Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  Vaccaro traveled and worked with Jordan often enough to be surprised, even amazed, by his discretion. Even though he was young, Jordan was obviously wise enough not to put his friends and associates in awkward positions. He had his moments, but he was no rampant womanizer like Magic Johnson, who later claimed to have slept with as many as five hundred women a year at the height of his stardom.

  To Vaccaro, the fact that Jordan was able to negotiate the tests of stardom further demonstrated the surprising scope of his talents and gifts. “When you talk about Michael, he obviously had that thing… that crossover appeal, whatever the hell it was,” the older man said. “I use the word charisma, but it’s like nobody can define what that really means. All the things we’re talking about in his life, including the personal battle within his family, he overcame all that. There’s something truly rare about that. There aren’t too many human beings who can do that, in any walk of life.”

  PART VII

  THE CYNIC

  Chapter 20

  THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT

  HIS OLDER SISTER had seen it in him as a child. His father and even Red Auerbach had identified it as his career was taking off. Jordan loved to entertain the crowd. His relationship with the audience was growing in ways that those around him struggled to fathom, including the university scholars who had begun to study him as a force in popular culture.

  Yet even as he ceded his existence over to the public domain, there remained much that Jordan kept hidden. He did this willfully, out of his growing instinct for self-preservation and his insistence that parts of his life were no one else’s business. Johnny Bach witnessed this with a sense of awe. An intense student of both the game and human nature, Bach was a grand philosopher, blessed with both charm and sincerity. Who knows where the narrative of Michael Jordan and the NBA might have gone had it not been for Bach and their conversations?

  “If his eyes would light up and he was listening, I was fortunate that he listened,” Bach said of their relationship and his opportunity to work with the game’s greatest player.

  Jordan fought to keep his self-indulgence private as well as the burdens he chose to bear beyond the game. “I thought in the early days, he was doing so much, it was unbelievable,” Bach recalled. “He always visited with some person or child who had a last wish. He never turned anyone down. Every night he faced that, and I could never understand how he was strong enough to do it. Kids that were burned, brutalized, and dying by disease or something else. I can still remember he saw a kid who was brought in whose father had burned his face off him. They brought him in, and Michael talked to him in that old dressing room we had in Chicago Stadium before the game. He just talked to him. You couldn’t imagine, a kid that was hideously burned. And Michael just talked to him. He put him on the bench, and during the game he would come over and ask, ‘How’d you like that jump shot?’ One of the officials came over and said, ‘Michael, you can’t have that kid on the bench. It’s against league rules.’ And Michael looked at him and said, ‘He’s on the bench.’ He left our team time-outs to talk to the kid. I can remember John Paxson and I having tears in our eyes, looking at that scene, because the kid was so hideously burned. And here’s Michael talking to him. So he had that greatness in him. It brought out scenes like that. That was repeated many times. He was a wonder man.”

  Jordan seemed to draw from the same vast emotional store that fueled his competitiveness, Bach recalled. “I felt that they abused it. He was asked for so many things by so many people that he had to have been wearied by all of these requests. But he always seemed to accommodate those that needed him the most. He went up in stature, not just as a player, but as an individual who could take that scene and make that child happy. I couldn’t do it. I’ll tell you that. I would have and did almost break down. He took pressures exceedingly well, whether it was the demand of the press, or the demand of the organization, or the demands of the game itself, basketball. He came out and did it more often than anyone else could do it. He had few poor nights. A poor night for him would be an all-star night for someone else. I admire him to this day. How he accommodated so many people I’ll never know, never.”

  Jerry Krause, too, admired Jordan’s innate ability with the less fortunate. The GM recalled that the only time the young star chafed at such duty was if someone tried to turn the moment into a public relations event. The things he did were to be kept quiet, strictly behind the scenes, Jordan ordered. “He did those kinds of things all the time,” Tim Hallam remembered. “There was only one stipulation. He wasn’t doing it for the publicity. He insisted on keeping things quiet. Absolutely no press.”

  Of course, the last thing Jordan seemed to need was a public relations effort. His performances on the floor assured that. And he privately complained that he already suffered enough from the perfection of his image. The audience had long displayed a weakness for sports stars and a strong desire to believe the very best about them, having elevated an array of figures to mythic status over what had come to be described as the “sports century.” Little did anyone realize that this adulation of Jordan was just the beginning.

  The boom in shoe sales mirrored the exploding business of the team itself. In Jordan’s three seasons, the value of the franchise had more than tripled, and continued to grow with each tip-off. Jerry Reinsdorf was so pleased with these developments that he extended Doug Collins’s year-old contract and made plans to give Jordan a new, extended deal.

  Chicago’s home attendance had grown by nearly 200,000 to 650,718, a jump of nearly a third over the previous year, when Jordan missed thirty-four home games. On the road, the Bulls also punched up the entire league’s attendance by drawing an extra 276,996 fans, which generated another $3.71 million in revenue. The other owners recognized that the new golden goose was not Reinsdorf’s alone. The increased popularity and cash flow boosted the confidence around the team. “We’ve reached a respect factor in this city,” Collins told reporters. “We’re no longer considered the Bad News Bulls.”

  Wooly Bully

  All of these gains had been made, and the franchise had yet to hire Phil Jackson or to draft Scottie Pippen. Michael Jordan didn’t know either of them—the two major relationships of his professional life—in the spring of 1987. Pippen would arrive via the 1987 draft, and Jackson would join the Bulls’ employ that off-season as an assistant coach, charged with advanced scouting and other lower-ranked duties. Mostly, Krause wanted Jackson there so that he could pair him with Tex Winter for tutelage.

  Somehow Krause talked Collins into hiring Jackson, who remained basketball’s “odd duck,” an intellectual sort who wore feathers in his hat and had the reputation for LSD usage revealed in his book. But this time pro basketball’s resident hippie shaved and donned a tie for the interview, per Krause’s instructions. Jordan had never heard of Jackson when he came to the team, and eyed him suspiciously as another Krause invention, but the initial impressions were strong enough to overcome the vibe.

  It wasn’t articulated that Jackson would be waiting in the wings as Collins’s replacement, but such things were understood in the insular world of the NBA, and they generally made for tense palace intrigue. The NBA hadn’t really made use of assistant coaches until the late sixties and early seventies because most franchises couldn’t afford them or wouldn’t pay for them. And why should Collins trust Krause, who had already fired two coaches in two years on the job? Still, the arrangement worked somewhat in Chicago because Jackson, for all his ego, was low-key and reserved.

  The Bulls were a collection of strong personalities, with Jordan, Jackson, Collins, Bach, and Winter all somehow drawn together by this strange little man named Krause, and all kept on their toes by Jordan’s growing frustration and cynicism. He had little faith in Krause’s ability to find any sort of solutions for the team. And he remained quite angry over what he viewed as the GM’s bungling of his return from foot injury. Yet Jordan had been raised to be respectful, both by his parents and by Dean Smith.
He knew chain of command. He might take an occasional playful shot in a media interview, but when reporters asked him directly about the team’s personnel, Jordan often deferred, saying personnel issues weren’t his job.

  Behind the scenes, though, he had plenty of doubt, and the 1987 draft would bring those doubts into focus, as Krause had worked to give the team two first-round picks. Pippen, taken with the fifth overall pick in a deal with the Seattle SuperSonics, was not an item of excessive internal debate.

  The tenth pick, however, grew into an issue, with both Dean Smith and Jordan exerting a certain pressure on Krause to select North Carolina’s Joe Wolf or perhaps even Kenny Smith. Increasingly, GMs had grown leery of some Carolina players. Smith’s system made it hard to judge their talents. Plus, the coach was persuasive, and he always wanted his players to be drafted as high as possible. An NBA GM could wind up in trouble if he let Smith cloud his thinking.

  Krause was on edge that draft night about the tenth pick, but Reinsdorf told him to “go with his gut.” So Krause selected Clemson’s Horace Grant over Joe Wolf, which infuriated Dean Smith. The selection of a Clemson player over a Carolina player was galling to the coach because it could be used against him in recruiting.

  “Dean Smith called me,” Krause recalled, “and ripped my rear end, literally. ‘How could you do that, you dumbbell?’ Literally. And Michael said, ‘What the hell? You took that dummy?!’ And for years that’s what he called Horace: Dummy. To his face. Dummy. Right to his face.”

  Krause had not consulted with Jordan about the pick, although he knew well what would have pleased him. “I talked to players, but I didn’t talk to Michael because he wasn’t old enough to understand at that point,” Krause recalled. What was more unusual, the players he consulted with over personnel issues were on other teams. He often talked to Robert Parish of the Celtics and Brad Davis of the Mavericks. “Those relationships had built up over years,” Krause later confided. “And they could tell me things because they had played against guys.

  “Michael and I don’t look at things alike,” Krause explained in 1995. “Michael would have wanted me to have Buzz Peterson here the first couple of years, his college roommate. We used to kid about that all the time. Walter Davis was another one. He begged me to get Walter Davis. I wouldn’t do it.”

  The situation fed into the growing animosity between the two men. A year earlier, Krause had picked Brad Sellers over Jordan’s friend from Duke Johnny Dawkins. Now he bypassed a solid player from North Carolina. Years later, Krause would offer that Joe Wolf would probably have turned out just fine with the Bulls, that the North Carolina forward failed to develop mostly because he went to the lowly Los Angeles Clippers. Yet at the time, it was Jordan’s experience that no one knew players better than Dean Smith and no stamp of approval was stronger than the Tar Heel logo. It was why he wore Carolina practice shorts under his Bulls uniform each game night, and under his street clothes each day. He believed deeply in all things Carolina. He had won a championship with Carolina, while the Bulls had been mostly a tinhorn operation, managed by the chaotic, insecure Krause, who had presented him with three coaches in less than three seasons.

  Beyond all of that, Jordan just hated dealing with Krause, recalled the Sun-Times’s Lacy Banks. “Krause made it a lot more difficult than was necessary and that’s why Michael hated him.” By now, it was public knowledge that Jordan had nicknamed the team vice president “Crumbs,” because everything he ate—and he ate a lot—supposedly looked good on him.

  “Crumbs and I, we keep our distance,” he told Sports Illustrated that off-season.

  In time, Jordan would become less guarded about his disdain for the humorless GM. Over the coming seasons, when Krause came into the locker room, Jordan would sometimes lead his teammates in mooing or humming the theme music to Green Acres, antics that Krause mostly ignored or failed to recognize altogether.

  When training camp started that fall, Jordan did what he always did: he turned the full force of his competitiveness on Krause’s rookies and player acquisitions to see if they were strong enough mentally to compete. That was increasingly becoming a ritualistic test with Jordan. He had to see for himself, to confirm independently the work the GM was doing. Jordan’s insistence and anger over personnel issues would settle into a theme that years later would haunt his own life as a basketball executive.

  The truth was that a lot of NBA players simply weren’t ready to compete alongside Michael Jordan, no matter what school they came from or who drafted them. Anyone who had made the roster was well aware of the mental gauntlet he required each teammate to run. It seemed obvious that he had little faith in those around him. “Michael initially thought he could just take over the game and always win it by himself,” Bulls scout Jim Stack observed. “And he did that a lot, obviously, in the key time of the game to help us win. Until he really embraced his teammates and the idea that he could help us, I thought we were stuck for a while.”

  Much of his help the previous season had come from Charles Oakley, who had averaged 14.5 points and 13.7 rebounds, and John Paxson, who had 11.3 points while shooting almost 49 percent from the floor. “The thing you had to do with Michael Jordan is you had to gain his confidence as a player,” Paxson explained. “You had to do something that gave him some trust in you as a player. He was hard on teammates as far as demanding you play hard, you execute. So there had to come some point where you did something on the floor to earn his trust. That was the hardest thing for new guys coming in, and some guys couldn’t deal with it. Some guys could not play consistently enough or well enough, or they would not do the dirty work or little things. That’s one of the reasons why Michael liked Charles Oakley, because Charles played hard. He did little things on the floor that Michael appreciated, but a lot of guys didn’t understand that.”

  Pippen

  The first time he met Pippen, Jordan looked at him and said, “Oh great, another country boy.” It was an apparent reference to Pete Myers, Krause’s sixth-round pick out of the University of Arkansas in 1986. Pippen came from the neighboring university, Central Arkansas.

  “I’d never heard of him,” Jordan said of Pippen. “He was from an NAIA school.”

  Pippen was from Hamburg, Arkansas, a former railroad town of about three thousand people that was also the home of True Grit author Charles Portis. Pippen was the baby of Preston and Ethel Pippen’s twelve children. Preston Pippen worked in a textile mill, but his health failed during Scottie’s high school years, perhaps limiting the opportunities for his youngest child. Pippen mostly sat the bench as a junior at Hamburg High, but he started at point guard as a six-one, 150-pound senior. For the second leg of his improbable basketball journey, his high school coach arranged for him to attend Central Arkansas as a team manager, a role Pippen had served in high school. “I was responsible for taking care of the equipment, jerseys, stuff like that,” he once recalled. “I always enjoyed doing that, just being a regular manager.”

  His raw talent soon registered with basketball coach Don Dyer. “He wasn’t recruited by anyone,” Dyer once explained. “He was a walk-on, a six-one-and-a-half, 150-pound walk-on. His high school coach, Donald Wayne, played for me in college, and I took Pippen as a favor to him. I was prepared to help him through college. I was going to make him manager of the team and help him make it financially through college. When Scottie showed up for college, he had grown to six-three. I had had a couple of players leave school. I could see a little potential; he was like a young colt.”

  An NBA career had never even crossed Pippen’s mind, not even in his dreamiest moment. But he had grown to six-five by the end of that freshman year and had established that he was one of the team’s best players. “He had a point guard mentality,” Dyer told the Chicago Tribune in explaining Pippen’s evolution, “and we used him to bring the ball up the floor against the press. But I also played him at forward, center, all over the floor.”

  Scottie Pippen began to understand that things were
different on the basketball floor. “I could be as good as I wanted to be. I developed confidence in my abilities.” He blossomed into a two-time NAIA All-American. His senior year brought the kind of performance that got the attention of Marty Blake, the NBA’s director of scouting. Pippen averaged 23.6 points, 10 rebounds, and 4.3 assists while shooting 59 percent from the floor and 58 percent from three-point range. Blake passed information about Pippen on to the Bulls and other teams. Pippen was invited to one of the NBA’s tryout camps in Virginia, the Portsmouth Invitational, where Krause fell in love, as scouts are known to do. For one thing, now a full six-seven, Pippen had exceedingly long arms, which had long been a key for Krause in his evaluation of players.

  “We watched him,” Krause later recalled, “and I just got excited. I just got really shook up bad.”

  From there, Pippen was headed to the NBA’s next camp, in Hawaii. Krause notified Collins that they had a hot prospect. “When we told Doug Collins about Scottie, he was skeptical,” Krause said. “So I put together a video of all the players in the Hawaii tournament and gave it to the coaches. I gave them names and rosters but no real information on the players. We let them see for themselves. After they came out of the video session, I asked if they had any questions, and the first thing out of their mouths was, ‘Who the hell is Scottie Pippen?’ ”

  From there, Krause worked a somewhat complicated deal with Seattle that netted Pippen for Chicago after the Sonics had selected him fifth overall in the 1987 draft. In return, Seattle got Olden Polynice, a center out of the University of Virginia. As a player from a small town and a small school who was suddenly thrust into the spotlight in Chicago, Pippen was understandably lost.