by Sam Smith
THE JORDAN RULES
The Inside Story of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls
by Sam Smith
Copyright
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, New York 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 2012 by Sam Smith
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For more information, email [email protected].
First Diversion Books edition July 2012.
ISBN: 978-1-938120-53-4
Introduction
So there was the time Mike Ditka called me a jerk, and the time Roy Williams said I didn’t know what I was talking about, whoever I was. There was the symbolic book burning on TV, and the time the wire services reported me missing after various threats. Yes, writing a sports book can be fun and enlightening.
It’s been two decades since The Jordan Rules was published, and we all pretty much know now what only those of us around the Bulls at that time knew: Michael Jordan is probably the most amazing basketball player anyone has ever seen, and he didn’t always quite work a room like Ghandi.
Michael has made out pretty well, and the years have been good to me, too. I left the Chicago Tribune in 2008 after almost 29 years, and I now write, of all places, on the Chicago Bulls Web site, Bulls.com. I suspect, as with The Jordan Rules, Michael still hasn’t read me in either place. Some people read The Jordan Rules today and ask me why people were so upset, though they constantly remark that it could be a literary achievement worthy of Tolstoy. Well, maybe that part isn’t true, but I am of Russian heritage. So, yes, I too can say I knew suffering when writing. Well, did you ever try the press room meal in Philadelphia?
It actually seemed more like history in reverse: The Jordan Rules was Tropic of Cancer before sensibilities and realities caught up. Man, the fans were mad. And then they realized, “Okay, that’s not too bad.” A few more championships did ease that concern.
Of course, all the hubbub did help land the book onto The New York Times bestseller list as high as Number 3, as I recall, and for about three months. I remember telling Norman Mailer at Elaine’s, “Norm, now with your prepositions…”
Not really. But I do remember the first time I saw Jordan after the book was published. He was sitting in the Bulls locker room after the team returned from the long annual November west coast “circus” road trip (named for the circus that came to town every year and kicked the Bulls out of the Chicago Stadium), which they had just swept for one of the only times in franchise history. Jordan was in his locker stall, his head down sorting through tickets to leave for family and friends. I walked over.
But let me tell you a little story first, about The Jordan Rules and how it all happened.
***
It was a dark and stormy Sunday night. Well, it was dark. I never thought about writing a book, any sort of book, and certainly not one about Jordan. I’d even been reluctant at first to follow the Bulls as the full-time beat writer. I’d been having a terrific time doing some backup for the regular beat guys, Bob Sakamoto and Bob Logan, and doing some big basketball features, like when I’d spent a weekend in Albany with Phil Jackson and his CBA team. But now I’d been on the beat a few seasons. It was exhilarating in many respects to live with a professional sports team, though back then it was more under the radar with the Bulls because they weren’t winning. Sure, Jordan was famous and cool, but the NBA was still Magic and Bird, and the rest of the season was a warm-up for their annual championship dance. There were no private planes or fancy hotels. We flew together, rode together and lived together. Jordan was the only Bull with an annual salary of $1 million. So it was a more intimate and comfortable setting, perhaps too comfortable. It was late summer of 1990, and after some time off I was again thinking about the upcoming season. I knew there was a story there fighting to be told, one I couldn’t quite completely tell as a daily beat writer, limited by the space in a daily newspaper.
I thought maybe I would write a book. After all, I’d known a lot of sportswriters who did that. I’d read their work. It wasn’t exactly art. I’d shrugged it off a year or so before when my Tribune colleague, Bob Greene, asked me whether anyone thought of writing a book about Jordan. There had been some instant paperback books. Rick Telander, who was then at Sports Illustrated, was trying to get Jordan to commit to a movie version of his book, Heaven Is a Playground. Mark Vancil, who was then with the Sun-Times, was talking to Jordan about an authorized biography (and would later do some coffee table-type books with Jordan). I didn’t take it all too seriously as Jordan and the Bulls then didn’t seem like such a big story, and I was busy enough with the daily beat. The Bulls were losing early in the playoffs, and though they were slowly gaining on the Pistons, it still didn’t seem like they could beat them.
But I thought it would be something to say that I wrote a book, sort of like climbing the Great Wall of China. It doesn’t get you a degree or a better job, but it’s something you can say you did. I had worked in Washington, D.C. as a political writer in the 1970s, and the news service I worked for rented some space from Mark Lane, the Kennedy assassination conspiracy author. He had a bunch of books he’d written stacked up in a corner, and I thought it would at least be cool to say you’d written a book. My ambition really wasn’t much more than that.
As I began to think about it, I imagined a book that was more a diary of a season, a sendup of a sort to David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game, which chronicled the Portland Trailblazers’ 1979-80 season. Halberstam was my favorite non-fiction writer, someone I patterned myself after as much as I could, and The Breaks of the Game was my favorite sports book. I felt if I wrote a book I’d want to pattern it after The Breaks of the Game. Unfortunately, when Halberstam wrote it, Bill Walton was hurt and it wasn’t the commercial success The Jordan Rules turned out to be.
As an aside, Halberstam came around the Bulls in 1997-98 to write a book about Jordan’s final season. I was thrilled to be able to have dinner with him a few times. I’ve never been much interested in celebrities and never collected autographs as a kid. Maybe it was growing up in Brooklyn and seeing Dodgers players around. As a kid I was a good bowler and even bowled for future Mets’ manager Gil Hodges’ traveling team. Gil used to give us pep talks which I later imagined was his training for managing the Mets. I never really thought to ask him for an autograph. He was just Mr. Hodges.
I did tell Halberstam that I intended to write The Breaks of the Game, and it became The Jordan Rules. He asked me for my old, dog-eared paperback of his book, and he sent it back to me with a cool inscription reading, “If you ever write a book, I hope it’s one like this.” I miss him and his work.
Anyway, by the end of the 1989-90 season, I was thinking it would be the ideal time to write a season’s diary about a team at a crossroads. The daily and magazine media could tell you in clever ways what you were seeing, but people really wanted to get behind that curtain, inside the locker room, on the bus with the fellas. Who were they really? What were they like? What was it like to play with a star like Jordan? What made up the team dynamic? Who was Phil Jackson? Or why? What did they say and when did they say it?
This was a turning point for the Bulls. Jackson was having private doubts about whether this Bulls team could win. Jordan was having his own apprehensions. He didn’t think Pippen and Grant were tough enough and he was lobbying for trades. Back then, players could defer some salary to give teams more salary cap space to sign players. Magic Johnson famously had done so, announcing it, as he announced everything. Jordan quiet
ly had agreed to give up part of his 1990-91 salary, which I learned about at the 1990 draft, and wrote it. But then the Bulls used the cap room to acquire Dennis Hopson instead of any of Jordan’s choices. Jordan was furious and Hopson had no chance, like Brad Sellers before him. When Michael was mad at Jerry Krause and the Bulls he’d take it out on someone. This would be Year 7 for Michael, and it seemed they’d never get past Detroit. He was getting anxious and unhappy. It hardly seemed a given this would be a special season of success. It seemed more like a season of conflict. There was more to this than any reporter could write in a newspaper.
I didn’t think much about it then, but I knew if I ever did a book it would be a reporter’s book. As it happened, Jordan made it feel like a novel with a dramatic ending no one could have predicted back in that summer of 1990.
Sports was different then, which is why you can’t write The Jordan Rules today. There was no chartered aircraft, players didn’t stay at the Ritz or the Four Seasons. League rules allowed media to ride on any team bus; not just the bus of the team you traveled with. I flew with the team on a commercial aircraft. NBA rules mandated that all players had to be in the airport gate area one hour before departure, so we all sat around together. The flights were booked with 12 first class seats for the active roster players. I sat in coach with—no pun—the coaches. I always worked to find a seat next to Jackson, Tex Winter or Johnny Bach, and I relentlessly asked them questions about the game. It was a graduate study in basketball. Once Tex even brought one of his original copies of the Triple Post Offense and went over diagrams with me on a flight.
We stayed at Sheratons and Marriotts, and when Jordan’s three close buddies from North Carolina, Fred Whitfield, Fred Kerns, and Adolph Shiver couldn’t afford to meet him he’d ask me or my Sun-Times colleague Lacy Banks to sit with him in his hotel room and play cards. Practices were all open, and you could attend any team’s practice any time. Before games, as players warmed up on the floor, you could chat with them. The locker rooms were always open. Jordan would show up two or three hours before the game and would talk with anyone. In fact, Jordan talked so much to media we’d get tired of listening and move on to others.
No big deal. These were just the guys I spent almost all day every day with. You knew they were notable given the crowds we’d sometimes get at hotels. But if you were there every day you were just a part of the show, albeit a small part. They became, in a way, just our co-workers.
You got to really know everyone, and it was hard not to love Jordan. I liked to describe him as a “man’s man.” Everything was a contest, from the card and golf games to the verbal assaults. Coming from Brooklyn, I loved that stuff. So we got along pretty well. There was no hero worship from me. I’d remind him when he’d miss a shot or his shooting percentage was low, when some guard would take advantage of his cheating by playing the lanes on defense. He seemed to like that as it helped fire his internal burner. We had a few dinners together and played golf once, though he was too good for me to gamble with on the golf course. That really pissed him off when I refused.
When The Jordan Rules was published in the fall of 1991, some said I’d betrayed Jordan and the team by writing the book. But I never felt I had. I know, what else would you expect me to say? But the book was ultimately about basketball; I stayed far away from the personal or embarrassing stuff that might have hurt someone. I told every player about the book before I wrote it, although Jordan later said he didn’t recall that. I sat down with every one of them at lunch or dinner and explained this was a book about basketball, not private lives. I remain proud of the book because it didn’t hurt anyone in that way. And to this day I remain friendly with most of those players.
People often ask me about Jordan’s reaction to the book. There was no question he was angry then, though I felt it was more because of the negative publicity from portions of the book that were taken out of context by others. My guess is Jordan never read the book. But people who read it now ask me why it was such a big deal then.
Yes, it was a big, big deal then, and Jordan stopped talking to me for a while. But I give him credit. He always was professional, never singling me out with any crude remarks even as he went through difficult questioning at times, some because of the book. Eventually we talked. But there was no more chatting and joking.
In the beginning, I didn’t know what the story would be. After all, when I started the book before the 1990-91 season, I didn’t intend to make it a Jordan book. It would be a story about a team, a story worth telling. But it was because of Jordan that the telling was worthwhile. I eventually accepted that he would be the focus of the book, just as he was the focus of the team and everyone came to accept that as well, some grudgingly. I still protested a bit that it would not be a Jordan book. After the book was written and I’d suggested a few generic titles, it was my book agent, Shari Wenk, who said, “Let’s call it The Jordan Rules.”
***
History generally doesn’t announce itself. Oh, I know these days it tries to, especially in sports with all kinds of arcane statistics. Yes, this is the first time with 16 seconds on the shot clock and a player facing west while shooting . . . Yes, we’ve fortunately let those roll by like relentless waves. When Lincoln made that brief Gettysburg talk, you know people weren’t saying, “a hundred and fifty years from now they’ll be talking about this!”
And so as Michael Jordan was doing all these incredible things and making all these amazing plays, I also recall going to sleep at night as usual and waking up in the morning as usual and even watching Michael dress, one leg at a time. Just like everyone else. And, after all, the Bulls weren’t exactly winning anything yet. It was the summer of 1990 and the Bulls had just lost, once again, to the Detroit Pistons. This time it was in seven games, with the famous Scottie Pippen migraine headache as the finale, leading to the blowout loss in Detroit. And while Jordan had made a point of going to every player in the locker room after the game and demanding this wouldn’t happen again, who really knew.
Pippen was shrinking against the physical play of the Pistons and Dennis Rodman. Horace Grant was too hyped up emotionally. John Paxson’s fury seemed to overwhelm him. The kids, like B.J. Armstrong and Stacey King, weren’t ready. It was difficult to see this as a championship team. They were going somewhere, but it was hard to see exactly when they would get there.
There’s always friction on teams, more on teams that aren’t winning. And as I understood then and people began to realize eventually, even more when you are with a relentless star talent.
When Jordan first came to the Bulls in 1984, it was just a medium deal. College star, Olympic star, but really, everyone wanted Hakeem. Teams, including the Bulls, purposely (it seemed) and obviously lost so many games late in that 1983-84 season the NBA instituted the draft lottery the next season. Bulls GM Rod Thorn famously warned fans after that 1984 draft (which were public events then in a downtown hotel ballroom) you didn’t build around a shooting guard, that Jordan was one more good piece. Thorn’s head coach and buddy, Kevin Loughery, later joked that Thorn finally got a draft right.
Right after Jordan arrived and before his rookie season began, I was invited to Jordan’s modest townhouse in Chicago’s north suburbs near the Multiplex practice facility to spend an afternoon with Jordan for a Tribune feature. I’d later return for a freelance assignment for Us Magazine. So I got to know Jordan early on. Not that you can auction this at Sotheby’s, but Jordan’s driver and assistant, George Koehler, and I are the only ones who hold the distinction of being at Jordan’s three first games (1984 with the Bulls, 1995 in his comeback in Indianapolis, and 2001 in his first game with the Wizards) and his three final games (1993 Finals, 1998 Finals and 2003 with the Wizards against the 76ers). There are said to be no statues being considered to commemorate this.
During my time in Washington, D.C. as a political reporter in the late 1970s, I wrote mostly about Congress and occasionally the White House. So I’d seen pro
paganda before and even been part of it when I spent a short time as the press secretary for U.S. Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr., a Republican from Connecticut. So I’m sitting with Jordan and the phone rings. Jordan talks for a while and asks then if I’d like to speak with Dean Smith. Oh, this was good, very good, I thought.
Jordan was a remarkably open and engaging guy then. He’s much less accessible recently, though perhaps his mystery makes him an even greater public figure, sort of a sporting Howard Hughes or Garbo. It remains more special today when Michael speaks. But back then he was as open and inviting as you’d like.
He happened to be ironing clothes when I arrived, and I think I rolled my eyes about that one. Nice show, I suggested. No, he insisted. He did iron. He said he took home economics classes in high school because he felt he wasn’t particularly good looking and might not ever attract a wife. I actually felt the same way, and I never did learn to iron. He told me about not being able to swim and being afraid of water, which I was as well, though I wasn’t questioning whether we were brothers separated at birth.
We seemed to hit it off relatively well. I really didn’t want to be his friend as I remained in the old journalism world of not getting too close to the people you have to write about, even if it was sports, which is essentially entertainment reporting. But since I wasn’t the full-time writer around the team I’d only see Jordan occasionally.
I was writing more general NBA stories and would do some Bulls playoff games. Then Jordan got hurt to open the 1985-86 season and we basically never saw him, as he went back to North Carolina. There was the famous battle of the tape recorders after his return as he pulled out a tape recorder to record management’s comments after conflicting statements about his return and the limitation of his playing time, which you’ll read about in The Jordan Rules.
