It turned out that a rubber glove was the tipping point in the Magic controversy. A couple of days after Malone made his comment, the Lakers were in Chapel Hill, North Carolina—Jordan country—playing an exhibition game against the Cleveland Cavaliers, one of those spread-the-game-to-non-NBA-towns events that players and coaches detest. Johnson suffered a small cut on his right forearm, and under new medical guidelines that had been set up specifically to allay fears about Magic—“the Magic rule,” as it had been inevitably christened—he was forced to come out of the game for medical attention.
Gary Vitti, the veteran Lakers trainer who was extremely close to Magic, came over to check it out. Vitti—one of those unsung heroes of the NBA, a guy who kept everything humming in Laker Land and never sought the spotlight himself—had made it his business to study up on the disease. The medical literature was not voluminous at the time, but from everything he could glean the risk of Magic’s passing on the disease was small, smaller than the cut itself, which Vitti later said he could barely see.
The trainer reached for a cotton swab and appeared to be reaching for the rubber gloves in his pocket, which was the newly instituted policy for dealing with blood. But then Vitti decided against it and tended to Magic barehanded, applying a cotton swab and bandage.
There was a stunned silence when fans realized that Magic was the one who was about to get treatment, and then a small collective gasp as everyone stared at the tableau before them: a man touching the bloody arm of someone with the AIDS virus. The story and the photo made national headlines the next morning and continued to have legs for weeks afterward. To look on the positive side, it did initiate a dialogue about what was safe and what wasn’t. It was a bit like the stories that would follow in the wake of a nonfatal accident at a nuclear plant—the story was not what happened but what could happen. On the negative side, the sensationalism dominated the conversation, and there were more than a few tabloid stories exaggerating the danger of what Vitti did or didn’t do. One medical doctor even filed a complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration about the trainer.
“By putting on gloves, I would have been giving my players a mixed message,” Vitti explained later. “I had told them there was no danger [of scrimmaging against and dressing next to Magic]. Yet here I’d be putting on gloves when the injury was only a scratch. The point of wearing gloves was not to protect me and other players from Magic, but to keep him from getting an infection.”
To gauge what happened psychologically to Magic on that autumn evening, you have to understand how the man thought and still thinks. He had done his due diligence about the disease, gotten himself into shape and changed his diet, come back, entertained the public, captained the Dream Team, heard the encouraging words from Bird, and gotten the (apparent) support of the other Barcelonians—in short, turned on the old charm and the old game, and now it was business as usual, the Magic Man back in form. So what could possibly be the problem?
But then came the visceral reaction from the fans in Chapel Hill. Magic’s face said it all. He was shocked and dismayed, and others saw it, too, particularly Cavaliers coach Wilkens, the Dream Team assistant who had grown close to Magic over the eventful summer months. Wilkens actually thought for a moment that he was going to have to coax his team back onto the floor.
Magic reentered the game, but he wasn’t the same, his joy devoured by that silence, that gasp, the attendant attention given to a small cut and the comments of Malone, his brother in gold.
“Just because he [Magic] came back doesn’t mean nothing to me,” Malone said. “I’m no fan, no cheerleader. It may be good for basketball, but you have to look far beyond that. You have a lot of young men who have a long life ahead of them. The Dream Team was a concept everybody loved. But now we’re back to reality.”
Over the next couple of days, Magic got some support, too. Of his fellow players on the Dream Team, Drexler spoke the loudest. “If Magic wants to play,” said the Glide, “I have no problem playing against him.”
Against much opposition, David Stern, from his bully pulpit in the commissioner’s office, remained solidly behind Magic. Whatever Stern’s legacy might be in terms of marketing and television deals, do not forget also that the man stood tall against those dark-ages diatribes about HIV.
But in the end, even the positive-minded Magic heard Malone loud and clear on the subject of reality. He told Lon Rosen to convene a press conference to announce his second retirement. Magic didn’t even show up, which revealed the depths of his sadness about the whole thing. He walked away from the game he loved and the game he saved, an outcast angel.
Magic says that Malone’s comments did take him aback. “We were in the process of educating the players and the public,” Magic told me in the summer of 2011. “The Olympics had given me the platform to show that a guy with HIV could still play at a high level and you weren’t going to get HIV by playing against me. So I come back and when Karl said what he did, yes, it did set back the message.”
Magic believes that Malone had another agenda, too. “Karl didn’t want the Lakers to be strong again with me on the roster,” Johnson said. “Karl saw the opportunity to win and he wanted to take advantage of that.”
To this day, Malone has never apologized to Magic, and in fact the two have never had a conversation about the Mailman’s comments. Like most athletes, Malone generally steers clear of the trip wire of regret.
“You know it’s not my style to take stuff back,” Malone told me in 2011. “That’s all that needs to be said about it. A lot of times I didn’t say the things people wanted me to say. But I don’t take anything back. As a writer, don’t you all cringe when somebody says, ‘I was misquoted’? I’ve never done that. I’ve stood behind what I said.”
In the summer of 2003, Malone was considering taking a free-agent offer to become a member of the Lakers, a last-ditch attempt to win a championship. He called Magic, then a part owner of the franchise, and they talked, and Magic encouraged him to sign on, which he did. No other subject came up.
The Chosen One
The 1992–93 Chicago Bulls, who won 57 games and who struggled at times in the postseason, were the least dominant of the six Jordan-Pippen championship teams, certainly nowhere near the caliber of the 1995–96 Bulls, who won 72 regular-season games and an astonishing 87 of 100 including the postseason.
But I always thought that the 1992–93 season represented Jordan at his best. Both he and Pippen returned from Barcelona physically and mentally exhausted. The repercussions from gambling, the revelations in Sam Smith’s book, the burdens of being a global superstar—all had taken a toll on Jordan. Plus two other teams, Ewing’s Knicks and Barkley’s Suns, had come along to steal some of the Bulls’ thunder, not to mention a couple of their wins, the Suns finishing with a league-best 62 and the Knicks with 60.
Barkley, in particular, was a revelation. Freed from what he considered the inhumane shackles of Philadelphia, he found new life in the Valley of the Suns and would play well enough during the season to win his only MVP award. Any reporter looking for easy copy could zip into Phoenix, spend a day or two sniffing around the Jester, dash something off, and go have a cold one.
As if it had been scripted, the Bulls and the Suns met in the Finals, Michael and his antic buddy Charles the leading men in what proved to be one of the greatest Finals in league history. Phoenix lost the first two at home, so the Suns were written off. Then they won an epic triple-overtime game in Chicago, so Phoenix was back. Then the Bulls won Game 4 to go up 3–1, so the Suns were dead again. Then Phoenix won Game 5 and, though trailing in the series 3–2, had the final two games at home. Then the Bulls won Game 6 and the championship. That’s five home-court losses in six games.
Barkley was magnificent throughout the postseason, averaging 26.6 points and 13.6 rebounds. But in the Finals Jordan was epic. Immortal. Sick. Stupid good. In the six games he scored 31, 42, 44, 55, 41, and 33 points. Though a John Paxson jumper won the
decisive Game 6, it was Jordan who put a rope in his mouth and hauled his team—not single-handedly but damn close—across the finish line.
After the game, Jordan and I made an arrangement to collaborate on a back-of-the-magazine column for Sports Illustrated about the pressures and strain, as well as the joy, of winning three straight championships, the first time that had been done since the Red Auerbach Boston Celtics, who won eight in a row from 1959 to 1966. By “collaborate,” that means the subject gets interviewed, the writer writes it, and the subject either approves or disapproves.
In this case, Jordan—or, rather, David Falk—disapproved. The column was, to Falk’s thinking, too dark, too replete with revelations about how hard it was and how sick Jordan was of the scrutiny, not celebratory enough, not Jordanesque.
But that’s how Jordan was feeling at the time—ecstatic about the win and the three-peat accomplishment but ambivalent about the toll it had taken on his private life.
Before the Bulls beat Barkley’s Suns in that epic Finals, it looked like they were going down. The powerful Ewing-led Knicks won the first two games of the Eastern finals at Madison Square Garden, and before Game 3 the New York Times reported that Jordan had been spotted gambling in an Atlantic City casino on the night before Game 2.
To those who knew Jordan, the story was along the lines of revealing that news anchors apply mousse. It was not Jordan being disruptive, contrary, or defiant. It was just Jordan being Jordan. But it seemed to be a story because it had the weight of the Times behind it. Would I have written the story in the way that it was written, as if it were an exposé (albeit one written in the subdued style of the Times)? No. Because I think it got blown out of proportion.
But the line is fuzzy. There are few laws in journalism, only judgments. Would it have been more of a story if Jordan had been at the casino until, say, 8:00 a.m. instead of 2:30 a.m. (the Times version) or 1:00 a.m. (Jordan’s version)? Yes. Would it have been a story if Jordan drank to excess (something he rarely did and which I never personally witnessed) and made a commotion? Absolutely. If nocturnal casino trips began affecting his play? Absolutely.
And was it more of a story put in the context of past revelations of Jordan’s gambling, l’affaire Slim Bouler? A trickier question to which the Times answered a resounding yes. But this is a legitimate question, too: should an adult be prohibited from indulging in recreation, on his own time and of his own free will, at a legitimate place of business just because it doesn’t look right?
To me, it was more of a note in the larger story: Michael Jordan didn’t let a customary casino visit hamper his play last night as he scored 36 points, although his Chicago Bulls lost, 96–91, to the New York Knicks to fall behind 2–0 in their Eastern Conference final series. Which is what happened. Then Jordan had a triple-double in a Game 3 victory, positively horsewhipped the Knicks with 54 points in a Game 4 win, and played another splendid all-around game in a Game 5 victory. In Game 6, however, he was less than super, appearing fatigued in the second half, as his “supporting cast” (Jordan’s frequent and clueless description of his teammates) led the way to a series-clinching victory.
To believe that Jordan was fatigued because he had been in a casino a week earlier is absurd. To believe that Jordan was fatigued because of the collective strain of bad publicity (and carrying a team on his back) is not. Because before that Game 6 win, a Jordan golfing partner named Richard Esquinas climbed out of a Las Vegas sand trap and claimed in a self-published book that Jordan owed him as much as $1.25 million on bets. Esquinas further wrote that Jordan had negotiated the debt down to $300,000 but had repaid only $200,000.
Throughout his five minutes of fame, Esquinas presented himself, unconvincingly, as a kind of early Dr. Phil, a man on the edge who wrote Michael and Me: Our Gambling Addiction … My Cry for Help to help himself, to help Michael, to help America, for heaven’s sake, with addiction. But nobody said that Esquinas was an outright liar, and he did raise the possibility that Jordan was, in gambling terms, “chasing,” that is, doubling up on his bets to try to get even, the conventional road to ruin.
Jordan confirmed betting with Esquinas but called the amounts of money that he owed “preposterous” and said that he could not “verify how much I won or lost” because he did not keep records.
One can only imagine the firestorm that would’ve ensued had Jordan been mediocre in the Finals. But he put the bad publicity behind him, found some extra energy source, conquered Barkley and the Suns, and looked forward to … what exactly?
On August 3—about eight weeks after I last saw Jordan as he was sipping victory champagne and celebrating with his father—the body of fifty-seven-year-old James Jordan, the son of a sharecropper, was found in a creek near McCool, South Carolina, the cause of death a single gunshot wound through the right side of his chest from a .38-caliber pistol. James, who had been returning home from a funeral, had pulled over to sleep in his Lexus at a North Carolina rest stop. When his body was discovered, he had been dead for about ten days, and positive ID was made only through dental records.
About eight weeks after that, at a press conference in Chicago, Jordan announced that he was “stepping away” from the game. The atmosphere at the gathering was, in some respects, like Magic’s press conference announcing his retirement, a jaw-dropping moment of Holy Jesus Christ almighty, what the hell is next? But it was different, too. While Magic’s press conference was imbued with a kind of Hamlet-esque gloom, as if we were listening to a doomed man speak from a castle in Elsinore, an air of skepticism engulfed Jordan’s midmorning affair. Were we getting the whole story when Jordan said that he was exhausted and just needed some time away from the game? Was he really as sick of the media—“you guys,” as he called us twenty-one times during the press conference—as he said he was? True, Bjorn Borg had retired from tennis at twenty-five. But how could someone as larcenously competitive as the twenty-nine-year-old Jordan, a man with a forest-dark competitive heart who would rip out your spleen to win a game of Parcheesi, possibly exist without basketball?
Not as much as some but more than most, I was aware of the toll that his fishbowl life had taken on Jordan. I had seen it coming even before all the gambling revelations, The Jordan Rules, and the murder of his father. (Had so many things happened to one person, even a famous person, in the course of a year?) At the same time, I, like every other NBA journalist, had to pursue the idea that David Stern had ever so quietly asked Jordan to step away.
There were so many questions. Had Michael lost too much money at the tables? Was he hanging with too many unsavory characters? Worst of all, did his father’s death have something to do with Jordan’s associations? With Jordan as an active player, the questions would be unceasing. If he stepped away, perhaps the temperature on the story would plummet.
I put in the dutiful phone call to Stern, who called me back and took my head off, calling such intimations “scurrilous” and “dangerous.” We’d had a few disagreements over the preceding years, but nothing like that. At the same time, part of it had to be an act, since he knew that questions such as those would be coming and would never stop coming. At such moments we turn once again to Hamlet: could it be said that Commissioner Stern, like Queen Gertrude, doth protest too much?
Twenty years later, I still don’t know. I’ve had numerous off-the-record discussions with players, coaches, and team executives who swear that Stern did make the request, and just as many who say that it was Jordan’s decision alone. We have gone through the Jordan press conference and the subsequent Stern statements like amateur Kremlinologists, and at the end of the day we all begin our theories the same way: Look, I don’t know this for sure, but …
The same arguments can be mustered to support both positions.
Jordan was so big, such a global star, that Stern couldn’t risk any further revelations. He had to jettison him for a year. Or: Jordan was so big, such a global star, that Stern couldn’t risk getting rid of him. He needed the Jordan buz
z, the Jordan revenue.
It was Stern who always supplied the best barometer of Jordan’s fame. He delighted in telling of a trip to a rural province of China, where families lived in almost prehistoric conditions, and meeting a farmer who, upon learning who Stern was, said, “Ah, the team of the Red Oxen.” Or his visit to a refugee camp in Zambia when the residents swept the dirt floors clean and put on Bulls jerseys to welcome an NBA contingent. “It demonstrated to me,” said Stern, “that the Bulls were the world’s team.”
And Jordan was, to a greater extent than anyone else besides Muhammad Ali, the world’s athlete. But he left, for a while at least, riding buses and eating fast food with the Birmingham Barons, the minor-league team he joined for spring training in 1994, conjuring up nightly memories of his father, secure in the knowledge that James Jordan was looking down and beaming, even on those frequent nights when he went 0 for 4.
The Writer
So as the 1993–94 season began, Bird was gone, Magic was gone, and Jordan was gone. The Dream Team was gone. Portland, Monte Carlo, Barcelona … all of it gone. I had signed on to do a book with a rookie named Shaquille O’Neal—cue requisite laugh track for the lunacy of telling the life story of a twenty-year-old—and my heart was only half in it. Shaq was, still is, a great character, a truly smart, funny, and unique individual. But I could see right away that this was new territory—the era of the fully hatched superstar, the guy who wanted to cut the line and get his just because, well, he could.
Shaq went on to be a great player, but for him it was never first and foremost about the game. It was about the other stuff that came with the game. For the guys on the Dream Team, these cut-out-your-heart-and-watch-it-beat-on-the-sidewalk immortals, it was always about basketball first and foremost. The other stuff just happened to come. I had been fortunate enough to catch them in the full bloom of their talent, maturity, and competitiveness, a team like no other.
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