“I knew Juanita from day one,” Joe O’Neil offered. “Juanita was a great person. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago like she did. For whatever reason, it all never seemed to go to her head. She always seemed the same Juanita that I always knew.”
Nonetheless, Jordan’s parents did not approve of her and spent some effort at trying to counter her influence, according to Sonny Vaccaro, which might explain, in part, the on-again, off-again nature of the relationship over Jordan’s first years in Chicago.
Truth be told, no one figure, no one factor, was likely to distract Jordan from feeding the competitive monster inside him. That ate up a substantial portion of each day. His main outlets were basketball and golf, although not always in that order. Fortunately, his fix required nothing elaborate. In the early days, when Jordan was still figuring out what to do with himself in Chicago, he would often drop by the Bulls offices, where he, Hallam, and O’Neil had set up their own miniature golf course.
“We’d play putt-putt,” Joe O’Neil recalled. “We’d put together a little eighteen-hole golf course in the office and we’d bet. We’d walk around the office putting golf balls into waste cans, and that son of a gun, he was as competitive playing putt-putt in the office as he was on the court. He’d take twenty dollars from me, and that’s when twenty dollars was like four hundred dollars. I still remember giving him twenty dollars in the office and my wife yelling at me for gambling with him.”
When the weather was good they’d take it outside, O’Neil recalled. “We played public golf courses, we played at Medinah Country Club. He was about as good as I was at the time. Then he started playing about 150 rounds a year and he became a very good golfer. But when Tim and I first started golfing with him, Michael was just taking up the game. He could hit the hell out of the ball but you never knew where it was going.”
Jordan often talked of how he prized the solitude of the course. However, his unrestrained joy didn’t exactly make it peaceful. “He never shut up,” O’Neil recalled with a laugh. “He talked when you’re swinging, talked when you’re putting. He could be a great commentator on TV someday if he wanted to. He could just mentally give it to you, whether you were putt-putting in the office or out playing on the golf course or shooting a game of pool. He would always ride you.” For the few brief hours, he could be Mike Jordan, regular guy. “That’s why golf became so important to him,” O’Neil said. “It gave him some solitude away from people. He said the golf course and the movie theater were two places he could get away from people… where he could go like he was anybody else.”
That spring of 1985, Jeff Davis was producing a regional golf show that featured celebrities playing a round with baseball broadcaster Ken “The Hawk” Harrelson. Once the season ended, Davis contacted Jordan about appearing on the show and he jumped at the chance.
“He came on and he couldn’t have been happier than to do this,” Davis recalled.
On the course, Jordan asked for three do-overs. “He wasn’t satisfied with his showing,” Davis said with a chuckle. “There was no money on the line. It was a matter of pride, and he wanted to beat Harrelson, who was a terrific golfer. He couldn’t get closer, but he looked nice, he had a nice swing for a guy that size. Golf is not a sport made for the tall man anyway. But Jordan was bound and determined to succeed at everything.”
The scenes were shot on a course in Chicago’s north suburbs that day, and after the shooting was finished the crew packed up their van and headed back down into the city. “It was about an hour from downtown,” Davis recalled. “And we were coming back down the Edens Expressway, driving along. All of a sudden, our cameraman, who was driving, said, ‘Jeez, there’s this Corvette that’s flying behind us!’ And here comes this car, it pulls right up beside, and it was him. He’s grinning ear to ear, just laughing, and then he just gave a little wave of his fingers and bam, he was off again and gone.”
Chapter 18
THE FOOT
JERRY KRAUSE GOT the call during spring training 1985, when he was working as a scout for Jerry Reinsdorf’s Chicago White Sox. Reinsdorf wanted him to come to Chicago to talk about running the Bulls. The conversation went well, considering that Krause had already been fired several years earlier as the Bulls’ GM.
Krause had bounced around for years scouting in baseball and basketball until he found his way into working for Reinsdorf and the Sox. Reinsdorf had grown up in Brooklyn, “where being a Dodgers fan was almost a religion,” he explained. He was a dutiful follower, along with every other kid on Flatbush Avenue. Reinsdorf also loved the New York Knicks, especially Red Holzman’s teams of the early 1970s. Later, after he had finished law school and begun amassing a fortune in Chicago real estate, Reinsdorf seized the opportunity to own sports teams, first the White Sox, then the Bulls.
Learning of his boss’s admiration for the Knicks, Krause was no fool. He soon took to regaling Reinsdorf with tales of his days competing as a scout against Holzman. It was the early sixties, Krause’s first year in scouting for the old Baltimore Bullets. Other scouts in the business were already making fun of him. He was dumpy and short and looked nothing like a scout or like anybody who had anything to do with athletics. He was also secretive and wore a trench coat and a hat, like Inspector Clouseau. They called him “the Sleuth” and snickered behind his back.
Everywhere he turned, it seemed Krause was running into Holzman, who was scouting for the Knicks at the time. Early one morning they happened upon each other in an airport and Holzman asked Krause where he had been.
“Down the road,” he replied.
Krause loved recounting what happened next: “He looks at me and he says, ‘Son, I want to tell you something. I know where you’ve been, and if you’ve got any brains in your head you know where I’ve been, so let’s cut the bullshit and let’s be friends.’ ”
Friends they became, even as they competed fiercely to find hidden gems among the available college players. Krause thought he was about to make the steal of the 1967 draft with a rawboned young forward named Phil Jackson out of the University of North Dakota, but Holzman snuck in and stole him for the Knicks with the seventeenth pick.
“Fuckin’ Holzman,” Krause had muttered on the day of that very special draft. Scouting for the Baltimore Bullets, Krause had set the table for Baltimore to take Winston-Salem State’s Earl “The Pearl” Monroe with the number 2 pick, and Holzman had picked Walt Frazier out of Southern Illinois with the number 5 pick. Both players would wind up in the Hall of Fame, as would Jackson, as a coach. Holzman went on to coach the Knicks to two NBA championships, with Frazier, Monroe, and Jackson all playing a role along with guys like Dave DeBusschere and Bill Bradley. And Krause made his way as a scout, all the while battling the snickerers and naysayers who seemed to question everything about him. In the process, Krause built the kind of knowledge that would impress a no-nonsense man like Reinsdorf.
When Reinsdorf bought the Bulls that spring of 1985, he had thought he might keep Rod Thorn as director of the team’s basketball operations. But the Bulls went on a losing streak, which prompted the new owner to feel out what Krause would do to improve the team.
First, Krause said, he would get rid of the bad apples. “The way I figured it we had a whole bunch of Fords making Cadillac pay,” Krause recalled. “It was selfish. Everyone was playing for themselves.” Next, because he knew a thing or two about spotting college talent, he would use the draft to make the Bulls a team with a future. They would stop signing bad free agents.
Reinsdorf liked the draft philosophy and trusted Krause as a scout. Krause said the first player he would look for would be a tough power forward, a banger to protect the basket and the Bulls’ shiny new star. Beyond that, he would attempt to draft athletic players with long arms. Finally, he said, he would find good jump shooters to make opponents pay when they double-teamed Jordan.
Just as important, he would look for solid citizens. Chicago had to clean up its history of bad eggs.
After t
he talk, Reinsdorf realized he had to fire Rod Thorn and bring in Krause.
“Krause was atop the scouting hierarchy at the White Sox, and I had gotten to know him,” the owner explained later. “There had to be a cultural change in the Bulls’ organization, and Krause believed the same things I did.” In time, they would become known in Chicago as “the two Jerrys,” the men who held sway over the Jordan era with the Bulls.
“I want a team that will play Red Holzman basketball,” Reinsdorf said in announcing the changes. “An unselfish team, one that plays team defense, that knows its roles, that moves without the ball. Jerry Krause’s job will be to find the DeBusschere of 1985 and the Bradley of 1985.”
Krause had been named the Bulls’ GM once before, about five years earlier, and lasted all of a few months before he got crossed up, offering to hire DePaul’s Ray Meyer as the team’s coach. Krause’s mistake was that he didn’t have the authority to make the offer to Meyer. Bulls ownership promptly fired him in the wake of that very public embarrassment, making him the laughingstock of the city.
The news of his return hit the sports desks at Chicago newspapers like a bomb. Jerry Krause is gonna be Michael’s boss? “Jerry had this reputation for being a guy who went out in public with gravy stains on his tie,” longtime Chicago sportswriter Bill Gleason once explained. “Personally, I never saw any gravy stains, but some of the other guys claim they did. Of course he was overweight. Jerry always had a problem with overeating.”
He stood just under five six and weighed 260 pounds.
“Jerry’s been around forever,” said one longtime Bulls employee in 1998. “He knew all the coaches, the assistants, the scouts in the league. The previous Bulls administration despised Jerry. They had all these stories and tales and ripped him all the time. Lo and behold if he didn’t come back here and get the job as general manager.”
Krause was elated to return to the Bulls. “I’d left in disgrace, and I’d come back on top,” he explained.
His first step was to fire coach Kevin Loughery. His second was to bring in his old friend Tex Winter, a retired college coach, to work with the coaching staff that Krause would hire. He picked journeyman Stan Albeck, most recently of the New Jersey Nets, to replace Loughery. “I knew it was a mistake almost as soon as I did it,” Krause would say later.
Then he turned his attention to the roster. “I had a brutal start,” Krause recalled. “I had nine players I didn’t want and three I did. I wanted Dave Corzine, I wanted Rod Higgins, and I wanted Michael. The rest of them I couldn’t have cared less about. And they were talented. All of them were very talented. But it wasn’t a question of talent.”
Krause recalled sitting down to discuss the team with Jordan. “I told him, ‘I believe you have a chance to be a great player. I’m going to try to get players around you to work with you.’ He said, ‘No, don’t get players who can work with me. Get players we can win with.’ ”
After two decades of upheaval in the team’s front office, Bulls fans were openly leery of Krause’s seemingly unorthodox approach. But Krause knew what he wanted and set about the business of making it happen. He had long told himself that if he ever got another chance as an NBA general manager, he had a certain vision of what he wanted to build. It began with Tex Winter’s basketball system, the triangle offense. Second, he wanted to develop Phil Jackson as a head coach. Krause had known Jackson since the days he had scouted him in hopes of drafting him. The son of two Pentecostal preachers, Jackson had been raised in Montana and North Dakota. By the end of high school, he longed for relief from his strict upbringing and found escape with an athletic scholarship to the University of North Dakota, where he played basketball for an engaging young coach named Bill Fitch. The six-foot-eight Jackson developed into a two-time NCAA Division II All-American, a legitimate pro prospect. Krause and Holzman were probably the only two pro scouts that had made their way out to North Dakota to check out Jackson.
As a Knicks fan, Reinsdorf liked Krause’s idea of developing Jackson into an NBA coach. After his thirteen-year playing career in New York and New Jersey ended, Jackson had worked as an assistant coach and broadcaster for the Nets before moving on to become head coach of the Albany Patroons in the Continental Basketball Association for five seasons. In 1984, Jackson’s Patroons won the CBA title, and the next season he was named CBA Coach of the Year. He was coaching in Puerto Rico when Krause contacted him about an assistant coaching job with the Bulls in 1985.
“I kept up with Phil as a player through the years,” Krause recalled. “We’d talk from time to time, and I followed his coaching career in the CBA. When I got the job in Chicago in 1985, I talked to him again. I told him I needed scouting reports on the CBA. Within a week, I had typewritten reports on the whole league, details on every player.”
“I went to the CBA and had some success,” Jackson recalled, “but still nothing came in my direction.… Jerry Krause was like the only person that really stayed in touch with me from the NBA world. And he had just gotten back in it. But that was my connection. Jerry had seen me play in college, and we had a relationship that spanned twenty years. Jerry’s a remarkable guy. He’s an enigma to the athletic world. He’s not what you would consider an athlete. And even as a scout back there thirty years ago, he was a very unusual type of fellow to be out there scouting a basketball player.”
Jackson had been known as a nonconformist during his playing days with the Knicks. In Maverick, his 1975 autobiography written with Charlie Rosen for Playboy Press, Jackson recalled his exploration of sixties counterculture. In the book, he talked openly about taking LSD and other drugs, which just about guaranteed that no NBA team considered him coaching material.
“I’ve never read the book,” Krause once explained. “I didn’t need to. I knew about Phil’s character.”
While putting together a staff that off-season, Krause set up Jackson to interview with Stan Albeck for the job of assistant coach. He showed up in Chicago with a full beard and wearing sandals and a straw hat with a large parrot feather in it.
“Stan and I had a very short interview,” Jackson remembered.
Albeck later told Krause, “I don’t want that guy under any circumstances.”
Actually, Albeck wasn’t much interested in Tex Winter’s system either. Having run aground over coaching issues in his first tenure as the Bulls’ GM, Krause wasn’t about to have another blowup with his second opportunity. So he backed off and told Jackson he’d try him some other time.
Meanwhile, Krause had done some frantic last-minute maneuvering to draft Virginia Union’s Charles Oakley, a bulky, little-known forward in the 1985 draft. As with many Krause moves, the pick was not a popular one in Chicago.
“Charles was a tough kid, and he didn’t take anything from anyone,” recalled former Bulls assistant Johnny Bach. “You could tell he was strong-willed as a person and he wanted to play.… He wanted to prove to people coming from a small school that he was worthy of his selection in the draft and he was committed to playing hard.”
Oakley soon developed into just the power forward the Bulls needed, a protector of Jordan from the Bill Laimbeers of the world. Krause went looking for other pieces, what he called OKP, “our kind of people.”
“Jerry took away a lot of things that this franchise didn’t need,” Phil Jackson would say later of Krause’s early moves. “It didn’t need certain types of people on the club. He had a certain idea of what type of person he wanted. He brought in character, or what he liked to think of as character. Good solid people. People who wanted to work hard.”
The Needle
For all his ambition and insight, Krause quickly erred that first year back in Chicago in that he needlessly alienated Jordan, which would put their relationship on a negative footing for the next fifteen years. Among the early steps Krause took was the trading of Jordan’s best friend on the team. “We traded Rod Higgins,” Krause admitted later. “Michael was upset about that.”
Krause later rea
cquired Higgins, only to trade him yet again. It was the kind of move that left observers wondering whether Krause took pride, perhaps even pleasure, in challenging Jordan. In his years of scouting, Krause had studied the game’s all-time greats, just as he had put in hours scouting talent at America’s traditionally black colleges. Krause was immensely proud of his background, and often expounded to Jordan on the game’s greatest players, and on his own scouting credentials.
“I used to needle him,” Krause recalled of his early conflict with Jordan. “I used to say, ‘Someday you might be as good as Earl Monroe. You remind me of Earl and Elgin. You’re a combination of Earl Monroe and Elgin Baylor, and you might be as good as both of them someday. Earl did it on the ground. You’re doing it in the air. Elgin was the first one to do it in the air. You remind me of him.’ And then every time after that, he’d say, ‘That fuckin’ Monroe.’ Then, he’d say, ‘Where’d you take Monroe? Second in the draft? Big fuckin’ deal.’ I think that whole thing with Michael stems from Earl Monroe.”
Bulls employees who happened to witness these exchanges would cringe at Krause’s insistence on challenging Jordan. “If you’re gonna toss things out towards Michael, they better be true,” Tim Hallam explained. “Because he never forgets and he never lets go.”
Ultimately, the new GM’s “needling” would ruin any chance he had at a cordial relationship with the star of the team he was managing. But Krause seemed driven by the disrespect he sensed in Jordan’s response to him.
Jordan, meanwhile, pushed for the only thing he really trusted. He wanted the team to sign Buzz Peterson or to acquire Walter Davis, and he seemed generally in favor of anything related to North Carolina, which left Krause rolling his eyes. After a while Jordan simply decided to avoid the new GM at all costs. Such were the gnarly twists in the plotline of Jordan’s professional career. It hinged on a chemistry of two men chained together by providence, one badly in need of affection, the other doing everything possible to avoid giving it. The strangest part of their pairing was Krause’s collection of insecurities and Jordan’s absolute lack of them. Despite that, Krause would prove to be one of the strongest personalities who ever stepped into Jordan’s path.
Michael Jordan Page 30
