Jackson first had to find a way to protect the team from the destructive potential of its star’s megawatt existence. Jordan was twenty-six in 1989 and already awash in fame and fortune. In the rapid-rise nature of American pop culture, he had become something of an instant icon. The circumstances threatened to swamp them all.
First, there was Jordan’s growing selfishness, something the star himself would later acknowledge. “I thought of myself first, the team second,” he later admitted. “I always wanted my team to be successful, but I wanted to be the main cause.”
“I was nervous when I took over the Bulls,” Jackson remembered, “but it wasn’t the kind of nervousness where you lose sleep at night. I wanted to do well. I was anxious about having a good relationship with Michael. I was anxious about selling him on the direction in which I was going.”
Jordan, too, had long been aware of the importance in pro basketball of the relationship between a team’s coach and its star player. If a coach couldn’t gain the respect of the star, or lost that respect, then the coach would lose the team. It all hinged on that player-coach relationship.
“You knew what Michael was going to give you every single night as a player,” Jackson said. “He was gonna get those thirty points; he was gonna give you a chance to win. The challenge was, how to get the other guys feeling a part of it, like they had a role, a vital part. It was just his team, his way.”
The next issue was Jordan’s stature. As Lacy Banks had said, he was a mesmerizing young prince. “He had such hero worship in the United States among basketball fans that living with him had become an impossibility,” Jackson explained.
Since his first days as an assistant coach, he had studied Jordan, and not just on the court. In fact, the coach had always toyed with the Zen fantasy of what it would be like to encounter the young Buddha. Now he knew. “I had roomed on the same floor of hotels as he did,” Jackson recalled in 1995. “Michael always had a suite because of who he was, and the coaches got suites, too, because we needed the space for team meetings and staff meetings. Michael basically had to have someone stay in his room with him. I’d hear murmuring in the hallway, and there’d be six or eight of the hotel staff, cleaning ladies, busboys, getting autographs and standing in the hallway with flowers. It was incredible, and he was constantly bothered.” To save Jordan from his situation, and to better establish the team identity, Jackson decided to deconstruct some of the world that had built up around the star. The coach knew that would require dealing with the sensitive issue of family and friends.
Jim Stack had become friendly with all of the major figures in Jordan’s inner circle, from his father to Adolph Shiver to George Koehler to the Freds. “They just loved Michael,” Stack said, “and Michael just took care of them. Adolph was there all the time. Adolph was a very friendly guy and always around but not overbearing in any sense. He just enjoyed the lifestyle and what Michael laid out for him. He was a real confidant for Michael, socially and away from the court. I don’t know how they were getting by in terms of employment, but it seemed to me that Michael just sort of took care of him all those years. Michael enjoyed the consistency of seeing them all the time. I think it had a settling effect as to what he did off the court.”
Shiver had begun to generate income by hosting parties for NBA players at the All-Star Game each year, a business that expanded steadily with his Jordan connection. Howard White, Sonny Vaccaro, and eventually Fred Whitfield were all employed by Nike. Koehler, Gus Lett, and a variety of others were there in security or service capacities.
“Traveling in airports, he needed an entourage to get through,” Jackson acknowledged. “He had brought people along on the road with him. His father would come. His friends would come on the road. He had just a life that sometimes alienated him from his teammates. It became a challenge to make him part of the team again and still not lose his special status because he didn’t have the necessary privacy.”
Even so, Jackson decided there would be limits. “So I knew,” he recalled, “that we had to make exceptions to the basic rules that we had: ‘Okay, so your father and your brothers and your friends can’t ride on the team bus. Let’s keep that a team thing. Yeah, they can meet you on the road, but they can’t fly on the team plane. There has to be some of the team stuff that is ours, that is the sacred part of what we try to do as a basketball club.’ ”
That was another thing that set the agenda and would eventually leave the team’s PR assistants rolling their eyes. Jackson threw around the word sacred like the son of “tent preachers” that he was. Jackson had that sanctimoniousness that great coaches like John Wooden always seemed to have. It made losing to them so hard for other coaches to stomach.
The Scrum
There were further complications, in that Jordan’s circle was beginning to include media figures, including broadcasters Quinn Buckner and Ahmad Rashad. A former NFL receiver, Rashad worked for both NBC Sports as a sideline reporter and the NBA’s entertainment division as host of Inside the NBA. Rashad was a picture of the changing face of media. He brought a certain charm and stylish sophistication, a departure from the gritty old days of lumpy guys with notebooks and microphones and drab clothes. The media was changing, just as MJ and the league were changing.
Rashad’s relationship with Jordan proved to be spun gold for Rashad, as it was for Jordan himself, who was always on the lookout for media interpreters that he could trust. “It was good for Ahmad, because he was a football guy,” explained Matt Guokas, who later worked at NBC with Rashad. “Now all of a sudden he was put into a sport that he knew only as a fan. He really didn’t know it like he knew football. Then he’s asked to be a sideline guy and come up with little stories and that kind of thing and to develop relationships with players. It’s not the easiest thing in the world except that Ahmad is and was a personable guy. He got along with everybody. He developed that relationship with Michael. Once again it was through the Nike thing. I used to go on those Nike trips when I was coaching and Ahmad would always be there and somewhat involved, as a guest of Michael or whatever. And every time that Michael went to New York they would get together and go out. And every time that we went to Chicago, Ahmad would go out with him or to his house or wherever. They just had that close relationship. And Ahmad did not abuse it. He did not break any confidences.”
Jordan became known for such alliances. In his first seasons, he became friendly with Mark Vancil, a Sun-Times reporter who later turned freelancer and produced several elegant and informative picture books with Jordan, and with Michael Wilbon, a Chicago native who wrote sports for the Washington Post.
Bulls press officer Tim Hallam had been around long enough to witness most of this change, and noticed that a certain unseemliness still lingered. Hallam was fond of calling that tight circle of media around Jordan each night the “pig fuck.” After every game, two dozen or so sportswriters and camera crews would crowd around the star, pressing their questions, squeezing in ever closer to catch every word. Hallam got it that Jordan craved the spotlight, but could never figure out why he insisted on the “pig fuck” in the steamy locker room after every game. Jordan had taken to showering in private quarters and dressing in what had become a seemingly endless supply of immaculate, perfectly tailored suits. He’d return to his locker looking as if he’d walked right out of the pages of GQ, and then he’d take position among the reporters as they’d push in around him. The klieg lights of their cameras would bounce a dazzling white on his familiar onyx pate, broken only by the tiniest rivulets of sweat as he held forth on the game he had just played.
As the crowd grew with each succeeding season, Hallam reasoned that it would have been much easier to hold a postgame news conference in an interview room with the star standing at a podium, but Jordan wanted to meet the crowd in the steamy, strangely primal locker room. Why would he want to take those fine suits into that crowd, Hallam wondered. But intimacy was the very essence of the pig fuck. Jordan knew that some detached, steril
e news conference would never do. He wanted to be at the center of that huddle of reporters as much as they wanted to crowd in around him. Meanwhile, his teammates were left each night to eye the mass with a mix of awe and disdain. Occasionally, they would garner some attention, but Jordan had come to live in the scrum. The stories and reports filed by the media radiated that closeness. The media referred to him as Michael, as if each of them knew him well and had shared a personal audience. As a result, millions of people the world over came to know him on that first-name basis. Michael.
Fans soon came to treasure that relationship, as if they too had special access to him, special insight into what he thought and felt. Yes, Babe Ruth and others had inhabited their own eras, but rarely had a mere athlete managed to convey so completely the experience to his fans. With Jordan, it went beyond kinship. It was decidedly personal. His talent and accomplishments—his absolute superiority—became theirs. They knew him. They could predict his successes, then gloat about them afterward. He was more reliable than any other soul in their lives. Most important, it was beyond race. If only Dawson Jordan could have been there to see it.
“He became more than a basketball player,” longtime NBA reporter David Aldridge observed. “No black athlete had ever had that happen before. Nobody had had that happen before. As great as Ali was, and Ali was obviously viewed as more than a boxer, he sort of took this anti-commercial position. On everything Jordan was the first black athlete, not just to cross over, but I mean, to become an icon of popular culture.”
Even the idolized white athletes from earlier eras, commercialized figures such as Mickey Mantle, had not had the opportunity to achieve such a status in the culture, Aldridge reasoned. “Nobody had done that before. His importance, in that regard, I think has always been somewhat underplayed. You know, it’s no small thing that middle-aged, white, conservative males felt okay with their teenaged white sons or their teenaged white daughters having Jordan posters up in their rooms. That was not nothing. That’s a big deal.”
Aldridge would later move to ESPN and Turner Broadcasting, but during the 1989–90 season he was still a Post reporter following the Washington Bullets and was just beginning to get comfortable talking to Jordan in those last months when the star was still easily accessible to reporters in the Bulls locker room. He encountered Jordan, who was affable and eager to engage the media that fall. Only later would it become clear that Jordan had a hidden agenda: he hoped to gather information about his opponents around the league. “In that old Chicago Stadium locker room, his was the first locker when you came in, on the right, and he’d be sitting there and, you know, would talk,” Aldridge remembered. “He was a different guy back then. He really picked your brain about the team you were covering. What’s going on with this guy or that guy, or why are they doing this? He seemed genuinely interested in different teams around the league. He was very receptive and liked talking to reporters back then. He seemed to enjoy the kind of give and take that you have. I remember thinking, ‘Gosh, for a guy who has got as much attention on him as this guy, he’s as close to normal as you could possibly expect.’
“You could talk to him,” Aldridge explained. “You could talk to a lot of the people that he was close to. Even then, he was close to Fred and Adolph and all those guys. I didn’t think of them as, just kind of like, hangers-on. Howard White was pretty established at Nike, and I knew that Fred Whitfield was a very smart guy, financially. I never did think of those guys as sycophants. You know, I always thought, ‘This guy did this for him and this guy did this for him.’ And that’s how it rolls.”
Of all the changes that Jackson sought to make, limiting the media availability to the team was perhaps the easiest. With the league having added five new expansion teams, Jackson wanted to keep the increasing numbers of fans and reporters at bay. They encroached on what the coach saw as the team’s essential space. Jackson provided some protection for Jordan just as his fame was about to surge yet again, while raising the profile of the entire league.
“I got a curtain for our practice facility, so that practice became our time together,” the coach explained. “It was just the twelve of us and the coaches, not the reporters and the television cameras. It wasn’t going to be a show for the public anymore. It became who are we as a group, as people.… Michael had to break down some of his exterior. You know that when you become that famous person you have to develop a shell around you to hide behind. Michael had to become one of the guys in that regard. He had to involve his teammates, and he was able to do that. He was able to bring it out and let his hair down at the same time. Over his years in pro basketball, Michael had learned to mark out his own territory. He had his own stall at every arena where he might find the most privacy, or he might find a territory in the trainer’s room. He had two stalls in the old Chicago Stadium. That was his spot because there were twenty-five reporters around him every night. We continued the protocol of all that, but we also made efforts to create space for him within the team. If we hadn’t done that, the rest of the world was going to overrun us, if we hadn’t done things the right way. So we said, ‘Let’s not all suffer because of his fame. Let’s give ourselves space and exclude the crowd.’ I guess I created a safe zone, a safe space for Michael. That’s what I tried to do.”
Jackson made his subtlest move of all in defining the small group of players and coaches as “the team,” apart from the rest of the organization, particularly “management.” In so doing, the coach was drawing a tight circle, a boundary, for keeping Jerry Krause separate from the team. Although he made no definitive steps to enforce this boundary, Jackson established it all the same. First, it made sense to separate Jordan from Krause, since the GM always seemed to set the star off with one comment or another. Besides, Jackson could see that Jordan naturally liked keeping the circle around him tight. Such shrewd moves went a long way toward helping Jackson establish a comfort zone in his relationship with his star. The coach made an effort in those early years to accommodate his overbearing and aggressive boss while working to shield Jordan from him as often as possible. It wasn’t so much that Jordan needed protection as it was that the team didn’t need the turmoil.
“Phil, he really separated players and management,” Jim Stack recalled. “He kept the players in a circle and management was outside the circle. As time went on, there was some stuff that Jerry could have diffused and handled better. Jerry probably would tell you that himself.” Stack operated in both worlds, because he worked with Krause yet also scouted for the coaching staff. In time, it became more difficult to cross over between the two, he recalled. The barriers became more pronounced, as did the conflict, as Krause pushed against the boundaries that Jackson tried to establish. But in his first years as coach, Jackson was concerned with finding a balance that allowed them all to get along and prosper.
Jackson got help from Winter and Bach, and new assistant Jim Cleamons, easily the best coaching staff in basketball. For all their experience, they marveled that first season as Jackson took control of the team and built strong, open relationships with the players, especially Jordan. Like Winter before him, Jackson, as an assistant coach, had been a bit wary of Jordan. But the two men soon found themselves enjoying the give-and-take of their individual meetings. Jackson confirmed his belief that Jordan was extremely bright, able to discuss things and to challenge him in conversation and debate. Jackson was eager to engage his players and, more than anything, to put them in position to win.
“I think Phil came in with the basis of some very sound philosophy,” Tex Winter recalled, looking back several years later. “I mean the philosophy of life. He recognizes that there are a whole lot of things more important than basketball. He doesn’t take himself too seriously. We all take basketball pretty seriously at times. Even then, he’s inclined to relax. I’m amazed at times in the course of the game how he sits back and lets things happen. He likes people to be able to solve their own problems, and so he gives his players the reins. On the
other hand, when he sees they’re out of control, then he starts to pull them in a little bit. I think this is his strength, the way he handles the players and his motivation, his personal relationship with the players. That’s borne out by the fact that they’ll accept his coaching, they’ll accept the criticism, even though sometimes it’s pretty severe with certain players. They accept that because it’s who he is, because he’s Phil.”
In a few short months, the coaching climate around the team had improved. Many challenges remained, but the mind-set had shifted. “It was a magical combination of a team that needed its coaches and coaches who needed the players,” Bach said in 2012. “And no one was in the way. There was no ego, no need for someone to have more fame than the rest. They were ideal situations. As I look back on it, the best days of my life.”
Chapter 24
THE TRANSITION
DEFENSE DOMINATED PHIL Jackson’s first training camp as coach of the Bulls. He had been a baseline-to-baseline player for the Knicks, and he wanted the same for his Bulls. “See the ball,” Red Holzman used to tell his New York teams in terms of pressure defense. Jackson certainly wanted them to have vision, but it was first and foremost a matter of conditioning. To play defense for Jackson, you had to be able to reach those higher gears and stay there.
“When Phil came in, our first training camp was as difficult a camp as I’d ever had,” Paxson recalled. “It was defensive-oriented. Everything we did was, start from the defensive end and work to the offensive end. Phil basically made us into a pressure-type team. Defensively, he knew that was how we would win.”
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