Jordan resumed his pace after the All-Star Weekend. In late February, he scored 58 against the Nets, breaking Chet Walker’s old Bulls regular-season, single-game scoring record of 57. A few days later, despite a painful corn on his left foot, he blasted the Pistons for 61 in an overtime win before 30,281 screaming fans at the Pontiac Silverdome. Down the stretch, Jordan and Isiah Thomas and Adrian Dantley of the Pistons furiously swapped baskets.
“Isiah’s play at that time pumped me to another level,” Jordan would admit later. “He was making great shots and then I’d come down and make a great shot. It was great entertainment for the fans and great basketball.” Of all his many huge games that season, the Pistons victory was by far his favorite. “Because we won,” he explained. “And because I switched onto Adrian Dantley in the last few minutes, stole the ball three times, and held him without a basket. A victory for defense.” Afterward the shell-shocked Pistons began working to come up with a scheme to prevent any such embarrassment in the future.
Jordan seemed to bound from one over-the-top performance to the next. “I don’t know how he did it,” teammate John Paxson said. “Every night someone else was standing in his face, and he never took a step back.”
The I in Win
There was something in this unleashed hunger that gnawed at many people across the NBA. Among the few who dared to speak openly about it was Larry Bird, who told a reporter, “I don’t like to watch the same guy take every shot. That’s not what the game is all about.”
Jordan thoroughly dominated the ball for Chicago that season, taking almost a third of his team’s shots. It would be the first of Jordan’s nine seasons leading the league in field goal attempts. The focus on one player at the expense of the team concept flew in the face of what Bulls assistant Tex Winter believed was important about the game. Despite Winter’s misgivings, Doug Collins seemed wholly supportive of Jordan’s volume scoring and was perhaps eager for even more, if it meant getting more wins. Originally shy about coaching Jordan, Winter began urging the third-year star toward a more fundamental approach to the game. Jordan immediately bristled.
“You know what he told me?” Jordan confided to writer Curry Kirkpatrick. “And when he said this, I knew one of us was over the hill. He told me, ‘The highest percentage shot on the drive is to lay it up.’ He asked me, ‘Why do you go on trying those outrageous jumps and moves and dunks?’ I couldn’t believe it. I just stared at him and said, ‘Hey, I don’t plan this stuff. It just happens.’ ”
In his late sixties, Winter had more than four decades of first-rate coaching experience, as head coach at five colleges and the Houston Rockets. His specialty had been the development of the triple-post offense, which was by then viewed as antiquated. But where other people in basketball scoffed at Tex Winter as some sort of oddball, Krause had known him for years and deeply admired him and his offense, almost to the point of worship, and was irritated that neither Stan Albeck nor Collins followed Winter’s offensive advice.
Winter’s offense wasn’t just Xs and Os, as he liked to point out, but a system, or philosophy, for playing the game, complete with an entire set of related fundamentals. The older assistant was focused on detail in a way that no other pro coach even considered. For example, he was agitated to no end that Jordan couldn’t throw a basic chest pass to his liking. Albeck and Collins had resisted Winter’s advice mainly because incorporating it would require them to give themselves over to his entire system, where he had each detail of the game spelled out. His system created an attack that offered immaculate floor spacing and a systematic breaking down of the defense. It allowed players to know where they were going to get their shots. Most important, it employed a two-guard front that allowed for floor balance. Winter’s idea was that one player would always be able to get back on defense to prevent easy fast breaks by the opponent.
“Tex in his own way was a very obstinate, aggressive man,” Johnny Bach recalled. “He believed in the triple post probably even before the gospel pages. That was his gospel. He wanted it installed. I don’t know if Krause had told him, ‘Yes, you can put your things in.’ He not only had to convince Doug. He also had to convince Michael that this is an offense that is not only good for the team but one that Michael could operate in.”
That would prove to be a tough sell, made tougher because Jordan saw Winter as one of Krause’s guys and thus tainted, and a target for a little fun.
“Tex was like a grandpa to all of us,” recalled trainer Mark Pfeil. “But the players would mock him. Michael used to tease him and stuff. Over everything. One time in practice, Michael sneaked up behind him and pulled Tex’s shorts all the way down to his knees, and there was Tex’s bare butt sticking out.”
Winter never reported any of this to Krause, but the distance grew between him and Collins, the coach he was supposed to be mentoring. Winter believed he had been hired to teach, so he taught wherever possible, with the sort of frank, direct feedback that most players hadn’t heard since middle school.
“When we step out on that floor at a practice session, I’m going to coach whoever shows up,” Winter once said of his approach. “And I’m going to coach them the way I coach, whether it’s Michael Jordan… or whoever it is. It doesn’t make any difference. They know that. If I see Michael making a mistake, I’ll correct him as fast as I will anyone else. On the other hand, he’s such a great athlete you have to handle him a little differently than you do the other players. I don’t think you can come down on him hard in a very critical way, whereas some younger guy or some other guy you feel you might be able to motivate by coming down on them pretty tough.”
Whereas Bach urged Jordan to attack, Winter spoke constantly of the team approach. And his will could be every bit as strong as Jordan’s. Conflict simmered within the Chicago coaching staff, exacerbated by Collins’s determination to be his own man. “He brought an enthusiasm that went beyond the normal,” Bach said of Collins in that first season. “He was fired up, especially in competition. Some coaches see very little out there. They’re very good about what they’re teaching, and they don’t see much more than that. Indeed, Doug Collins has always been a coach that sees too much.” Collins could never seem to leave well enough alone and was always adding new plays to his team’s mix.
Given the conflict between his parents and the conflict among his coaches, it was no wonder that Jordan seemed to be losing trust in the authority figures around him. Criticism, however, always seemed to get his attention. There was no question that the observations offered by Bird and Winter took Jordan by surprise and left him a bit defensive. “I’m taking these raps as a challenge just to get better and see that my team gets better,” he said in one interview. “But it’s not as if I’m playing with a bunch of all-leaguers.… Anybody who thinks that is a damn fool.”
In truth, Jordan’s growing selfishness when it came to scoring had begun generating resentment among his teammates. Some years later, Jordan himself would come clean on the issue and acknowledge his concentration on self rather than team. At the time, his focus on his own game, his own abilities, seemed impenetrable. He heeded Bach’s counsel, and persisted in the attack.
March brought another streak of five 40-plus games. In April, he had an opportunity to become the only player since Wilt Chamberlain in 1962–63 to score better than 3,000 points in a season. (Chamberlain had done it twice.) Jordan scored 53 against Indiana, then 50 against Milwaukee, after which Bucks coach Don Nelson took off his necktie and wrote “Great Season, Great Person” on it before giving it to Jordan. Nelson was another of the old-style, turn-loose-the-assassin coaches who would later trade subtle insults with Winter and Jackson across the competitive divide. The signed tie was his way of urging Jordan on, just like Bach.
The game’s offensive monster rewarded his fans with his second 61-point performance of the season, this time against Atlanta in the Stadium. He finished the season with 3,041 points and a league-best 37.1 scoring average.
During
the Atlanta onslaught, he scored an NBA-record 23 straight points. At the end of the game, he tossed up a half-court shot that fell just short, enough to leave purists like Winter shaking their heads even as fans across the league hooted in delight. As Jordan walked off the floor, Winter told him, “There’s no I in team.”
Jordan highlighted the moment in his 2008 Hall of Fame acceptance speech, recalling that he looked at Winter and replied, “Yeah, but there is in win.”
The moment framed basketball’s great debate, indeed the debate of American culture itself, about the individual versus the team or group. Only in retrospect would it become clearer for both Winter and Jordan that the philosophical confrontation they shared would have a profound effect on both of them, their later success, and how they both viewed the game.
Meanwhile, Jordan’s “reward” for his season-long offensive display was being left off the first and second NBA all-defensive teams, which infuriated him. That season he had become the first player in NBA history to record more than 200 steals and 100 blocked shots. He had 236 steals and 125 blocks.
In the history of the league, Jerry West was the only scoring champion to ever make the all-defensive team. Jordan determined that he wanted to be recognized for having the “complete game.” He had set Bulls records in six different single-season categories, all enough to drive Doug Collins’s first team to a 40–42 record and another first-round playoff meeting with the Celtics. Bird and Boston, however, swept the series in three (while Jordan averaged 35.7 points), emphasizing Bird’s and Winter’s message that team strength could easily outshine a one-man show. Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls had lost nine playoff games and won just one in his first three seasons.
“He’s a guy whose highlight films you most want to watch,” Boston guard Danny Ainge said of Jordan. “But I don’t know how much fun he’d be to play with.”
Even so, it had been the kind of individual year that moved even his most determined critics to speak up. “Everybody always says it’s me and Larry,” Magic Johnson, whose Lakers defeated the Celtics for the league title that season, told reporters. “Really, it’s Mike and everybody else.” Jordan and Johnson had identified each other as the game’s top players. Once Jordan’s high school idol, Johnson now loomed as an unliked rival, and it wasn’t just about winning. From the debate within his own team to his relationships with stars on other teams, Jordan faced substantial criticism.
“It’s no secret around the league that, even with his four championship rings, Johnson harbors something that seems to be more than professional jealousy toward Jordan,” Curry Kirkpatrick wrote in Sports Illustrated. “Commercially, at least, Magic should have been Michael seven years ago when he followed up winning the 1979 NCAA title for Michigan State with a tour de force sixth game in the 1980 NBA championship series, which the Lakers won over the Philadelphia 76ers.”
It clearly still bothered Johnson and other veterans that Jordan’s Nike deal and the promotional effort behind it gave him a status above even the league’s most accomplished stars. Jordan, meanwhile, didn’t hesitate to express his theory that Johnson had been behind Lakers owner Jerry Buss’s push to trade James Worthy. “I don’t hold anything against him,” Jordan told Kirkpatrick. “I just think he doesn’t like players who come from North Carolina.”
It didn’t help that Johnson and Isiah Thomas were making much of what was then their high-profile personal friendship. When Johnson sent an invitation to play in his coveted summer all-star charity game, Jordan tersely declined. It was obvious that the All-Star snubbing two years earlier still burned him.
The truth was, he faced a staggering array of commitments in the off-season. Jordan had laughed the first time David Falk ran the name “Air Jordan” past him. But in less than three years, he had become an unprecedented marketing force, with an estimated $165 million in sales of Nike shoes and merchandise alone. “First I thought it was a fad,” Jordan would say, looking back on the response to his shoe line. “But it’s far greater now than it used to be. The numbers are just outrageous.”
Strangely, Phil Knight had begun to have second thoughts about his company’s relationship with Jordan, which set up something of a drama that would unfold over the next year as talks continued about a new contract for Air Jordan. It was as if MJ had gotten too much power too quickly and it spooked Knight, Sonny Vaccaro explained. Such huge sales were difficult to sustain, and a slight dip had given the Nike chairman reason for pause. “Phil was ready to get rid of him,” Vaccaro remembered. “Phil was ready to sign all the college teams and forget Michael. I said, ‘You can’t do that.’ ”
First of all, Rob Strasser had left the company and was now advising Jordan to push for his own product line. Knight rejected that idea and persisted in questioning the value of the company’s relationship with Jordan until Vaccaro put together some numbers that made it clear that Nike couldn’t gain anything near the Air Jordan sales in college markets.
Knight had a choice: to cut Jordan loose or to ride this surging, though sometimes frightening, tide. Ultimately Knight chose to stay the course with Jordan. Eventually, a fat new Nike contract would be signed, a deal that would open the door a few years later for the emergence of the Jordan Brand and create unimaginable wealth for an athlete.
“He got the big raise, then the Jordan Brand,” Vaccaro said of Jordan’s succeeding deals with the shoe manufacturer. “There’s no question he bought in. I mean it was huge. Michael was in. That was a seminal deal in the history of deals. There’s no question. And to Michael’s credit and to Nike’s credit, they created an empire.”
“He was climbing so fast, and the product was so good,” Johnny Bach remembered. “He tried on every new pair of shoes they were making. He was very proud of the product. He wanted to make sure he liked what he saw.”
Jordan’s image seemed to become one and the same with Nike, as he continued to both embrace and shrink from the metastasizing fame. As if the air time of the Nike TV ads hadn’t been enough, CBS’s 60 Minutes had broadcast a ten-minute profile by Diane Sawyer that portrayed a playful, almost sweet Jordan, the kind of image-making you couldn’t buy. David Falk was beside himself with glee. Backing up what his agent called 60 Minutes’ “commercial” was Jordan’s first appearance as a cartoon character, in the popular syndicated comic strip Shoe by Pulitzer Prize winner Jeff MacNelly, who just happened to be a fellow Tar Heel. There seemed to be no connection that didn’t work for Jordan. The first line of toys made in his image was scheduled to appear on shelves that Christmas.
Lacy Banks returned to the Bulls beat as a sportswriter for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1987 and was introduced to Jordan. His first impression of the star was that Jordan was atop a throne and quite taken with it, Banks recalled with a laugh years later. “Michael had come into possession of the world.”
“It was like he was anointed,” Sonny Vaccaro remembered. “I mean seriously, everything. I mean, even where he did something contrary to what was supposed to happen, it would come out all right.”
Indeed, fans and opponents alike were beginning to grasp that the arc of Jordan’s rise was broader and much, much higher than anyone had imagined. “In the age of TV sports,” David Falk observed that summer of 1987, “if you were to create a media athlete and star for the nineties—spectacular talent, midsized, well-spoken, attractive, accessible, old-time values, wholesome, clean, natural, not too Goody Two-shoes, with a little bit of deviltry in him—you’d invent Michael. He’s the first modern crossover in team sports. We think he transcends race, transcends basketball.”
“Things were changing and Michael was in the middle of it,” Sonny Vaccaro explained. “He was doing commercials for everybody, you know, and he became this entity.”
McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Chevrolet, Wilson Sporting Goods, and a half dozen other companies used him to promote their products. The sums they paid him dwarfed his five-year, $4 million Bulls contract. Which meant that his schedule that summer was packed with everythi
ng from hosting TV shows to throwing out pitches at Major League Baseball games.
“It took getting used to, but now I enjoy all the off-court stuff,” Jordan said during a quick promotional trip to Pittsburgh that summer. “It’s like being back in school. I’m learning all the time. In college I never realized the opportunities available to a pro athlete. I’ve been given the chance to meet all kinds of people, to travel and expand my financial capabilities, to get ideas and learn about life, to create a world apart from basketball.”
A big part of that world apart appeared more and more to include Juanita Vanoy. He had proposed on New Year’s Eve, just as they were looking out across 1987 and wondering at all the bounty it seemed poised to bring. Indeed, he had purchased a new five-bedroom, five-thousand-square-foot home north of Chicago. As she helped him decorate it, they began to articulate the kind of life they might share together. The news of the engagement did not sit well with his parents, who remained caught in their own struggle for influence over his life.
The discreet activities that made James Jordan smile were the stuff of nightmares for Michael’s mother and fiancée. “We live in a very tempting world,” Sonny Vaccaro explained. “At that level, at Michael’s level, it’s unbelievable. He was good-looking, a young guy on top of the world. The stories are out there. But these things are just indigenous to fame and fortune. It’s hard to be an idol.”
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