Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  Yet the one guy Jordan would most love to see walk through that office door hasn’t been able to do it lately. He’s a 61-year-old former Chicago narcotics cop named Gus Lett, and Jordan says, “He’s like my second father.” That sort of figures, considering that Lett and James Jordan, who was murdered in 1992, were born two months apart, both Air Force vets and both as straightforward as a left jab. Gus even looks like James did—5′10″, balding, hard face around soft eyes.

  Gus is one of six former or off-duty Chicago cops who can come into the office anytime they want, as far as Jordan’s concerned. They look like guys you might see in a barbershop, and they spend more time with Jordan than his wife does. They’re Jordan’s security force, and you’ll find them in the office with him, on the bus with him, in crowds with him, in his hotel suite with him, behind the bench with him. They watch his back, his front, his side and, especially, his cash, because they play a lot of liar’s poker with him. Jordan loves the game. Chicago cops are a bitch to bluff. In the same way a hostage learns to love his captors, Jordan has made them his best friends. What choice did he have?

  There’s Joe Rokas, 49, a detective in the city’s organized-crime unit. There’s Clarence Travis, 63, Gus’s old partner, retired from narcotics. There’s detective John Wozniak, 45, narcotics. There’s special agent Calvin Holliday, 49, internal affairs. There’s Sgt. Tom West, 49, who supervises a tactical unit. And there’s Gus, the man in charge, the one who’s been with Jordan the longest, the former DEA undercover agent from the South Side. “Where’s Gus?” Jordan would constantly bellow. “Where’s Gus?”

  They became friends during Jordan’s second year with the Bulls, the season he spent with a cast on his broken foot. Gus was working security at the old Chicago Stadium. He noticed how hard it was for Jordan to get up and down the stairs, so he would carry Jordan’s bag, give him a shoulder to lean on as he climbed. Something about the two of them just worked. Gus never asks anything of Jordan, not even an autograph. When you’ve taken a bullet, worked the riots in Marquette Park after Martin Luther King’s assassination, worked the riots at the ’68 Democratic Convention, made some of the biggest narcotics busts in Chicago in the ’70s, sat in a room full of drug dealers with your cover blown, you do not worry about some scratchings on a napkin.

  “We just became close,” Gus says. “I don’t know why. Maybe because I talk to him the way I talk to my own two sons.” Gus stopped being just a guard to Jordan a dozen crises ago. “We’ve never lied to each other,” Gus says, “and we always listen to each other.”

  “His wisdom is always welcome,” says Jordan. “Rarely do I come to any big decision without talking to him first.”

  Gus knows that. “Michael loved his father very much,” he says. “You know, sometimes I see him staring into space, I can tell he’s thinking of him.”

  So when everybody—Jordan, Gus, the other guards—got the flu in Utah in February, just before the All-Star Game, nobody worried. Why shouldn’t Gus and Jordan be sick at the same time? They’re never much farther than a gin hand from each other. But when Jordan recovered and Gus never did, never got rid of the cough and the weakness, Jordan wouldn’t stop bugging him to go to the doctor.

  “It’s nothin’, Jumper,” Gus kept saying.

  “Don’t make me take you,” Jordan kept saying. So he went.

  The news wasn’t good.

  When Jordan is finished, the Bulls will be finished, we all know that. Jordan tells friends he is probably finished. He says he’s not playing for anybody but coach Phil Jackson or for any team but Chicago. Jackson acts as if he’s gone, too, says he’s gone and routinely and publicly rips Bulls vice president Jerry Krause. If he’s staying, he’s going to need a lot of Wite-Out. Jackson says he might coach some other team, might just stay home and read, might work on a possible presidential run by Bill Bradley. “People come up to me all the time and say, ‘I can’t believe they won’t bring you back,’” Jackson says. “I tell ’em, ‘Believe it.’”

  The center is not holding. Scottie Pippen says he wouldn’t be surprised if the Bulls just cut him. Rodman figures he’ll be with the Los Angeles Lakers next season. “And it’s gonna be just as crazy there, bro, lemme tell you,” he says.

  Jordan has always said he wants to go out “right at the peak” of his career, not on the way down, and, in a wonderful and strange way, this season may be it. He helped wring 62 wins out of a team that was without Pippen for three months and that has little bench to speak of. True, Jordan doesn’t go to the hole the way he used to, and gravity has finally begun to figure him out, but watching him this year has still been like staring at a winter sun. He’s so brilliant, it hurts the eyes. He was unguardable in the air as a young man, and he is just as unguardable on earth now. Nobody ever toyed with the double team the way Jordan has this season. Nobody ever hit the big shot night in and night out. Few players in the NBA’s history have won the way Jordan does. Do you realize that in the 1990s Jordan has never started a basketball season that didn’t end in a parade?

  Yet this year there have been tiny glimpses of the end. Against the New Jersey Nets on a March night, long before the Bulls dispatched the Nets in last week’s playoffs, Jordan opened the game by throwing a pass into the stands. Then he threw one into the scorer’s table. In one 89-second span he missed one dunk and had another chumped by a nobody named David Vaughn. A kind of hush came over the United Center, a giant whisper, the kind heard at Sinatra concerts near the end. Of course, Sinatra didn’t come back the next night with 35 points on the road against the Indiana Pacers.

  “I know I will be forgotten as soon as this is over,” says Jackson. “All of us will. Except Michael. Michael will be remembered forever.”

  As Camelot closes down, even the Bulls are finding their own ways to remember. Jackson calls this season “the last dance” and has been taking photos on the road. Center Bill Wennington takes along his video camera, making tapes to show to the grandkids. Routinely, Bulls ball boy Chris Mott brings something in for Jordan to sign—for the refs.

  The rest of the world would love to get that close. The Bulls have been sold out at home for more than 10 years. The waiting list for season tickets has 23,000 names. One doctor calls ticket official Joe O’Neil every year with a standing bribe. “If I get him one season ticket,” O’Neil says, “he’ll give me a free nose job.” Yet people still show up at the United Center, hundreds a day, hoping to find a freak ticket, begging to see the court, wanting just to be part of it. Lobby receptionist Michelle Danaher has to turn them away, but they’re desperate, so they get her autograph and picture. Hey, it’s something.

  When Jordan eats at his own restaurant, Michael Jordan’s, near the Loop, people stand vigil around his red-and-black Range Rover with the TWO TREY plates. Well, no, Tommy, I never got to see him play. But I made sure nobody messed with his wheels. It took only a few months for the restaurant’s managers to realize that if they didn’t take the Jordan logo off the dishes, they’d go broke. So, on logoless plates, Jordan eats his standard pregame meal—medium-well 23-ounce steak, mashed potatoes, a salad he rarely touches and two ginger ales, only one of which he drinks—in a private room with the shades drawn. Still, people wait patiently with cameras down a nearby hallway. Why? Because that’s the way to the men’s room. See those shoes under there? Those are Michael’s!

  How would you like to have a job in which your entire year’s schedule is printed in the paper? In which the world knows which city you’ll be in on what day, in which hotel and at what time? Outside the Ritz-Carlton Pentagon City in Arlington, Va., last November, a dozen security people had to be marshaled to hold back more than 500 people who’d left a nearby mall and gathered around the Bulls’ bus. They stood, enthralled, as it idled for more than an hour. When, at last, they saw Jordan inside the lobby, they surged forward, cameras raised, pens readied, toes tipped. The path the players had been using to get to the bus narrowed by half. When Jordan saw the crowd, his shoulders hunc
hed up. Somehow he made it onto the bus, but he looked scared. “I was,” he says.

  In Atlanta this season there has been such a last-day-of-Saigon thing going on that the Bulls’ bus has often left without Jordan, dissolving the crowd. Jordan has then snuck out in a special car, which has pulled off the highway at a certain exit to let him rejoin the bus.

  For most business travelers the hotel is a refuge, but not for Jordan. Sometimes he checks in under the name of Leonard Smith, sometimes Lawrence Welk. One night Tom Smithburg, the Bulls’ manager of media services, accidentally got Jordan’s room and Jordan got Smithburg’s. Smithburg hardly slept because of all the people knocking at the door. Oh, sure, the hotel was completely secured. The people knocking were hotel employees. Everything’s still fine, Mr. Jordan. Say, could you just sign a quick one for my brother?

  Sometimes fans call a hotel months in advance to get a room the night the Bulls are there. Then it’s just a matter of knocking on every door until they’ve got their favorite player. Usually, that’s Jordan. When you’re Michael Jordan, the line between fan and stalker is very thin. “I really feel sorry for him sometimes,” says George Kohler, Jordan’s longtime assistant. “People tell me they want to be rich and famous? I tell ’em, ‘Just be rich.’ Michael’s had 14 years of this nonsense. I wouldn’t blame him for wanting to retire.”

  No wonder Jordan likes hanging out with the old cops who never want anything more than a locked hotel room and a rousing game of bid whist. No wonder he likes the bull sessions and the kidding, even if he’s pinned into a tiny back office. No wonder it tears Jordan up not to be able to protect an old guy who has spent 14 years protecting him.

  Jordan pulled up to a side entrance at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, in downtown Chicago, and was taken up a service elevator. He knew he wouldn’t have a lot of time, maybe a half hour. It’s the 30 Minute Rule. If Jordan stays anywhere in public longer than 30 minutes without a good exit route, it may take him hours to get out.

  Gus had always been good at finding a route. “We’re not above going through a few kitchens,” he would say. That was the funny thing about this visit. The guy who could best get Jordan out of this kind of jam was the reason he was in it.

  When Jordan got the news in late February from Gus’s wife, Tisher, it hit him like a roundhouse right. Two tumors. One in the brain and one in a lung. The doctors said the cancer had metastasized. If that isn’t the worst word in the language. Metastasized. Spread.

  The worst thing about being John Elway or Ken Griffey Jr. or Michael Jordan is that you learn more about deadly diseases than you ever hoped to. If there’s a sick or dying kid in North America, chances are good that he’s written to Jordan. Twice a year Jordan fills the third floor of his restaurant with dying kids for the Make-A-Wish and Starlight foundations. He sits down with them, one by one, and talks with them, signs for them, tells them he’ll see them next year, even though he knows it’s a lie. He doesn’t cry, though. Neither do the kids. The parents do.

  But now cancer is working on a man he loves like a father. “He’s got my plane, my staff, whatever,” Michael told his agent after speaking to Tisher. “The best doctors, the best hospitals, whatever. I want him to have nothing but the best.” That’s how Gus got moved from the South Side hospital he was in to Northwestern. Hey, everybody needs a shoulder to lean on when he’s got some stairs to climb, right?

  After visiting Gus in the hospital, Jordan played indifferently in a win over Toronto. There was no joy in it. He refused to speak to the press, a rarity. He looked wrung out. “Bad day,” he said as he left. “Very bad day.”

  Every home game beat writers, columnists, radio guys, cameramen and television reporters bolt from their courtside seats with a minute or so to go, scramble down the hall and jump in line outside the Bulls’ locker room. They carry stepladders, stools, boom mikes. They want a good spot in line, because in about 10 minutes the locker room door will swing open, and they’ll burst in, and in 20 manic seconds they’ll construct a human amphitheater around Jordan’s locker. We’re talking about 40 to 50 people, many of them in designer dresses and silk ties, all pushing, slinking and elbowing into a perfect semicircle around a locker that isn’t three feet wide.

  “Seriously! Seriously! That’s my foot!” a woman yells.

  “Well, I can’t move! If I move, this guy’s gonna fall on top of us!”

  “Wait! Ow! Wait! That’s good!”

  Finally everybody is jammed into a solid, mangled mass, some up high on chairs, some down low on their knees, arms stuck under armpits, legs akimbo. Everybody’s ready. Except Jordan, of course. It’ll be another half hour before he comes. Pippen, named one of the NBA’s top 50 players of all time, comes and goes, and the human jigsaw puzzle doesn’t budge. Rodman, wearing pajama bottoms, leaves without a bother. It would be nice to talk to them, sure, but if you do, you give up your spot, and you’re toast. A lot of the newspaper writers are forced to stand in the opposite corner of the locker room and wait for the TV to show Jordan’s mini press conference, which is almost always broadcast live in Chicago. It will be a bizarre scene: grown men and women taking notes off a TV set while the live, three-dimensional Jordan is standing 15 feet behind them.

  Someday soon Jordan will stop coming altogether. “It’s going to be quick,” says Jackson. “And it’s going to be painful.” What then? Will the Bulls go back to what they were the season before Jordan—attendance of 6,365 a night, one fourth of the games televised, two photographers on the apron instead of 40? Will we all be a little like those 50 journalists, our cameras focused on an empty locker, wondering what in the world we’re going to do now?

  What in the world will they do at Chicago’s Lakeview High, where, nine times a day, they use the Bulls’ theme music to get kids to class fast? Who will be the big hero in Toronto, where the Raptors’ mascot stomped on a Jordan jersey one night this season and was roundly booed for it? What will fans do for a team in Denver, where the crowd for the Chicago game this season wore four times as many Bulls jerseys as Nuggets jerseys? What will they write about at The Philadelphia Daily News, which recently put out a 52-page section to commemorate the career of an athlete who never played for a Philly team?

  “People are getting desperate,” says Jackie Banks, who handles Jordan’s 6,000 pieces of mail a month. “They’re desperate to get to him before he retires.” They send letters. And cards. And packages. And flowers. And crocheting. Somebody sent the Bulls a box of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. What the sender didn’t realize is that mail that arrives for the team today is opened in three months. Ice cream doesn’t do three months in a hot warehouse very well. “Oh, lord,” groans Banks. “That was a mess.”

  People send Jordan money. Do people send Dolly Parton Wonderbras? Occasional letters from Japan contain $20 or $50 for a picture or a ticket. Banks sends the money back. People write in Chinese, Polish and Swahili. “We get letters from countries I never heard of,” she says. People send Bibles. Lots and lots of Bibles. People send wooden shoes and hand-sewn curtains and specially designed bathrobes and giant oil portraits of Jordan. “Tell everybody,” Banks says, “Michael Jordan does not need another portrait of himself.”

  She opens the door to the warehouse. There must be 100 portraits in there. Jordan comes by every now and then and pokes his head in, sees himself in 100 poses, half smiles and closes the door. One lady knitted him a sweater with arms that are six feet long. No kidding. It’s still in the warehouse. “That sweater is not going to fit anybody on this planet,” says Banks.

  But mostly people send their fondest wishes to be part of it. The weird thing is, finding out that they aren’t really part of it makes them feel like they are. Banks is sent photos all the time of people in their backyards, squinting into the sun, proudly holding up a letter from her that reads: “Thank you for your letter to Michael Jordan. Unfortunately. . . .” Hey, it’s something.

  “It’s really kind of wonderful,” Banks has decided. “I constantly re
ad, ‘Dear Michael, thank you for entertaining me, thank you for entertaining my mom or my sister when they were so terribly sick. They never missed a Bulls game.’

  “I don’t understand sports, really. I’ve never been a fan. But sports seem to be such an uplifting thing for these people. It’s like, for that hour and a half, people step away from all the pain and tribulation of their lives and look forward to these games and to Michael playing in them. They’re overjoyed.”

  But who comforts Jordan?

  What was it Jordan said? Enjoy it, because you never know when it’s all going to be taken away.

  Where is Gus?

  Gus Lett had brain surgery, chemotherapy and radiation in the last month, and he’s still laughing. “Good news!” he told one hospital visitor, even though he looked 20 pounds lighter and 20 years older than when he checked in. “The doctors tell me that unless I fall down the stairs or get caught in a drive-by, I’m not gonna die today.”

  As the free world frets about Jordan’s future, Jordan’s got something real to worry about. He calls Gus and goes by the hospital, keeps wanting to spend the day with him. Maybe the two of them will leave the NBA together next month, the second father and the third son. Leave the tray table and the hotel rooms and the cramped office behind, spread out in a great big room and play some real cards.

  “Give me a coupla months, Jumper,” Gus says, “and I’ll be back on the job.”

  Only one problem with that: Gus is so damned good at liar’s poker.

  Melissa King

  When Melissa King (b. 1966) turned twenty-seven she didn’t know what she wanted from life, though she knew that northwest Arkansas wasn’t supplying it. She left a job writing sell copy for plots of land in the Ozarks and moved to Chicago, renting an apartment on the Near West Side and taking a position with a mom-and-pop natural foods company. To construct a community and prove her urban bona fides, she returned to the game she had played at Vilonia High School, hoping it might provide “that old clarity . . . those blessed moments pulled from the chaos when you see what matters and nothing else.” White, southern, and female, King was usually an interloper three times over as she migrated from court to inner-city court. But even as she knew she was an object of curiosity, she not only returned the gazes but also took mental notes. After a few hours on the courts, often still in her gym clothes, King would write up her most recent engagement with the game she has called “a dive into forgetting.” These entries toggle between the confessional and the dismissive, and, as she has put it in her self-deprecating way, “walk the line between sage and doofus.” But they come from a generous, curious, and earnest place. “It’s All in the Game” was published in the Chicago Reader in 1998 and became the germ of her 2005 book She’s Got Next. King eventually made her way back to her home state, where she worked for the University of Arkansas Press.