For Jordan himself, it represented a murky window to his future. His once magnificent confidence was now in tatters all around him, yet he remained cautiously steadfast. He was driven by emotions that few if any understood. He had arrived at this point in his life so completely wrapped in silent fury that even he failed to recognize it. This blinding yet unarticulated rage would play out in incongruous ways over the coming years, until the central question of his life became: Would he ever be rid of it?
Chapter 31
COME AGAIN
AS LONG, TALL Michael Jordan busied himself trying to match the rhythm of his swing to the rhythm of the pitcher, he was also keeping an eye on the world he had left behind. He had kept up with the adventures of the Bulls and was amused by the NBA’s feeble attempts to replace him as the marketing engine for the game. He was particularly curious to follow Pippen’s breakout year that spring of 1994. No longer under Jordan’s shadow, his old sidekick had shown surprising growth as a premier player. He had been named the MVP of the All-Star Game in February and on the season had averaged 22.0 points, 8.7 rebounds, 5.6 assists, and 2.9 steals per game as the Bulls posted fifty-five wins that year, just two fewer than the previous season with Jordan.
At first glance, the team appeared to be doing quite well, but behind the scenes Pippen’s anger simmered. The Bulls made their way through the Eastern Conference playoffs to a showdown with the Knicks that saw Chicago fall behind two games to none. Game 3 was suddenly critical, and the Bulls started off poorly, only to charge back in the fourth period. With just 1.8 seconds left, New York’s Patrick Ewing scored inside to tie the game at 102. On the bench during the ensuing time-out, Phil Jackson drew up a play that called for Pippen to inbound the ball to Toni Kukoc for a final shot. Pippen cursed the coach and sat on the bench, fuming and refusing to go back in. Andrea Kremer, an ESPN reporter with a camera crew just feet away, witnessed the entire scene, including the anger and shock of Pippen’s teammates. Bill Cartwright, in particular, was both stunned and furious.
Nonplussed, Jackson directed Pete Myers to inbound the ball. Kukoc caught it and swished a twenty-two-footer as time expired for a dramatic victory, the fourth such game he had won that season with a last-second shot. Any celebration, however, was overshadowed by the outrage over Pippen’s actions. It was explained to the media that Pippen had felt disrespected, that with the year he had had, he felt the final shot should have been his. Hardly mentioned was Pippen’s simmering envy of the European player, who in his first year already had a salary to rival his own. After the game, Jackson told reporters: “As far as the last play goes, Scottie Pippen was not involved in the play. He asked out of the play. That is all I’m going to say about it.”
“Phil and I kind of exchanged some words,” Pippen told reporters in the locker room afterward. “That was pretty much it. It wasn’t Phil taking me out of the game, we pretty much exchanged words and I took a seat. I think it was frustration. We really blew this game as much as we possibly could. We were able to pull off the win. Toni made another outstanding shot and it was a well-called play by Phil.”
Jordan, in Birmingham, was transfixed. “Poor Scottie,” he told reporters, little realizing at the time how much the incident would come to affect his own career. “I kept telling him it’s not easy being me. Now he knows.” Jordan felt sorry for Pippen, and he knew that the incident was going to cause his friend much trouble.
“I apologized to the team and to Phil Jackson,” Pippen told reporters several days later. “I don’t think I have to apologize to anyone else.”
The Bulls ultimately lost the series to the Knicks in seven games.
“It was a devastating thing,” Steve Kerr said at the time. “Scottie never could have judged the magnitude of his actions. I felt so badly for him.” Krause was infuriated by the incident. Pippen had already spent much of the season engaged in a nasty public argument with the GM over his contract. “I don’t think you can call me a quitter,” Pippen said in defending himself. “I think you can look at it and say I made a stupid mistake. That’s pretty much it. I haven’t been a quitter. I think I go out and approach the game as hard as anyone. I play smart, I play hard, and I play as a team player.”
Although Pippen was considered one of the best in the league, Krause began efforts to trade him but had trouble finding a deal that would net a player of comparable value. Finally Krause put together a trade with Seattle that would have brought power forward Shawn Kemp plus a draft pick, which would allow Krause to select Eddie Jones, a bright young guard out of Temple. But at the last minute, Seattle’s owner backed out of the trade, and the subsequent series of news stories revealed Krause’s plans. Pippen, who was already unhappy over his contract, was further enraged that the team planned to trade him.
The lingering hard feelings set the tone for a tumultuous off-season. Horace Grant, who was a free agent, became engaged in a similarly messy feud with Jerry Reinsdorf and soon left the team to sign with the Orlando Magic. In the acrid atmosphere, Cartwright announced his retirement, only to resurface on the SuperSonics. John Paxson also decided to retire.
Jackson watched the breakup of his very good team while involved in testy negotiations of his own with Krause for a new contract. The coach had already executed the off-season’s most questionable move when he abruptly fired Johnny Bach just days after the playoffs ended. The dismissal came at a terrible time in the older assistant coach’s life, just weeks before his seventieth birthday. The irony, Bach recalled, was that the coaching staff had probably never worked better together than during the 1994 season. “At the end of that year I had every reason to think my contract would be renewed,” Bach recalled. “The first person that told me was Phil. He said, ‘We’re not gonna renew the contract.’ I was stunned. Before I could say much in defense, he said, ‘It’s really best for you that you do leave. The organization has made up its mind.’ I was disappointed. Shocked is a better way of saying it. I didn’t quarrel. I just couldn’t believe it. I went to see Krause and he said the same thing. I just got up and left. I had a lot of crisis in my life at that time. I was in the divorce courts ending a long-term marriage. I had to move. I thought everything was collapsing around me that summer. Then I had a heart attack. It was all a shock, and it took some time to believe and trust people again.”
The mysterious dismissal smacked of retaliation. Bach had apparently fallen into Jackson’s disfavor because he had at times encouraged Jordan to follow his own instincts and ignore the triangle offense. Some in the organization felt that Bach’s relationship with Jordan threatened Jackson’s control of the team, even though Bach was also a strong supporter of Jackson’s. There was clearly something about Bach that annoyed Jackson. “We were very different people,” Bach acknowledged.
At the time and in accounts several months later, Jackson portrayed Bach’s firing as a result of Krause’s anger over The Jordan Rules.
“It was Jerry Krause’s relationship with Johnny Bach that created a very uncomfortable situation,” Jackson said of the firing several months later. “It made this have to happen eventually. It had gone all wrong. It was bad for the staff to have this kind of thing because we had to work together. Jerry basically blamed Johnny Bach for a lot of the things in The Jordan Rules. And there’s no doubt that Johnny did provide that information. Jerry felt that Johnny talked too much. And Johnny, in retrospect, felt that animosity that Jerry gave back to him, the lack of respect, so Johnny refused to pay allegiance to Jerry just because he was the boss.
“It had gone on for too long a period of time,” Jackson said. “I could have kept them apart, at bay from one another, I suppose for a while longer. But I didn’t like the fact that it wasn’t good teamwork. That was my staff and my area. I agreed to do it. I felt it was a good opportunity because Johnny had an opportunity to get another job in the league quickly. It worked out fine for Johnny, although I would just as soon have not put him through the disappointment, or have to go through the situation mys
elf.”
It would be several years before events revealed that Jackson was seeking to cover up his own role in the book. Sam Smith eventually disclosed to Reinsdorf that Jackson, not Bach, was among the sources for the book. Reinsdorf violated Smith’s confidence to reveal Jackson’s role in the book to Krause. The revelation instantly infuriated the GM, who alleged that Jackson had deceived him into believing that Bach was the anonymous source for most of the inside detail. Smith later independently confirmed these events and Jackson’s role in his book. “Phil and the players had much more of a role than Johnny Bach,” Smith said.
“Phil lied to me,” Krause said when asked about the matter. “Phil actually got Johnny fired.”
“It was Phil’s idea to fire Bach,” Jerry Reinsdorf alleged as well. “Phil told me that the bad relationship between Krause and Bach had made things impossible. It was Phil’s idea. Nobody told him to do it.”
Once he recovered from the heart attack, Bach was eventually hired by the Charlotte Hornets. It was several years before he learned the alleged reason for his firing, that he had supposedly provided the inside information to Smith. Bach said he went back and read the book three or four times looking for damaging information he might have provided. His quotes, though, were on the record and hardly scandalous.
“I didn’t see a single quote in that book that was out of order,” he said. “Sam is obviously a good investigative reporter. There was a portrait in there that Michael did not like, based on whoever gave it to Sam.” The book “was quite an accurate portrayal,” Bach said. “I don’t think Sam painted someone as he wasn’t.”
Krause said he was distraught that he had been deceived into firing an innocent man. By the time the lie was uncovered several years later, Bach was working in Detroit as an assistant coach. One night when the Pistons were in Chicago to play the Bulls, Pistons executive Rick Sund told Bach that Krause would like a word with him. Bach had mixed feelings but agreed to the meeting, and was more than a bit surprised. “When Jerry spoke to me he was emotional, and so was I. I always thought the organization had made that move, not Phil. I thought it was a huge concession on Jerry’s part to come up to me. I thought he meant it,” Bach said of Krause’s apology. “And I accepted that.”
Bach would later address the issue with Jackson, but what was said would remain between the two of them, Bach said. “I’d rather leave it be. Certainly he knew how I felt. I always thought we had a relationship that was strong enough. We had sat there on the bench together for five years. As an assistant coach you don’t always know about these things that are going on. It was always foolish, kind of an indictment that I could never defend myself. Now the whole thing is not important. Once it was.”
The incident, however, revealed an intriguing element of Jackson’s strategy with Jordan. Why had he risked the job he had coveted or that key relationship with the game’s brightest star by providing a reporter with information about his boss or about Jordan? One longtime Bulls employee who worked with Jackson on a daily basis figured the coach did it to gain more control over his team. After all, the book had served to further alienate Krause from the players, thus securing Jackson’s role as their leader, the team employee said. “It was, ‘Let’s get down on Michael. Let’s whip this guy and keep him in line for my purposes.’ It was his way of getting on Michael’s side by alienating him from the media,” the Bulls employee suggested. “That was why Phil always used it’s the Us-Against-the-Media approach, the Us-Against-the-Organization approach, because if he did that, then he could be the leader of the pack.”
For years, the coach did not address the allegations by Reinsdorf and Krause, although in a 2012 interview Jackson pointed out that The Jordan Rules had been immensely important in the evolution of the Bulls because it brought Jordan down to a level that was closer to his teammates. Certainly, Jackson was within his rights as a coach to want to speak with one voice to his players, but he had resorted to an extreme subterfuge to exert control. “Phil is the master of mind games,” Jordan had said of the coach on several occasions.
Jordan was dismayed at the news of his favorite coach’s dismissal, although he had no idea what had really happened. On numerous occasions in the future, he would make a point of involving Bach in his life. Yet Jordan also reflected on the special relationship he had shared with Jackson, the long talks they had, the debates and exchanges—not just about basketball, but about life in general.
“We talked about so many different things,” Jordan said of those sessions. “We used to get into philosophies more than anything.”
It was obvious that both he and Jackson enjoyed the talks immensely. “We used to challenge each other,” Jordan said. “I think I would learn from him, and he used to learn a little bit from a player’s perspective at that time. He had played years back, but I was giving him a thought process for a new era. It was a lot of give and take. Much more listening from me. Not disagreements but more or less concepts, with him saying, ‘Think about this and think about that.’ ”
The implicit running theme, ironically, had been greater trust. Jordan would recall that his trust in Jackson grew over time. As he won Jordan over and the Bulls began claiming championships, the coach found new ways to motivate the superstar and to maintain offensive balance between Jordan and his teammates. From there, Jackson pulled together an array of influences to shape Jordan’s mental approach to performing under intense pressure. Obviously those lessons had aided Jordan not just in basketball but in his baseball life as well.
The Stadium Again
That September, Jordan came to Chicago to play in the Scottie Pippen All-Star Classic, a benefit game for Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH. At first, he was hesitant to accept the invitation, perhaps because of hard feelings left over from the boycott four years earlier. However, the event would afford him one final chance to play in Chicago Stadium, which was scheduled for demolition in the coming months to make way for the $150 million United Center, just across Madison from the Stadium. The lure of the Stadium proved too strong, and Jordan showed up to find a packed house eager to reclaim him. His team, dressed in white, took on Pippen’s crew in red, and the two old teammates went at each other with surprising fierceness. Jordan didn’t want anyone thinking that he’d “lost this or lost that.” He found his old fire and took 46 shots for the game, making 24 of them, for 52 points. His group won, 187–150, in an evening that may have set a record for standing ovations. When it was over, he embraced Pippen near the scorer’s table, waved to the crowd, and walked to center court, where he hitched up his shorts and bent over on all fours to kiss the floor, a final, emotional farewell to the platform of his rise to greatness.
“I was kissing the Stadium good-bye and kissing good-bye to my years of playing there,” he told reporters afterward. “But I was not kissing basketball good-bye. I’ll always love basketball, and I’ll always play it. I just won’t play organized ball.”
Indeed, he played quite a bit of pickup ball that fall in Scottsdale, where he went to play in the Arizona Fall League. Terry Francona had noticed that in Jordan’s final month in Birmingham he had begun driving the ball much harder when he hit it. His bat speed had improved, and he was starting to gain a base in his spindly lower body. Indeed, he hit a respectable .255 at Scottsdale, in a league of the game’s top young prospects.
Bob Greene went to Arizona with Jordan and noted the lonely, windswept nature of the experience, the chilly games before mostly empty bleachers. Later that fall, Deloris Jordan phoned her son and detected something in his voice that told her she needed to visit him. A few days later, George Koehler picked her up at the airport and took her to the stadium for his game. The crowds were relatively sparse in Arizona, compared with Birmingham, but Greene watched Jordan step out of the dugout that evening and stand there, searching the crowd until he found her. Then his eyes lit up and he smiled broadly, a rare sight during his months of grief.
Later that fall, he returned to Chicago for “
A Salute to Michael,” a ceremony to retire his number 23 jersey in the Bulls’ brand-new arena. In conjunction, the team planned to unveil a bronze statue of His Airness in action, called The Spirit, outside the new building. The statue was a burden to Jordan. He had seen a model of it and had somehow agreed to it, but his elevated public image had already made his life a nightmare. He was a real person, he confided to Greene, not a statue, and its presence outside the United Center only served to further wall him in. It was an immediate hit, however, attracting countless tourists from around the country and around the world.
Jordan’s better sense warned him to avoid the ceremony, and it proved to be even worse than he had imagined, packaged as it was into a nationally broadcast program for TNT. After a series of staged segments and awkward skits, Reinsdorf and Krause were introduced, and the crowd of 21,000, still quite angry over the team’s summer of discontent, booed lustily.
“C’mon, now,” Jordan chastised the fans. “Both Jerrys are good guys.”
It wasn’t as if “the two Jerrys” hadn’t heard it before. At virtually every rally or celebration of the Bulls’ three straight championship seasons from 1991 to 1993, Krause had been the target of merciless booing from Chicago crowds. Trainer Chip Schaefer, sitting nearby, could see Krause’s wife, Thelma, break down in tears during the booing. The GM had long ago inured himself to the anger of fans, but the sight of his wife in tears, being consoled by Dean Smith, made him furious.
“Dean came up to her later on and said that it was nice of Michael to mention my name,” Krause recalled. “Thel looked at him and said, ‘Too late! Bullshit, that’s too damn late! He could have done a lot more much earlier.’ Dean was pretty pissed.… I was really proud of my wife. She said that to a couple of people that night. She told Dean Smith off. She told several people off that night. She was pissed. She sat there with tears in her eyes after that happened.”
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