining jumpers from the perimeter and weaving their way to handsome dunks. “I had that same type of vibrancy when I was young,” Jordan told reporters afterward. “It’s exciting to match wits against physical skills, knowing that I’ve been around the game long enough that if I have
to guard a Kobe Bryant … I can still hold my own.”

  Jordan had attempted to show restraint. “It was a challenge because of the hype,” he said, “but it’s also a challenge not to get caught up in the hype, not to make it a one-on-one competition between me and Kobe. I felt a couple of times that it felt like that, but I had to refrain from that, especially when he scored on me. I felt a natural tendency to want to go back down to the other end and score on him … But you can’t. It takes a lot of discipline not to get caught up in that individuality of our games. You stick close to the system and you think team first and try to do your job.”

  It was especially fun for Jordan because the Lakers showed a disinclination to double-team him. “The urges were there tonight,” he admitted. “Mentally, I think I’m tough enough to take on those challenges because I know so much about the game and I can make the adjustments. I feel if they’re not going to double team me then I have the advantage. Defensively, I just have to get used to playing against a player who has skills similar to mine. I try to pick a weakness and exploit it.”

  Bryant’s specific weakness was his defense, no surprise considering his age and experience, Jordan said.

  If nothing else, the circumstances revealed that Bryant possessed certain Jordanlike qualities. “This kid is really, really driven. I haven’t seen it in a player in a long time, not to that extent,” said Laker assistant coach Larry Drew.

  “Kobe’s one of the most competitive guys that we’ve ever had on our team,” said longtime Laker trainer Gary Vitti, “to the point where when we practice and we scrimmage and his team loses, he’s uncomfortable to be around. In simple practice pickup games he gets mad, you can’t talk to him. He goes over and sits on the sideline, and he’s mad. Really mad. That’s his competitive nature. He just wants to win all the time. You need somebody like that to elevate your practices.”

  “It’s always been there since I was four or five years old,” Bryant said of his competitive nature. “I can’t explain it. You just don’t feel right if you lose.”

  The observations sounded hauntingly like Bulls coaches talking about Jordan in 1985-86. Jordan, though, came to the NBA after three years of undergraduate study under Dean Smith at North Carolina. Bryant, instead, took the surprising shortcut of the ‘90s, going directly from high school into the pro game. Just months after taking his last high school exam and taking diva-in-waiting Brandy to his senior prom, Bryant joined the Lakers as a first-round draft pick (13th overall) to become one of the youngest players in NBA history.

  As early as his ninth grade year, Bryant had begun thinking about turning pro after reading about the prodigy young Magic Johnson was, going into the pros as a 19-year-old. Throughout the 6-6 Bryant’s career at Lower Merion High in the Philadelphia suburbs, there was simply no opposition that could contain him.

  With excellent grades and college board scores, he could have gone to any college he wanted, including LaSalle, where his father, Joe “Jelly Bean” Bryant, who had played professional ball eight years in the NBA and eight more in Europe, was an assistant coach.

  The young Bryant’s polished offensive skills meant that he could hold his own in those high-test Philly pickup games that featured big-name college talent and occasional 76ers. All of which meant that he came into the NBA with a certain confidence, almost an air of assumption.

  It wasn’t an entirely smooth ride, though. First came the injuries that got his season off to a late start. Then, even when he did return to active duty, he found Laker coach Del Harris using him sparingly, partly because the pro game’s busy schedule allows so little time for practice and developing young players. Bryant went on to average 7.1 points while getting to play about 15 minutes a night his first season.

  The primary reason for his dramatic improvement his second season was the work Bryant put in over the summer. He took a quick promotional trip to Europe and completed a summer school course in Italian at UCLA, but beyond that he spent his days and nights developing his game.

  “It’s non paralleled,” Del Harris said of Bryant’s work ethic, another reason people compare him to Jordan. “He doesn’t waste a minute. Before practice, after practice, during the summer, whenever. Kobe doesn’t waste any motion.”

  “I drive myself,” Bryant explained, saying that work was more important than play. “I like to go out and have fun and have a good time. But I just don’t feel right. While I’m out having a good time, I could be playing basketball or something, could be lifting weights. I could be working on something.”

  His coaches saw this intensity as his response to the challenge of the NBA. “As a rookie he had the chance to kind of grow up a little bit,” Larry Drew said. “It was a tough year for him last year, but he handled it well. He’s got that one year under his belt. There was a little bit of maturity that goes along with that. He got to see what the whole NBA life was about. He made a good adjustment. He’s not surprised by many things any more. And I try to stay in his ear as much as I can about things that happen out on the floor. He absorbs it, and he very much wants to learn.”

  Indeed, in the fourth quarter of his game against Jordan, Bryant stopped the Chicago star to ask a question about posting up. “He ask me about my post-up move, in terms of, ‘Do you keep your legs wide? Or do you keep your legs tight?’ Jordan said. “It was kind of shocking. I felt like an old guy when he asked me that.

  “I told him on the offensive end you always try to feel and see where the defensive player is. In the post-up on my turnaround jump shot, I always use my legs to feel where the defense is playing so I can react to the defense.”

  Jordan added that Bryant’s biggest challenge would be “harnessing what he knows and utilizing what he’s got and implementing it on the floor. That’s tough. That’s experience. That’s things that Larry Bird and Magic Johnson all taught me. There’s no doubt that he has the skills to take over a basketball game.”

  Bryant said his answer to Jordan was to “try to play my heart out. Michael loves challenges. He loves to answer the bell. But at the same time, my father always taught me growing up that you never back down to no man, no matter how great of a basketball player he is. If he’s fired up, you get fired up. You go out there, and you go skill for skill and you go blow for blow.”

  Jordan himself admitted to being a bit awed by the aerial talent on display. His Airness confided, “I asked Scottie Pippen, ‘Did we used to jump like that? I don’t remember that.’ He said, ‘I think we did, but it’s so long ago I can’t remember it.’”

  The situation left Jordan feeling a little like he had been forced to play defense against himself. “I felt like I was in the same shoes of some of the other players I’ve faced,” Jordan explained. “He certainly showed signs that he can be a force whenever he’s in the game. He has a lot of different looks. As an offensive player, you want to give a lot of different looks, so that the defense is always guessing.”

  Given Bryant’s abilities, Jordan quipped that the next time instructional questions came up in the middle of a game he would charge Bryant for the lessons.

  “That just comes from competitiveness,” Bryant explained about asking Jordan for the tips. “You want to learn as much as you can. He told me a lot of things. I’ll use them.”

  What else did he learn from his first major encounter with Michael?

  “He does a great job of initiating the offense, making the proper cuts, getting his teammates open, whether it was with back picks or moving without the ball,” Bryant said of Jordan. “Even when he doesn’t have the ball, he makes himself visible, makes himself a threat, allowing guys like Luc Longley and Steve Kerr to get open. Those are the things that I learned from him, how to be a threat without the basketball.”

  Especially impressive was Bryant’s ability to post up effectively, a feature that most guards don’t share with Jordan. “He’s a very good low-post ball player,
because he has good foot work,” Larry Drew said of Bryant. “He’s good on both blocks, and he really, really uses both hands well. His left hand is solid. He has so much confidence in taking that little lefthand jump shot that it’s just unbelievable.”

  Perhaps the main lesson for Bryant was that the little things add up. In the second period, Jordan caught the young Laker off balance, went up for a jumper and drew the foul. It was a classic case of the veteran schooling the understudy. But Bryant went right back at him.

  “That’s the whole purpose of the game,” the 19-year-old said. “If somebody scores on you, you go right back at ‘em and try to make ‘em work back down on the other end.

  “He’s a very smart competitor,” Bryant said of Jordan. “I could tell that he thinks the game, whether it’s the tactical things or little strategies he employs on the court. I’m checking him out and analyzing him, so that I can do the same thing. But he’s just better at it, because he’s been doing it awhile. He’s very smart, very technical. You just don’t naturally acquire that. You can go into the NBA and be in the league a while and play games, but if you try to learn, and really push yourself to learn the game, not just from a physical standpoint but from a mental standpoint, you can get better.”

  Beyond the Bryant interlude, December for the Bulls was a month marked by a quiet nervousness. Would Pippen return to the team, or was the championship run about to come to a premature end? Unable to answer that question, Jackson and his players had to turn their attention to a host of milestones:

  On December 5th, the team played its first home game in three weeks and celebrated by holding Milwaukee to 62 points, setting a Bulls team record for the lowest output allowed an opponent. Surprisingly, despite Pippen’s absence, Chicago continued to lead the league in fewest points allowed. “They’re playing better,” Pippen said. “The stuff surrounding me sort of put them back on their heels. It took their mind off what they wanted to do. I think they’re going to be fine.”