Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  It remained Jackson’s job to integrate this new, harsher version of Jordan into the roster. Since Jordan’s return, the coach had continued to remind him that the team was only as strong as its weakest link, which had precipitated the fiery training camp. The coach’s bag of tricks included the mind game, the deceit, the motivational hide-and-seek, and, when necessary, the rare frank assessment, or even confrontation. As their time together went on, the nature of Jackson’s effort became more political, more soothing and understanding. The respect he showed Jordan presented an obvious double standard, however.

  “Phil would make references to things with Michael as ‘We need to do this,’ ” backup center Bill Wennington observed one day after a game. “Whenever there was a problem with Michael in a meeting, it was like ‘We need to do this.’ If it was me, it was like, ‘Bill, you have to go box out.’ When it was a Michael thing, it was a ‘we’ thing. For us, it was, ‘Steve, you need to take that shot.’ Michael would maybe miss a box out, and it was like, ‘Well, we need to box out now.’ Just little things like that. But if you understand the reason for it, and the reason that the team was good, it’s all part of it.”

  Jordan had long accused Jackson of playing mind games, but he played them as well, only far more harshly. “That’s what it is, mental,” Jordan said. “You gotta force them to think. This team is not a physical team. We don’t have physical advantages. We have mental advantages.”

  “They were vicious,” Kerr said of Jordan’s particular brand of mind games. “But the good thing was, we had to deal with them in practice. But we knew that our opponents had to deal with them every game.”

  Muggsy Bogues could confirm that. At a key point during the ’95 playoff series between the Bulls and Charlotte Hornets, Jordan backed off of the five-foot-three Bogues and told him, “Shoot it, you fucking midget.” Bogues missed the shot, lost his confidence, and later reportedly told Johnny Bach that the play started his career down the path to ruination.

  Friend or foe, Jordan knew how to get through to those around him on a deeply psychological level. Chicago sports broadcaster Jim Rose gained rare insight to this once when he played in a charity basketball game with Jordan against several other NBA stars. Rose had covered the team and knew of Jordan’s competitive demands, so the broadcaster spent weeks practicing for the game. But during the game he blew a layup, which sparked Jordan’s fury.

  “You’re not black enough,” Jordan supposedly barked at Rose, deeply offending the broadcaster, so much so that Rose immediately fired the ball at Jordan. Jordan later apologized. But the incident revealed how intuitive he was in knowing which buttons to push to get through emotionally to his teammates. “He did it all in good fun,” Rose said. “Michael doesn’t like to lose at all. I missed the layup. I got mad and threw the ball at him and stormed off the court. Michael doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. He’s a wonderful person, but there are some times when his competitiveness takes over.”

  Jim Stack often found himself marveling at the gap between the Jordan that the public adored and the often ugly, domineering figure of Chicago practices. “Nike helped create that image for him,” Stack observed, adding that there was substantial truth to what the public saw. “Michael was raised well. James and Deloris did a hell of a job. But when he was in his competitive mode, he could flip the switch and keep it there. Off the court, he was one of the most engaging, charismatic figures of all time. I put him up there with Muhammad Ali in that category. He was engaging and respectful and knew the right things to say. But when you flipped that competitive switch with him, he’d rip your heart out.”

  PART X

  FURY

  Chapter 33

  THE CARNIVAL

  HAVING BEEN CHASTISED and assaulted and terrorized, the Bulls emerged from training camp turbocharged, and Dennis Rodman, with his multihued head bobbing up and down, was much more than a hood ornament. His energy and enthusiasm alone made the team instantly better. The way he collected offensive rebounds in bunches almost made shooting percentages irrelevant. His teammates seemed assured that if they happened to miss a shot, the crazy, fist-pumping Worm would come up with the ball for another shot. He drove the point home with 10 rebounds in the first preseason game.

  “Once he gets a little more familiar with everybody out on the floor and there’s more continuity, he’s going to start to shine,” Jordan cautiously predicted. Jackson saw much the same.

  “The very first preseason game of the year,” Jack Haley recalled, “Dennis goes in the game, Dennis throws the ball up in the stands and gets a delay-of-game foul and yells at the official, gets a technical foul. The first thing I do is I look down the bench at Phil Jackson to watch his reaction. Phil Jackson chuckles, leans over to Jimmy Cleamons, our assistant coach, and says, ‘God, he reminds me of me.’ ”

  The United Center crowds became infatuated with his pogo-stick approach to the game, and were rewarded at the end of each contest with Rodman hurling his sweat-soaked jersey to the fans, after which he would prance bare-chested to the locker room. Female fans responded in kind. Whenever he would venture into bars across the city women seemed compelled to lift their shirts and show him their breasts. The season seemed destined to take Chicagoland to new and different places.

  Until that time, Rodman had acted as if there were no limits, but Jordan’s presence instantly provided them. The media went on and on about how Phil Jackson would handle Rodman, but Jackson could relax because Jordan provided all the presence that any coach would ever need.

  Lacy Banks loved to make predictions, some of which had forced him to eat crow over the years. During the preseason that fall, he predicted the Bulls would win 70. As if on cue, Jordan went for 42 points against the Charlotte Hornets in an opening-night win at the United Center, setting in motion an epic momentum.

  Unfortunately, the opening game would also feature an ugly confrontation between Juanita Jordan and her husband’s family as they shared a skybox. Juanita was entertaining her family and friends in one part of the skybox, while the Jordans gathered and enjoyed each other’s company in a way that apparently offended Juanita. Sis recalled their surprise when her brother’s wife angrily lashed out at them at the end of the evening. There must be some mistake, Deloris Jordan and her children thought. But the next morning, Michael made an angry phone call to his mother and cursed her out. He expressed resentment that the family had encroached on his peace of mind.

  While the exact nature of the conflict was unclear—it appeared to be as much a matter of accumulated conflict as anything—the episode would mark a period of Jordan’s estrangement from his mother and siblings. At one point, he changed the locks on the offices of the James R. Jordan Foundation to bar her access. Further tension built behind the scenes as his brother Larry began developing a plan for a Jordan cologne. While aware of his brother’s activities, Michael had begun working with established perfume industry intermediaries through his agents to develop his own line. Michael eventually informed his brother of his plans, but only after Larry had spent substantial time and money developing the idea. The older brother was crushed by the news, and Deloris Jordan grew furious with her famous son. Michael offered his brother a role in the cologne product, but that apparently did little to ease the hard feelings in the family that had been building since James Jordan’s death. Clearly, however, Michael Jordan had learned his lesson from the Flight 23 stores fiasco. He did not want to be in business with family.

  Private dramas like these, along with the murder trials of the two men charged with James Jordan’s killing, formed much of the backdrop of the magical 1995–96 NBA season. The trial, motions, and deliberations ran for months, concluding in March with the convictions and life sentences for the two killers. For the most part, the sports media respected Jordan’s desire not to speak about the proceedings, so the harsh circumstances of the case played out for months on the news pages, juxtaposed against the ongoing celebration of the Bulls’ spectacular season.


  In his tirade with his mother, Jordan had vented months of anger and frustration. From an early age, Jordan had always loved his family. But it would become increasingly clear that the young men who killed his father stole precious things from Jordan himself in the process. The families of murder victims are deeply, profoundly changed by the experience and often find it difficult to identify with anyone, even family members, in the aftermath. Jordan’s father had been gone two years, an important period in the grieving process, but much conflict remained.

  Steve Kerr’s own father, an educator at the American University of Beirut, had been assassinated by terrorists when Kerr was a freshman at the University of Arizona. Jordan knew that the two of them shared something that no one else on the team had faced, yet never once in their years together did they discuss this. Jordan was leading the most public of lives while walking one of the most difficult private paths that any person could take.

  “Even from his teammates, he kept it very close,” Kerr said. “I would say in five years of playing with Michael, we probably shared just a handful of meals together, and I’m not talking about team meals or meals on the plane. I mean, like, going out at night with the team and having dinner. Michael would stay in his suite every night. He was a prisoner of his own life. Once or twice a year we’d end up at the same restaurant, at the same table with five, six of our teammates, but I never had just a breakfast, just the two of us, or lunch, just the two of us. It just never happened, because of the world that he lived in. Every single other teammate I shared very quiet moments, where you could discuss things… intimate things. But I never, ever even had a chance to bring anything like that up with Michael. Because, even though he was the leader of the team, the dominant presence on the team, he was always a little bit apart from the rest of us, too.”

  There was little time to process the situation with the most extraordinary of seasons upon them. One relief available on a Jackson-Jordan team was that the hierarchy quickly fell in place. At center, Longley seemed eager to face the challenge of being a starter, and Wennington was comfortable in his role as a backup. And thirty-nine-year-old James Edwards, the former Piston, gave them further depth at the post.

  “It was kind of weird going there after all those battles we had with those guys,” recalled Edwards, who was also curious to see how Jordan received Rodman. “But Michael seemed to have a lot of respect for Dennis. As long as he did what he was supposed to do on the court, that was all that Michael was concerned about.”

  Krause had also brought in guard Randy Brown to work with Kerr as backcourt reserves. Coming off the bench were Jud Buechler, Dickey Simpkins, and first-round draft pick Jason Caffey out of the University of Alabama. The other factor in the mixture was Toni Kukoc’s reluctance to play the sixth man, or third forward. He wanted to start, but his role in the lineup had gone to Rodman.

  Yet no sooner had Rodman started to settle in with the Bulls than a calf muscle injury sidelined him for a month. Even so, they rolled out to five straight wins, the best start in team history. If the early success did anything to make the Bulls complacent, the Orlando Magic snapped them back to attention in the sixth game, just as the Bulls were breaking in their new black with red pinstripe road uniforms. Orlando guard Penny Hardaway outplayed Jordan, giving the Magic a key home victory. The Bulls responded with two quick wins back in Chicago before scorching through a western road trip winning six of seven games. The trip opened in Dallas, where Chicago needed overtime and 36 from Jordan (including 6 of the Bulls’ final 14 points) to win, 108–102.

  “This is a very aggressive basketball club and very confident,” Jackson said afterward. “I think people are surprised who we are, or are surprised how we are playing, or they’re not comfortable with our big guard rotation. It is giving us some easy offensive opportunities so we are getting going early.”

  They finished the western road swing in early December with Jordan scoring 37 in a win over the Los Angeles Clippers. “I feel I’m pretty much all the way back now as a player,” he said, reflecting on the first month of the season. “My skills are there. So is my confidence. Now it’s just a matter of me going out and playing the way I’m capable every night.”

  In his years before baseball, Jordan had shot a stellar .516 from the floor, but the numbers dipped to just .441 during his seventeen-game run over the spring of 1995. Now, he was up to .493. His scoring, too, was headed back up to a 30-point average from the nine-year low of 26.9 in 1995. Lacy Banks put together a comparison showing that if Jordan played through the 1998 season, he would rest third on the all-time scoring list with almost 29,000 points, behind only Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the all-time leader with 38,397.

  Banks asked him about going for the all-time record.

  “Forget Jabbar,” Jordan replied. “No way do I plan to play anywhere close to twenty years.”

  “He’s right where I knew he’d be about now,” Ron Harper told reporters. “And that’s leading the league in scoring and pulling away from the pack. He’s removing every shadow of a doubt that he’s the greatest player of all time.”

  “Age-wise, I think I’m old,” Jordan said on the issue. “But skill-wise, I think I’m still capable of playing the type of basketball I know I can play.… The question people end up asking me the most is, how do I compare the two players, the one before baseball and the one after. Quite frankly, I think they are the same. It’s just a matter of putting out the stats to show that they are the same. And I think by the end of the year hopefully, you will see that it’s basically the same player with two years in between. Right now, I’m still being compared to Michael Jordan, and according to some people, I’m even failing to live up to Michael Jordan. But I have the best chance of being him because I am him. In the meantime, I’m improving and evolving.”

  Next

  The season also saw a wave of talented young players come into the league. None of them figured they needed to study Jordan on tape, LA shooting guard Brent Barry recalled, because they’d all spent their lives watching him on TV. But catching him in person was a different experience.

  Eddie Jones joined the Lakers that fall out of Temple. “When I saw Michael walk onto the court, it just excited me,” he recalled. “I knew he was gonna go after me. I knew whatever player he faced he was definitely gonna attack.… When Michael went against somebody that was known as a defender, that ignited him. He just wanted to go out and take you out in the first quarter. That’s just his competitiveness. He lived for that. He wanted to show you that, ‘Hey, all these people are saying that you’re a defender. I want to show you how well you defend.’ ”

  Jerry Stackhouse, a rookie out of North Carolina, learned that same lesson after boasting that he could hold his own against Jordan, based on their summer showdowns back in Chapel Hill. “Nobody can stop me in this league, not even Michael Jordan,” he told a reporter for a story in the morning papers in Philadelphia. That night, Jordan talked his way through 48 points and allowed Stackhouse a mere 9.

  “It was just very clinical,” said Julius Erving, who was watching from the stands.

  Later that season, Jordan would score 53 against the league’s hottest young star, Grant Hill, who was coached by Doug Collins. Collins immediately understood the difference between the two. “Grant is more inclined to want people to like him and to make people happy,” Jordan’s former coach observed. “Michael will cut your throat out.”

  Chicago turned in a 12–2 record in November and 13–1 for December to begin 1996 with an astounding 25–3 record, and was in the midst of an eighteen-game winning streak after having run through a twelve-game streak earlier. With each victory, speculation grew as to whether Chicago could win seventy games, breaking the all-time record for wins in a season, set by the 1972 Los Angeles Lakers with a 69–13 finish. Jerry West, the Lakers’ vice president for basketball operations, who was a star guard on that ’72 club, said that only injuries could keep them from winning seventy.

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nbsp; “I look at the Celtics back in ’86 back when they had Bill Walton and Kevin McHale coming off the bench,” Jordan said, in trying to compare his team with others he had known. “Those guys were tough to deal with. Those guys played together for a long time. We’re starting to learn how to play together, but those guys were together for a period of time. They knew arms, legs, and fingers and everything about each other. We’re just learning fingers.”

  It was pointed out to Jordan that most great NBA teams had a dominant low-post defender, someone to stop other teams in the paint. “We don’t have that kind of animal,” he admitted. “But I think Pippen compensates for that. I don’t think any of those teams, other than maybe the ’86 Boston Celtics, had a small forward that was as versatile on offense and defense as Scottie Pippen is.”

  Meanwhile, Tex Winter had begun worrying that Rodman’s focus on another rebounding title was tearing at the team fabric. Beyond that, Winter wondered whether Rodman really had a handle on his emotions. But with each game, each road trip, the former Piston seemed to find ways to relate better to his new teammates. “Dennis was different,” Kerr remembered with a laugh. “Dennis wanted to be close to us, he just didn’t always know how. He was just so shy. What ending up happening… the white guys ended up bonding with Dennis because of his love of Pearl Jam and the Smashing Pumpkins. We’d go to concerts with him… and in the end, Dennis felt a lot more comfortable around the white guys than he did around the black guys. We definitely felt comfortable around him and would go out with him, once in a while, have a big night out, have a ton of fun. That was our way of bonding with him.”

  Rodman bonded with Jordan and Pippen on the court, as the Bulls evolved into a defensive force. What Rodman lacked in height he made up for in strength as he lifted weights around the clock. It was hard for opponents to muscle him out of the post, which helped shore up Chicago inside—if other teams even managed to get inside. Bringing the ball up-floor, the first thing opposing guards often encountered was Jordan at the top of the defense, bent low, his gaze fixed, telling them, “Come on, I’ll give you a jump shot. Shoot it! Oh, you don’t want it?” As the season wore on it became clear that many teams wanted absolutely nothing to do with Chicago.