Everything They Had

by David Halberstam

  Michael, it should be noted, does not like to lose, and does not have much patience for players who are not good. He will be surrounded by a good many of them in Washington.

  It is important at this point to recall the last moment when we all saw Michael play. That was in Salt Lake City in June 1998; he was in the process of breaking the hearts of thousands and thousands of Utah Jazz fans. It was Game 6 of the NBA Finals, and the Bulls had gone to Salt Lake City leading in games 3–2. But the home-court advantage rested with Utah. Worse, the Bulls were in trouble, because Scottie Pippen’s back was killing him, and he could barely play. Michael had carried the Bulls that night, as he often had in the past.

  Ron Harper was sick that night as well, and Pippen was used primarily as a decoy. By the second quarter, Phil Jackson was going with Bill Wennington, Steve Kerr, Toni Kukoc, Scott Burrell and Jud Buechler, not the most imposing five players to play so early in so critical a game.

  As best he could, Jackson was buying time for his starters. He knew Jordan was exhausted, and he told Michael it was all right to cheat some on defense. Amazingly, the Jazz failed to put Chicago away early on. The Bulls managed to stay close, and late in the game Jordan once again put the Bulls on his back and carried them to the point where they could win. But the small tell-tale signs Michael gave out when he was tired were not so small at that point. The fatigue was obvious: He was not elevating well on his jump shot, and even shooting free throws looked like an ordeal.

  Given all that, the last two minutes were remarkable even for Jordan. His jump shot looked terrible. His elevation and follow through were poor, and he had missed four in a row near the end of the game. With about five minutes left, Phil Jackson told him to forget the jumper and drive to the basket. That he did.

  With 37 seconds left, Utah had the ball, but Chicago had whittled the lead to 86–85. And then it happened. Utah ran a little clock and with 16 seconds left, Jordan, sensing the play which was developing, slipped in on the blind side of Karl Malone and made a clean steal, brought the ball up court, slowly, deliberately, master of the universe once again, almost as if taunting Bryon Russell, left out there alone with the melancholy task of guarding him. With a little more than seven seconds left, Michael began his move, going to his right. Suddenly he pulled up, faked Russell to the floor (aided by a little tap on Russell’s butt with his left hand) and absolutely confident of his shot, and with exceptional form, elevation and follow-through almost perfect, hit the game-winning jumper.

  Utah missed its last shot, and Chicago won—its sixth championship in the Jordan years. Afterward someone asked Jerry Sloan about Jordan. He should be remembered, Sloan said, “as the greatest player who ever played the game.”

  It was the perfect final moment to one of the most brilliant careers in team sports. Michael was 35 at the time, not so much showing his age—he was as good as ever—but working ever so much harder to compete at that level.

  Lest we—and he—forget, in those final weeks there had been a number of signs of age. The series with Indiana had been very hard, and the Bulls had barely slipped by the Pacers. If anything, the Indiana series was tougher than the Finals against the Jazz. In particular, I remember matchups he had with Jalen Rose. Rose, just emerging as one of the premier players in the league after a spotty beginning to his career, had proved very frustrating to Michael: He was tall, strong, and he seemed to be quite rested in those moments in the game, late second half, late fourth quarter, when Michael was accustomed to putting (smaller) tired defenders away.

  That Chicago team, for all of Dennis Rodman’s wackiness, was a lot better than the Washington Wizards are likely to be next year. By the end of that season, Dennissimo was unraveling at an ever-faster rate, his drinking was getting worse, and even someone as nuanced with bad boys as Jackson was having trouble keeping him even partially focused. But still he averaged 15 rebounds a game.

  Pippen, only 32 back then, was—once he recovered from a foot injury and accepted his unhappy relationship with the Chicago management—in peak condition and playing at the top of his game. Kukoc was both talented and erratic—one was never sure which Toni would show up on a given night. The other players had played together for some time, knew their roles and their limitations. But the number of Bulls’ victories per season was on the way down, from 72 to 69 to 62 wins in what might be called Jordan II, his return after his quick baseball retirement.

  It will not be like that in Washington. I am one of those people who thought taking the Washington job was a mistake in the first place—not that Michael can’t be a fine basketball executive, if he wants. He’s smart and shrewd, and if he can get away from David Falk, who is too smart by half, he’ll probably be a successful manager in his life after basketball.

  Becoming a part owner and perhaps eventually a principal owner at Charlotte, an opportunity offered to him earlier on, was a far better choice than Washington. Charlotte was a young team, was not capped out, and had vastly more upside. Washington was the worst of two worlds, an old team that was capped out. The sweetener in Washington was said to be a $30 million bonus in taking the job, a short-range plus and a long-range minus, if you’re already rich and your most precious commodity is your reputation.

  I can understand Michael’s frustration and impatience—he’s a very impatient young man—with his own team, and I can understand him looking out at the current NBA and thinking to himself that he can still do it, that his game is more complete than that of almost all these players. And he’s both right in many ways—and, I suspect, wrong. That is, I think he can still come back and play if he’s with a quite good team that is only one piece short and does not have to depend on him. The Wizards, even if both he and Barkley play, will not be a very good team, and it will be, I suspect, very frustrating for him.

  I realize that there is something unfair in all this—I write as someone who has been able to enjoy my own profession for 46 years now, and I realize that life is crueler for athletes, taking away from them at a young age what they do best, love best, finally what defines them. I realize as well that with someone as driven and passionate as Michael, that playing is like life itself, that there is, in a benign sense, an addiction here, and that it is harder to walk away from his sport than almost any of the rest of us can imagine.

  But Michael, when he played, was always aware of his special niche, and of not wanting to slip. Of not playing a moment in his career when he was less than his best. He knew too many stories of athletes who had stayed too long, and were on the way down and held on, of Willie Mays falling down in center field late in his career. Michael would talk to his friend, Johnny Bach, the assistant coach, telling Bach to let him know when he began to slip.

  But here is the real truth: The player he will really be competing against is not Latrell Sprewell or Vince Carter. The player he will be competing against will be Michael Jordan, the best ever at that position, the Michael Jordan who emerged those six wonderful years with an almost perfect complement of talent around him.

  That will be the toughest matchup of his career, going against the myth of the most charismatic and exciting player most of us ever saw, and who again and again—in what was ostensibly a big man’s game—lifted his team above the odds and the competition. Those are images most of us would prefer to leave as they are.

  The temptation for him to come back must be immense: You go from a life of the ultimate highs when every camera is always aimed at you, and then when you are still a young man, you enter a far more mundane middle-class existence. You get all the privacy you once wanted—but at a terrible price, the loss of what was dearest to you.

  I suspect if he comes back it will be fun again for him for a time—a brief time—playing the game he loves so much, and being on the road with his teammates; he and Charles will be quite a pair. He will love the excitement generated by the crowd and the thrill of the competition. The NBA’s television ratings, now in a predictable post-Jordan depression, will probably bloom again.
God knows, I’ll watch again for a time.

  And some of it might work. Michael might lift the Wizards to a higher level than they’ve played at—that would not be too hard. There might well be some wonderful nights when it all comes back, and he can score 40 or 50 points.

  But I remember how hard those final weeks were in 1998, and I know how much he hates to lose and how much he hates to play with indifferent teammates, and if I were Michael, I would not take a chance on what was not only one of the most brilliant careers in modern sports, but as close to a perfect exit as I’ve ever seen.

  IN ADMIRATION OF IVERSON

  From ESPN.com, June 11, 2001

  The first game of the 2001 NBA Finals was one of the best basketball games I have seen in a very long time. There is just nothing like great talent fused with great passion in a big game.

  It was not just that everyone, myself included, expected Goliath to coast to the title, and it was not just that David beat Goliath in Game 1, but it was the nature of the game, the pure ferocity with which David played, and in time the matching ferocity with which Goliath had to counter.

  Even if the Lakers had won, which in the end they did not, it would have been a magnificent game, because the Sixers had pushed them so hard, pushed them to match Allen Iverson’s level of passion. For it was obvious that Iverson controlled the pace of the game, not just by his own play but by his infectious effect on his teammates, and thus in turn his effect on the Lakers.

  If that Game 1 assault upon the Laker journey to an unbeaten playoff record wasn’t bad enough, the Sixers, in Games 2 and 3, again challenged the Lakers. In both games, they lost, but they also pushed L.A. very near the breaking point, leaving them confused and uncertain at critical moments in the fourth quarter. Game 1 clearly had not been a fluke, or a result of too long a layoff for the Lakers. Iverson has the rare capacity to bring a lesser team to parity with what was seemingly a far more powerful team.

  I have been learning to admire Iverson this season, and it’s turning out to be a good deal of fun. I don’t know whether it matters if I like Iverson or not. We come from different worlds, and we are likely, once the Finals are over, to remain part of our different worlds. Just to admire him is good enough.

  Iverson is very simply, no matter how well Shaq or Kobe or Tracy McGrady played, the great story of this basketball season, and if you think about it, I suspect, the single most interesting success story of the past basketball, baseball and football seasons. He has taken a team of players with a medium talent level and struck terror into the hearts of a team with vastly greater size and talent. He has commanded our interest and our own emotions in these Finals against great odds. He has Phil Jackson calling timeouts, and Lakers fans aware that a five- or six-point lead near the end of the game is not enough because Shaq can’t shoot free throws. On the sidelines Jack Nicholson looks unnaturally tense.

  We, the fans, are engaged in these Finals as we did not intend to be. He has made us look at the two previous challengers to the Lakers—teams from Sacramento and San Antonio that obviously had a great deal more natural talent—and made us think they did not play very hard on defense, and they could be intimidated by the Lakers. Because Iverson cannot be intimidated, and the Sixers, in turn, cannot be intimidated. This makes for very good basketball and a wonderful story.

  Learning to admire Iverson took time. I am not a hip-hop kind of guy. I don’t call people “Bro’,” or talk of “The Hood.” To me, Pearl Harbor—the news of which I remember all too well—is the beginning of a hard frightening four-year war (during which we moved some 10 times because my father went back in the service), not a bad, indeed almost a profane movie. However, Iverson, if he has seen it, might well think it’s a good movie—after all, it’s made for his generation with lots of video-game dogfight sequences.

  I own no rap CDs, and by instinct when I hear the name Snoop Dogg, it sounds to me like that of someone who should be in a comic strip. So, we have our cultural differences, or perhaps more accurately our cultural divide. I think it’s safe to assume that in my eyes he arrives with more cultural baggage than I like, and that if I were doing a piece on him, I would have more cultural baggage than he would prefer.

  I, like many others of my generation, did not like what he seemed to represent. Nor was it just the surface manifestations of alienation, although in truth they matter, for we judge each other first on surfaces. (“I don’t want,” said a friend of mine who has Knicks season tickets, speaking of the old Iverson about three years ago, “to root for someone who looks like he might mug me.”) And the surface manifestations are, in fact, very different, and to the white middle-aged fan, they are at first quite offputting: the cornrowed hair, the tattoos, the body piercing, the somewhat volatile relationship with the law.

  But more important was his game. He was, I thought, like all too many young athletes in the NBA, disrespectful of opponents, disrespectful of teammates, disrespectful of his coaches, and in some way, I thought, disrespectful of the game. The transgressions in previous years were all too numerous, the fights with coaches, the deliberate tardiness to practices, the sulking when he was taken out of a game, the sense he gave out that his real team was his posse, who represented what he was and where he came from, and that it was to them that his true loyalty lay, not his Sixers teammates, who were involuntarily merely his business associates.

  I saw all the talent, heard all the fuss, and thought that in the end the talent didn’t really matter, because finally it was about self, and as much as he added to a team with his talent, he managed in other ways to subtract with his behavior.

  In the past, I—and, I think, a great many sports fans of my general background, gender, class, race—have remained largely immune to his talents. Yes, he was very talented, exceptionally quick, and tough, and he could score and he could pass. No one, it seemed, could get a shot off that quickly. But 50-point games do not move me.

  I saw the passion as I saw the talent, but I had a sense that the passion, like the talent, was primarily about self. In the end, there’s nothing more boring than the rise of a talented, self-absorbed star in this modern entertainment society, whether it’s on the part of movie stars, television stars, athletes, or for that matter, the self-inflated television personalities who cover them and are often equally as self-absorbed and who promote themselves instead of simply doing their job.

  So, there was always a gulf between us. We come from not merely different, but really quite separate Americas. We only meet, in the sense that we meet at all—which we do mostly electronically—because of his superb athletic skills. Otherwise, we would be each other’s invisible men, effectively vague, faceless shadows to each other in our daily lives, at best stereotypes.

  I am white, a college graduate, old enough to be his grandfather. I was 26 when his mother was born. I belong to the generation which, when it was young, held its breath hoping that Jackie Robinson would succeed when he broke in back in 1947, and I have watched with pleasure the coming of the social revolution in American sports, the coming of the new immensely talented black athletes in all sports.

  In my 20s and 30s I covered Civil Rights in the South. I take a certain degree of alienation on the part of black athletes for granted—I’m somewhat surprised when it isn’t there. I’m not easily offended by manifestation of black dissent or separatism. The decision of Cassius Clay to become Muhammad Ali did not bother me. Nor did his decision not to serve in Vietnam—although it greatly offended many journalists from the generation older than me (even when their own sons were not going to Vietnam).

  The early afros of the 1960s didn’t bother me. Athletes at the 1968 Olympics raising their hands in black power didn’t bother me. But I feel that whatever your beliefs, you have to prove yourself, first and foremost, by what you do, and how good you are at your profession, and your alienation better not interfere with your job.

  Having said that, let me make a number of other points. We should, I think, before we continue, b
e aware of a number of things. One is that the media does not always get the business of who is a good guy and who is not a good guy exactly right, and that it tends to go softer on winners in these judgments because it wants, however unconsciously, access to winners.

  The media wants good guys to win and the bad guys to lose, and tends almost without knowing it, to award an edge in being a good guy to the winner for merely winning. Inevitably, it thereupon tends to search harder for the warts of the losers than the warts of the winners.

  Sometimes, because of this, it tends to blow the call.

  Thus in the ongoing competition between Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams back in the 1950s, the media—actually the press in those days—spent a good deal of time deciding who gets white hats and black hats. And they decided that DiMaggio was the good guy, and Williams the bad guy. That turned out to be a colossal mistake.

  DiMaggio might have been the better all-around baseball player, but he was a deeply misanthropic man, surprisingly ungenerous and uncommunicative to all; even some of the same reporters who helped keep the flame of his alleged elegance burning, would, when speaking in private, talk about how unpleasant he had been with them, and how they had always been forced to adapt to his rather selfish treatment of them.

  By contrast, Williams, tempestuous, systematically assaulted by a brutal Boston media, was by far the better, in all ways a more open and more interesting person. He was a beloved teammate. But the Yankees won regularly, and the Red Sox, much weaker in pitching, won only once. DiMaggio got the white hat, Williams the black.

  Comparably in the Bill Russell–Wilt Chamberlain competition, Russell (surrounded generally by better teammates) almost always won on the court, and was in time awarded the white hat by the media. In truth, Russell has always been, except to a small handful of people who go back a long way with him, aloof and unacceptably difficult to deal with, whereas Chamberlain was by contrast open, generous and accommodating to all kinds of people.