by Sam Smith
On the bus ride back to the hotel after the pregame shootaround, Armstrong said to PR director Tim Hallam, “Find out what Stacey shot in college on threes.”
Hallam investigated, and reported that King had been 0 for 2 in his college career. Armstrong wouldn’t leave him alone before the game. “You didn’t even hit one, King,” he shouted in the locker room. “Man, you can’t even dunk. I knew you couldn’t hit no three-pointers.”
The shouting would continue later even though the Bulls picked up their sixtieth win over the Hornets. It was Charlotte’s last game of the season, which they dubbed Teal Night, after their uniform color. They had asked the Bulls to wear their white home uniforms so the Hornets could wear their teal road uniforms. The Bulls declined.
The Bulls led Charlotte by 20 in the first quarter and held a big lead until Charlotte pulled within 4 in the fourth quarter. But the Bulls pulled away for a 115–99 win. Jordan scored more than 40 for the fifth time in ten games. He told reporters it was because some of his teammates were relaxing and it was up to him to take over.
He was particularly angry with Hopson, who had played just four minutes in the game, the fewest on the team. Hopson’s playing time had been decreasing steadily, and by now he’d fallen to twelfth man on the roster. Some of that was due to Hopson, some to Jackson. Hopson had never adjusted to the triangle offense, but Jackson also didn’t care for Hopson’s emotionless look, which looked like arrogance to Jackson. The coach liked emotional, tough players, and Hopson was too much like Brad Sellers. For whatever reason, the Bulls found Ohio State players to be lacking toughness. So Hopson got almost no playing time behind Jordan, who would yell at Jackson during games, “Put me in for Hop.” Jackson usually would.
After a scramble in the fourth quarter in which Hopson lost the ball, Jackson called time-out. Hopson had played his four minutes and figured that was it for him. He was always pulled after a mistake. The Charlotte crowd was the only one in the NBA that was perhaps as loud as Chicago’s, and as the Hornets hovered within 4 points there was chaos. Hopson wandered to the edge of the huddle and stared up in the stands.
“Dennis,” Jackson shouted, but Hopson didn’t hear. Jackson saw it as indifference, as did Jordan. “Your boy doesn’t want to play,” Jordan yelled at assistant Jim Cleamons, an Ohio State graduate who had been assigned to work with Hopson that season. “I’m tired of bailing his ass out.”
Jordan went back into the game for Hopson and the Bulls recovered, but Jackson was angry. He thought Hopson didn’t want to go back in the game. As a result, Hopson would be the only Bull not to make an appearance in Sunday’s finale against Detroit; Jackson explained, “I owed him one.”
Hopson was supposed to be one of the final pieces the Bulls would need to get past Detroit. Levingston was the other piece, an active rebounder to back up both Grant and Pippen and run the court. He played fourteen minutes in the Charlotte game, mostly in the first half, and when he was removed after a short first-half stint, he began cursing Jackson. “Screw him,” he shouted to teammates as he came to the bench. “If he ain’t gonna play me, screw him.” He finally composed himself after the game and admitted he had let his emotions get the best of him, but he was still unhappy that he didn’t have a role, the tenth man at a time when teams rarely go more than nine deep into the bench.
The anger wasn’t limited to those two. Armstrong was disappointed with his l-of-6 shooting. Recent late-game failures against Philadelphia and Detroit seemed to have drained his confidence and demoralized him again. It was the seventh straight game he’d failed to shoot at least 50 percent.
Armstrong was complaining after the game about not getting any opportunities, when Jordan began shouting at him.
“Hey,” Jordan yelled, “we’ve had a great season. I’m tired of this. We won sixty games and you should be happy about that.”
“Screw you,” Armstrong shot back. “You don’t tell me what I can and can’t say.”
As Jackson had said earlier, “Ain’t winning great?”
But by Sunday’s final game, Jordan couldn’t have been nicer to Armstrong. He joked with him endearingly as if nothing had happened, and displayed an interest he’d never shown before, asking him how he was doing and including him in his inside jokes with Pippen. Armstrong was absolutely charmed, for Jordan could radiate like the rings of Saturn when he chose to.
Grant just watched. “That’s the way it is with him,” Grant said. “You’ve got to stand up to him or he’ll never respect you. Brad Sellers never would and he killed him, just killed him. Same with Hop now. We get along a little better now, but that’s only because I told him what he could do with himself. He still pushes me, but he knows when to stop now.”
The final game of the regular season was against Detroit on national TV, but nothing was at stake except pride. Playoff pairings had already been clinched and the Bulls would open against bottom-seed New York. The Bucks had collapsed down the stretch to fall behind the Pistons into fourth place in the East, so the Pistons were in the opposite playoff bracket. The teams wouldn’t meet again until the conference finals, assuming both won their first two playoff rounds.
It was a time of celebration for the Bulls, and on this Fan Appreciation Day the adoring crowd rained bouquets of applause all over the team. The Bulls would win their sixty-first game that day, 108–100. They had the most blowout wins and the biggest margin of victory per game in the league; they tied the franchise record for most road wins and had won twenty-six straight at home to tie for second place in the league’s all-time list. They were the highest-scoring Bulls team in twenty years; at 51 percent on the season, they were the best-shooting Bulls team ever. They also set team records for assists and three-point shooting and were the best Bulls defensive team since the Dick Motta era.
And still Phil Jackson was livid. For a game that was seemingly unimportant, the players were playing rough. Isiah Thomas got smacked on his sore wrist by Armstrong; Thomas slapped Paxson in the face after a hard foul and the two began shoving each other. Late in the game, chief referee Darell Garretson decided he wanted the rough stuff to stop, so he called for both captains. But when cocaptain Cartwright approached along with Thomas, Garretson waved Cartwright back. He wanted Jordan and Thomas.
Jackson started screaming at Garretson, “You dickhead. You dickhead.”
Bach tried to keep Jackson from running to midcourt, and Jordan, having left the game after three quarters, went to meet with Thomas and Garretson. Cartwright, who tagged along anyway, told Paxson when he got back to the bench that he thought the sullen Garretson just wanted to be on national TV with Jordan.
But Jackson remained angry long after the game, saying that Cartwright was a cocaptain, which he was. Garretson had explained that since Jordan had come out as captain with Thomas before the game, Jordan was the only Bulls captain he would accept. Jackson wouldn’t accept the argument, but he never would when it came to Garretson.
Jackson and Garretson had a history dating back to Jackson’s playing days; he had once purposely run over Garretson in a game and been fined. Although generally depicted as an even-tempered intellectual, Jackson was a ferocious competitor and was known as a dirty player in his days. His reputation was somewhat similar to Cartwright’s, actually—he was considered clumsy and dirty, although he lacked Cartwright’s offensive ability. Former Knicks teammate Walt Frazier remembered how the Knicks tried to avoid Jackson and his lethal flying elbows in practice, and how Jackson broke Jerry West’s jaw once, though not in a game. “He was waving to someone after the game and just clocked Jerry,” laughed Frazier. “Broke his jaw and nearly knocked him out. Couldn’t catch him in the game, though.”
When the Bulls—Pistons game—and the regular season—finally ended, Krause was walking around the locker room trying to pump hands. “Jumping on the bandwagon,” someone mumbled.
Krause had just returned from watching the European Final Four, where he had made one last pitch
for Kukoc. It was the third European trip for Krause in four months, and to the players that seemed to be all the front office cared about. Jordan was still refusing to call Kukoc, as Krause asked, and was instead swiping at Krause over his failure to deal with Paxson’s contract situation. “I’m surprised by the Bulls’ treatment of him,” Jordan said. “They talk about loyalty all the time here, so this is a good opportunity for them to prove themselves.”
Meanwhile, Pippen remained annoyed that his new deal wasn’t signed yet. Owner Reinsdorf had by now given him a written assurance that he would extend his contract for five years, but Pippen knew he was still on hold because of Kukoc. Paxson had yet to hear anything from the Bulls and Cartwright, too, was being stalled. Scott Williams, the rookie, felt his playing time was being minimized so he would have less bargaining power and the Bulls could re-sign him cheaply. Maybe he’d go to Europe, he thought. Levingston was thinking about Europe, too, having heard talk that the Bulls were not about to pick up his one-year option. Hopson just felt as if he’d been lied to; Krause had told him he would be the sixth or seventh man, and now he was the only one not playing against the Pistons. He was embarrassed and angry.
Jackson watched his unhappy players after the game, and realized that their mutual problems with Krause were actually uniting them as teammates—and just at the right time. It was like a pickup game in the schoolyard, he thought, where you could play hard and play well, even with guys you didn’t like, and then go your separate ways later and rip each other. It didn’t matter, Jackson felt, as long as the group would come together in games and use their talent to win. They just needed to be united.
Warming Up
4/25 v. New York; 4/28 v. New York; 4/30 at New York; 5/2 at New York*; 5/4 v. New York*
*lf necessary.
BY THE END OF THE FIRST DAY OF PRACTICE FOR THE PLAYOFFS, Scottie Pippen was ready to kill Dennis Hopson. It wasn’t really Hopson that Pippen was upset with; he was still thinking about an afternoon almost eleven months ago.
He looked out at the assembled media beyond the glass wall from the court the Bulls used for practice in the Deerfield Multiplex. The first-round playoff series against the Knicks would begin Thursday night in the Stadium. He knew they’d be waiting to talk to him. He knew the reporters would be there from the national publications and they would be coming. Everyone would want to know about “the migraine.”
Pippen now knew he wasn’t dying. On that frustrating afternoon in Auburn Hills early last June and during the next few frightening days in Chicago, he hadn’t been so sure. He’d even gone to the hospital to get a CAT scan. His head throbbed for days and the pain would grow worse at times. Sometimes he felt a numbing sensation around his skull. It couldn’t be just a headache. “I thought it was a brain tumor,” he said.
The Bulls had overwhelmed the Pistons in Chicago in Game 6 to knot the Eastern Conference championship series at 3–3. But as the Bulls gathered by their bench for the start of the deciding game, Pippen started blinking his eyes madly. “The lights look dim to you?” he asked Horace Grant. “No,” Grant said. “I’m having trouble focusing,” Pippen said. The introductions were beginning and some twenty thousand fans were screaming. The public address system was blaring a song from the movie Animal House.
“Hey, Mark,” Pippen yelled to Bulls’ trainer Mark Pfeil, “I got to have some aspirin.” Pfeil handed him two and Pippen swallowed them down.
Boom! Pippen’s head felt as if it had exploded.
“That seemed to energize it,” Pippen recalled. “It got worse and worse and when the game started I couldn’t focus. I thought I’d been poisoned.”
It was a migraine headache at the worst possible time for an athlete. It was the Bulls’ moment of truth, their crucible. And Pippen couldn’t go. Oh, he stayed in the game after a quick rest a few minutes into the game. Jackson had asked him to stay out there and try it. But it would have been better for the team if he hadn’t. He played forty minutes, but he scored just 2 points, hitting 1 of the 10 shots he attempted as the Bulls lost big.
Pippen thought back many times to that day and the night before. He’d gone to a movie. He was fine at breakfast and wasn’t nervous. “We’d had a successful season and nobody really expected us to get to the seventh game against Detroit after we lost the first two,” said Pippen. “There really wasn’t anything to be nervous about.”
But it was a headache. And that’s associated with nerves, even though Dr. Lawrence Robbins, the neurologist the Bulls sent Pippen to, told the team afterward that the symptoms could be physical and there were various possibilities other than stress that could have caused it, even food. Pippen was given new instructions on his diet, started wearing glasses off the court, and never had a recurrence. Sometimes he actually wished for another migraine, just to show people that he hadn’t choked, that he really did have a headache. He had been told later it can happen just once in a lifetime, but how, he wondered, and why then? There is nothing worse that can be said about a top athlete: Pippen had cracked under pressure.
Pippen’s voice doesn’t trail off when he talks about that day anymore. Although he was savaged by the newspaper columnists and national NBA writers afterward, he was greeted sympathetically that summer by fans. “People would say they were sorry about what happened in the playoffs,” said Pippen. “And then they’d say they got those all the time and they couldn’t understand how I could even be on the court. But I know people are going to be looking at me, especially in big games. It’s always going to be there for me, even if we win the championship. I know people will always say, ‘Well, if Pippen had played last year, the Bulls would have had two in a row.’
“Now,” said Pippen, his voice firm and hard, “I just want to get a chance to get back to that final game again, and whether we win or lose, I just want to be there and play and say I was there for the team. I know it’s in my past and it will always be there and people will be looking at what I do. But if we can get back there and I can have a chance to play and help the team, well, that’s what I feel I have to do this year.”
Dennis Hopson found himself in the way of Pippen’s determination at that first practice. Pippen hit Hopson with an elbow and the two squared off before being separated by teammates. Hopson had been guarding Pippen tightly and hooking Pippen when he tried to move; Pippen didn’t like it and Hopson didn’t like the elbow. Bach was closest and jumped in quickly. Pippen was feeling a little anxious. He was ready to go. That final conference game couldn’t come fast enough.
The Bulls were not terribly concerned about the Knicks, though there was always some anxiety about an opening series. The Knicks just couldn’t play the Bulls anymore. Nonetheless, Jackson was at practice early. “No one in our business sleeps much this time of year,” he said. “You’re always wondering what you could do or should have done. So you get up and go to work.”
Jackson had been reading more lately, and had come upon a passage he liked in Rudyard Kipling’s The Second Jungle Book.
Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forward and back—
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
Jackson sometimes saw his team as a pack of wolves; the way they picked over one another with their biting verbal exchanges, the way they sparred with each other over money, playing time, and shots. Jackson selected the passage because he wanted to make a point about staying together. Only in the pack was the wolf strong; the Bulls must play that way and be that way, despite their disagreements, to survive the playoff jungle. It was time to come together.
The quote was at the top of the scouting report on the Knicks that was handed out to each player.
Jordan told Hodges they ought to have a team meeting. “No coaches,” Jo
rdan said. “Just players. Just to make sure everyone’s focused on the same thing.” Hodges agreed and began to tell some of the other players. Although he wasn’t a pivotal contributor like Jordan or Pippen, Hodges was respected by everyone, a rarity on the Bulls. In one of the team’s rituals, after every Bulls win in the Stadium, he’d race down ahead of the rest of the players to the landing at the bottom of the steps from the court. There he’d greet every player and coach with a handshake as they turned toward the corridor to head for the locker room.
The players-only meeting never occurred. The weather cleared, and Jordan decided to play golf after practice instead.
Oh, well, few on the team really thought of Jordan as their leader anyway. “Michael wants to win, really bad, but he doesn’t want to win,” Pippen would tell friends. “You know what I mean? He’s trying to win, but doesn’t always do it the best way.”
Pippen, though, had started to grow into a position of some respect. “Every time you go on the court wearing a Bull uniform if you’re not Michael Jordan, you have to work for respect,” Pippen knew. “We know everyone says the Bulls would be nothing without Michael, so there really isn’t much respect for the other eleven guys, even after I made the All-Star team. You take Michael off this team and give us a consistent two [shooting] guard and we’d still be a top, contending team. I wouldn’t say we’d be in the position we are now, but we could be like Milwaukee or Philadelphia, win forty-five to fifty games and play a round or two in the playoffs. But people are never gonna think much of us. And why is it that if Larry Bird gets fifty points, the Celtics are a team, but if Michael Jordan does, the Bulls are a one-man team?” Still, Pippen felt reasonably comfortable in Jordan’s shadow. “As long as we keep winning,” he said. “If we aren’t, well, I don’t know. It would be harder to take.”
