Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  Doug Collins was well aware that the summer league team was using Winter’s offense, and that Jackson was involved. But Collins didn’t fully grasp that Krause would likely have supported any coach who actually listened to Winter. “Doug was very headstrong and confident, which you would expect,” explained Jim Stack. “He had been a number one pick and had had a great NBA career. Doug really wanted to do things his way. At that young age, he sort of bucked against some ideas.”

  Besides, anyone could see that the Bulls were getting better, driving more exciting change for the franchise. For example, the supply of Bulls season tickets was exhausted by the fall of 1988. If you wanted to ride on the Jordan express, you had to get on the waiting list. His team coffers plump with revenue just four short years from the time that the Bulls seemed doomed, Jerry Reinsdorf rewarded his star with a contract extension that September, reported to be worth about $25 million over eight seasons. This new deal, too, would be outdated in record time.

  They were all headed into a blizzard of cash. That season, the Bulls would lead the league in the sales of licensed merchandise and they would do so for the foreseeable future. “To put that in proper perspective,” recalled longtime Bulls VP Steve Schanwald, “about 40 percent of all NBA licensed merchandise sold was Bulls-related.” If only all that money could have bought Jerry Krause a little love, or at least respite from Jordan’s ballooning frustrations.

  The Conflict

  As Jordan suspected, the early returns for his fourth NBA season proved troubling. The Pistons pushed them around on opening night in Chicago. Collins had Cartwright at center, Brad Sellers and Grant at forwards, and Jordan in the backcourt with Sam Vincent, who had come to Chicago from Seattle. Faced with glaring weaknesses there, Jordan again seemed to take it all on himself and broke out of the gate on his way to leading the league in scoring—and brashness too. He stole the ball during a November game and dunked on guard John Stockton, which prompted Jazz owner Larry Miller, who was sitting courtside, to snap at Jordan that he should pick on somebody his own size. Moments later, Jordan went to the hoop and dunked over six-eleven center Mel Turpin, then ran by Miller as he headed down the floor and asked the owner, “Is he big enough?”

  The team, meanwhile, teetered along a mediocre path. Media critics had long pointed out that Larry Bird and Magic Johnson made their teammates better, while Jordan often seemed to be playing for himself. Assistant coach Phil Jackson had articulated a similar point one day about the need for Jordan to make his teammates better. Jackson said that it was something Knicks coach Red Holzman had emphasized to him years earlier. Collins thought Jackson had a good point, and ordered his assistant to go and inform Jordan of it immediately. Jackson took on the foolhardy mission, fully expecting an unwelcome response from the star. He was surprised, however, that Jordan listened with patience and seemed to appreciate the honesty, no matter how much the public discussion of it irritated him. Jordan’s recollection of the moment had him rolling his eyes as the assistant coach walked away.

  Jordan was beginning to grow as a team leader, although it wasn’t a warm and fuzzy kind of leadership. It was mostly the pressure he put on his teammates to be good or be gone. Now, however, he was headed into the season fearing that Krause had just made a terrible trade for Cartwright that would make the team weaker and Jordan’s job all the more difficult.

  “At the beginning of the year it was frustrating and hard to accept,” Jordan recalled. “Things were not going well, and it was getting to me. I had very high expectations, just like everyone, but there was a transition period we had to go through.”

  The coaches, however, had seen Cartwright’s value, not only as a defender but as a leader. Jackson began calling Cartwright “Teach,” and the name stuck. On the court, his teammates and opponents around the league knew Cartwright for his elbows. He held them high when he rebounded or boxed out.

  “Michael really didn’t know Bill Cartwright as a person,” Krause recalled. “Michael made Bill prove himself. Michael did that with everybody. That was Michael’s way. I knew what Bill was. Bill was gonna be fine with Michael. I told Bill, ‘It’s coming. He’s gonna needle you. Michael’s gonna drive you crazy.’ Bill said, ‘He ain’t gonna do nothing to me.’ ”

  It would prove complicated, former teammate John Paxson recalled. “Michael demanded nothing less than playing hard. If you missed shots when you were open, he didn’t want to see that either. If Michael came off the screen and roll a couple of times and threw a quick pass to Bill Cartwright and he couldn’t handle it, Michael wasn’t going to go there again. That was kind of what happened early. If you do something and one of your teammates doesn’t respond to it, you’re going to think twice about going there. It’s a natural thing. You always sensed with Michael that he was looking for perfection out of himself. There’s a part of him that expected that of those around him, too.”

  If Jordan wasn’t great almost every night, it was hard for the Bulls to win, so it only made sense that he wanted more out of his teammates. They all did. “I feel I’m very observant about the game,” he said of his approach. “If things were going well, I didn’t have to score too much. I could stay in the background and get everyone else involved.”

  It was imperative that his teammates be able to do their share, Paxson explained. “Michael challenged guys, and for some, their game didn’t live up to that challenge. Brad Sellers, for example. It was tough for him to handle what Michael expected of him. Michael had a tendency to look at certain guys and say, ‘You’re capable of doing this. Why aren’t you? I look at your physical skills. Why can’t you?’ ”

  Jordan made a connection with Paxson as a teammate, although the guard from Notre Dame was not physically or athletically imposing. Jordan often rated athleticism second to heart. He said he wanted teammates with the fearlessness to step up at crucial moments. Just as important, Paxson didn’t need the ball in his hands, which removed one potential conflict. “I’m sure he looked at me many times and said, ‘You’re not capable of doing that on the floor,’ ” Paxson explained. “But I had an advantage with Michael in our basketball relationship. We spent a month overseas together when we were in college as part of an international team. I made a shot to win a game over in Yugoslavia, and I’ve got to believe that in the back of his mind, Michael remembered that about me as a player. He was able to trust me. At the same time, I don’t remember Michael early on putting any pressure on Scottie Pippen or Horace. He knew that a lot of guys have to grow into the league. Michael was always more than fair with me. He was always positive with me and never said anything negative about me in the papers. That meant a lot to me. You can get battered down when the great player of the team says something critical of you personally. He didn’t do that. I thought early on he was too reserved toward players at times. I’m sure he felt he was walking a fine line. ‘Should I be critical? Should I just lay back and let these guys do their own thing?’ I felt the more vocal he became as a leader, the better we were. Once he really started challenging guys, it made us better. We had to learn how to play with Michael as well as Michael had to learn to play with us.”

  The Point Guard

  January found the Bulls struggling to stay above .500 and slipping into yet more conflict. Collins chafed at the assistants that Krause had hired for him. “I was upset because Doug basically wasn’t listening to Tex,” Krause explained, “and he wasn’t listening to Phil Jackson. Doug did a great job for us for a couple of years. He took the heat off me from a public relations standpoint. Doug was great with the media. But he learned to coach on the fly, and he didn’t listen to his assistants as much as he should have. Doug had a thing with Phil, too. As time went on, he was like Stan in that he got away from what we wanted to do.”

  Three weeks into the season, Juanita Vanoy had given birth to a boy, Jeffrey Michael, but Jordan’s parents still opposed their son marrying the mother of his child. The birth of the baby was kept hush-hush throughout the season. Some writer
s knew about it but kept it out of their reports. Vanoy supposedly contemplated a paternity suit for about six months but ultimately decided to hold off. The tension was as thick in his personal life as it was in the locker room.

  Finally, in late January, the team began a turnaround thanks to the improvement of Pippen and Grant, as Jordan began stepping up the pressure on them.

  “I think Michael saw what kind of players Scottie and Horace could be,” explained Will Perdue, a rookie backup center that season, “and he was very difficult on them at that time. He did it in a positive way, but at the same time he was challenging them to see if they would answer the challenge.”

  Complicating the chemistry was Jordan’s continued exasperation with Cartwright, who was one of the few who stood up to the bullying and intimidation, Jim Stack remembered. Some would later describe the center’s intense dislike of Jordan’s tactics as something that approached hatred. “Bill felt that Michael chastised him unnecessarily at times,” Stack said in a 2012 interview. “Bill was a guy with a lot of pride. He had built a lot of respect in the league.” Stack didn’t think the dislike reached the level of hatred on Cartright’s part, but Perdue seemed certain that Jordan hated Cartwright. Perdue was pretty sure Jordan disliked him as well.

  As for the enmity sent his way, Cartwright seemed to take it in stride. He had been the kind of player in New York who could average 20 points and 10 rebounds, Stack pointed out, adding that Jordan didn’t seem to recognize the sacrifice Cartwright was obviously willing to make in becoming a role player in Chicago.

  “Bill appreciated totally Michael’s talent,” Stack recalled. “But at the same time Bill wasn’t just gonna accept his crap. Michael would test everybody. In practice, if Michael came to the hole, Bill was there to meet him. So many of the players before Bill Cartwright would totally acquiesce and defer to Michael. But Bill would take no shit… Michael could walk over just about anybody because he was so overwhelming with his talent. But Bill held his line. He said, ‘This is my domain in here, and you stay out there.’ And it had a galvanizing effect on the team. Bill was respected in the locker room for kind of standing up to Michael in a lot of ways, which was appreciated by everybody.”

  In March, Collins grew unhappy with the play of point guard Sam Vincent and benched him. The coach moved Jordan to the point, putting the ball in his hands even more than it already was. Craig Hodges, who had played for Winter at Long Beach State, was inserted into the starting lineup as the off guard. “It’ll be interesting to see how Michael likes it,” Collins said. Jordan responded by turning in seven straight triple-doubles (he would record fourteen triple-doubles between January and April), and the Bulls won six straight. Collins, it seemed, was positioning him to play the game the way Oscar Robertson had played it. Jordan took to checking his stats with the official scorekeeper during games, so that he would know just what he needed to ring up another triple-double. Soon, the league grew wise to what he was doing and ordered scorekeepers to stop providing in-game updates.

  Then Hodges was lost for the rest of the regular season with an ankle injury, and the Bulls soon lost six in a row. The outspoken Winter had opposed Jordan’s move to the point, and discord on the coaching staff mounted until Collins barred Winter from practice. “Tex was basically out of the picture at that time,” Jackson recalled.

  Krause wondered whether Collins might just wear the superstar out with all the extra duty. As an assistant coach, Jackson quietly observed that Jordan was being worked so hard that he was too tired down the stretch of some games. Jordan didn’t particularly care for playing the point, but he had little trust in his teammates’ ability to score.

  And it was hard not to admire the work Jordan did as a “one” guard, where his ball handling allowed him to dance into spaces on the floor that opponents could never seem to reach in time. He would stop and start, hesitate and go, making every possession a workout on the defender’s ankles. He learned quickly how to come off screens. Jordan was so elusive that help defenders had trouble just tracking him down for a double-team. He drew so much attention that Hodges, Pippen, and Paxson usually found themselves wide open for threes. Jordan worked the perimeter, too, and his jumper fell often that spring, which forced defenders to make themselves even more vulnerable and step out on him.

  Chicago finished at 47–35 for fifth place in the conference, which earned the Jordanaires a first-round playoff matchup with the fourth-seeded Cavaliers, who had lost but four home games the entire season. Jordan had taken to listening to Anita Baker that spring, playing her song “Giving You the Best That I Got” before games for inspiration. He would need it. The Bulls had lost all six regular-season games against the Cavaliers, but that didn’t stop Lacy Banks from boldly predicting a Chicago victory in the five-game playoff series. When other Chicago writers expressed doubt that the Bulls could survive, Jordan angrily challenged them and forecast a win in four games. Even casual observers could see that Cleveland had the size both inside and on the perimeter in Ron Harper and Craig Ehlo to slow Jordan down.

  The Cavaliers held home court advantage, but Chicago moved to a surprising 2–1 series lead and had a chance to close it out in the Stadium in Game 4. Jordan scored 50 points but missed a late free throw, and Cleveland escaped in overtime to tie the series. He seemed devastated by the turn of events, but then tossed the self-doubt off quickly. Jackson recalled that when Jordan showed up the next day for the team flight to Cleveland, he virtually bounded down the aisle, telling his teammates to have no fear, they were going to win.

  That enthusiasm burned right through Game 5 the following day. Jordan came out scoring and dishing, matching the Cavaliers bucket for bucket. Hodges and Paxson also stepped in to make a barrage of threes, and the game wound its way to a tight fourth quarter that produced six lead changes in the final three minutes. With six seconds to go, Jordan drove hard to his right at the top of the key. Ehlo reached across to stop him and was rewarded with a staggering blow to the face as Jordan scored to put Chicago up 99–98. Ehlo recovered to inbound the ball, then got it back and rolled in for a layup to give Cleveland a 100–99 lead with three seconds left.

  During the time-out, Collins quickly drew up a play for center Dave Corzine to take the last shot, with the logic that it wouldn’t be expected. Jordan reacted by angrily whacking the clipboard and telling his coach, “Just give me the fuckin’ ball!” Collins quickly drew up a new look, with Brad Sellers inbounding. As he walked on the floor, Jordan whispered to teammate Craig Hodges that he was going to make the shot.

  Cleveland coach Lenny Wilkens had planned to use forward Larry Nance’s height to deny Jordan, but he slipped free, took the pass, and motored into the key for a jumper. Ehlo quickly picked him up and played textbook defense—on him every step until Jordan moved past him and rose up. Ehlo recovered, flying from the right, left arm outstretched to challenge the shot with an extended hand. But Jordan’s elevation and hang time secured the moment. Ehlo had a hand in front of the ball, but his momentum carried him to the left as he fell away, and the form in red continued rising, reached his apex, then swished the game winner, 101–100, which ignited his famous fist-pumping celebration, replayed a trillion times over the ensuing years.

  The moment was immediately dubbed “the shot.” Krause’s first thought while watching from the stands was that Brad Sellers had delivered a perfect inbounds pass that made the play possible. “That was the best pass I ever saw in basketball,” he said in 2011. “He got that pass between three guys, really threaded the needle. I ran down on the floor and hugged Brad Sellers.”

  It was telling that in that moment, Krause had wanted to embrace his beleaguered draft pick. In 1986, Jordan had lobbied for the drafting of Duke’s Johnny Dawkins, but Krause had taken Sellers instead, which became yet another bone of contention as Sellers struggled to fit in. It was certainly a fine pass, but perhaps nothing would better encapsulate the coming troubles. Krause and Jordan viewed the moment of euphoria from opposing per
spectives. They were two willful, overbearing figures whose success was growing and spreading between them like a no-man’s-land. As for Sellers, he would be gone from the Bulls after the season. Once a starter, he had averaged just 4 points and played just thirteen minutes per game over the playoffs.

  Meanwhile, another piece of videotape from the game would also gain notoriety. The tape was a shot of the Bulls’ bench after Jordan’s 44 points delivered the victory, and it captured the beat writers sitting nearby, including Sam Smith and Bernie Lincicome of the Tribune and Lacy Banks of the Sun-Times.

  “You see a shot of Doug Collins celebrating, and then Lacy’s like jumping up and down and waving his fists over his head,” recalled ESPN’s J. A. Adande, who had worked with Banks at the Sun-Times. “There was a bit of Bulls fan in Lacy, you know, and it clearly came out in that moment, but he never let it cloud his journalistic duty.”

  Banks, the one journalist to challenge Jordan consistently, had been caught in a sudden, comical lapse of objectivity. He had something on the line, having predicted a Chicago win, but the moment spoke of an industry deeply conflicted by its adulation of Air Jordan. It would become increasingly difficult for the business of sports journalism to find any sort of restraint in an era where the moments—and the media profits—were becoming exceptional.

  For Cleveland, meanwhile, the loss was devastating. Cavaliers center Brad Daugherty, Jordan’s teammate from college, had seen it before. “I saw him go up,” Daugherty said, “and I turned to box out, to look for the flight of the ball. I didn’t see it, because Michael pumped, then brought it down. Then he went back up and hit the bottom of the net. I still don’t know how he fit all of that into three seconds.”