“He was a phenomenal talent but he was just so raw,” Jim Stack recalled. “And Scottie, when we first drafted him, had those back issues. Because of that, he sat out a lot of training camp.”
The back issues would be a huge factor in Pippen’s career development, and in his relationship with the front office. But his fast friendship with the Bulls’ other first-round pick, Horace Grant, helped him adjust that first year.
“The two of them came to Chicago the next day after the draft and went to a White Sox game,” Cheryl Raye-Stout recalled. “They were sitting in the dugout with their Bulls caps on. They forged a friendship immediately.… And it translated onto the court because they felt really good about each other. They both had a lot of maturing to do. Scottie had it the most difficult coming from an NAIA school. Not being used to ever having media around, it was quite a shock for him.”
The relationship between the two rookies became an infatuation of sorts. “Scottie is like my twin brother,” explained Grant, who already had a twin brother, Harvey, also an NBA player. Pippen became his surrogate twin. The two shopped together, double-dated together, drove the same type of car, and lived near each other in suburban Northbrook. They even got married a week apart and served as each other’s best man. It was the kind of relationship that cast an odd bent to the Bulls’ already awkward chemistry. “Scottie called in one day and skipped practice because his cat died,” recalled former trainer Mark Pfeil. “Horace called about fifteen minutes later and said he was with Scottie because of the grieving. Johnny Bach, our assistant coach, was absolutely furious. He got Horace on the phone and said, ‘You get here. You oughta throw the cat in the garbage can.’ Horace, when the team got together, wanted to have a moment of silence for Scottie’s cat.”
Such nonsense irritated Jordan. Krause recalled that practices soon became more entertaining than games in Chicago, with Jordan hunkering down and yelling at Pippen, “I’m gonna kick your ass!”
Early on, the goal of Jordan’s harsh confrontations in practice was to toughen Pippen. Bach recalled that the young forward learned from the experience, although it didn’t leave the two of them with a relationship noted for its warmth.
“When Scottie and Horace came in, Michael sensed the thing could be turned around,” Mark Pfeil recalled. “But the thing that frustrated him was that they didn’t have the same attitude. They were young enough to say, ‘Hell, we get paid whether we win or lose.’ And it was good enough for them just to get close.”
Jordan cared only about finding some partners to help him compete. Collins took a similarly hard line, Bach explained. “Doug Collins had high demand on young players, and sometimes misunderstood them. High demand with a lot of emotional involvement with them. Doug brought them to a level of competing hard every night. He drove them. He emotionally got involved with them and got them to understand how important each game and practice was, and he drove them. Some people lead young players; he drove them.”
Pippen continued to be troubled by his back that first season, which led some in the organization to suspect malingering, until he was finally diagnosed and underwent disk surgery during the 1988 off-season.
“My first year or two, I admit that I messed around a lot,” Pippen once disclosed. “I partied, enjoyed my wealth, and didn’t take basketball as seriously as I should have. I’m sure a lot of rookies did the same thing I did. You’re not used to the limelight or being put in a great situation financially.”
Even so, his talent presented great hope for the franchise, despite the fact that he weighed just 205 that first year. “Even though his body wasn’t there, you could see signs,” Jordan recalled. “As an open-court player, he was so much like Dr. J. He’d get the ball on the break with those long strides and next thing you know, he’s at the basket. I think it took people by surprise to see how quickly he progressed and how his body responded to the style of play.”
The Spat
Looking for some size and veteran leadership in the frontcourt, the team brought back thirty-eight-year-old Artis Gilmore to share center duties with Dave Corzine. Oakley was well established at power forward, and wanted to get the ball more. Collins didn’t disagree with him, but it was hard to resist the Jordan option.
“We have to get to the point where Michael Jordan is not the sole source of energy on this team,” Collins told reporters. “Both Michael and the Bulls know he can’t survive long with the inhuman burdens we put on him. Of course, sometimes I’m not sure he’s a mere human.”
The optimistic plan was that Pippen and Grant would earn playing time, and that Jordan could merge his overpowering talents with the developing abilities of his teammates. “We have not proven anything yet,” Collins told reporters. “Last year we were overachievers that played on emotion. Oakley’s rebounding, Jordan’s scoring, Paxson’s steadiness, Corzine’s toughness—all fell into place and allowed us to be average.”
The season hadn’t even started before trouble boiled up. In late October, Jordan accused Collins of cheating on the score of a scrimmage and walked out of practice. Headlines informed the city that the two weren’t speaking. Jordan was fined, and Collins found himself under pressure to make the next move.
“Michael in the early days was both ambitious and strong-willed,” Bach reflected. “Doug Collins also had a flash point. With that flashy personality and drive, I could see that at times it could rub a player the wrong way, especially someone like Michael Jordan.”
“He has his pride; I have mine,” Jordan told reporters. “We’re two adults. In due time, words will be said. I’m not going to rush the situation.”
“Doug knew he had to kiss and make up, and that’s what he did,” John Paxson recalled. “He had to calm his superstar. That was a little test he had. Had another player done that, you don’t know what would have happened, because guys just don’t walk out of practice. Just don’t take off.”
While the two soon patched up in public, the reality was that Jordan had little respect for his coach. Over the years, Collins would prove his stature in the game. “But at that time, he was immature,” Sonny Vaccaro explained. “He just wasn’t ready. It was obvious.”
Jordan sometimes vented his frustration to Vaccaro about the coach. There were situations that led Krause to caution Collins about his behavior. There were suspicions that the GM was keeping track of the coach’s indiscretions. They had clashed mightily that spring and off-season regarding player acquisitions. The blowup over practice only added to Collins’s already substantial insecurities.
The coach was torn. He believed that Jordan dominated the ball too much for the team to win a championship. Jordan continued to force the point guards off the ball on the inbounds and take it himself, to control the offense. It meant that the coach could never get the Bulls into any sort of running game. The situation led Krause to believe that Collins was incapable of saying no to Jordan.
“It’s got to be very difficult as a head coach to have a relationship with Michael and try to have that same type of relationship with other players,” John Paxson observed almost a decade later. “You just can’t do it. You have to give Michael leeway. On the floor you can’t be as critical of him as you can with other players because of what he can do and what he means.”
Impulsive and emotional, Collins revealed a tendency to blame his players for losses, sometimes in bitter, caustic terms that only alienated them. Teammates began encouraging Jordan to speak up about these issues, but he declined, pointing to the public furor that Magic Johnson stirred up in 1982 by taking on Lakers head coach Paul Westhead.
“As a head coach you’re walking a fine line with Michael Jordan,” Paxson said, looking back. “Not that he would ever do anything like that, but we all knew about the situation with Magic Johnson and Paul Westhead at the Lakers, when Westhead got fired after disagreeing with Magic. That’s the power Michael could have wielded if he chose to. So Doug was walking a fine line. Early in Doug’s career he handled it the best way he
knew how.”
The result was a rift in the Jordan-Collins relationship that Jordan worked hard to mask. Some thought the player and coach were reasonably close. They were not, Vaccaro said. “It was water and oil. I knew that.” Jordan also took exception to Collins’s antics during games, which contrasted sharply with the dignified calm that he so appreciated in Dean Smith. Many in the organization fed on Collins’s zany energy. Jordan found it almost distasteful, but he kept that to himself because so many fans considered it an important part of the exciting young team.
“Doug was such an intense guy,” recalled longtime Bulls equipment manager John Ligmanowski. “It was almost like he wanted to be in the game. He’d come downstairs soaked in sweat, totally drained after a game. It was fun because we were just really starting to get good. The team had come around.”
Whatever his youthful shortcomings, Collins had the energy to drive the Bulls through the next stage of growth. “Doug was a great guy,” Mark Pfeil explained. “He was interested in everything about people. He cared about them.”
Cheryl Raye-Stout recalled that the media, particularly TV reporters, loved Collins. “He was very accessible to them. Doug was screaming and yelling and jumping and throwing.… He definitely was demonstrative in his actions, and the guys who were key to this team were extremely young. Horace and Scottie, they hated him. He was growing up with them. He was new to the job. Here’s a guy who came from the television booth. He was learning the process, too.”
If Jordan felt any recrimination about the October incident with Collins, it was because he had begun—sometimes even more than his mother already did—to process things that happened to him in terms of his image, which had become the basis of his income. He acknowledged as much to Detroit reporter Johnette Howard in an interview several weeks later. “I felt bad that I did it that way,” he said of walking out. “But I felt good that people perceived it the way it really was, that I’m just such a competitor.”
This was becoming his go-to excuse for just about any behavior that might be interpreted as unseemly: it was because he was such a tremendous competitor. Blaming his own excessively competitive nature was a convenient out and, more importantly, the public seemed hungry to accept it. Even so, he had plenty of reason for concern about his image, he told Howard. “I’m put in a tough position with this team. It’s hard for me to be a vocal leader with this team because everyone seems to view the Chicago Bulls as ‘Michael Jordan’s team’ or ‘Jordan and company.’ My name is always in the spotlight, and some people are naturally going to get jealous.”
He worried that his treatment of his teammates in practice would be viewed as harsh. So he tried to keep things balanced, he explained. “If you show some tenderness and concern, people appreciate you more.” He made a habit of trying to praise his teammates regularly in his media interviews.
Collins was popular in Chicago, and Jordan took pains after the practice incident to show him the proper respect. The coach had been rewarded with a contract extension, but some observers saw signs that the pressure was taking its toll on him. He had lost weight, wasn’t eating well, and on many days looked drawn.
Jordan was also stressed, a situation, ironically, made worse by his financial success. The money and status continued to irritate players around the league. They had heard about his promotional contracts and saw his expensive suits and his gold necklaces. At the time, there were as many as twenty-four NBA players who made more than one million dollars a year while Jordan was locked into a contract that paid him about $830,000 for 1987–88. Sonny Vaccaro recalled that Magic Johnson never could understand how Jordan could have a shoe contract so much larger than any other star’s. Vaccaro heard similar complaints from players all the time. He was now well known as Nike’s money man, and it was his job to listen and to talk with the players in the game.
Lacy Banks heard it, too. The Sun-Times had assigned Banks to cover the Bulls that fall of 1987. Banks was also a Baptist minister and thus sometimes called “the Reverend” by those he worked with. He, too, was struck by Jordan’s unusual relationship with wealth. “When I started covering Michael, he was still evolving,” Banks remembered. “He hadn’t even gotten a big contract yet. He had this principle that he signed his contract with Reinsdorf and he felt duty bound. If Reinsdorf wanted to break it and give him some money, he wouldn’t turn it down. But he didn’t feel it was his place to say, ‘I think I’m worth more money now. I think you ought to pay me.’ ”
Jordan was making so much off the court, his basketball pay became a matter of pride. He didn’t want to be seen as clamoring for more. The off-court income allowed him to say he didn’t really play for the money. Others had said the same thing over the years, but Jordan was the first pro player who really didn’t have to focus on his NBA salary.
Banks had covered Muhammad Ali for Ebony magazine and had gotten to know him, and he often contemplated just how misunderstood the boxer was. Ali had displayed tremendous courage in speaking out against the Vietnam War, well before that became commonplace, and he had paid dearly for his opposition to the war. This young basketball prince that Banks was now covering showed no such concern for social justice. Yet like most of the other people reporting on Jordan, Banks found that he admired the Bulls star. “I could see that he appreciated the fact there was a black guy covering the Bulls,” Banks recalled in 2011. “We were very close the first few years.”
The two would often sit together, playing cards and talking, on the commercial flights the team took in those early years. And so many times when Jordan didn’t have his entourage on the road, Banks would be there to fetch orange juice and oatmeal cookies for Jordan after games—since the fans in the lobby made getting them himself an impossibility. They’d sit up until the wee hours, watching movies on SpectraVision or playing yet more cards. That’s when Banks came to the conclusion that Jordan had a photographic memory. He could quote entire sections of movie scripts and could recall amazing details of the endless blur of games he played.
“I came to believe he was counting cards on me,” Banks said of their titanic games of seven- and five-card stud and tonk. “He could call every bet, at least ninety percent of them. I was playing to try to win money. He was playing for relaxation and competition. In many ways, he fascinated me. Michael was a dream, and I had a nice, meaningful, enriching, enjoyable relationship with him.”
He would be unfailingly polite with any woman who knocked on his hotel door late at night seeking affection. “That was before I realized he had a secret life going on,” Banks explained. They were together so often in those early days that “people began calling me Michael’s man,” Banks explained. “That made me feel good and massaged my ego.”
Especially with so many beautiful women wanting to meet Jordan. “You know Michael? Can you introduce me to him?” they would ask Banks, who always politely declined.
The sportswriter found Jordan amazingly patient not just with women but with the many strangers they encountered in airports and hotels. “He wouldn’t brush people off,” Banks said.
Jordan drew much of his approach from his parents. “They were quiet but sociable,” Banks said. “There was a tremendous resemblance between his father and Michael, their facial expressions and speech patterns. Mrs. Jordan was a devout Christian. I never heard anything untoward about his mother or father, or his siblings.”
The sportswriter spent time pondering how Jordan was misunderstood, not by the public as much as by his peers in the game. “When people begrudged him his success, they didn’t understand,” Banks recalled. “People thought he was being arrogant wearing the bling, and they begrudged him not so much for his talent but more for his marketing success. To have a multimillion-dollar contract with Nike was unheard of. What we all saw was that this guy is a marketing magnet and whoever had a piece of him was going to do well. The Bulls started drawing a capacity crowd, leading the league in attendance. Michael became king of the court.”
It was
a coronation that both opponents and certain people in the Bulls organization eyed with disdain.
Chapter 21
RULING JORDAN
THE BULLS OPENED the season in October 1987 with Brad Sellers, their first-round pick in 1986, at small forward, ancient Artis Gilmore at center, and Oakley at power forward. Jordan and John Paxson were the guards. Collins and management had agreed that Jordan needed to play fewer minutes and to share the responsibility with his teammates, but just the opposite occurred. Collins saw that Jordan wasn’t going to allow the running game to happen. So he ran isolation plays for Jordan again and again, which consistently confounded the opposition.
For Jordan, 1988 would be a season of adjustment. His quickness to the basket was so great that teams had to force him to take jump shots and push him to give up the ball. The league had no rules against hand-checking and physical play in that era, so coaches started looking around for people strong enough to muscle him. Jordan worked on his outside shot, so as not to present a weakness that could be used against him. But he maintained that he was a much better shooter than people gave him credit for.
There was no team focused on Jordan quite like Detroit. The 1987 playoffs had been a watershed of sorts for the Pistons, who had battled for several years to unseat Bird’s Celtics in the playoffs. They finally had what seemed like the edge in Game 5 of the 1987 Eastern Conference finals in Boston Garden with a 1-point lead over the Celtics and scant seconds to go. The Pistons were inbounding the ball along the sideline near their own basket, and Isiah Thomas wanted the ball from referee Jess Kersey. “Don’t you want a time-out?” Kersey asked.
“Just gimme the fuckin’ ball!” Thomas shouted over the noise.
So the referee gave Thomas the ball. He passed it in, then Bird stole it and hit streaking Celtics teammate Dennis Johnson for the go-ahead basket. Like that, Boston had a 1-point lead with a second left.
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