The real breath-holding, however, came in Game 6 back in Utah, where the Jazz charged out early and Pippen came up with horrendous back spasms. The pain sent him to the locker room where a massage therapist literally pounded on his back trying to drive the spasms out. One team employee reported Krause standing back in a corner of the room, almost transfixed, watching Pippen absorb the blows, eager to get back in the game to help Jordan. The GM didn’t intrude upon the scene, but afterward, after Pippen had returned to the game and winced his way through the proceedings, giving Jordan just enough support to get to the end, some observers said that Krause seemed dramatically and genuinely changed in his opinion of Pippen.
“I just tried to gut it out,” Pippen said. “I felt my presence on the floor would mean more than just sitting in the locker room. I knew I was going to come back in the second half, but I just didn’t know how much I was going to be able to give.”
He returned to the game to run the offense as Jordan scored a magnificent 45 points, including the final jumper from the key after which Jordan stood poised, his arm draped in a follow through, savoring the moment, inhabiting the moment, frozen in that moment. Photos of the shot would show in the soft focus a number of Utah fans suspended there in agony with him, their hands covering eyes and ears, the ball hanging there in air, ready to swish for an 87-86 Chicago win. Cute.
“Things start to move very slowly and you start to see the court very well,” said Jordan, explaining the last play. “You start reading what the defense is trying to do. And I saw that. I saw the moment.”
The Jazz would get a final Stockton shot, but Ron Harper hustled to help him miss. When the ball had bounded away and the buzzer sounded, Jordan produced yet another of those moments to inhabit, this time with he and Jackson together in a prolonged embrace.
The emotion would carry them away from there, first on a peaceful plane ride home, shared with Krause and Reinsdorf and free of acrimony. Reinsdorf, known for his needling of others, liked to think that he was one of the few people in the organization who could trade barbs with Jordan and not come out a loser. He recalled that during the 1993 championship series Jordan was dealing blackjack on the plane and had instituted a rule that he won all ties, which for some reason his teammates accepted. “These guys were dumb enough to do it,” the team chairman recalled with a chuckle. In 1998, as the team headed back home after yet another championship, there was Jordan, enjoying perhaps his last card game in the sweet privacy of the team plane. The mood was light, and Reinsdorf couldn’t resist a needle. This time Jordan was dealing tonk. “You making up your own rules again so you can take advantage of these guys?” the chairman asked.
“That’s the way to stay on top,” Jordan replied.
He played his fill, squeezing every last drop from the moment, but with an hour still to go in the flight he could do no more, and an exhausted Jordan found a quiet place to curl up in deep sleep. He would awaken, of course, from the dream to find that Jackson had ridden off on his motorcycle after turning down Reinsdorf’s late offer to stay with the team. Another year trading insults and hard lines with Krause just wasn’t worth it, no matter how exhilarating the finishes. “I told Phil we wanted him back the Wednesday night after we won the title during our office celebration,” Reinsdorf insisted. “I sat down with Phil and told him, ‘If you’ve changed your mind, we want you back, no conditions, whether Scottie and Michael come back or not.’ He said, ‘That’s very generous.’ I told him, ‘Generosity has nothing to do with it. You’ve earned it.’
“He took a deep breath,” Reinsdorf said, “and then he said, ‘No, I have to step back.’”
As for the rest of them, the players, their futures would be frozen in another summer of charged NBA labor deliberations. Who knew where it would end up?
All they really had, as Jackson had told them, was the moment. The sweet, sad, wonderful moment. And that was more than enough.
Epilogue
It almost didn’t happen, Jerry Reinsdorf would admit later. The Bulls came very close in the summer of 1997 to giving up on their hopes for a sixth championship. He and Jerry Krause doubted that they would be good enough to win another title, and there was an enticing offer from the Boston Celtics for Pippen.
“We considered giving up a shot at the sixth title to begin rebuilding, and we would have given it up if we could have made the right deal,” Reinsdorf said. “The reason we considered breaking the team up is that we wanted to minimize the period of time between winning the last championship and getting back into contention with the next team.”
Pippen was going into the last year of his contract, and if they didn’t trade him they would get nothing for him in a trade.
Krause kept upping the ante with the Celtics. Ultimately, the Bulls didn’t get what they wanted, so they kept the team together.
The reward for that, Reinsdorf said, was the franchise’s unexpected sixth title in 1998.
Both he and Krause figured the price for that title was steep. “We now have very little to trade, very little to work with in rebuilding,” Reinsdorf said.
Their other option, of course, would have been to offer Pippen a nice fat contract extension before the 1997-98 season. But that wasn’t their history. In the past, they could have signed key players for lesser sums, but many times they had waited, had found some means of offending those players, and had then been forced to sign them for much more. Or they had watched those players walk away, as Horace Grant did in 1994. Chip Schaefer pointed out that if they’d been just a bit nicer, the Bulls could have probably re-signed Grant with no more effort than a good steak dinner.
As it was, the Bulls somehow found a way to anger and insult their key players.
Suddenly, in the aftermath of the 1998 playoffs, they found themselves needing Pippen very badly. They needed Pippen back on the roster for 1999 to entice Jordan to stay. And they needed Jordan to keep from plunging into the abyss of miserable losing, the fate they had dreaded for years.
“I really admired what he did,” Krause said of Pippen’s insistence on playing with a bad back in Game 6. “At halftime I didn’t think there was any way he was gonna play. He was hurtin’.”
But Pippen’s response to the new appreciation management expressed for him would have to wait until the league’s labor problems were settled, which left both Krause and Reinsdorf hanging in doubt as the columnists for Chicago’s newspapers took turns whacking them for chasing away the greatest team in NBA history.
Reindorf assured Jordan that he could take the entire summer of 1998 before deciding his future. “I told him the money would be there under the salary cap,” the chairman pointed out. Because he owned 100 percent of the corporation that managed the Bulls as general partner for the team’s limited partnership, the power was Reinsdorf’s alone to wield. How much did he want to pay?
Players and coaches think only about the present, never about the future, Reinsdorf said. “Michael couldn’t care less about what happens after he leaves.”
The chairman did sense that Jordan wanted to keep playing but only if Pippen returned.
The first sign of danger had actually come with Jackson’s indifference to Resindorf’s late offer to return. “Jerry and I talked about making the offer to him,” Krause said. “Could I have lived with Phil another year? Yeah. For the good of the franchise. My personal relationship with Phil did not hurt the franchise. It got crazy. That’s true. There was no love lost between Phil and I. But we could have done it. We could have worked together for another year. No one can say I’m not an organization man.”
Jackson told Rick Telander that he might have stayed if management had asked him to hang around until after Jordan finished his career. “But they never suggested that,” Jackson said.
For Jackson’s replacement, Krause gathered a list of a half dozen candidates with his only declaration being that the next
Bulls coach would definitely not be represented by an agent.
Did Krause actually think that he could go back and start all over again? Conjure up all this magic again?
The answer to that lay in a simple, hubris-filled comment the GM made after Jordan hit the shot in Salt Lake City to win the sixth championship. “Jerry and I have done it six times now,” Krause told Phil Rosenthal of the Sun Times.
It was one final sour note on his theme from October. Organizations do win championships.
He was wrong, of course. These were and are Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls. Always have been. Always will be.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following for answering my questions: Terry Armour, Marty Burns, Jud Buechler, Scott Burrell, Bill Cartwright, Horace Grant, Ron Harper, John Jackson, Phil Jackson, Michael Jordan, Steve Kerr, Joe Kleine, Jerry Krause, Toni Kukoc, Rusty LaRue, Bruce Levine, John Ligmanowski, Luc Longley, Kent McDill, Scottie Pippen, Jerry Reinsdorf, Dennis Rodman, Jim Rose, Chip Schaefer, Sam Smith, Rick Telander, Rod Thorn, Mark Vancil, Bill Wennington, Tex Winter and numerous others (you know who you are).
For their friendship and guidance, I would like to thank L.J. Beaty, George Mumford, Bill Kovarik, David Halberstam, Mike Hudson, Mike Shank, Lindy Davis, Billy Packer, Kay Kuhn, Susan Storey, Heather Lowhorn, Greg and Lindy Boeck, Marty Burns, Jeff Joniak, Steve Kashul, Scott McCoy, Cheryl Raye, Mark Vancil, Rick Telander, Joe Austin, Ron Anderson and Mark Morrison.
I have a number of people to thank for making this project possible. First, Bob Snodgrass, the publisher at Addax, and his assistants Darcie Kidson, Sharon Snodgrass, and Michelle Washington, all helped guide it through the publishing process. Then, of course, there’s my wife Karen and children Jenna, Henry and Morgan, who somehow manage to cope with the crazy nature of my work.
I want to acknowledge the work of the dozens of writers and reporters who have covered the NBA, including Mitch Albom, Terry Armour, Lacy J. Banks, Jesse Barkin, Terry Boers, Gary Seymour, Mike Nadel, Jim O’Donnell, Cheryl Raye, Mitch Chortkoff, Robert Falkoff, Bill Gleason, Scott Howard-Cooper, Mike Imrem, Melissa Isaacson, John Jackson, Paul Ladewski, Bernie Lincicome, Bob Logan, Jay Mariotti, Kent McDill, Corky Meinecke, Mike Mulligan, Fred Mitchell, Skip Myslenski, Glenn Rogers, Steve Rosenbloom, Phil Rosenthal, Skip Bayless, Eddie Sefko, Gene Seymour, Sam Smith, Ray Sons, Paul Sullivan, Mike Tulumello, Mark Vancil, Bob Verdi, Scoop Jackson, Kerry Eggers, Michael Bradley, Terry Pluto, Tourre, Mike Kahn, Michael Hunt, Martin Frank and many, many others. Their work has been invaluable. Extensive use was made of a variety of publications, including the ESPN Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Slam, Toronto Globe and Mail, Waterbury Republican, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Inside Stuff, Lindy’s Pro Basketball Annual, the Akron Beacon Journal, Baltimore Sun, Basketball Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Defender, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Copley Newspapers, Daily Southtown, The Detroit News, The Detroit Free Press, The Daily Herald, Hoop Magazine, Houston Post, Houston Chronicle, Inside Sports, Los Angeles Times, The National, New York Daily News, The New York Times, New York Post, The Charlotte Observer, USA Today, The Oregonian, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Antonio Express-News, Sport, Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News, Street & Smith’s Pro Basketball Yearbook, and The Washington Post.
Also vital were several books, including:
And Now, Your Chicago Bulls! by Roland Lazenby
Bull Run! by Roland Lazenby
Bull Session by Johnny Kerr and Terry Pluto
Michael Jordan by Mitchell Krugel
Rare Air by Michael Jordan with Mark Vancil
Sportswit by Lee Green
The Bob Verdi Collection by Bob Verdi
The Glory and the Dream by William Manchester
The Jordan Rules by Sam Smith
The Sporting News NBA Official Guide and Register
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