“I can’t believe this is happening,” Magic Johnson told reporters.
“It’s no surprise the way they’ve been defending,” Laker coach Mike Dunleavy said of the Bulls. “They are very athletic and very smart.”
Suddenly, the Bulls were on the verge of the improbable, but they’d have to be patient. “We went up 3–1 and had a long wait, from Sunday to Wednesday, for Game 5,” recalled Bulls equipment manager John Ligmanowski. “Those three days took forever. Before we had even won it, Michael would get on the bus and say, ‘Hey, how does it feel, world champs?’ He knew. That was a pretty good feeling. We just couldn’t wait to get it over with.”
The eve of Game 5 brought a meal of crow for Jordan. He publicly acknowledged what Cartwright had done for the team. “He has given us an edge in the middle,” he said. “He has been solid for us.… This guy has turned out to be one of the most important factors for this ball club, and he has surprised many who are standing here and who play with him.”
Later told of Jordan’s comments, Cartwright brushed them off. “That stuff really isn’t important to me,” he said. “I’ve always figured what goes around comes around. What’s really important to me is winning a championship.”
Every Bulls starter had taken at least 10 shots in Game 4, a testament perhaps to Jordan’s trust and proof that Jackson had a will of his own. He had rarely confronted Jordan directly in his time coaching the team. When he wanted Jordan to do something, he would often tell the team it was time to do it. When he had criticism for Jordan, it was instead directed at the team. It was a means of communication that the coach and star player would settle into over the course of their years together. They both obviously knew what was going on and found the practice acceptable. The other players on the team would sometimes complain about it quietly. But they too accepted it as a quirk of the circumstances.
As Game 5 twisted toward its conclusion, this dynamic produced a moment of lore, one that Jordan’s teammates—and even future teammates—would come to treasure. With a championship hanging in the balance, with John Paxson open and Jordan ignoring him while continuing to attack mostly one-on-one, Jackson asked impatiently during a late time-out, “MJ, who’s open?”
Perhaps stunned by Jackson’s sudden directness, Jordan said nothing.
So Jackson asked again. “Who’s open?”
The story has been passed along by the many Jordan teammates who supposedly suffered his demands and indifference over the years.
“It’s one of my favorite stories,” Steve Kerr, who filled Paxson’s role on subsequent Bulls’ teams, said in a 2012 interview. “Michael’s having a rough second half, they’re double-teaming him, and he’s forcing some shots. And Phil calls a time-out with, like, minutes left in the game. And he’s looking right at Michael and he goes, ‘Michael, who’s open?’ And Michael won’t look up. He goes, ‘Michael, who’s open?’ Finally, Michael looks up at him and goes, ‘Pax!’ And Phil goes, ‘Well, throw him the fuckin’ ball!’ ”
Paxson would make five long buckets in the final four minutes as time and again, Jordan penetrated, drew the defense, then kicked it out. Paxson would finish with 20 and Pippen 32 as the Bulls closed out the championship with a 108–101 win in Game 5. The moment was met by a numbed silence from the Forum crowd, recalled Bulls broadcaster Jim Durham in 2011. “The one thing I’ll remember is the Bulls dancing off the floor and everybody else just sitting there watching it.”
On the floor in the quiet aftermath, Laker superfan Jack Nicholson hugged Jackson, and Magic Johnson sought out Jordan to offer his congratulations. The two had become closer during the series after Johnson approached Jordan and told him that they needed to forget their differences. The event was the true beginning of their friendship, Jordan would say later. “I saw tears in his eyes,” Johnson said of their conversation after the final buzzer. “I told him, ‘You proved everyone wrong. You’re a winner as well as a great individual basketball player.’ ”
The tears became a tide as Jordan made his way through the bedlam of the locker room to inhabit the moment he’d sought for seven years. “I never lost hope,” he said as his wife and father sat nearby. “I’m so happy for my family and this team and this franchise. It’s something I’ve worked seven years for, and I thank God for the talent and the opportunity that I’ve had.”
“That scene with Michael crying, with his dad and with his arms around him,” Jim Durham recalled. “Finally he had won, and he had won doing it his way.”
Once the tears started, Jordan couldn’t seem to hold them back. “I’ve never been this emotional publicly,” he said. “When I came here, we started from scratch. I vowed we’d make the playoffs every year, and each year we got closer. I always had faith I’d get this ring one day.”
Delivering the final game had come down to Paxson hitting the open shots, Jordan said of the moment that Jackson had forced upon him. “That’s why I’ve always wanted him on my team and why I wanted him to stay on my team.”
“It was done and over, and it was dramatic, like a blitzkrieg,” Jackson recalled. “Afterward, there was a lot of joy. There was Michael holding the trophy and weeping.… It was special.”
Later, the Bulls took the party to their quarters at the Ritz Carlton in Marina del Rey. “I remember going up to Michael’s room,” John Ligmanowski said. “He told me to order like a dozen bottles of Dom Pérignon and enough hors d’oeuvres for forty people. We’re at the Ritz Carlton, and I call down to the concierge. I said, ‘Yeah, send up a dozen bottles of Dom and hors d’oeuvres for forty people.’ So they were like, ‘Wait a second.’ They didn’t want to send it up because they knew it wasn’t Michael on the phone. So I handed the phone to him. He grabbed the phone and said, ‘Send it up!’ ”
The Bulls returned to Chicago and celebrated their championship in Grant Park before a crowd estimated at between 500,000 and a million fans. “We started from the bottom,” Jordan told the sea of happy faces, “and it was hard working our way to the top. But we did it.”
Behind the scenes, winning it all seemed to ease the conflict between Jordan and Krause. “We wound up winning that first championship,” Jim Stack remembered, “and Michael never said anything again publicly about whether we needed to make this trade or that move. There was a begrudging respect that Michael finally gave Jerry, but Jerry really had to go out of his way to earn it. In those early years Michael was really relentless on Jerry in terms of his basketball acumen.”
In the wake of the championship Jordan eased Krause out of his crosshairs, Stack recalled. “The hatred subsided there for a while.”
Chapter 27
THE GAMBLE
AFTER TAKING HIS team to the Promised Land, Jordan abruptly veered into the wilderness, even as Gatorade was preparing to release its tour de force ad with that overpowering refrain: “I wanna be like Mike.” Time would reveal that the limitations to what he could achieve in basketball were largely self-imposed. While he had just claimed his first pro championship and thus had begun to refute criticism about his ability to be a team player, Jordan had already embarked on a path in his off-court life that threatened the good name he had built so carefully.
That summer, Jordan and Richard Esquinas, the part owner of the San Diego Sports Arena, engaged in a series of high-stakes golf matches and began keeping a running tab of their wins and losses. “We were always very flexible in payments,” Esquinas would recall later. The gambling hit a new level that September in Pinehurst, North Carolina, when Esquinas lost $98,000 to Jordan in a day of golf. He wanted Jordan to take a double-or-nothing bet, and to emphasize that, he wrote Jordan two checks for $98,000 each. What he didn’t tell Jordan was that he wasn’t sure he had the funds to cover either. He wouldn’t have to, as it turned out. Jordan accepted the bet, and the two gamblers went at each other later that month over an adrenaline-fed, ten-day spree at the Aviara Golf Club in San Diego. Jordan not only lost the $98,000, but ended up down an additional $626,000. Jordan, too, wa
nted a double or nothing. Esquinas, who was on a hot streak, said he pleaded with Jordan not to go double or nothing but finally agreed to it.
“Once again, he went into a long story about his wealth,” Esquinas would later recall. “He could handle $1.2 million, he said, should he happen to lose. ‘Let’s play for it,’ he said. ‘E-Man, I can’t believe you won’t give me this game.’ I was trying to get him to comprehend the magnitude of losing at such a level, to defer this insistence that we engage once again. Not only did he want to continue this chase, he was demanding it. ‘I do not want this game,’ I said, ‘but I must be honest with you. You lose and you pay. That’s the only way I’ll give you a shot. And, if I beat you, that’s it. No more of this double or nothing.’ ”
Jordan promptly lost, bringing his total debt to what Esquinas claimed was $1.252 million. He seemed a bit shaken after the loss but returned home to Wilmington for the grand honor of having a stretch of Interstate 40 near his Gordon Road boyhood home named after him. Dean Smith was there, his plaid sports jacket contrasting with Jordan’s sleekly cut tan suit with a dapper silk pocket hanky. The tears streamed down his face in the Indian summer heat at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Juanita gently wiped them away after he returned to his seat, but perhaps the most tender moment had come before the ceremony started, when James Jordan, dressed in his own dapper light blue suit and sporting a “Be Like Mike” button on his left lapel, stepped onto the platform to shake his son’s hand. Still seated, Jordan looked up at his father with a broad, beatific grin and patted his shoulder.
That same week, Jordan had been named to the 1992 US Olympic basketball team. The announcement came after a negotiation in which Jordan was adamant that he would not play on the team if the roster included Isiah Thomas. After his intense and sometimes unpleasant experience on the 1984 Olympic team, Jordan had been reluctant to get involved in what would come to be called the Dream Team. Jack McCallum of Sports Illustrated reported that the selection committee decided not to invite Thomas because of questions about how he might affect the team’s chemistry. The story suggested that neither Chuck Daly nor Detroit GM Jack McCloskey, who was on the selection committee, had put up much of a case for including Thomas. More than anything, the story damaged the Pistons’ hopes of recovering from their disastrous loss to Chicago in the playoffs. Their chemistry had taken a severe hit.
Meanwhile, Esquinas had begun phoning Jordan to inquire about payment for their wager. Esquinas would reveal three years later that Jordan replied with a laugh, “Rich, I just might as well shoot you as to give you a check for $1.2 million.”
The comment left Esquinas more than a bit fearful and prompted him to contemplate the great value Jordan held for various interested parties. “I feared that I’d be perceived as a threat to Jordan, and the things that come with those fears,” he said. “I played it off,” Esquinas would reveal later. “But he was definitely drawing the line that he wasn’t going to pay the full amount. What he was saying was, ‘I’m not paying the full amount.’ And right there, I knew I had trouble collecting.”
The Book of Revelations
Although the golf losses remained out of public light, Sam Smith’s book The Jordan Rules would land as another bombshell in his life that fall and immediately set the entire organization on edge. It was an intensely negative portrait of Jordan, but also of frumpy Krause and his substantial hubris. Phil Jackson would later note that the book had accomplished something truly rare: it gave Jordan and Krause something they agreed on.
“Sam Smith made some money on that book,” the GM would say several years later. “I hope he chokes on every dollar.”
The book, however, was truly revelatory about the hard edges of Jordan’s competitiveness. Always hugely sensitive, he was angered and deeply hurt by the depiction. The public, meanwhile, soaked it up, delighted by this figure with a diamond-hard will who drove everyone around him to an odd amalgam of misery and greatness. Rather than damage Jordan’s image, it spurred yet more worship. The impact of The Jordan Rules contributed to Jordan’s sense of being besieged, and to the fabric of what Jackson called “the pack.”
“The Jordan Rules was very divisive to the team,” the coach recalled.
Horace Grant served as one of the sources, which angered Jordan. “I knew people were going to start taking shots at me,” Jordan told Mark Vancil. “You get to a point where people are going to get tired of seeing you on a pedestal, all clean and polished. They say, ‘Let’s see if there’s any dirt around this person.’ But I never expected it to come from inside. Sam tried to make it seem like he was a friend of the family for eight months. But the family talked about all this hatred they have for me. I mean, if they had so much hatred for me, how could they play with me?… I don’t know how we won if there was so much hatred among all of us. It looked like we all got along so well.”
The same resentment surfaced just weeks later when Jordan decided not to join the team in the traditional Rose Garden ceremony with President George Bush. Instead, he headed off on a golf trip with a group of pals that included childhood friend David Bridgers. The White House fuss spurred yet more discord between Grant and Jordan.
“I think it was a situation where Horace felt demeaned, felt that he was made light of, and he wanted to be a person of importance,” Phil Jackson observed. “There were some things about Horace that bothered Michael. Basically, Horace says whatever comes into his mind in front of the press. One of the situations that was exacerbating to Michael came after our first championship when Horace and his wife and Michael and his wife went to New York. They went to dinner and to see a play. While they were out, Michael basically told Horace that he wasn’t going to see President Bush. Michael said, ‘It’s not obligatory. It’s on my time, and I have other things to do.’ Horace at the time had no problem with it. He knew about this in a private situation and said nothing. Yet when the press came into the picture later, after the story became public, and asked Horace if it bothered him, he made a big issue of it. Basically, the press had put the words in his mouth, and he felt it was a good time to make this kind of statement.”
“No way am I going,” Jordan told reporters when asked about the traditional visit. “No one asked me if the date was convenient. It’s OK if the other guys go, but the White House is just like any other house. It’s just cleaner.”
Just days before the White House event, Jordan had made something of an awkward appearance on Saturday Night Live, along with Jesse Jackson and the rap group Public Enemy. Jordan didn’t want to do it, but Sonny Vaccaro talked him into it and even went to New York to sit in NBC’s green room with him.
Phil Knight had recently fired Vaccaro from Nike, but he moved on to successes with other athletic shoe companies. “When Phil let me go, Michael called me. One of the first calls I got,” Vaccaro recalled. “He said, ‘What can I do? You want me to call Phil?’ And I said, ‘No, it’s done.’ ”
Like Rob Strasser and others who had moved on from Nike, Vaccaro had pushed for Jordan to demand his own brand in the wake of the overwhelming success of the Air Jordan shoe. “I was so much involved in making sure that Michael asked for that,” Vaccaro said. “I mean, that was my last will and testament to Michael. I told him, ‘You’ve got to get a piece of this company.’ I mean, that’s what it was.” One of Vaccaro’s last chores for Nike and Jordan was cleaning up the final details of the mess with the Flight 23 stores and James Jordan. “Michael was frustrated with not being able to just close it down,” Vaccaro recalled. “It got to the point where he stood up and said that James had to close it down. If money could stop it, it had to be stopped.”
That same busy month NBC aired A Comedy Salute to Michael Jordan, a Comic Relief prime-time special to raise funds for homeless children. Tickets to the event, which was taped at the Chicago Theater in July, ran as much as $400, and thousands filled the streets outside, hoping to catch a glimpse of Jordan. He and Juanita sat in a box in the audience, obviously embarrassed as an array of s
tars worked their way through skits about him.
Emcee Billy Crystal kicked off the event by poking fun at the vast number of products endorsed by Jordan. “I have Michael Jordan everything,” he said. “I even have Michael Jordan contact lenses. They make everybody else look shorter and slower.”
To repay NBC for all its effort in producing the fund-raiser, Vaccaro finally got Jordan to agree to do Saturday Night Live. “That was the biggest thing in the world to do,” Vaccaro said, “and he was a little bit nervous about doing it. He almost didn’t do it.”
Sports Illustrated’s Jack McCallum was there in the green room, too, observing a Jordan both entertained by the SNL cast and put upon for autographs. The producers had wanted to do a skit about an effort by Jordan to keep Isiah Thomas off the Olympic team, but he refused. His opening segment in hosting SNL was roundly flat and unfunny, and Jordan certainly rued the decision afterward.
It was in the wake of these events that Jordan’s first real troubles surfaced. In December, police surveillance of a Charlotte man, a convicted cocaine dealer named James “Slim” Bouler, turned up a $57,000 check that Jordan had written to him. Bouler was later charged with money laundering after a tax-evasion investigation. Both Bouler and Jordan told authorities that the money was a loan, but Jordan was soon caught up in Bouler’s troubles and would later be served with a subpoena to testify in the case against him.
Then in February 1992, a bail bondsman, Eddie Dow, was murdered during a robbery at his home. Thieves took $20,000 in cash from a metal briefcase on the premises but left three checks worth $108,000 written by Jordan. The lawyer handling Dow’s estate confirmed that the checks were for gambling debts owed by Jordan to a North Carolina contractor named Dean Chapman and two other men. Press reports revealed that Jordan often hosted small gatherings for golfing and gambling at his Hilton Head Island residence, where Jordan had lost the money. Dow had been to at least three such gatherings, according to his attorney. Jordan was also known to host Mike’s Time, a gathering for golf and high-stakes poker before training camp each season.
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