The Jordan Rules

by Sam Smith

  Jordan was stunned. “Was she watching too many TV shows?” he wondered.

  The deal Davis signed with Denver paid him less than the $1.3 million a year for two years that Chicago was willing to pay. Davis had wanted to continue to play for Denver coach Doug Moe, and Jordan knew that was important because Moe had played at North Carolina and the loyalties remained strong. But when Moe was fired and replaced by Paul Westhead, Davis found himself unhappily trying to figure out how to keep his thirty-five-year-old legs going in Westhead’s idiosyncratic running system. Davis would later tell Jordan how much he regretted his decision.

  “I’m just glad it was Michael who tried to get him,” Reinsdorf said. He knew the kind of fallout there’d be if Jordan saw this one as another opportunity screwed up by Krause.

  In northwest Indiana, near a small town called La Porte, Craig Hodges had purchased a farm. Hodges was a city kid, having grown up in the projects in Chicago Heights, a suburban ghetto community about forty miles south of Chicago. Hodges was raised in what he called an extended family. “I called my grandma and grandpa ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad,’ and I had lots of uncles and aunts around who were like brothers and sisters.” All lived within a few blocks of one another. The young Hodges says he was a gym rat at four, even though he didn’t know it, because his grandfather ran the local park. And although Hodges became a good basketball player, he was not highly recruited. He eventually won a scholarship at Long Beach State University from coach Tex Winter, who had been at Northwestern and had heard of Hodges. Hodges was 6-2 and an excellent shooter who would find a place in the NBA as a specialist, mostly coming in to hit the three-point shot. But he also was a player teams liked to have around, upbeat and full of encouragement for younger players, active in the community and always the first to accommodate the team when it needed speakers at high schools. He’d even started his own youth organization to help teenagers with their problems; it got little publicity, which wasn’t unusual for any venture that didn’t involve Michael Jordan. “My idea was to stay on course and get an education,” said Hodges, who had majored in Afro-American history in college with the full intention of becoming a history teacher. “I felt I had to use basketball instead of letting it use me.”

  Unlike most of his teammates and colleagues around the NBA, Hodges looked at basketball as a transitional phase in life, which was why he had begun working with black entrepreneurs in hopes of landing contracts, some for NBA merchandise. “Change in our community must come through economics,” said Hodges, who had strong beliefs about black development. “We need businesses to give us jobs.” He was viewed with alarm by some players for his association with radical black militant groups and his devotion to the Muslim religion and the Koran, which he often quoted to his teammates. But Hodges realized it was a white world he worked in, even if most of the workers were black, and he kept his views shielded from management and the general public.

  Hodges had tried to interest Jordan in going into the shoe business for himself when his first Nike contract expired after the 1987–88 season. “Just think of the jobs and contracts you can provide for your people,” Hodges told Jordan. But Jordan wasn’t interested, and he always wondered later whether Hodges had anything to do with the Operation PUSH boycott of Nike products, which proved embarrassing to Jordan in the summer of 1990. Here he was, the hero of every black ghetto kid at a time when perhaps the most prominent black citizens’ organization in the nation—at least in the Midwest—was accusing Nike of profiting from the black community and giving little back.

  And it was Hodges who was among the strongest backers of an additional pension program for the players that went into effect late in the summer of 1990. The plan was to provide money for players in the years after they retired until their pension plan went into effect at age forty-five. It sounded good, but it also meant that each team would have about $1.5 million less under the salary cap to sign players now. The concept upset the players’ agents, who earned 4 percent commission on contracts and clearly preferred a bigger cap; with more money under the cap, the teams presumably could renegotiate some deals, like Jordan’s. One of the leaders of the opposition was Jordan’s agent, David Falk, who had enlisted Jordan’s support. Publicly, it should have been an embarrassing position for Jordan to take, seeking a raise at the expense of players who were less fortunate. But the issues became muddied by charges and countercharges and never became clear publicly. Late in the summer, Hodges got a message to call Falk. “You know, Michael is against this proposal,” Falk told Hodges, the Bulls’ player representative, who would cast the team’s vote at the upcoming union meeting. “He’d really like to see it rejected.” Hodges heard the underlying warning—go against Michael and you risk your position on the team—but he believed the issue was more important than his own security. “If Michael’s got a problem, tell him to call me,” Hodges told Falk. Jordan never did, and Hodges joined in a near-unanimous vote in support of the proposal. As Hodges walked out of the meeting, smiling broadly if a little nervously, he went up to a friend and joked, “You know he’s going to have me traded now.”

  And, frankly, Hodges wouldn’t have minded, even if it meant leaving home again. It seemed as if he’d had his chance and never would again. Late in the 1988–89 season, Hodges’s first with the Bulls, Doug Collins had inserted Hodges into the starting lineup and shifted Jordan to point guard, a move that helped the Bulls sweep a four-game Western Conference road trip for the first time in their history. Jordan then played perhaps the best series of games in his career, recording seven straight triple doubles—at least 10 points, rebounds, and assists—as the Bulls won ten of eleven games. One of those wins was over Golden State, and Hodges recalls Don Nelson, the Warriors coach, generally regarded as the best strategist in the NBA, telling him, “Well, they finally figured it out there. I would have been playing him at point guard from the day he showed up as a rookie.”

  Putting Jordan in the middle of the floor as point guard instead of to the side as a shooting guard made it more difficult to double-team him effectively. But Jordan was assured by Collins the move was only temporary, and after the season he told the team he preferred to return to his shooting guard role. Why? The official reasons were that he would get too tired playing point guard and that he’d have trouble defending against the smaller, quicker point guards and that, too, would wear him out. But the fact was that Jordan continued to have grave doubts about his teammates’ ability to score, saying, “How am I supposed to be the principal ball deliverer and the main scorer?” Phil Jackson would later reject his assistants’ suggestion to move Jordan to point guard, arguing that Jordan’s passing was not consistently good enough and that giving Jordan the ball even more would reduce the chances of dividing up the scoring load, one of Jackson’s main goals.

  Hodges, meanwhile, suffered an ankle injury in that game against Golden State in March 1988 after averaging 18 points, almost double his career average, and shooting 22 for 31 from three-point range in his previous six games. He would miss the rest of the regular season, be hampered in the playoffs, and never truly regain his health the next season. With Hodges still hobbling at the start of training camp in 1989, John Paxson moved in as starting point guard, and Hodges went on to have the poorest season of his career.

  The team never truly believed there was anything wrong with Hodges. Their reports merely noted some soft-tissue buildup and said that Hodges would be able to play through it. The Bulls were also angry because Hodges had been a free agent after the 1988–89 season and, fearing they might lose him to Portland (which was prepared to make an offer), they gave him a four-year, $2.6 million contract, and now he couldn’t play effectively. Hodges kept saying something was wrong, but he wasn’t getting much response from the team, which had a reputation for such things (such as downplaying the extent of Scottie Pippen’s back problems in 1987–88 until after the season, when it was finally determined he needed disc surgery).

  With the Davis n
egotiations dead, the team called Hodges and told him to see the team doctor so they could determine once and for all what his status was. It was mid-July and Hodges was preparing to go to a golf school for a week and then on a cruise with his family, but the Bulls wanted to try to package Hodges for the shooter or rebounder they were seeking.

  The doctor determined that Hodges needed surgery on his ankle. And another chance to add a player went away.

  The free-agent list was not deep and the Bulls had already turned down Adrian Dantley, whose style of play, Jackson felt, wouldn’t fit with the passing, motion, and fast-break concepts he sought. David Falk, Dantley’s agent, was relentless and would call Reinsdorf or Krause all year after Bulls losses to suggest that the Bulls wouldn’t have lost if they had Dantley. Purvis Short of New Jersey was a scorer who could fit in, and assistant John Bach had coached him when Bach was head coach at Golden State, but it was determined that Short had played too many minutes over the years to do that job now. Same with Charlotte’s Robert Reid, whom the Bulls had considered the previous season but rejected.

  That’s when the Bulls began to talk about Cliff Levingston of Atlanta. Levingston wasn’t a scorer—he was known in Atlanta as “House” for putting up so many bricks when he shot—but he was active and could play small forward to back up Scottie Pippen. The Bulls had let Charles Davis go in order to have enough money available—along with Jordan’s contribution—to trade for Hopson. And while Krause talked about Hopson as a possible backup to Pippen, the coaches felt Hopson would have enough difficulty trying to fit in as a backup shooting guard.

  Levingston, who liked to go by the nickname of “Good News” because of his friendly demeanor, was not a favorite of Reinsdorf’s. “I watched all those Atlanta games and I don’t ever remember seeing him,” Reinsdorf told Jackson. But Reinsdorf left personnel decisions in basketball principally to Krause and Jackson. Krause didn’t care much for Levingston either, and wanted to go after an old personal favorite, Joe Wolf, who was a restricted free agent. But Jackson was lobbying hard for Levingston. He believed Levingston, though only about 6-7, would help on defense and rebounding and fit well into the open-court style of basketball Jackson felt the Bulls had to play. Krause was resisting, saying Hopson would do as a backup small forward. Jackson believed otherwise, and he was now getting additional pressure from the assistant coaches. They all knew the Bulls simply didn’t have the players to contend for a title without some additions. They couldn’t go into a new season with just Hopson, if only because it would demoralize Jordan. But Jackson was hesitant to get into a fight with Krause. He’d seen Krause and Collins battle desperately over trade possibilities, with Collins going over Krause’s head to Reinsdorf and even trying to get Krause fired. This proved fatal in the long run to Collins, for Reinsdorf hadn’t wanted Collins as coach in the first place, and only agreed to hire him after a desperate appeal from Krause. And a year later here was this brash kid trying to get his sponsor fired.

  Perhaps the dispute that had made the strongest impression on Jackson was the Collins-Krause battle over Ricky Pierce. The talented scorer for the Bucks was a holdout in 1987, demanding renegotiation of his contract. The Bucks made him available, but after dealing with the likes of Dailey, Woolridge, and Oldham, Krause wanted no part of another public holdout who might also be a clubhouse lawyer. He refused to trade Brad Sellers to the Bucks and Collins was livid, ranting and accusing Krause of trying to cost him his job. It was a common habit of Collins’s, blaming either Krause or the players for team failures.

  “I’d seen this organization almost come apart over Ricky Pierce,” Jackson told his assistants at a meeting. “I’m not going to let that happen here over Levingston.”

  But finally Jackson, in his softer way, made Krause see the obvious: The Bulls needed help. “Jerry,” he told Krause, “you’re going to blow this one.” Krause didn’t blow it, but the Levingston negotiations provide a revealing look at life on the edge at the NBA.

  Unbeknownst to the Bulls, Levingston was in serious financial trouble and needed to put $200,000 in the bank by the last day of September or face action by his creditors. He had been earning about $425,000 per year, which would seem to be enough to live on, especially when your room is paid for on the road and you get $55 meal money per day during road trips. Despite their garish wealth—the average NBA salary approached $1 million by the 1990–91 season—players often are remarkably stingy. They get so used to having their way paid as highly recruited high school and college stars that they often don’t think about paying their own way, especially when it comes to tipping. Some coaches, like Al Attles when he was with Golden State, used to go into restaurants his teams frequented on the road and leave $50 in tips to be divided among the waitresses because he knew that invariably the players would not tip.

  Nonetheless, players often find themselves in financial problems, especially when trying to keep up with their teammates, as Levingston had tried to do with the Hawks’ Dominique Wilkins, who owned almost a dozen automobiles and liked to travel home from games by limousine, a habit Levingston then acquired. That was okay on Wilkins’s multimillion-dollar salary, but it was something else at Levingston’s level to pay. Levingston was frustrated in Atlanta; Dominique wasn’t ever going to share the scoring spotlight. He was there to rebound and pick up loose balls; there’d be none of the glamour scoring for him. In fact, point guard Glenn “Doc” Rivers once told him that coach Mike Fratello had instructed him never to pass the ball to Levingston on the fast break. And it only got worse when the Hawks picked up Moses Malone and Reggie Theus.

  So Levingston decided to test the free-agent market. Levingston was the team’s player representative, and union officials had told him it would be good for free agency if more players would try that route. Levingston figured the Hawks were about to start making moves anyway, and he might be traded, so this way maybe he could pick his team. Detroit had some interest, as did Indiana. Denver would later take notice, as would New York. But Levingston decided he wanted to come to Chicago.

  Krause called Levingston’s agent, Roger Kirschenbaum, and said the Bulls were interested, but had some other issues to handle first, including the matter of Davis. Levingston was looking for a four-year deal worth about $5.6 million. And why not? The Hawks had offered $4 million for four years and Levingston, Kirschenbaum felt, could be the missing veteran the Bulls needed. And after the Davis deal fell through, even Jordan said he’d like to have Levingston. He’d called Reinsdorf to tell him so, and Levingston and Kirschenbaum assumed that would assure a deal. That was their first mistake.

  The Bulls didn’t want the risk of a long-term contract with a thirty-year-old player, which was fine with Levingston.

  “We’re talking one point three, one point four [million dollars for one year],” Kirschenbaum told Krause.

  “That’s no problem,” Krause said. “Money shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Kirschenbaum and Levingston’s second mistake was misreading Reinsdorf’s business sense. Although Reinsdorf loved sports, he lived for business. Earlier in his career, he was a lawyer at a Chicago firm representing several local doctors. “They all kept getting screwed in these real estate deals,” related Reinsdorf. “I’d look at them and tell them these were shit deals, but it didn’t do any good, they’d go into them anyway. Finally, one of these guys said, ‘If you’re so smart, why don’t you put something together?’” So he did. And it led to the start of his real estate empire and Balcor. For all his interest in what happened between the first- and third-base lines, or between the sidelines and the endlines, he never wavered in his commitment to the bottom line.

  Levingston pretty much assumed he was coming to Chicago when Krause never questioned Kirschenbaum’s demand. In fact, Krause told Levingston not to bother with those other teams, that the Bulls would work out something, so Levingston didn’t worry when Detroit signed Tree Rollins, leaving itself little room to add Levingston also. And then the Players
’ Association voted for its prepension plan, effectively knocking out teams like Indiana, which needed the larger cap to sign Levingston as a free agent. Levingston still wasn’t concerned, even when Atlanta was forced to relinquish his rights to sign first-round draft pick Rumeal Robinson. So Atlanta, which would have been permitted to exceed the salary cap to re-sign Levingston because he was Atlanta’s own free agent, was now out of the running until at least two months into the season under NBA rules.

  Still, Levingston was certain he was headed for Chicago. But he hadn’t bargained on two things. One was the Bulls’ fears about Scottie Pippen’s salary. He desperately sought a new deal, especially when, in August, his close friend Horace Grant was awarded a new contract extension that would pay him $6 million over three seasons. But Grant was coming into the final year of a four-year deal, while Pippen still had three years remaining on his six-year deal. The Bulls had some leverage, but they knew Pippen wouldn’t react well to being paid less than his backup, which Levingston would be.

  Of even greater importance to the team, though, was the Yugoslav Kukoc, who wouldn’t even be with the Bulls in 1990–91. Krause had never scouted in Europe before, but the Lakers’ success with Vlade Divac made him think twice. Jackson had urged Krause to take a look at Divac in the 1989 draft, but Krause, like a lot of NBA general managers, doubted Europeans could play effectively in the NBA. He’d realized his error, and went to Europe in the spring of 1990 to see Kukoc, advertised as the best player there. And he came back with an obsession.