“There were times, a few years before the flagrant foul rules,” Pippen recalled, “when guys would have a breakaway and [the Pistons] would cut their legs out from under them. Anything to win a game. That’s not the way the game is supposed to be played. I remember once when Michael had a breakaway, and Laimbeer took him out. There was no way he could have blocked the shot. When you were out there playing them, that was always in the back of your mind, to kind of watch yourself.”
The series developed as a classic, with each team winning tight battles at home to tie it at 3-3 heading into Game 7 at the Palace of Auburn Hills. The Pistons had homecourt advantage, and the Bulls could only watch as things went dreadfully wrong, beginning with John Paxson’s badly sprained ankle and Pippen’s migraine headache just before tipoff.
“Scottie had had migraines before,” recalled former Bulls trainer Mark Pfeil. “He actually came to me before the game and said he couldn’t see. I said, ‘Can you play?’ He started to tell me no, and Michael jumped in and said, ‘Hell, yes, he can play. Start him. Let him play blind.’ Horace kind of backed up a little bit that game, too. It was more a matter of maturity than wimping out. It took a certain period of time before they would stand up and say, ‘Damn it, I’ve been pushed to the wall enough.’ Scottie played with the headache, and as the game went on he got better.”
“It grabbed me and wouldn’t let go,” Pippen later explained. “It’s something the fans will never let die. Then again, it’s something I look over. I really don’t think much about it.”
Pippen played, but the entire roster seemed lost. They fell into a deep hole in the second quarter and never climbed out. “My worst moment as a Bull was trying to finish out the seventh game that we lost to the Pistons in the Palace,” Jackson recalled. “There was Scottie Pippen with a migraine on the bench, and John Paxson had sprained his ankle in the game before. I just had to sit there and grit my teeth and go through a half in which we were struggling to get in the ball game. We had just gone through a second period that was an embarrassment to the organization.”
The burden of the loss fell on Pippen. Everyone, from the media to his own teammates, had interpreted the headache as a sign of faintheartedness. Lost in the perspective was the fact that the third-year forward had recently buried his father.
Determined to prove his detractors wrong, Pippen answered with his play over the 1990-91 season. A gifted swing player, Pippen performed with determination, playing 3,014 minutes, averaging nearly 18 points, seven rebounds and six assists.
“I thought about it all summer,” he said of the migraine. “I failed to produce last season.”
“For Pippen, it was ultimately taking him from being a wing into a point guard role,” Jackson said. “He became a guy who now had the ball as much as Michael. He became a dominant force.”
Finally mature, the Bulls swept Detroit in the conference finals. Then Pippen discovered in the league championship series that he was up to the task of guarding Magic Johnson. The Bulls claimed their first championship with a 108-101 in Game 5 in Los Angeles. Pippen led the scoring with 32 points. “I thought that Scottie Pippen would be, at best, a very good journeyman player in this league,” Utah executive Frank Layden told Lacy Banks of the Sun Times in the aftermath. “But to tell you the truth now, I’d have to think real hard not to place him as the second best player in this league. I think he’s that good. I get the feeling that his development has been enhanced by playing alongside Jordan. He’s picked up some good habits from him.”
“It was just a matter of him believing in himself,” Jordan said of Pippen. “When he got here, just playing with him, you could see he had all the right tools. It took some time for him to get his confidence on this level because he was competing against some of the best.”
HARP
Ron Harper knew that as a friend of Scottie Pippen’s there were just some things that you didn’t ask him. For example, you didn’t ask him about Jerry Krause. Pippen was an emotional guy, and you just didn’t go digging into his emotions like that. “I stay away from that subject,” Harper said.
It was important to the Bulls that Harper was a big, athletic, veteran guard with the ability to defend smaller, quicker players. The fact that Harper was also a sensitive, understanding person with a huge heart would make his contributions immeasurable.
“Our relationship has been as close as any player on this ball club in the short time that we’ve played together,” Pippen said of Harper. “Our relationship started before we became teammates. From what I know of people around the league, Ron has the greatest heart of anybody that plays the game. Everybody loves him for being himself. He’s always a respectful guy, he never has a change or a mood swing or anything like that. I mean he’s just always the same guy, always the same even keel.”
Above everything else, it was Harper’s friendship and good nature that would eventually bring Pippen back to the Bulls. But it was a slow process. “That wasn’t corrected in a day,” trainer Chip Schaefer said of the emotional damage done by Pippen’s outburst on the team bus in Seattle. “That thing happened in November, and he didn’t come back till January. It took weeks and weeks and weeks of his teammates saying please come back and play. It was a big deal. It took a long time.”
Of all the Bulls coaches and players, the 34-year-old Harper was perhaps the most patient with Pippen. Then again, Harper was quite familiar with the healing process, having been through a devastating knee injury that cost him a chunk of two seasons while playing for the Los Angeles Clippers. A slashing scorer, Harper had always relied on his athleticism until the 1990 injury. But major reconstructive surgery had robbed him of that, or at least he thought it had. Only with the help of then Clippers coach Larry Brown had he been able to overcome the mental barriers to regaining his aggressiveness. Harper quickly understood that at heart Brown was a teacher and a patient one. “He was the kind of coach who loved teaching young guys, who loved to work with you on your game,” Harper recalled. “That’s why Larry Brown has been a great college coach, because he’s a great teacher and knows how to teach this game.”
If there was anything that Harper admired, it was a teacher, someone full of soul and love and understanding. At Miami of Ohio Harper had majored in physical education with an emphasis in learning disabilities, and during his five years in Los Angeles had become actively involved with Widney High, a school for disabled young people. Harper himself had overcome a halting speech pattern. He knew every inch of the depths of frustration, and he knew that patience was critical to finding your way out. The process that he had been through made Harper aware of the patience that would be necessary for Pippen to heal mentally and physically. He also knew that when the time was right, the patience would have to end. Then it would be time to push.
And by January that time had come. Pippen had made public statements suggesting that he might have come back sooner, suggesting that he was ready physically before he was mentally. But that really wasn’t the case, said Schaefer. The big problem was that Pippen had gone months without activity. Sure, he could dunk as he showed the media briefly. But in reality he didn’t have the conditioning or health to leap and run and move constantly in an NBA game.
Ideally, he would have had surgery immediately after the 1997 season, but circumstances conspired to prevent that.
“The thinking would have been to get something done as soon as possible after the season in order to have ample rehab time,” Schaefer said. “For some reason he wanted to delay it, and somehow we lost touch with him. Actually what wound up happening is that June became July, and summer league and things went on.”
During the first week of August, Pippen made a public appearance in the Chicago area for a book signing and told the Sun Times’ John Jackson that his foot was still troubling him. Schaefer read that and was immediately alarmed.
“Lo and behold Scottie reveals to everyb
ody involved that his foot’s still killing him and not any better than it was in June,” said the trainer.
Schaefer hadn’t seen or heard from Pippen in the two months since the ‘97 championship series and had presumed no news was good news. But upon reading Jackson’s story, the trainer phoned the star and asked if foot still hurt. Pippen said yes, it did and that he probably should have something done.
Part of the problem, Schaefer said, was that Pippen was angry with the team and Krause over the trade talks and subsequent rumors throughout July. Once it became known that he might need additional treatment, a round of medical opinions became necessary. The situation was further clouded by the fact that Pippen played in Vin Baker’s benefit game and seemed healthy, but his play there in part apparently prompted Krause to fax the letter to Pippen cautioning him not to play in Pippen’s own charity game. That letter only sparked Pippen’s anger.
The issue was further inflamed when the player’s representative wanted another medical opinion from a New York foot guru. The team mentioned Pippen taking a commercial flight to see the specialist. “His agent wound up handing the Bulls a couple thousand dollar bill for a private plane,” Schaefer said. “They wanted to know why he couldn’t fly commercial.”
The result of all the miscommunication and disagreement was that Pippen didn’t undergo surgery until October, after training camp had started. “In theory, if all things were as they should have been, the surgery should have happened in June,” Schaefer said.
As it was, the rehab took weeks, which only left Pippen to suffer atrophy. Team officials were astounded in December to discover that Pippen’s vertical leap had fallen off by nearly two feet, down to a little more than a foot, due to the previous months of inactivity.
“The reality was he hadn’t done anything, so it was a four or five month rehab,” Schaefer said. “He had lost his explosive power. It was poor. It was much poorer.”
As a result, it took him weeks of physical work, not to mention mental healing, to be ready to play. “The timing was right,” Schaefer said of Pippen’s return in mid January. “We probably needed a good eight weeks to get his body right, and we needed just as long to get his head right. He came back as soon as he could come back. The deficits in his strength and his power and stuff were genuine.”
Even as he healed physically, it wasn’t clear that he would rejoin the Bulls. Finally even Harper ran out of patience. “Finally I just told him he had to come back,” Harper said with a smile, “that I wasn’t going to let him leave me there by myself.”
“Having a friend makes things much smoother for you,” Pippen said. “You don’t want to be in a situation where you don’t have a close friend, because it makes you feel worse than what the situation really is.”
The bonds of that friendship were strong enough to make Pippen go back in the face of his public declarations. He had said he would never again play for the Bulls.
But he did.
“I love Pip,” Harper said with a sly smile. “That’s my man there. Every now and then he gets on my nerves. But Pip is a great character, even though some of the fans probably don’t think that. They may see all the things that he has done off the floor.”
Without question, Pippen had made his share of public missteps during his career, from being arrested on a weapons charge to once accusing Chicago’s white fans of favoring white players. But Harper and his teammates saw an entirely different person from the image projected to the public. Pippen’s unselfishness had prompted Kerr to describe him as one of the best teammates he’d ever had. Not every Bull had those feelings about Jordan, but they did about Pippen.
Harper had even seen his goodness from afar, dating to their earliest days in the league. In the late 1980s, Harper was the star offensive weapon for the Cleveland Cavaliers and Pippen was a budding star. They got to know each other through Charles Oakley, who was then Pippen’s Chicago teammate. In the offseason, Pippen and Harper began hanging out together. “To party, have fun,” Harper explained.
“Since then, we’ve just kind of allowed things to evolve,” Pippen agreed.
The Bulls got better and better in those years and played later and later into the season, meaning that Harper, who played first for the Cavs and then the Clippers, began hitting up Pippen for playoff tickets. “My season would end and their season would still be going on,” Harper said, “so every time I came to town I would call up Pip and say, ‘Pip, I need some seats to a game.’ And he would say, ‘OK, park back in the back. Tell Sam back in the back that you’re coming, and I’ll take care of you.’ So he always gave me seats.”
Then timing enhanced their good fortune. Jordan had left the game abruptly in the fall of 1993, and that next spring Harper became a free agent. The Bulls needed a big guard, a big scorer, someone to help them battle Orlando and the Magic’s big guards in the Eastern Conference. Harper, at 6-6, had just played 75 games and averaged 20.1 points per game for the Clippers.
“We knew then that we needed bigger guards,” Pippen recalled. “We had B.J. (Armstrong) at that time, and had had Pax. We needed some more size to be able to match up with Orlando better, and I felt Ron was gonna be a fit for us, that he could give us that missing link, that missing component we needed to get to the next level to be able to compete with Orlando.”
So Pippen went to Jackson with his idea about Harper. “Phil’s always been one to listen to my opinions,” Pippen explained. “Even during games he’s allowed me the opportunity to orchestrate the offense or run whatever I feel like we need to get the right motion out on the court. He was just willing to listen, to see how I felt about Ron. He knew that I had a relationship with him. They tried to sort of use that to our advantage to get him. After Michael retired, Ron was a big guard, someone that we needed whether Michael came back or not.”
Harper said that he and Pippen had talked about his becoming a Bull. “Once I got a chance to become free, Pip went and told Phil and them, ‘Sign Ron.’ That’s how I became a Chicago Bull.”
“When we brought Harper in, we felt that if he could regain some of his old skills, his old abilities after the knee injuries he’d had, he could be an ideal player for us because of his size,” Tex Winter said.
Harper signed a six-year deal with Chicago for plump millions, then promptly found himself facing one of the toughest tests of his career—the triangle offense. Like most players, he found the adjustment frustrating, agonizing. His scoring average plummeted to under seven points a game. Then, just when he had begun to spark a connection with the offense, Michael Jordan returned to the game, and Harper’s playing time shifted dramatically.
Soon the whisper circuit around the NBA had Harper pegged as finished, his legs gone, his game headed for moth balls. The circumstances left Harper understandably despondent, struggling through the lowest point in his 9-year career. “Suicide was an option,” he would say later, only half jokingly. “It was something I learned from. It was frustrating, but my friend had a frustrating year, too,” he said, referring to Pippen, who had spent much of the ‘95 season fighting with management, “and we both grew.”
Out of that growth came Harper’s motivation to show everybody just how wrong they were about the status of his career.
In the wake of the Bulls’ 1995 playoff loss to Orlando, Jackson realized that Harper could be part of the answer and told him so in their season-ending conference—if Harper would dedicate himself to offseason conditioning. “Phil let Ron know that we very definitely were counting on him to be a big part of the team,” Winter said. “I think that helped Ron no end. Phil put it to him in no uncertain terms: ‘You gotta go out and get yourself ready to play.’ And Ron did that, he really prepared himself.”
“Phil asked me what my role was going to be on this team,” Harper recalled, “and I told him, ‘When Michael returns, I’ll be a player who plays defense and fills the spot. If the
re’s a chance to score, I’ll score.’ I think that we felt as a team that we had something to prove. And on my own I had something to prove. I figured this was going to be a very good ball club … I trained hard. I felt that last year I definitely didn’t have the legs to play the style here. I had to learn that, too.”
The situation was further clouded by the fact that the NBA endured a lockout during a collective bargaining standoff that summer of 1995, and Harper was forbidden from having contact with the team. Not to be deterred, he conducted all of his conditioning on his own, with a trainer.
And when he returned that fall, he had remade his game into that of a defensive specialist, much as Michael Cooper of the Los Angeles Lakers remade himself from a high-flying scorer into a great specialist. It soon became clear that for major stretches of games Harper could take on the toughest defensive assignment, leaving Jordan and Pippen to patrol the passing lanes for steals and transition baskets, what would become the teeth of Chicago’s attack.
How valuable was Harper? That became apparent when his knee problems flared up during the 1996 league championship series against Seattle. With Harper out of two games, it became obvious that the pressure dropped in Chicago’s defense. Pippen or Jordan had to take the primary assignment and were no longer free to terrorize the passing lanes as effectively as they had before.
It was no coincidence that when Harper returned for Game 6 and gave the Bulls big minutes despite his knee problems, the pressure returned to Chicago’s defense, and the Bulls rode that to their fourth championship.
“It’s very rare that you find guards of that size who have the ability to defend,” Pippen said, “and Ron is a guy that I think is a very, very underrated defensive player. I think he could get a lot of credit for his defensive ability, and he’s never been rewarded for it.”
Blood on the Horns Page 25
