Blood on the Horns

by Roland Lazenby

  Afterward, reporters ribbed Kerr about shooting so quickly. “I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen you shoot on your first touch,” the Daily Herald’s Kent McDill told him.

  “I felt like Bill Wennington,” Kerr replied, the joke being that Wennington was known for being so eager to get his shots in that Jordan called him “trampoline hands.”

  “Vinnie Johnson is gone,” another reporter told Kerr, “but you might be Microwave II. You didn’t waste any time getting that shot.”

  Kerr laughed and said he wasn’t a threat to the former Pistons’ sixth man who was known for heating up off the bench in a hurry. “He’s got nothing to worry about,” Kerr said. “They might call me like the Toaster Oven or something. But it probably wouldn’t work very well.”

  Kerr, the league’s all-time leader in three-point field goal percentage, was viewed as a critical element for the Bulls’ bench. His injury, plus the recurring knee troubles of center Luc Longley had left the Bulls searching for rotations even while they won. The time off, though, worked in his favor, Kerr said. “This last two months has been great for me because, while I was healing I was really kind of getting refreshed and mentally prepared. I stayed in shape physically, and I’m just so excited to be back playing. Sometimes in the long course of a season, you can get kind of worn down and you lose a little of your spirit. I’m just so fired up to be back.

  “That’s one of the things about injuries, you have a lot of time to think,” he explained. “I really thought about my situation here and my future, and I realized that early in the season I was probably pressing a little bit because of the uncertainty over next year, me being a free agent and nobody knowing what was happening with the team. I realized that I was gonna have probably 20 games left and then the playoffs. And then, who knows? That might be it. So I better enjoy it and be aggressive and try to have as much as fun as I can when I do come back.”

  His explanation was a window to how many of the Bulls felt. Scott Burrell, for example, had battled his insecurities about the triangle offense, which was predicated on the Bulls’ players reading the defense and reacting, much like a quarterback in football reads defenses and reacts. That was one reason it was difficult to learn.

  “Each pass is a different option, and no plays are really called,” Burrell explained. “When a pass was thrown in, I had to think about it first, instead of just reacting. And you can’t play while you’re thinking. You gotta keep a clear mind. When I got the ball, I didn’t know what to do about passing. I didn’t know about shooting or doing anything else with it. The way they teach you makes it a lot easier. It takes them a long time to teach you, but after that, it’s so much easier.”

  It was pointed out that Jordan had developed a trust in former Bulls guard John Paxson, and eventually trust in Kerr. Jordan knew that when he passed to them, odds were they would knock down the open shot. Burrell had begun to find his open shots in the offense. Had Jordan come to him and expressed a confidence?

  “Nah. He’s not gonna come and talk to me,” Burrell said and laughed. “I’ll find out for myself. If I’m open and he throws me the pass, then we’ll know.”

  Without question, Burrell’s growing comfort in the offense was adding to Chicago’s depth. But the injuries and Caffey’s trade had left the players questioning their ability to dominate a playoff series the way they had in recent seasons. “I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to get to that point from a personnel standpoint,” Kerr admitted. “We’re just not as deep as we have been. But I think we can still win the championship. It’s going to be more difficult.”

  At first it was reported that Knick and Jordan friend Charles Oakley had gotten Jordan’s red shoes in the wake of the Garden game. But Bulls equipment man John Ligmanowski had secured them for his private collection. Jordan admitted as much the next week. “My right foot has always been 13 1/2. My left foot has always been 13. And everybody said I tried to squeeze my foot into a 12. That was not true,” Jordan said, though he admitted the shoes had given him blisters.

  Regardless, the touch had been well worth it from an entertainment standpoint. Beyond that, it had allowed him to score big points in his public relations battle with the two Jerrys. “That move was a brilliant public relations move,” said John Jackson of the Sun Times, “because it brings attention to the fact that he’s serious about retiring because in his own mind he considers this his last game in Madison Square Garden, so he’s looking to make it special. Obviously, this isn’t an idle threat. Doing it this way, by using the red shoes, he doesn’t have to come out and say it. He doesn’t have to say, ‘I’m retiring.’ He doesn’t put himself in a position to look like a spoiled athlete.”

  It was obvious that Jordan was campaigning against management, but he appeared to be rethinking his position, observed Bruce Levine, the reporter for WMVP radio. “I’ve never seen anything like it. He has been an open book to talk about the contract, where the team should go, about Phil and his destiny with Phil. But he’s kind of changed his opinion over the last six or seven weeks, but it’s more of a wait and see policy now. If Michael Jordan does change his mind and play for another coach, who’s gonna say anything?”

  Kerr agreed that Jordan was campaigning, but seemed to be doing so with a sense of frustration. “He speaks up,” Kerr said, “but there’s not a whole lot he can do. Everyone kind of assumes that if he wants he can just step in and just kind of take over the whole organization. But it doesn’t work that way. He’s wants people’s respect, but he’s still going to respect management. But he doesn’t go overboard, like Scottie or someone like that.”

  Pippen was asked if he was amazed that Krause and Reinsdorf would let Jordan and the rest of the team just walk away from the game. “I’m looking toward that,” he said, “so it doesn’t amaze me at all. I think change is good for you at some time. Maybe it’s just that time for me.”

  Kerr, though, had a definite opinion. “It’s unfortunate,” he said. “I think Scottie deserves to be a Bull for his entire career. But if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen.”

  Keeping Krause from breaking up the team was obviously Jordan’s goal, John Jackson said. “The reason Jordan’s saying his leaving is not a hundred percent a done deal is that in his own way he’s putting enough public pressure on them to put them in the position where they can’t really do that. If they break this team up and try to start rebuilding next year, the team’s not gonna be that great. They’re talking about building another championship club, but that’s gonna take another five or six years down the road minimum. They’re gonna have to get through a tough period. They’re gonna have to have the support of the public and the fans before they can do that. What Jordan’s campaign does now is basically back them in a corner, where public sentiment is so much against them that they’re gonna have no choice but to back down.”

  Kent McDill of the Daily Herald said, “Krause doesn’t want to be the man who chases Michael out of the game. He just wants to get rid of Phil. He wants a coach who respects him. He likes to be a kingmaker, and he feels that Phil doesn’t give him the respect he deserves for putting him in a position to be considered one of the top ten coaches in NBA history.”

  “To be honest,” said the Sun Times’ Jackson, “if I was Krause and I was in his position, I think I would want to change coaches right now, too. I think it’s time. I think Phil’s a little burned out in this job. He has changed a lot, and he has gotten a bit arrogant. The decision to change coaches is a valid one, and I think Krause is right on about that. But the problem with it is, Jordan has aligned himself so heavily with Phil. Sometimes perception is more important than reality. And the perception is that if Krause makes a coaching change now, he and Reinsdorf are showing no loyalty to Phil, they’re just kicking him in the ass.”

  “I don’t see any reason,” said Kent McDill, “why this whole thing just couldn’t keep on going.”


  PLAYBACK

  If the springtime meant that Jordan had to campaign to keep his once-in-a-lifetime team together, it also afforded him rare occasions to sit back and reflect on just what his career had meant to him. Sometimes these moments would come in the hours before a road game, sitting around with a few reporters. These sessions disappeared as the season tightened. But when the mood and circumstances allowed, he would sip his pre-game coffee with cream and sugar and visit the past and sometimes the future.

  If he wanted, he could have simply ducked into a private screening room at home and opened up his library of videotape, for just about any selection from any point in his career. “I got it all on tape,” he explained. “Everything that was on TV, I got it.”

  Regardless, he had not viewed any of it. “I don’t watch it because I’m still building it up, building up that library,” he said. “I think a library is something where if I want to refresh my memory, I can. But right now my memory is still good. I don’t want to feel like I’m losing my memory, like I have to go back and refresh it. It’s special for my kids. I know where I’ve been, and I know pretty much a lot of the games that I’ve had, against who, and what my thoughts were at the time. I’m a library in terms of the game, in terms of my participation. So whenever I start losing that, then maybe that’s a good place to go back and replace those memories.”

  How good was his memory? Asked about a 1983 game against the University of Virginia, he knew it immediately. In the closing minutes he had stunned the crowd at University Hall in Charlottesville by soaring across the lane to block the shot of 7-foot-4 center Ralph Sampson. “That was back in young days,” he said, admitting that he had no idea he could make the block. “I surprised myself. That was the beauty of my game, and it has propelled me to my career to some degree. No one could sit there and tell you that I could do anything. I couldn’t tell you what I couldn’t do and what I could. And that was the beauty of everything. Even today, you can’t sit here and tell me what I can do and what I can’t.”

  “The surprises of your athletic feats aren’t gone yet?” he was asked.

  “That’s my whole point,” he said. “That’s the beauty of the game. Even I don’t know what I can do. If I knew, why would I play?”

  His favorite Bulls championship was 1996, he said. “That’s the first time I really came back and focused on my career without my father. That was probably my best.”

  Even that, however, didn’t outrank the 1981 NCAA championship team he played on at North Carolina. “It’s hard to outrank Carolina,” he explained, “because that started everything. The confidence, the knowledge, and everything I gained from that, is without question the beginning of Michael Jordan as a whole. So the beginning is always going to outweigh everything else that has happened since.”

  Yet he also acknowledged that his favorite championship could be ahead of him. “It’s not resolved until I say, ‘I’m done.’ Until I accept it,” he said. “Until I accept it, that’s all that matters.”

  He also held plenty of sweet feelings about the thousands of hours of practice over the years, another factor that set him apart. “It becomes such a routine for me that I don’t view it as hard,” he said. “I guess the hard thing about it is when you think about other players who should have those same feelings but yet they don’t. That’s the hard part. And that’s probably why I’d never be able to coach, because I have a whole different perception about how you should do things and how you shouldn’t. I could easily get frustrated watching other people not take advantage of an opportunity given to them.

  “It’s not necessarily younger players,” he added. “It’s older players, too. Older players have bad habits, bad preparations for games and things like that. You could say it’s predominantly young players, because they’re young and have their future ahead of them. But some of the older players, veteran players, have bad habits, too.”

  When he came to the Bulls in 1984, he found a team held hostage by drug abusers and slackers, people with deeply negative attitudes. “I found bad habits that were multiplied because of bad things surrounding the team,” he recalled. “I’m not saying I had the perfect approach, but I had good habits. I was taught good habits. And I was able to utilize them for what was most important to me—basketball. I prepared myself. I practiced hard. I did all the necessary things to make myself a better basketball player. I’m not saying everybody should be like Michael Jordan in this situation. You can be your own person. But you’ve got the have the same outlook in terms of what you’re productivity’s going to be on the basketball court and how you want that to happen. It doesn’t happen just in games. It starts in practice, and that’s the way I approach it.”

  His experience had left him concerned about the future of the league. “One person can’t solve a multitude of problems, a multitude of concerns,” he said. “As a member of the NBA, I’m concerned that this league can be marketed to be, or misunderstood to be, spoiled kids with a lot of money, with no effort, no motivation, paid off of their potential, never reaching their highest potential because of the spoiling of athletes. I don’t want that attitude.

  “A long time ago,” he said, “people spoke of the league as no defense, just a lot of scoring and no fun to watch. Teams scoring 150 points or whatever. The league has worked on that image to where it’s very competitive. You can see the challenge, you can see the strategizing going on during an NBA game. But we’re certainly on the verge of losing that perception because of a lot of the things that have happened within the game. Once you get a crack in the armor, believe me, the whole armor is in danger because it becomes magnified and starts to spread and people start to look at the littlest things in the largest ways. For years they’ve done a great job of keeping things nice and tight, where other leagues have had their problems. Now as you look at it, baseball has come back to a certain degree. Football has certainly come back from their strike. And basketball now is showing cracks, and it’s gonna start to spread if you don’t take care of it.”

  One way to take care of basketball was to share the game’s immense wealth, he said. “Some of the money should go back into the communities. The player’s association should step forward. So should the league. It’s a very profitable situation. They should give back to the community in some form, if it’s the Team-Up situation, the Stay In School program, or some other expanded program, what they should do as well is support the ex NBA players, the guys who pioneered this whole process. That’s one of the points that should be talked about.”

  As a player he had obviously been a guardian of the game, which led to questions about his interest in becoming a team executive, like Jerry West of the Lakers.

  “When I walk away from the game, I’m separated, other than being a fan,” he said. “I have total admiration for what the game gave to me and certainly will have interest in seeing that other players maintain the success of the Chicago Bulls as well as the league.

  “I think I could make a pretty good GM,” he added. “If you tell me to manage my money, I could manage the dollars in terms of who I paid. But if the public’s perception of who deserves what interferes with that, then I couldn’t be a very good GM.”

  “Would you borrow from the Jerry Krause school of management?” he was asked.

  “Never,” he replied quickly. “It would be totally independent of the Jerry Krause school of management. I wouldn’t sneak around. I wouldn’t be the Sleuth. That’s one thing you wouldn’t call me.”

  “Your clothing line won’t have the Krause hat and coat?” he was asked.

  Jordan laughed. “Or the … Nothing.” He obviously started to say crumbs and thought better of it. “I almost slipped,” he said, still smiling. It was obvious he wanted to turn loose his full sense of humor, but this wasn’t the team bus.

  Did he see anything positive in Krause’s relationship with the team? “He works hard,”
Jordan said after a moment’s thought. “I give him credit. He works hard to make things successful, or he works hard to get you to like him, one of the two. He works hard. But really I don’t try to figure it out. I would rather save my energy.”

  Asked if there was anything in basketball he hadn’t done, he replied, “I haven’t won six championships.”

  TEXAS

  From their win in New York, the Bulls jetted back home briefly to notch a big win over the Heat before heading south for a two-game trip to Texas. First up were the Dallas Mavericks, a team stumbling through yet another misguided season. “I think we’re jelling now,” Jordan said, sitting in the locker room at Reunion Arena before the March 12h game. “I think we’re focused now. I think we’re trying to finish off the season right.”

  David Moore of the Dallas Morning News asked him if he had seen Kevin Garnett’s comment on national TV that he didn’t want to be one of the people coming into Chicago to play for the Bulls in the wake of Jordan’s acrimonious departure.

  Jordan laughed, fully enjoying the anecdote. “I think a lot of things have to be considered,” he said. “What do you say to the next team, the next stars that come in, from a management standpoint? You show a sense of loyalty to us, we’ll show a sense of loyalty to you? And do you believe that? Or do you just hear it? That’s the danger of what’s happening with this organization. What can you tell the next group of guys who come in to pursue a championship? Do you tell them the same things they told us? Or do you tell them something else that may have the same effect? That’s the key.”

  From there, the Bulls went out and ran up a decent lead against the struggling Mavericks. Chicago was up by 18 with about five minutes to go, and the fans were leaving in droves. But then the Bulls lost focus and watched the Mavs stage a strange comeback, aided by a succession of Bulls miscues and questionable calls, to tie it in regulation and win it in overtime. It was only the Bulls’ second loss since the All-Star break, but later they would look back on it as the place where they lost homecourt advantage against the Jazz. In the waning seconds of overtime, a disgusted Jackson sat on the bench, clipping his fingernails.