In pro basketball, there is a simple axiom: Nothing is easy the second time around. Or the third, fourth, or fifth, for that matter. That notion has held true since the early seasons of the National Basketball Association, when the Minneapolis Lakers and Boston Celtics gutted their way to a series of championships. Yet the process of winning spoiled the fans for both teams, so much so that they struggled to sell tickets because success had become so routine. Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls had their problems, but not that one. Heading into Phil Jackson’s eighth season as head coach, the waiting list for seats at the United Center ran twenty-one thousand deep, and the ratings jumped whenever the Bulls appeared on television.
Still, there was that inevitable “spoiled” atmosphere around this team. The Bulls were so good that they were expected not just to win, but to dominate and confuse the opposition night after night with increasingly magical performances. All of which meant that in Chicago, the encore was the supreme challenge. “What the hell are we gonna do this time around?” Jackson always had to ask himself.
That was certainly the prevailing concern heading into the 1996–97 season as the Bulls attempted to follow their 1996 campaign, which the team concluded with an all-time best 72–10 regular season record and a 15–3 playoff run that netted Jackson and Bulls their fourth championship in six seasons.
No sooner had the confetti settled to the ground from that celebration than the media—and the Bulls themselves—began trumpeting the “drive for five,” that overwhelming assumption that the team was going to claim its fifth championship in 1997.
Once again, the greatest obstacles seemed to be the excesses of success itself, with the players stacking up so much in new business, new contracts, and new product endorsements that they hardly had time to count the money. After all, the championship series concluded in late June 1996, and the celebration finally settled down sometime in July.
In the interim, poor Dennis Rodman had struggled to cram in the international shooting schedule for his movie Double Team and to start production of his MTV series “World Tour” before training camp opened in October. All the while, he managed to fit in autograph sessions, book promotional tours, and junkets to Las Vegas. He had come to Chicago in October 1995 facing bankruptcy, and a year later was the picture of financial health due to the wash of endorsement opportunities that came with being the wackiest Bull.
For Scottie Pippen, the summer included an appearance on Dream Team II, the U.S. Olympic basketball team, followed by surgery on a bad ankle. Guard Ron Harper and center Luc Longley also underwent offseason surgery and recuperation.
The first order, then, for Jackson and his coaching staff was to see just how big a toll success and all its gnarly attachments had taken on the team’s togetherness.
“We were all very curious,” said assistant coach Jimmy Rodgers, “as to how our team was going to respond after we won the championship and played into June and accomplished what we accomplished last season, winning over 70 games and then having a short summer. We were all curious as to how our team would reenergize and come back.”
In Rodman’s case, the answer was immediate and disappointing. In the media session opening the season, he told reporters just how bored he was with basketball, a jarring revelation in that the team had just agreed to pay him better than $9 million to play the upcoming season.
“I know Dennis made some statements in the opening press conference that he’s not so excited about this,” Jackson acknowledged later. “But in effect I tried to diffuse that with the team by saying that we’re fortunate that we’re all back together again.”
Indeed, Jerry Krause had retained the core roster from the championship team, jettisoning only deep subs James Edwards and Jack Haley while adding forty-three-year-old Robert Parish as a reserve center.
Back were young forwards Jason Caffey and Dickey Simpkins, still charged with bringing energy off the bench; guards Randy Brown, the defensive specialist, and Steve Kerr, the three-point weapon; multifaceted Toni Kukoc, with his unique passing and ballhandling skills; Bill Wennington, the reserve center who worked so effectively as a spot-up shooter; and swingman Jud Buechler, whom the coaches called from the bench whenever they wanted to inject a little mayhem into the proceedings.
Mixing these components with starters Jordan, Pippen, Longley, Harper, and Rodman provided the Bulls’ coaching staff with an enviable set of options.
“There’s not another club in the league that kept its same unit together,” Jackson said. “And we have this history of being together. There’s so much less that we have to work at. There’s so much more that we can experience as a team because we have that memory and that knowledge of how to do it out there on the court.”
Amazingly, the league had been overrun with an unprecedented rush of free agency migration that saw nearly two hundred players change teams. The reshuffling of rosters created chaos on most other teams and a tremendous window for the Bulls.
“We’ve got the opportunity to do this again,” Jackson told his players as camp began. “It’s a wonderful opportunity. We had a lot of good fortune in the things that happened to us last year. A lot of little things added to our edge. From that standpoint, I just assume that 70 wins is a high plateau to aim for. We’ve been doing this for a long period of time, staying at the top of the league, and I think that the future is now in the NBA. Everything points to, ‘Get it this year, and next year you make up your mind what you want to do.’ This is the only time we’ll be together as a group; or as a team, so let’s do something special together.”
After a brief camp at the Berto Center, the Bulls opened the exhibition season with an early October weekend swing through Las Vegas to play Seattle in a rematch of the 1996 NBA Finals.
Vegas seemed the perfect place for the Bulls to begin their campaign, because the season was something of a gamble for the organization with team chairman Jerry Reinsdorf agreeing to plunk down a league-record $57 million payroll to see if his club could complete that “drive for five.”
On the court at the Thomas and Mack Center, Rodman wasted little time in making it clear just how much of a crapshoot Reinsdorf’s gamble really was. He got a second technical late in the game against the Sonics and was booted, causing him to immediately rush at official Ken Maurer. Rodman snapped his head as if to butt Maurer, but teammate Randy Brown was there to pull him away.
Afterward, Jordan implied that Rodman was just showing off for his Vegas fans, which may have been the case, because Rodman cooled down immediately and trotted across the court to give his jersey to a woman in a wheelchair, all to deep applause from the sellout crowd. Jordan, though, sounded caution that Rodman’s seeming indifference could be a storm gathering on the team’s horizon.
Jackson agreed. “It will be a very different year,” he said after the game, his face already weary. “I just don’t know what to anticipate. I try not to anticipate. Just let it happen. Our whole scenario, our whole buildup of this ball club, is that we alone can destroy our opportunities.”
The other big question, Jackson acknowledged, was the age of his crew. Rodman was thirty-five, Jordan would turn thirty-four during the season, and Harper and Pippen were well into their thirties. Could they withstand the grind of another championship push? What about the mental toll of meeting the challenge night after night in the 82-game schedule and mustering the competitive intensity required?
“Maybe the monotony might build, or the same-old, same-old that happens to a ball club,” Jackson said. “So we’ve got to keep it fresh and new as often as we can so we can make it as entertaining as last year.”
The press, meanwhile, wondered whether the one-year, $30 million contract Jordan had signed with the team meant that this would be his final NBA season. They also wondered whether the one-year contracts given to Rodman and Jackson would undermine the Bulls’ chemistry.
“A lot of times in this modern-day game, people relax because they know they’re going to be around for three or four years,” Jordan said. “I think what we’re showing is that we’re going to play for the moment. We’re gonna give our best moments, our best effort. We’re not going to sit back and say, ‘We’ve got another three or four years on our contract, maybe we can take a day, take a year off.’ We’re gonna come out here and play each and every game like it’s our last.”
He didn’t say it publicly, but the negative experience of his contract negotiations still rested in Jordan’s craw.
“It’s put an edge on everything,” Jackson would say privately of the negotiations that both he and Jordan had undergone with the team.
Reinsdorf and Jordan had enjoyed over the years what both considered a largely warm relationship. As the 1990s unfolded and it became increasingly clear that the player salaries in pro basketball were headed to previously unimaginable heights, Jordan was said to be bothered by the fact that he was signed to a contract that paid him in the range of $4 million annually while a dozen or more lesser players in the league were being paid twice that. After all, Reinsdorf and his friends had purchased the team for about $14 million, then watched it escalate quickly in value to $400 million or more. They had raked in tens of millions each season while Jordan’s and Pippen’s salaries remained relatively low. Reinsdorf admitted that even with an organizational payroll above $70 million (including coaches), the team was still making a nice profit.
All the same, Jordan was far too proud to ask for a renegotiation. Where other athletes had routinely pouted and fretted and demanded renegotiations, he wanted no part of that. His answer was to live up to the deal he had signed in the highest fashion.
Yet when he abruptly retired in the fall of 1993, there were the inevitable insinuations that he did so in part because of his contract. In 1994, a reporter asked if he could be lured back for a $100 million deal. “If I played for the money,” he said testily, “it would be $300 million.”
Actually, considering the billions his special performances had brought to the league coffers, the number wasn’t entirely out of reason. With Jordan away from the game and television ratings falling, some NBA owners had approached Reinsdorf informally about the possibility of enticing the star back to the NBA with group funding from the league. Such a notion was unprecedented, but then again Jordan’s impact on the game was also unprecedented. The idea of the league paying Jordan, though, was never pursued beyond informal discussions, Reinsdorf said.
In the summer of 1993, just after the Bulls had won their third straight championship and before his abrupt retirement that fall, there had been speculation in the Chicago press that Jordan’s one-year playing contract could zoom to the $50 million range. That speculation all but disappeared with the murder of Jordan’s father and the star’s subsequent decision to leave basketball that October of 1993.
The Bulls continued to pay Jordan despite his retirement, which, according to one of Reinsdorf’s associates, was a gesture of loyalty from Reinsdorf to Jordan. But more cynical observers suggested that by continuing to pay Jordan, the team also kept his salary slot open under the league’s labyrinthine salary cap rules. If nothing else, the circumstances suggested the difficulty of fostering personal relationships amid the conflicts of business. Even kind gestures could be interpreted as ploys.
In one sense, Reinsdorf and Jordan were partners in the most lucrative sports entertainment venture in history. The problem was, Jordan as a player was barred from having any real equity position in the relationship. As a result, Reinsdorf was management, and Jordan was labor. The labor costs were fixed, while the profit percentages were soaring for those with a piece of the action.
Jordan, of course, was making his tens of millions off the court, using his overpowering image to hawk a range of commercial products. In a way, that position created a comfort for him. His outside income so dwarfed his player contract that he could say with a straight face that he didn’t play the game for money.
Still, his relatively meager player contract created an inequity. And when he returned to the game in 1995, he returned under his old contract, which meant that the Bulls’ payroll itself remained well under $30 million and that the team could continue scoring tens of millions in profit. That, of course, was in addition to the tremendous growth in equity Jordan’s brilliant play had helped create for the team’s owners.
So there was easily the strong sense that Jordan was “owed.” And that wasn’t a feeling held just by Jordan and his representatives but by virtually anyone who had anything to do with the NBA.
If the notion wasn’t entirely clear, Jordan emphasized it with his play. With the close of the 1996 playoffs, Jordan’s long-term contract had finally expired; then the real trouble started.
Days after the championship celebration, the star’s representatives laid out his contract demands in a phone call to Reinsdorf. Jordan’s agent, David Falk, wanted a one-year contract worth just over $30 million. Reinsdorf was supposedly told he had one hour to respond.
“It was cold,” said one team employee.
Although he would never admit it or discuss it publicly, the team chairman was wounded. He had assumed he had a personal relationship with Jordan. After all, hadn’t he extended the opportunity to Michael to begin a pro baseball career with the White Sox? Hadn’t he always made the effort to publicly and privately show his respect for his star player? Reinsdorf later told close associates that he began to think Jordan had faked their friendship to take advantage of him. After the hurt came Reinsdorf’s anger. But he realized he had no choice. He had to accept the terms.
Asked about the matter, Jordan said he told David Falk, his agent, “Don’t go in and give a price. I’ve been with this team for a long time. Everyone knows what this market value may be, or could be. If he’s true to his word and honest in terms of our relationship, listen to what he says before we offer what our opinions may be.”
“Falk’s instruction was to go in and listen, never to negotiate,” Jordan explained in an interview. “Because it shouldn’t have come to a negotiation. We didn’t think of it as a negotiation. We felt it was an opportunity for the Bulls to give me what they felt my value had been to the organization. As I know it, no numbers were ever talked about until I was into the game. No one wanted to put the numbers out on the table. Everyone was jockeying to see who was gonna put the first number out, which we were not gonna do. We had a number in our heads, but we really felt like it was the Bulls’ place to tell us what our net worth was. And to do it from an honest state, not influenced by David, not influenced by me. Just what they felt I’d meant to the organization.”
Reinsdorf recalled that he could have employed Jordan for two years for $50 million and opted instead to take one for $30 million, a decision he would regret because he would later have to give Jordan a second contract for $33 million for 1998.
As for the 1996 negotiations, Jordan acknowledged that they came down to a final rushed phone call to Reinsdorf. Jordan said he was about to enter negotiations with the New York Knicks and was in fact prepared to leave the Bulls to play in New York.
“At the time they were negotiating I was in Tahoe for a celebrity golf tournament,” he explained. “And we had some conversations with New York. And we were gonna meet with them right after we met with Reinsdorf, and I think that was within an hour’s time. David wanted the Bulls to, make their offer and discuss it before we go down and have a conversation with New York. But he knew he had a window in terms of the conversation with New York.”
Even Reinsdorf had trouble arguing with the amount Jordan had asked for. In fact, the star could have pushed for far more and enjoyed the support of public opinion that he deserved every penny. But in agreeing to the deal, Reinsdorf made a comment to Jordan that would further damage their relationship: he said he would live to regret giving Jordan the $30 million.
“Michael is bitter at Jerry,” explained one Bulls employee, “because when Jerry agreed to pay him the $30 million, Jerry told Michael that he would regret it. Michael stood in the training room one day the next fall and told all his teammates, ‘You know what really pissed me off? Jerry said, “You know what Michael? I’m gonna live to regret this.”’
“Michael said, ‘What the fuck? You could say, “You deserve this. You’re the greatest player ever, you’re an asset to the city of Chicago and the organization. And I’m happy to pay you $30 million.” You could say that, but even if you don’t feel that way and you’re going to regret it, why are you telling me that?’ Luc was standing there and said, ‘Really? Jerry told you he was going to regret it?’ Michael said, ‘He told me that. I couldn’t believe my owner told me that.’ ”
“That creates tremendous bitterness,” the team employee said.
“I said I ‘might’ live to regret it,” Reinsdorf later admitted.
“Actually, he said, ‘Somewhere down the road, I know I’m gonna regret this,’ Jordan recalled. “It demeaned what was happening. It took away from the meaning of things. The gratitude seemed less because of that statement. I felt it was inappropriate to say that.”
The team chairman had reportedly made a similar comment to another popular Bulls player a few seasons earlier. That player, a role player who had spent several seasons working under a contract that paid him relatively little, had finally earned a substantial pay raise. Reinsdorf agreed to an increased contract but upon signing the deal told the hard-working player, “I can’t believe I’m paying you this kind of money.”
The former player said the comment angered and insulted him and was typical of a management mentality where Reinsdorf and Krause wanted to “win” every contract negotiation with every player. That desire to get the best of the players in contract negotiations erased any good feelings between players and management, the respected former player said. And it usually resulted in an ill mood from Krause or Reinsdorf whenever they “lost,” the player said.
“He’s loyal, he’s honest,” Jackson said of Reinsdorf. “He’s truthful. His word means something. But there’s something about going in and trying to get the best every time. Winning the deal. When it comes to money, to win the deal.
“He has actually said those things, according to people I’ve been close to,” Jackson said of Reinsdorf’s comments, “and those things really hurt. Because most everybody really likes Jerry Reinsdorf.
“But,” Jackson added with a laugh, “Jerry is Jerry. Jerry is … Jerry doesn’t spend money freely, even with himself. He wants value for money.
Who doesn’t? The salaries that have happened in the past ten years have been real difficult for owners to swallow. Large money. It’s an amazing amount of money. I understand it. I’m not spending that money, but if I had to spend that money … Sometimes you’re seeing a lot of money coming in, and then the ones going out are even bigger. You say, ‘I wonder if the stuff coming in is going to match what’s going out during this period of time.’
“It’s a step of faith all the time for them to do it,” Jackson said of Reinsdorf and Krause handing out large contracts. “But every time they’ve taken that step, there’s been a reward for them. They’ve gotten more money to come in. And so it’s kind of like this faith proposition. The more you seed, the more you’re gonna reap.”
In the final analysis, it comes down to faith in the NBA itself, Jackson said, “and faith in the people in this organization.”
If there was anything about the Bulls that wasn’t open to question, it was Jordan himself. There was no better proof of this than the preseason game in Las Vegas. Although it was only an exhibition, Jordan’s eyes were afire and he was going full guns in an amazingly physical battle with Craig Ehlo, who had just signed on with the Sonics. They pushed and shoved and fought so hard for position that Jordan even took a quick swing at Ehlo that was missed, or ignored, by the officials.
He wanted to make it clear that he was starting off this season the way he closed things out last year. “I want to be consistent every night,” Jordan explained afterward. “I want to step on the court and accept every challenge.”
Cracking the Case
The Bulls whipped Boston on the road to open the regular season, then returned home to the United Center to receive their 1996 championship rings. From there, the Bulls rolled out to the best start in franchise history, eviscerating twelve straight opponents. Jordan gave the blastoff a little extra push by zipping Miami for 50 points in the third game of the season.
The motivation for this outburst could be traced to the spring before, when sportswriters and analysts began debating whether Chicago was the greatest team ever. Individually, Bulls players were reluctant to speak out on the issue. As Jordan pointed out, “Anybody else win 72 games?” Yet there was little question that Jackson made sure his Bulls saw the 1996–97 schedule as an opportunity to settle the matter once and for all.
“They’re just smart,” Seattle forward Shawn Kemp said of the Bulls. “They have a team where they don’t make a lot of mistakes. They don’t win off true athletic ability. They win off true intelligence.”
Kemp said he was surprised that more teams couldn’t muster the bravado to at least give the Bulls a decent challenge. “After a while, some of these teams are going to get embarrassed by the way the Bulls are sweeping through these cities.”
The streak had followed the Bulls’ familiar pattern of the previous season. They often toyed with a team early, then selected some point, usually in the second or third quarter, to break the opponent down with pressure defense. It was a pattern that would persist throughout the 1996–97 campaign.
“It’s definitely satisfying to come out every night and feel like we dismantle people at some point in the game,” said Chicago center Luc Longley. “We’ve done that every game so far and that’s fun.”
The sign was a certain look of defeat in opponents’ eyes, usually after Jordan made a shot and gave them a smile or a wink, which talked louder than trash.
“I see that almost every night,” Longley said. “That’s one of the great things about playing on this team.”
Asked about the look of defeat in the other team’s eyes, Jordan replied, “Sure. You can tell.”
Asked if he ever thought about pitying any of his victims, Jordan quickly said, “No. No one ever pitied me when I was [in the same situation] earlier in my career. No pity. We just want to go out and keep this going.”
“It’s arrogance to label people victims, I think,” Longley said, adding that battling arrogance was one of the Bulls’ challenges. “You got to be careful not say things that will come back and bite you. We’ve got to be careful to keep our i’s dotted and our t’s crossed. But not getting ahead of yourself is an important thing. I think we did a good job of learning that last year. We’re good at it. We go to work every day and have thorough preparation for every team. We try not to be arrogant about it.”
“We step on the court wanting to win every game, and I think that’s a great attitude,” Jordan said. “We go out there not overconfident or taking anyone for granted. We go out with the motivation that each team is trying to take something from us.”
With the competition so weak-kneed, Jackson constantly reminded his players that it was important to play to their own standards. That, however, wasn’t so easy when the opponent acted like a deer caught in a headlight.
“It’s tough,” Jordan explained, “to find perfection in your own game when the other team is going right down the alley that you want them to go down, in terms of fast shots, missed shots, rebounds, getting out on the break, playing solid defense. It’s a temptation to get away from the things that make us a great team. Behind-the-back-passes, alley-oop passes, trying things that in normal situations we wouldn’t try because they’re not in the team concept, the team system. Phil is really trying to keep us to the basics.”
“Phil is an amazing coach,” Winter observed. “He has tremendous patience. I think he sees a lot of things that I can’t see in these players. That’s because he had the playing experience himself that he had. He doesn’t get as concerned about things as I do. He can sit there and let more bad things go on in the course of a ball game than any coach I’ve ever been associated with or known. And it’s healthy to an extent, because he wants the players to work their ways out of difficult situations. He thinks they’ll have more growth and learn more that way. The players know that. Even when they make big mistakes in a game he’s not critical of them. Oftentimes I am. He’s not. But he lets them know in practice the next day, or in videotape review. He points out the mistakes then. Or it might be on an individual basis. He might call a player in and talk to him individually, so that he’s not embarrassing them in front of the whole team. One good thing about this ball club, it’s hard to embarrass them in front of the whole team because they’re so open with each other. It’s amazing how they ridicule each other when they make mistakes. They’re supportive, very supportive, don’t get me wrong, but at the same time, they’re very critical of each other, and they kind of make a joke out of it. The chemistry is good because of the leadership that Jordan and Pippen provide. They kind of set the tone; they work hard in practice every single day; they’re willing to step back and do what they can for their teammates oftentimes, to support their teammates. Yet they let their teammates know what they expect of them, including Dennis Rodman.”
Part of the success rested on the fact that most teams continued to run isolation offenses against them. When it didn’t work, those teams for some strange reason had no second option.
“That plays right into our favor, playing halfcourt offense with that isolation situation,” Jordan said. “I think we have enough of a team defense to collapse. If we need to double-team, we rotate well, and we have good individual defensive players. If the other team misses, we rebound the ball and start our break.”
It would have been good strategy for opponents to run the Bulls and force them to shift strategy to control the tempo. But few teams could run wisely.
With the team struggling to regain its competitive nucleus, it had been Jordan who pushed things ahead with his intensity. He was named the league’s Player of the Month for November after averaging 31.9 points, 4.9 rebounds, 3.4 assists, and 1.5 steals while playing nearly 36 minutes per game. He did this while completing the renovation of his offensive game into the sport’s deadliest jump-shooting weapon.
“Michael is relying a little bit more on the outside shot,” observed Winter, then seventy-five, “but I think that’s what he feels he can get the easiest out of the offense, that and the post-up. He’s not trying to take the ball to the hole as much as he did at one time, and I think that’s wise that he doesn’t. He’s still getting his 30-plus points a ball game, and he’s getting it a little easier than he did at one time. At his age, that’s a smart thing.
“In my mind it works better for the offense when he’s not into the show so much, but in his mind I’m not sure that it is. In his mind, he still likes to penetrate, to take the ball into a crowd, get himself in what I call that compromised position and then make the play out of that. In my eyes, that’s not necessary in the way we play the game. But he makes it successful, so I guess it becomes a plus.”
On November 30, against San Antonio, Jordan scored his 25,000th career point, making him the second fastest player in league history (behind Wilt Chamberlain) to reach that milestone.
The team suffered its first loss in a road game at Utah. Rodman was badly outplayed by Karl Malone and cost the Bulls the game with a key late technical for shoving Jeff Hornacek. Afterward, Rodman said he had been bored by the proceedings.
A few nights later the Bulls nearly suffered a second loss, to the Los Angeles Clippers, when forward Laught Voy made Rodman look bad. “If we win it again, I’ll come back,” Dennis said afterward, wearing pink suede shoes and a blue suede jacket. “If we don’t, I’m getting out. I’ve already made my mark in this game. I’ve got other things to do.”
That same week the pressure on Rodman increased dramatically when Bulls center Luc Longley left Jackson and his teammates miffed after he injured his shoulder while body-surfing in California.
Longley, after all, was the giant body who anchored the Bulls’ defense and played the pivotal pinch-post position in their triangle offense. Although Longley (who would be out of action until January) had been prone to bouts of erratic play, he had given the Bulls the frontcourt size that presented matchup problems for many other teams.
The Bulls returned home to face their second loss of the season, to the Miami Heat, which brought more complaints that Rodman had been outplayed—this time, by the Heat’s P. J. Brown. The Heat erupted in ecstatic celebration on the United Center floor. “We’ll have that memory,” Jordan promised afterward.
In a loss the next night in Toronto, Jordan was clearly winded after playing more than 40 minutes against the Heat. He scored just 13 against the Raptors on 5 of 17 shooting and failed to score at all in the second half. In the fourth quarter, Jordan would post up only to kick the ball out, usually to Pippen, who finished with 28.
This time Rodman couldn’t keep up with Raptors forward Popeye Jones and was ejected late in the game for disputing an offensive foul call. Afterward, in a locker room interview with The Sports Channel, Rodman spewed out a profanity-laced invective against the officials and Commissioner Stern.
The Bulls responded a day later by suspending Rodman for two games, costing him approximately $104,000 in fines (subtracted from his $9 million salary).
There had been suggestions a few weeks earlier that the team reconsidered signing Rodman pal Jack Haley, who was picked up by the La Crosse (Wisconsin) Bobcats of the CBA after the Bulls elected not to bring him back for a second season. “I don’t need a baby-sitter,” Rodman declared. “I don’t need Jack Haley. I don’t need anyone. I’m a grown man.”
Jackson pointed out that Rodman had played hard in the Bulls’ three losses, but “he just seemed less interested.”
Rodman, however, was irritated that he could fail to win his sixth straight league rebounding title. Heading into 1997, he trailed Houston’s Charles Barkley and New Jersey’s Jayson Williams in the statistical rankings and was frustrated that both of those players were averaging better than 40 minutes per game while he was averaging only 33.
“Right now Dennis is struggling to find a direction to be challenged every game,” Jackson said. “I keep telling him that he’s going to get that rebounding title and things are going to go his way.”
As he had the previous season, Rodman came back contrite and strongly focused after suspension. The Bulls, meanwhile, had continued to prosper without Rodman’s full attention. They racked up a 15–1 November and sank to 11–4 in December, but finished the month by winning 10 of 11 games. The more they won, the more fans were drawn to them, making team life on the road hectic and sometimes bizarre.
“The elevators,” team trainer John Ligmanowski replied when asked what part of the team’s travel routine had become most difficult in the face of the crowds that greeted them in almost every city. “Just trying to get guys on the hotel elevator. All of a sudden everybody wants to get on the elevator as soon as the Bulls get there. We had some security trying to get the people off the elevator, and they would complain, ‘Well, I’m staying here, too. I want to go up in the elevator, too.’ You know what they want to do. They want to find out where the players are, what rooms they’re in.”
The on-court highlights of the first half of the season were topped by a December overtime win over the Lakers in the United Center. Los Angeles had dominated Chicago through three quarters, building a fat lead until the Bulls’ pressure defense began forcing Lakers turnovers in the fourth quarter and Toni Kukoc got hot from three-point range. His 31 points allowed the Bulls to tie it at the buzzer, then break it open 129–123 in overtime, leaving the young Lakers aching and embarrassed.
Jordan had 30 and Pippen 35, making the first time in team history that three players had scored more than 30 in a single game.
The Bulls then opened 1997 by winning their first seven games, including a 110–86 thrashing of the Houston Rockets. On the 15th of January, Jordan passed Alex English (25,613) to become the eighth leading scorer in league history.
Unfortunately, that night will be better remembered for Rodman’s kicking a courtside cameraman in the groin in Minneapolis, a move that brought an eleven-game suspension and more than $1 million in fines and lost income. Jordan and Pippen had never hesitated to express their displeasure with Rodman’s misbehavior, but the kicking incident brought a strong reaction from teammates and fans. Observers resumed wondering why the Bulls would put up with all the shenanigans. The answer, however, lay in the videotape of 1996’s playoff games, when Rodman’s masterful rebounding and bucked-up frontcourt play rescued Chicago night after night.
“There was no question,” Tex Winter said, “that the situation got to the point where it was, ‘One more deal and you’re outta here.’ But at the same time it was never addressed in those terms, yet Dennis still definitely got the message.
“Jerry Krause and Phil Jackson and even Michael Jordan let him know there are certain standards that the Chicago Bulls expect of their players, and you have to meet those standards to be a part of it. Now if you can’t do it, you won’t be a part of it. I don’t think Phil Jackson has ever run out of patience with Dennis.
“I enjoy Dennis,” Winter added. “I enjoy coaching him. I’m always concerned a little bit about what might happen off the court. I talk to him about his life a little bit, but I’m not gonna correct him or tell him how to live his life. That would be a mistake. At my age, I think he sort of looks upon me as a grandfather figure. He’s willing to listen, and he’s very receptive, especially in the coaching aspect of it. And he’s been fun to work with on the floor as far as that’s concerned.”
For some, the kicking incident was simply the final sign that Rodman’s physical, emotional style of play had gone too far.
“I gotta have some kind of emotion out there for me,” Rodman countered. “I know the other team’s not gonna do it for me, so I gotta go out there and do it myself. I try to psyche guys out. Hit ’em here and hit ’em there and try to get them out of position. Try to frustrate guys. That’s my game, and it works most of the time.”
His coaches and teammates knew how important he was to this team. They just wanted to keep him focused enough to earn the home-court advantage for the playoffs.
“I am concerned when we go into a ball game because he is an emotional guy,” Winter said of Rodman. “We don’t want to take that energy away from him. One of the reasons that he’s such a terrific player is that he’s so energized. He gives this basketball team that same kind of energy. And if you squelch him, if you say, ‘Dennis, you can’t do this and you can’t do that,’ well then he’s probably not gonna be nearly the basketball player that he is. Because of the way he is.”
With the Rodman distraction, the Bulls suffered a 102–86 spanking in Houston, but then went on to win the last six games in January to close out the month with a 13–1 record. The run included Jordan’s 51 points against the Knicks after New York coach Jeff Van Gundy said Jordan befriended and “conned” players on opposing teams to defuse their competitiveness. The allegation infuriated Michael, and he answered with the kind of performance that New Yorkers had come to know all too well.
February opened with another Jordan tiff, this time with Seattle coach George Karl, who had suggested what any fan could clearly see: that Jordan had resorted more often to jump shooting as opposed to attacking the basket. Jordan used this imagined slight to push Chicago to a 91–84 win over Seattle to open the Bulls’ West Coast road swing. The burst of energy propelled them to five straight wins.
Although the Lakers had lost Shaquille O’Neal to a January knee injury, they were fired up enough to hammer out a 106–90 win over the Bulls, who finished up the road trip at 5–1 just before the All-Star break.
At the All-Star festivities in Cleveland, the league celebrated its 50th anniversary by honoring the 50 greatest players in NBA history at halftime. Jordan and Pippen were among those selected, and Jackson was picked for the list of the league’s 10 best coaches.
To emphasize his standing, Jordan finished the game with the first triple-double in All-Star Game history (14 points, 11 rebounds, and 11 assists). Added to Chicago’s loot was Steve Kerr’s win in the three-point shootout.
That success, plus the return of Longley and Rodman, helped push the Bulls on another big win streak coming out of the break. The stretch included a career-high 47 points by Scottie Pippen against Denver.
“Scottie all around might be as fine a player as there is in the NBA,” Winter observed at the time. “But he’s not a great shooter; he’s a scorer. And there’s times when he’s not even a great scorer. He has very poor shooting nights at times. He seems to get out of sync, out of rhythm, on occasion, and it might even last over a period of several games. But he seems to always snap out of it—and the bigger the game, the better Scottie plays. If he feels like he has to, Scottie can take a lot of pressure off of Jordan and then suddenly he becomes a real scorer, where at other times he’s satisfied not to even shoot the ball. If Jordan’s having a good night and the other players are having a good night, then Pippen doesn’t care about his own offense. That’s one of the things that makes him a great player.”
“He’s had a consistent year,” Jordan said of Pippen. “Last year he got off to a great start, where he was putting up some big offensive numbers. But I think you look at what he’s done this year, it’s been just as consistent, All-Star caliber. A lot of times he can get overlooked because of my play. But I certainly couldn’t be as effective without him. We’ve complemented each other very well. He’s certainly my MVP.”
On February 22, the Bulls went to Washington and played the Bullets with President Clinton in the stands, the first time a president had attended an NBA game since the Carter administration.
“He came in the locker room and greeted everybody and knew everybody’s name and made it around and was comfortable talking to the team,” Jackson said of the president.
On the court against Washington, Jordan struggled for three quarters, then wowed the crowd and the president with a fourth-quarter shooting display that drove Chicago to yet another victory.
“Suddenly,” Jordan said, “you find one little play, a jump shot or a certain move, you say ‘OK, I’m coming back to this…”
Washington’s Harvey Grant saw him hit the first two shots of the fourth quarter and turned to a teammate and said, “Oh, no, here he goes.”
“It’s always a matter of time with Michael,” Jackson said with a smile. “He has that incredible energy level, and you know there’s a point in the game where he’ll just take it over and destroy a team.”
It all translated into those same old feelings of invincibility, Jackson added. “We think we’re doing things right, rolling along and taking care of business on the road, then going home to the United Center and playing the way we want to play, maintaining that home-court attitude that we’ve had. Games are a little tighter. Teams are playing us three and four times in the conference, and as they get to know us, they’re stepping up their competitiveness.”
After a 10–2 record in February, March brought its own sort of madness for the Bulls, beginning with Kukoc’s foot injury on the 3rd and closing with a knee injury on the 27th that caused Rodman to miss the remainder of the regular season.
In between, the team still managed to roll up a 12–2 record, relying on the emergence of reserve forward Jason Caffey and the usual brilliance of Pippen and Jordan.
“I’m having a great time,” Jordan said, “more so than last year even, because it’s not the same pressure. Last year I had to prove myself. People didn’t feel I could come back. I had a whole different motivation. This year I’m more relaxed. The team is more relaxed, yet we’re being just as productive.”
Even in the spring, after opponents had had the time to adjust their chemistries, they still found the Bulls to be an unsolvable puzzle. They rolled across April to what appeared to be a 70-win finish, pausing just long enough to make a White House visit with President Clinton, whom Pippen described as a “home boy” from Arkansas.
Part of the Bulls’ momentum was the late-season acquisition of free-agent center Brian Williams, who gave them a solid post presence. But in the home stretch, they lost three of their last four games, including a final meeting at the United Center with the Knicks. Even so, at 69–13, they tied for the second best total in league history, matching the 1972 Lakers, and were five games ahead of the nearest competitor to claim home-court advantage throughout the playoffs.
“We want to meet every challenge,” Jordan had said at the start of the campaign.
Once again, they had done it in top fashion, building hope along the way that the encore would be every bit as good as the original. For that to happen, Jackson told his players, they would have to regain their “togetherness.” Their usually excellent chemistry had finally gone foul after struggling through an injury-riddled season.
Jackson addressed the problem with the film clips he spliced into the team’s video scouting reports on the postseason. This time around, he chose What About Bob?, starring Bill Murray as a mental patient who tries to move in with his psychiatrist.
“Every time he used game clips, he’d put in pieces of the movie,” Wennington said of Jackson. “Basically we saw the whole movie. He was implying that we got to come together, that we got to use baby steps to move along and start playing well. In the end, if we stick together and work together as a team, we’re not gonna be crazy. We’ll accomplish our goal and things will work out.”
To help emphasize his points, Jackson also included clips of old Three Stooges movies.
“It’s hard for me sometimes to read exactly what the message is in Phil’s movies,” Winter said with a grin. “On the Three Stooges it was pretty easy, because it was after a dumb play by one of our players.”
“He’s trying to break some of the monotony of going over play after play after play,” center Brian Williams said of Jackson’s approach. “The film always magnifies your mistakes. The film is not flattering. A lot of the times, the Three Stooges is appropriate, because we look like the Three Stooges out there.”
“Tex Winter likes to sing a song when we get together for our morning sessions,” Wennington explained. “He likes to sing, ‘It’s time we get together. Together. Together. It’s time we get together. Together again.’ That song is played once in the Three Stooges when Moe swallows a harmonica, and they’re playing him on a harmonica. They’re playing that song. That’s part of the message. We need to stay together as a team.”
That, of course, was Jackson’s main idea. Over the spring the separate agendas of all the players had begun tugging at the fabric of the team.
Another factor eating at this togetherness stemmed from the questions about the future hanging over the heads of Jordan, Jackson, and Rodman, all on one-year contracts. Would they be back with the Bulls for another season? There was ceaseless speculation on this issue in the Chicago press, and the uncertainty tugged at the entire team’s peace of mind. With the arrival of the playoffs, the Bulls wondered if the end of their great run was in sight.
“We’ve been together a long time, especially Phil and me,” Tex Winter said of the circumstances. “Nine years. I think we understand each other pretty well … Phil is the kind of guy who has the ability to not let things distract him. My Lord, I couldn’t do it. If I were the head coach, I’d be a maniac by now. And my whole team would be out of whack. That’s Phil’s strength. This Rodman thing, all the things that come down along these lines, Phil kinda just handles it in a very natural, easy way. And yet he gets his message across as to how it should be handled.
“He’s very good at handling distractions,” Winter added. “As far as next season is concerned, he’s said very little about it. It doesn’t seem to bother him one bit about what is coming down. I’ve told him at times that maybe he might not be concerned but some of his staff members might be. On the other hand, he sets the tone. He says, ‘We’re just playing this thing out. Let’s worry about today. Let’s don’t worry about tomorrow.’ ”
The result of all of these factors was a loss of cohesiveness.
“I think the team is a little different this year,” Wennington observed in late April. “We’re not as loose and relaxed as last year. We’ve been struggling a little bit. Things haven’t been going as easy. There’s a little edge on everyone. We’re a little more serious. The last few weeks of the season, we weren’t playing as well. We had all the injuries. They throw your rhythm off and at times make people a little testy.”
Jordan, Pippen, and Harper were solid as a core. The three lifted weights together early each morning in what they called their “Breakfast Club.” Rodman, of course, was an entity to himself. So was Kukoc, isolated somewhat by culture. Then there was the Arizona contingency of Buechler and Kerr, joined at times by Longley, the Australian, and Wennington, the Canadian. Then there were the new elements of Parish and Williams and Matt Steigenga, a late-season signee. Simpkins and Caffey and Brown would hang out some.
Despite the potential conflicts of their success, the Bulls got along far better than the average NBA team. But winning another championship would require more than a “better-than-average” approach. It would require a supreme chemistry.
Jackson was a master at pulling all the disparate elements of a team together. Perhaps there was no better example of this than Brian Williams. He, too, was a free agent, but salary cap restrictions and league compensation rules virtually assured that he would have to move on to another team at the end of the season. Never one to show a fondness for coaches (he had played for four different teams in his six-year career), he had taken an immediate shining to Jackson.
“I’m going where Phil goes,” Williams said when asked about his future. “If he goes somewhere else to coach next year, that’s where I’m signing. That’s the way I feel about him. He’s an excellent coach. In my time in the league, he’s the most thorough, the most understanding coach I’ve been around.”
Matt Steigenga, another late-season signee, expressed a similar appreciation for Jackson, especially his knack for using a player’s mistakes for teaching instead of humiliation.
“He doesn’t berate guys, doesn’t get on them,” Steigenga said. “But guys still know when they mess up. I had a college coach, if he wasn’t yelling there was something wrong. When he stopped yelling at a player, he didn’t care about that player any more. Phil’s the other way. He rarely will scream or yell or belittle a player. But he really gets a guy to see his mistake and learn from it. His mental approach and mental prowess comes through. He has that grip on players, that feeling of force. You know this man is able to lead.”
The Fifth Championship
The Bulls opened the 1997 playoffs by ditching the Washington Bullets in three quick games in a series highlighted by Jordan scoring 55 in Game 2. Washington came out strong and caught all of the Bulls blinking—except for Jordan, who proceeded through the evening like he was conducting a shooting drill in solitude. Jumper after jumper after bank shot after dunk after jumper. He made them from all over the floor, while the rest of his teammates seemed to stand transfixed.
With five minutes left in the game, Jordan drove and scored, pushing Chicago up by three. Moments later he got the ball back, motored into the lane, and flexed a pump fake that sent the entire defense flying like some third-world air force. As they settled back to earth, he stuck yet another jumper and followed it on the next possession with a drive that ended in a falling-down, impossible shot from the right baseline that pushed the lead to 7 and his point total for the evening to 49.
He then wrapped up a 55-point night (the eighth time in his career that Jordan had scored more than 50 in a playoff game) with two free throws that provided Chicago with a 109–104 win and a 2–0 series lead.
“He’s the king of basketball,” Washington assistant Clifford Ray said afterward. “He’s thirty-four years old, but he still knows and understands ‘Attack!’ better than anybody in the game. He attacks all the time. He just kept churning away.”
Luc Longley said Jordan’s conditioning alone was astounding in that it allowed him to score and play intensely active defense over 44 minutes. “These are the games where he demonstrates who he really is,” the center added. “Those performances you definitely marvel at. What I marvel at is how many of them you see a year. Perhaps he only had three or four 50-point games this year, but the 30- and 40-point games he has almost every night. The fact that at his age he can come out physically and do the things he does every night, that’s what really makes me marvel.”
“I’ve been watching him for—what is it? twelve, thirteen years?—and he showed me moves I’ve never seen before,” Jerry Reinsdorf said. “Bill Russell once asked me what was the greatest thing about Michael, and I said it was his determination. Russell said, no, it was his imagination. He certainly had imagination tonight.”
Reinsdorf was asked if Jordan’s big night was a perfect dividend on the $30 million, one-year contract the team had given him. “He’s earned it,” the chairman said. “I’ve never had any regrets.”
The Atlanta Hawks stepped up as the Bulls’ next hurdle in the Eastern Conference playoffs and promptly claimed Game 2 of the series. For the first time in their incredible two-year run, the Bulls had surrendered home-court advantage in the playoffs. In fact, Atlanta became the first visiting team in two years to win a playoff game at the United Center. Chicago had won 39 games against only 2 regular-season losses on their home floor over each of the past two years. During that same period, the Bulls had been 13–0 in home playoff games.
Now, however, the Bulls were facing back-to-back weekend games in Atlanta, leaving Pippen to warn that “unless we do the things we did all season to get 69 wins, we’re not going to pull another win out of this series.”
The Bulls seemed far from the togetherness that Jackson was urging. Pippen, in particular, seemed perturbed with Rodman, who had struggled throughout the postseason with his return from the knee injury and with the officials, who had greeted him every playoff game with a technical or two.
“We’ve got to have a big effort from Dennis,” Pippen said in his postgame press conference. “If he’s not going to lead us in rebounding, don’t lead us in technical fouls, because we don’t need those.”
Jackson later addressed the comments in a team meeting, reminding his players to stick together. “It’s very unusual for this team,” Tex Winter said of Pippen’s open criticism of Rodman. “Generally they’ve been very supportive of each other … Phil handles this by saying simply, ‘We’re not pointing fingers at each other. Let’s go out and do our jobs.’ ”
The other concern for the coaches was that Jordan, who had hit just 12 of 29 from the floor in Game 2, suddenly seemed to be pressing on offense, as if he felt he had to carry the entire load. “If he’s not shooting any better percentage shots than that, then he shouldn’t be taking so many of them,” Winter said. “Phil’s told him not to force things, not to try to do too much. To move the ball. And Michael knows that. Michael’s a smart player. But he’s so competitive and he’s got so much confidence in himself that it’s hard for him to restrain. I’ve never been associated with a player—I don’t think anybody has—who has any less inhibitions than he does.”
It was pointed out that Winter was taking the diplomatic way of saying Michael had no conscience. “Well, that’s one of the reasons he’s a great player,” Winter replied. “He has no conscience.”
Yet Jordan clearly had a sense of team. With little or no complaint, he complied with Jackson’s request to ease up on his aggressiveness. Although Rodman’s situation saw no improvement, the Bulls rediscovered their team concept and took two games from the Hawks in Atlanta.
Then the Bulls closed out the series back in Chicago, where Rodman scored 7 quick points to stake the Bulls to a 33–27 lead and went on to finish the contest with 12 points (including a pair of three-pointers), 9 rebounds, 3 assists, and a steal. He even blocked one of Dikembe Mutombo’s shots.
Rodman was ejected after a profanity-laced exchange with the Atlanta center in the fourth period, but by then he had provided the hypercharge his team needed to subdue the Hawks, 107–92, and claim the series 4–1. It was a grand way to celebrate his thirty-sixth birthday, and the crowd seemed to reconnect with his energy.
The victory sent the Bulls to their seventh appearance in the Eastern Conference finals in nine seasons, this time to face Pat Riley’s surprising Miami Heat club. There was little doubt that meeting Riley still stoked Phil Jackson’s competitive fires. Since his Bulls had clashed with Riley’s Knicks in the early 1990s, the two had harbored a competitive animosity for one another. An upset loss to the Riley’s Heat late in the 1996 season had prompted Jackson to enter the locker room and tell his players, “Never lose to that guy.”
So the 1997 Eastern Conference finals became a showdown of coaching styles: Jackson’s cerebral approach versus Riley’s intensity; Chicago’s triangle offense up against Miami’s clutching, snakebiting, overplaying defense.
The Heat had won 61 games, mainly because point guard Tim Hardaway, in his second season playing for Riley, had gotten comfortable in his surroundings and turned in an All-Star year. In Game 1, though, Rodman’s rebounding and the Bulls’ pressure defense propelled Chicago to a win.
“The thing that shocked me the most is just the way we got taken apart at the end,” veteran Heat reserve Eddie Pinckney said after watching his team lose the first game. “The Bulls are able to pressure on all the trigger points of your offense. Next thing you know the shot clock is down and you’re throwin’ up a shot from 30 feet out, or you commit a charge or something. It’s like a blitz defense.”
Pinckney remarked that the air of confidence was tangible in the United Center, and it wasn’t something that other teams liked. “I guess it’s routine for teams to come in here and play hard and still lose at the end,” he said. “The Bulls are entitled to that attitude.”
Actually, neither team had managed to shoot the ball well in the atmosphere of frenzied defense, set in motion by Riley’s brand of scrambling, holding, bumping, brushing, or anything else that worked. The final for Game 2, a 75–68 Bulls win, set an all-time NBA playoff record low for scoring. Not since the days before the 24-second shot clock was installed had teams turned in such meager totals.
Hardaway, Miami’s main weapon, was just 5 for 16 from the field. And Jordan made only 4 of 15 attempts. “Both teams were frustrated with their offensive play,” Jackson said.
“We played ugly against Atlanta. We played ugly against Washington. It isn’t the competition. It’s just us. Except for our defense. Our defense has won games,” Jordan, whose 23 points included 15 free throws, told reporters afterward. “Our offense has kept people in the stands. Defense has been winning championships for us in the past.”
Behind the scenes, the Bulls’ coaching staff spent hours reviewing the tapes of the first two games and came up with a plan to spread their triangle offense, an adjustment they had rarely used over the years. To say the least, it caught Riley and his players flat-footed and opened the back-door lanes to the basket for an array of layups and slams in Game 3. The Bulls exploded with a 13–4 run to open the second quarter and another 11–0 spurt midway through the third.
The Miami crowd sat in misery, with only Rodman’s new dye job (from his fundamental blond to another multihued look) and dark purple fingernails to keep them entertained as the Bulls smoked their way to the finish, 98–74.
“We got embarrassed out there today collectively,” Miami’s Alonzo Mourning admitted afterward. “They just did what they wanted to do out there, and we did nothing to counter it.
“It’s tough to stop a team like that because they’ve perfected their offense so well. If one part of their offense breaks down, they’re able to go to another option.”
It was as well as the triangle offense had ever functioned against an aggressive defense, Winter said, adding quickly that the Bulls’ previous championship teams, featuring John Paxson and Bill Cartwright, probably executed the offense better than the current group. Winter would eventually look back on the day as one of Jackson’s finest coaching exhibitions.
The other part of the Chicago equation was their trusty defense, which included a fine low-post effort from Rodman. Chicago had forced Miami into 32 turnovers. “It’s almost like an amoeba defense,” Riley said. “They take away angles. They deny your trigger passes. They’re long. They switch on everything. They are an exceptional defensive team. You can’t rely on just scoring in your halfcourt. If you’re not running and rebounding and getting second shots at every opportunity you get, then it’s gonna be very difficult to score.”
It seemed foolhardy at the time, but who could have known that Jordan would decide to play 45 holes of golf on his day off between games? Who would have figured His Airness to make just 2 of his first 22 shots in Game 4?
Yet no matter how deep a hole he dug for himself and his teammates Jordan found a means to bring them rushing back at the end. Finding themselves down 21 points with the clock eating away the second half, the Bulls abandoned the triangle offense that had worked so well just the day before and watched Jordan go into his attack mode.
The Heat surged right back at the beginning of the fourth, pushing their margin back to a dozen, 72–60. Jordan then scored 18 straight points for Chicago, a display that trimmed the Miami lead to just one with only 2:19 to go. The ending, however, came down to the Heat making a final six free throws, good enough for a Miami win.
Jordan had scored 20 of Chicago’s 23 points in the fourth quarter. “When he started making them, they just came, came, came, came, came,” said Tim Hardaway. “He’s a scorer, he’s the man.”
The good news in Game 4 was another outstanding effort from Rodman, who finished with 13 points and 11 rebounds, a performance he would nearly equal back in Chicago in Game 5 with another 13 rebounds and 9 points.
Jordan, too, continued on his tear from the end of Game 4. He opened Game 5 with 15 in the first quarter, good enough for a 33–19 Bulls lead and little doubt as to the outcome. The only cloud as they closed out the Heat 100–87 was a first-quarter foot injury to Pippen that kept him on the bench the last three quarters.
“They are the greatest team since the Celtics won 11 in 13 years [from 1957–69],” Riley told reporters afterward. “I don’t think anybody’s going to win again until Michael retires.”
The Utah Jazz, winners of 64 games, emerged from the Western Conference playoffs to challenge the Bulls in the 1997 Finals.
To get his players ready for the championship round, Jackson brought yet another movie out of the dustbin, Silverado, a 1985 Western starring Kevin Kline, Kevin Costner, and Danny Glover as good outlaws who take on the bad sheriff in a Western town.
“It’s one of those quick draw movies, quick gun movies,” Tex Winter said, “and I guess the key to it is that you better react quicker than the opposition.”
And certainly shoot better than they do.
That became imminently clear on Sunday, June 1, in Game 1 of the championship series, broadcast to a worldwide audience. The comforting sight for Bulls fans was Pippen grinning broadly in pregame warm-ups. He hopped around on his injured foot and seemed ready to go.
The other welcome sight for old-time Bulls fans was Utah coach Jerry Sloan, hands jammed in pockets, awaiting the introductions, scanning the Chicago crowd—a crowd better behaved and not as rabid as the one that used to cheer him on in old Chicago Stadium. For almost a decade, Sloan had been “Mr. Bull” during his playing days in the Windy City, leading the Bulls with his hard-nosed, physical style of play. He had even served as an assistant and later the team’s head coach, right up until his firing in 1981.
Utah’s Karl “the Mailman” Malone had just a few days earlier been named the league’s regular-season Most Valuable Player. He had narrowly edged Jordan, the prime contender and four-time winner of the award. Jordan said he didn’t mind the Jazz power forward getting the individual honor, so long as the Bulls claimed the team championship at the end of playoffs. Now the stars and their respective teams were meeting to settle the matter on the court, with fans in both Chicago and Utah eager to seize on the issue, chanting “MVP” when one or the other stepped to the free throw line at key moments throughout the series.
The Jazz rushed out to a solid start in Game 1 by throwing quick double teams at Jordan and working the boards hard, good enough for a quick Utah lead.
The Bulls obviously felt the tension, evidenced by their 40 percent shooting in the first half. Utah was slightly better at 44 percent, with John Stockton scoring 11 and Malone 10. Utah’s Bryon Russell hit a three-pointer just before the buzzer to give the Jazz a 42–38 halftime lead.
Jeff Hornacek scored 11 points in the third period to help keep Utah in the lead, except for a brief run by Chicago that netted a one-point edge. The fourth opened with Utah clutching a two-point lead in the face of a mountain of Chicago’s trademark pressure.
With just under eight minutes to go, Stockton hit a jumper, pushing the Utah lead to 70–65, which Harper promptly answered with a trey. Surging on that momentum, the Bulls managed to stay close and even took a one-point edge on a Longley jumper with three minutes left.
Malone responded with two free throws, but Harper snuck inside for an offensive rebound moments later and passed out to Pippen for a trey that put Chicago up 81–79. For most teams, that would have been enough pressure for a fold, but Stockton hit a three of his own with 55 seconds left to make it 82–81, Utah.
Then at the 35.8 mark, Hornacek fouled Jordan, who stepped to the line with the building chanting “MVP.” He hit the first to tie it, then missed the second, sending the crowd back to its nervous silence. The Jazz promptly spread the floor and worked the shot clock. As it ran down, Stockton missed a trey, but Rodman fouled Malone on the rebound.
As Malone prepared to shoot his free throws, Pippen whispered in his ear, “The Mailman doesn’t deliver on a Sunday.” To ensure that, the crowd raised a ruckus. His first shot rolled off the rim, and the building exploded in celebration. He stepped back from the line in disgust, then stepped back up, wiped his hand on his shirt, dropped eight short dribbles, and missed again, bringing yet another outburst of delight from the crowd as the Bulls controlled the rebound with 7.5 seconds left. “I’m from Summerfield, Louisiana, and we don’t have any excuses down there. So I’m not going to use any,” Malone would say later. “It was agonizing, but I won’t dwell on it.”
Amazingly, the Jazz decided not to double-team Jordan on the last possession. Pippen inbounded the ball to Kukoc, who quickly dumped it off to Jordan, who executed a move on Bryon Russell and broke free just inside the three-point line on the left side. The entire building froze there for an instant upon the release of the shot. When it swished, twenty-one thousand fans leaped instantly in exultation. The shot gave the Bulls the win, 84–82, and the Jazz sank instantly, knowing they had just lost any hopes they had of controlling the series.
Asked afterward who deserved the MVP, Malone replied, “Obviously, it’s Michael Jordan, no matter what Karl Malone says or not. Michael wanted the ball at the end and made the shot, and it’s hard to argue with that.”
Jordan had finished with 31 points on 13 of 27 shooting while Malone rebounded after missing 7 of his first 8 shots to score 23 on the night with 15 rebounds.
“I think anyone watching anywhere in the world knew who would take the shot,” Stockton said of the game winner.
The Bulls opened Game 2 three nights later as loose as the Jazz were tight, and the scoring showed it. Jordan hit a jumper, then Pippen finished off a Harper back-door pass with a sweet little reverse, and moments later Longley broke free for an enthusiastic stuff. Like that, the Jazz were in a maze and couldn’t find their way out.
Long known for their sadism, the Bulls’ game management people had set up Part II of Malone’s little chamber of personal horrors by declaring it Clacker Night and passing out noisemakers by the thousands to fans as they entered the building.
When Longley fouled Malone 90 seconds into the game, the clackers were waiting and rattled him into two free throw misses. Two minutes later, when Malone went to the line again with the Jazz trailing 8–1, the whole barn was rattling. This time, Malone stepped up and hit both. Given a momentary rush of confidence, Utah closed to 14–13 at the 4:41 mark of the first period.
Jordan was afire, though, and quickly squashed any momentum with a trey and a jumper. Then he fed Kerr for a pair of treys, and just like that, Chicago had stretched the lead to 25–15 with 1:30 left in the period, which had fans on their feet clapping and pounding to “Wooly Bully.”
The Jazz dug in and made a run in the second period, bringing it to 31–29 with a Malone bucket. Just when it seemed Utah might find some life, the killer in Jordan emerged. He drove the Bulls to a 47–31 lead, scoring and drawing fouls like only he could. At every trip to the free throw line, the fans greeted Jordan with lusty chants of “MVP! MVP!”
How big was his hunger? That seemed to be the only question. Jordan finished the night with 38 points, 13 rebounds, and 9 assists. He would have registered a triple-double if Pippen hadn’t blown a late layup, costing him the tenth assist. No matter—the Bulls coasted to a 2–0 series lead, 97–85.
“I thought we were intimidated right from the beginning of the game,” Sloan said afterward. “If you allow them to destroy your will to win, it’s hard to compete.”
The series then shifted to Utah, where the 4,000-foot altitude in Salt Lake City had the Bulls winded for the better part of a week. The team stayed in the nearby ski resort of Park City, which had an elevation of about 8,000 feet, in hopes it would help the players adjust. But the Jazz took a 61–46 halftime lead in Game 3 and did a little coasting of their own, pulling the series to 2–1 with a 104–93 victory, during which Jazz fans showered Malone with “MVP” chants. He answered their support by scoring 37 points with 10 rebounds to lead the rout.
Game 4 on Sunday, June 8, unfolded as what was easily the Bulls’ biggest disappointment of the season. The offense still sputtered, but the defense for 45 minutes was spectacular. In short, they played well enough to win, and should have. With 2:38 to go in the game, they had willed their way to a 71–66 lead and seemed set to control the series 3–1.
But Stockton immediately reversed the momentum with a 25-foot three-pointer. Jordan came right back with a 16-foot jumper, and when Hornacek missed a runner, the Bulls had a chance to close it out. Instead, Stockton timed a steal from Jordan at the top of the key and drove the length of the court. Jordan recovered, then raced downcourt and managed to block the shot, only to get whistled for a body foul—a call that might not have been made in Chicago, Jordan later pointed out.
Stockton made one of two to pull Utah within three. Pippen then missed a corner jumper, and Stockton was fouled and made both with 1:03 left to cut the lead back to 73–72. Jordan missed a jumper on the next possession, and Stockton rebounded and looped a perfect baseball pass down to Malone for a 74–73 Utah lead.
The Bulls’ next possession brought Kerr a wide-open three-pointer from the right corner that missed. With 17 seconds left, Chicago fouled Malone, setting up repeat circumstances from Game 1. Would he miss again in the clutch? Pippen wanted to talk to him about that, but Hornacek stepped in to keep him away from the Mailman.
“I knew what he was doing, trying to talk to me,” Malone said. “He still talked to me the whole time I was shooting.”
Pippen went into rebounding position and yelled “Karl! Karl!”
His first shot knocked around the rim before falling in, smoothing the way for the second and a 76–73 lead. With no timeouts, the Bulls were left with only a rushed three-point miss by Jordan, which Utah punctuated with a breakaway slam for the 78–73 final, the second lowest scoring game in league championship history.
“I guess the Mailman delivers on Sundays out here,” Pippen acknowledged afterward.
Jordan had scored 22 points, and a foreign journalist asked whether he felt mortal. “There’s gonna be games where I can’t live up to the fantasy or the hype of what people have built up Michael Jordan to be,” he replied. “I’m accustomed to living with that.”
A year later, a team employee would reveal that a Gatorade switchup had possibly cost the Bulls Game 4. A team assistant got confused and served the players Gator Lode instead of Gatorade. “That’s something you drink after the game,” longtime Bulls equipment manager John Ligmanowski said of the Gator Lode. “It’s a high-carbohydrate drink. So they each had the equivalent to twenty baked potatoes during the game. It slowed ’em down a little bit.
“Dennis and Michael and Scottie, they all had stomachaches,” Ligmanowksi added. “They were drinking Gator Lode instead of Gatorade. Dennis had to run off the floor to go to the bathroom. Scottie was laying down, and Michael asked to be taken out of the game. And he never asks that, or very rarely.”
Trying to figure out what was going on, trainer Chip Schaefer discovered the mistake late in the game and was furious. But by then it was too late. The “baked potatoes” had begun to weigh heavily on the Bulls’ bellies. Still, they had managed to take a five-point lead with about two and a half minutes remaining in the game when the Jazz surged past them, outscoring Chicago 13–2 to win 78–73, tying the series.
Needless to say, Gator Lode was not a problem thereafter. “We got that straightened out,” Ligmanowski said.
After moving at a breakneck pace, playing every other day, the NBA Finals slowed down again, giving the Bulls an agonizing three-day wait before pivotal Game 5 on Wednesday. Asked about the time off, an obviously despondent Steve Kerr said, “I try not to think about it. It hasn’t been fun.”
Actually, none of the Bulls seemed too relaxed. Kukoc was shooting 34 percent for the series and averaging 7.5 points. Kerr had made only 3 of his 12 trey attempts. Harper was shooting 33 percent and averaging 5.5 points. Rodman was averaging a little over 5 rebounds in each of the first four games. Even Jordan, who had shot 51 percent in the first two games, had seen his shooting drop to 40 percent in the next two.
“They’re giving us everything we can ask for,” Pippen said of the Jazz. “Five, six days ago, everyone was predicting that we would sweep this team. Now everything is turned around.”
Just when it seemed their predicament couldn’t get worse, Jordan came down with a viral illness in the wee hours before Game 5. Never had a Bulls locker room been so quiet. About the only sound in the room was Ligmanowski whistling as he worked, trying to cut the tension. In the darkness of the training room a few feet away, Jordan lay sick. However, at least one veteran Bulls staff member wasn’t fooled. “Michael’s sick?” he asked. “He’ll score 40.”
Actually the total came to 38, including the back-breaking three down the stretch to deliver the Bulls from the dizzying altitude. Despite his well-known flair for the dramatic, this performance was no act. “I’ve played a lot of seasons with Michael and I’ve never seen him so sick,” Pippen said afterward.
The Bulls had ridden their championship experience to a decisive 3–2 series lead. Jordan stood under the Utah basket jutting his fists into the air triumphantly as the game ended.
“I almost played myself into passing out,” Jordan said. “I came in and I was dehydrated and it was all to win a basketball game. I gave a lot of effort and I’m just glad we won because it would have been devastating if we had lost…”
He had hit 13 for 27 from the field with 7 rebounds, 5 assists, 3 steals, and a block.
“He hadn’t gotten out of bed all day; standing up was literally a nauseating experience, and he had dizzy spells and so forth,” Jackson said. “We were worried about his amount of minutes, but he said ‘Let me play,’ and he played 44 minutes. That’s an amazing effort in itself.”
The series returned to Chicago, and on the morning of Game 6 the players begged Jackson not to make them watch more basketball video clips. “Let’s just watch the end of Silverado,” they said.
In the film, the group of good guys had become fragmented only to come together at the end for a glorious shootout with the bad guys. Sensing the mood had built just right, Jackson agreed to run the tape through to the end.
Togetherness, of course, was the clear and perfect answer to the predicament they were in.
Jordan finished the season’s business that night. A perfect Hollywood kind of ending. The Jazz valiantly took the lead early and kept it until the Bulls’ pressure finally ate it away down the stretch, with Jordan driving the issue. Thirty-nine more points and two hours of defense, all capped off with the sweetest little assist to Steve Kerr, the same Steve Kerr who had been groaning in his sleep and talking to himself because he had missed a wide-open three that could have won Game 4.
“Steve’s been fighting with himself because of Game 4,” Jordan explained afterward. “He missed a three-pointer, and he went back to his room. He doesn’t know this. His wife told me he was very frustrated. He kept his head in the pillow for hours because he let the team down, because everyone knows he’s probably one of the best shooters in the game and he had the opportunity to pick us up and give us a lift and he was very disappointed.”
Always looking to use everything, Jordan knew that the desire for absolution would run strong at the end of Game 6. “When Phil drew up the play at the end, which everybody in the gym, everybody on TV knew it was coming to me, I looked at Steve and said, ‘This is your chance, because I know Stockton is going to come over and help. And I’m going to come to you. And he said, ‘Give me the ball.’ ”
The response struck Jordan as something that John Paxson would have said. “Tonight Steve Kerr earned his wings from my perspective,” Jordan said, “because I had faith in him and I passed him the ball and he knocked down the shot. I’m glad he redeemed himself, because if he’d have missed that shot, I don’t think he could have slept all summer long. I’m very happy for Steve Kerr.”
The greater glory, however, remained Jordan’s—because NBA championships ultimately are a test of will, and for the 1997 title he had produced a superior display of it, in sickness and in health.
“It’s been a fight,” he admitted afterward. “It’s all guts, deep down determination, what your motives are, what your ambitions were from the beginning. There’s been a lot of soul searching. It’s easy to sit back and say, ‘I’ve given my best, I’m tired. Somebody else has got to do it.’ Or whatever. I didn’t take that approach. I thought positive and did whatever I could do. Every little inch of energy that I have I’m going to provide for this team.”
He knew his teammates were following his lead. “If you give up, then they give up,” he said. “I didn’t want to give up, no matter how sick I was, or how tired I was, how low on energy I was. I felt the obligation to my team, to the city of Chicago, to go out and give that extra effort so that we could be here for the fifth championship.”
Jordan would then say publicly that it would only be fair if all of the Bulls were allowed to return for one more season to defend their title. Jordan’s pronouncement would offend and infuriate Reinsdorf, because it usurped his opportunity to offer that to Jackson and the players. Beneath all the glitter and excitement, the emotions within the organization were raw and ugly. Then again, the entire ’97 playoff run, as beautiful as it was, had been marked by little pockets of ugliness—especially the scenes on the team bus between Jordan and Krause. Team staff members figured it was the alcohol that made Jordan do it. In the first half-hour after their playoff victories, Jordan and various teammates would pound down five or six beers and often fire up a cigar, which left the team star buzzed enough to turn loose his wicked sense of humor.
For years, Jordan had sat at the back of the bus after games, zinging teammates and anybody in range with his laserlike wit. He liked to hit the usual targets, teasing Kukoc for his showing in the 1992 Olympics, or for his defense, or for that European forgetfulness when it came to deodorant. Or there was Ligmanowski, whose weight made him an easy target for Jordan and Pippen (who would chime in when Jordan started).
Ligmanowski wanted to go back at Jordan, but it was hard to do. So the team’s longtime equipment man just took aim at Pippen.
“If it gets real bad,” Ligmanowksi confided, “I get on ’em about nose jokes. Like in the playoffs [against Miami] when Scottie got hit in the head and he had that big knot on his head, I told him, ‘You scared the hell out of me. I thought you were growing two noses.’ He got a little hot about that. They get on me about my weight and stuff sometimes. If you’re gonna dish it out, you gotta be able to take it.”
Jordan used the humor to police the roster, Ligmanowski said. “If he doesn’t feel somebody’s doing their job, or sucking it up to go play, he’ll say something. He’ll get a dig in and let them know how he feels.”
“I don’t take things too seriously,” Jordan said. “I take them serious enough. I’m able to laugh at myself before I laugh at anybody else. And that’s important. I can laugh at myself. But then I can be hard…”
He was particularly hard on Krause during the ’97 playoffs.
“That was ugly,” said one observer. “As ugly as it gets.”
“A lot of it was just fun,” Jordan said. “It wasn’t anything derogatory towards him. It was all in jest. He laughed at it, and sometimes he would respond.”
“Jerry Krause! Jerry Krause!” Jordan would yell from the back of the bus. “Hey, Jerry Krause, let’s go fishin’.” (Krause had taken up fishing over the past few years.)
“Hey, Jerry Krause, let’s go fish. It’s B. Y. O. P. Bring your own pole. Don’t worry. If we don’t catch anything, you can just eat the bait yourself.”
The back seats of the bus, where most of the players sat, exploded in laughter at these darts, while at the front of the bus, where team staff members rode, people bit their lips, some of them frowning at the discomfort of a player belittling the team’s vice president and general manager. Jackson, who was never the target of Jordan’s impishness, seemed to smile with his eyes.
“Those guys would get a few beers in ’em back there, and then they’d start in on him,” a Bulls staff member said.
“Phil sometimes sits there and says nothing,” said another Bulls employee. “You’re Phil Jackson and your boss is being hammered by one of the players. At least say something. Phil does not stick up for him in any of those situations. It’s just like school kids, like school kids ganging up on somebody.”
“I don’t know in retrospect what Phil could have done,” Chip Schaefer said. “It’s not like he would have turned and said, ‘That’s enough, Michael.’ ”
Krause, for the most part, endured Jordan’s 1997 assaults in silence. Occasionally, when the barrage got especially heavy, Krause would turn to whoever was sitting nearby and say, “The mouth from North Carolina is at it again.”
“Maybe it’s a defense mechanism as far as Jerry is concerned,” Tex Winter said of Krause’s silence. “But it doesn’t seem to bother him that much. I think he’s got a pretty thick skin.”
“Brad Sellers, now he was a good draft pick,” Jordan would be yelling from the back.
The pace of the team bus slowed dramatically as the Bulls rode out of Salt Lake City into the mountains to their hotel thirty miles away in Park City. “Hey, Jerry Krause, this bus went faster yesterday without your fat ass on it!” Jordan yelled.
“We were reduced to like 25 miles per hour in these buses because we’d have to climb up over this big summit to get to Park City,” Chip Schaefer recalled. “You can make it from Salt Lake to Park City in a car in thirty minutes. But these buses were just terrible, and were reduced to like 25 miles per hour and the cars were just buzzing past us. It just sort of created this situation where it went on and on.”
“Krause doesn’t have much to go back at Michael with. He calls him Baldy or something silly like that,” a Bulls employee observed. “When those guys are having their beers and they’re back there smoking their cigars and they’re buzzed over a victory, if Jerry said anything back to them he’d just be feeding the fire. They would just come back with something worse. That’s the way they are.”
Krause could be a tyrant around the players, but his humiliation still wasn’t a thing of joy, Chip Schaefer said. “Teasing is a cruel thing. It’s cruel when it’s done on a playground with six-year-olds and ten-year-olds and fifteen-year-olds, and it’s cruel with adults, too. Have I heard comments before and cracked a smile? Probably. But I’ve also heard comments before and wished in my heart that he would just be quiet and leave him alone.”
Luc Longley admitted that while Jordan’s barbs made the players laugh, the moments could also be uncomfortable, especially if you were the butt of Jordan’s jokes. “They’re a little bit tense at times. But for the most part, they’re pretty funny,” Longley said.
Jordan could be wicked, the center added. “He’s on a pedestal, at least as far as he’s concerned. Well, that’s the wrong way to put it. But he’s in a position where he can crack on people fairly securely. But people crack back at him, and he handles that just as well. It’s usually not a mean thing.”
Steve Kerr said Jordan’s jabs were a lot easier to take after a win, but he also had comments after losses. “He’s cracking on people all the time,” Kerr said. “Those are fun moments. Those are moments that really last in the memory. He says some incredibly funny things. I think what makes them kind of special is that it’s just us on the bus. It’s just the team. They’re kind of intimate moments because they’re right after an emotional game, one way or another. The guys get going on the back of the bus, and it’s very entertaining.”
“Michael is a very funny comedian,” guard Ron Harper said. “He keeps everybody loose. When it’s very tense, when there are tight ball games, he keeps you very very loose. He has an ability to say things that you don’t expect. He scores from the back of the bus a lot. He gets on Jerry Krause a lot.”
Asked if Krause takes the ribbing well, Harper laughed and said, “He don’t have a choice, does he?”
“I think Jerry has the ability to maybe recognize Michael for what he is,” Tex Winter said. “He knows that Michael has the personality that likes to challenge people and belittle people and berate people. I think he just accepts that. He really doesn’t have much choice, as great a basketball player as Michael is. And Jerry’s the first to tell you that. Everybody recognizes how valuable Michael is to this ball club.”
Asked if the conflict added to Krause’s frustrations in dealing with the team, Winter replied, “I’m sure it does. I’m sure it does.”
Did Jordan cross the line with Krause? “I guess maybe that there isn’t even a line because he crosses it so often,” Winter said adding that the situation is an obvious by-product of the mingling of “the personalities, their egos.”
“Michael can be as stubborn as Jerry,” pointed out another longtime team staff member. “They’re both incredibly stubborn. But that’s what makes people successful.”
“In Jerry’s case, and Michael’s too, they sort of avoid each other as much as they can,” Winter said. “But there are times when they’ve got to face off with each other and talk about things because that’s part of the running of a franchise and being the superstar on a franchise.
“It’s unfortunate that Michael has not had a little bit better relationship with Krause,” Winter added. “I’m not gonna take sides on it, but I will say this, Jerry is the general manager. Then again, because Michael is involved in a lot of the negotiations and dealings with him, it’s a give-and-take proposition. It’s too bad that they can’t kinda find a middle ground there. But for some reason, Michael’s had sort of this resentment, and it’s a shame.”
The harassment only happened three or four times in Jordan’s fourteen years with the team, Krause said. “Who cares? He’s drunk every time. He hadn’t been sober yet when he’s done it. It’s a young man’s mistakes. He was drunk. I can live with that fine. It doesn’t bother me.”
Privately, Krause had come to believe that Jackson was instigating or at least condoning and encouraging the attacks. Another Bulls employee with insight into the relationship said that Krause would never believe it but Jackson had actually asked Jordan to ease up on the general manager. Jordan supposedly replied that he knew he shouldn’t go so hard, “but sometimes I just can’t help myself.”
“I think they’ve visited about it,” Winter agreed. “Phil has talked to Michael about trying to accept authority a little bit more as it’s handed down from Jerry. I think Phil has helped a little bit in that regard. But on the other hand, sometimes I feel like he doesn’t help as much as he maybe should, to be honest with you.”
Winter said that he’s told Jackson he needed to do more to ease the situation.
Jackson’s response is that getting between the players and Krause was a question of “balance.”
“Just trying to keep an even balance all the time,” the coach said. “Trying to present his point of view, where it makes sense, then trying to play an even field. If I present the prejudiced side, I’m unrealistic or not truthful … Jerry’s felt like I’ve been disloyal to him in certain situations. He has guys on the team that he kinda has in his pocket who will rat on me in certain situations. That’s pretty natural, and I know Jerry plays a game. He brought this up to me at one point, and I said, ‘Jerry, I’ve only been fair. I’ve gotten these players to comply with so many things that I think are fairly done and we’ve kept them moving in the right way. But if I hadn’t been honest and they couldn’t read the honesty, then we wouldn’t have been successful. And you know I don’t have anything against you being in this job.’ ”
Jackson and Jordan had discussed the internal friction. “We’ve sat down and talked about it a couple of times, and I’ve asked him to really curtail it,” Jackson said. “It makes it really uncomfortable for everybody else. And he says, ‘Sometimes I think it’s good for the team.’
“I said, ‘Why?’ And that was his excuse. He’s taking up for Scottie. He’s taking up for the team. He’s airing some things for the team, and he thinks, ‘If all these guys have to take this much, I’m gonna give them back a little bit.’ ”
Most general managers don’t hover around their teams, Jordan said when asked about the issue. “That was our whole argument from day one,” he said, pointing out that Jackson has tried for three years to get Krause to relent. “That shows you how much power he has,” Jordan said of Jackson. “We don’t want to feel like we’re under a microscope the whole time while we’re working. That’s very important. I think that helps the team grow.”
In the past, Jackson had suggested that Krause not travel with the team because he is “brusque” and “sets the players on edge with his presence.” In fact, he supposedly made Krause’s travel with the team an issue during his contract renewal talks in 1996. Essentially, Krause only traveled with the team during the preseason, during the team’s first West Coast road trip each November, and during the playoffs. At other times, the general manager was usually off scouting college talent for each season’s draft.
“Jerry felt like any exclusion or any intrusion into that territory, which is his territory, is an effort to keep him from trying to do his job,” Jackson said of the issue. “I suggested a number of ways around that. Flying in the plane, then taking a private car to the games with scouts, with people who are necessary to ride on the bus at game time. Taking a private carrier back to the hotel afterwards. Flying commercially. Doing things like that to keep his distance.
“But he said, ‘I don’t get a feel for the team and what the team’s all about.’ Well, it’s obvious that since 1991 Jerry really hasn’t had a feel for the mood of the team. Basically, he knows how to run the show and how it goes. It’s a pretty smooth operation.”
“I think that Jerry feels like as general manager he should be able to make the decisions as to whether he’s going to be on the bus or not,” Winter said. “That is one of the sore spots as far as Phil and the players are concerned. Maybe as a coach, Phil in this case feels that the general manager shouldn’t be on the bus early in the year. I think Phil has said on occasion that he doesn’t think other general managers do that. And Jerry says he thinks they do.
“So what do you do?” Winter said with a laugh. “If Jerry wants to be on the bus, I think that’s his prerogative. Unfortunately, if the players do respond negatively, or a player even, particularly of Michael Jordan’s status, responds negatively to it, well then it’s something that maybe Jerry should take into consideration and maybe say, ‘Well, it’s not that important to me.’ ”
“If anything, it was a frustration,” Jordan said of his behavior. “I don’t think we, as a team, should always have to walk around on our toes with the GM following us everywhere we went. So we didn’t feel like we had freedom. It’s like your father overlooking your shoulder all the time. So sometimes I just felt compelled to vent frustration towards Jerry, which was probably uncalled for. But I was really trying to get him away from the team, so we could be ourselves, in a sense, and do our job without having someone looking over our shoulders.”
“Michael is the only player I’ve known who’s come up with that,” Krause responded. “Part of that is that there’s other things involved, too. A player can have a lot more freedom if I’m not around, in the sense that you can do what you want to do and not be worried about whether I’m walking the hall. I’m coming up late or something. I’m not talking about Michael. I’m talking about anybody. But the point being that on the road I don’t eat with the players, I don’t play cards with ’em, I don’t do any of that stuff with ’em. I never have. I do my job the way I see fit, and I resent the fact that people say I shouldn’t be doing this because Michael says it. I say, ‘Well, wait a minute now. It ain’t been too bad, what I’ve done.’ I resent … I shouldn’t say resent. It’s more, if I’m gonna do my job, I’m gonna do my job my way.”
Jackson’s point was that the players were grown men, and what’s more, they had shown great leadership in winning championship after championship. They didn’t need a team executive tiptoeing around their personal lives. There was the implication that Krause could use the information he gathered against the players in personnel decisions. Krause had often boasted that he traded Sedale Threatt to Seattle because the player’s off-court life was too socially active.
Told of Jackson’s observation, Krause pointed out that Jackson also didn’t want people checking up on his behavior.
“But you know how I feel about it?” Krause said. “If a player can’t handle me being there, he don’t belong there. He shouldn’t be on this team. But it really doesn’t matter. When somebody criticizes me for that, I say, ‘Wait a minute. I’ve got to do my job the way I know how to do it. That’s the way I know how to do my job. Michael can handle it. He handles it fine. It doesn’t bother his play.’ ”
“He likes to see the players and how they react in certain situations,” Jackson said. The coach pointed out that the problem wasn’t just on the bus, but in the team locker room before games.
“There have been some situations that have set the players on edge,” Jackson said. “Michael is always the last one in the bathroom. It’s kind of a pecking order between the taping table and the bathroom. With him going in the bathroom, and Jerry’s still in there in the players’ locker room in the bathroom using the toilet when Michael’s getting ready for the game and he’s the last one in there.”
It seemed ludicrous, that the ultimate superstar of the NBA and his general manager were at odds over latrine habits. But the situation was far more complicated than that, Jackson said, although he admitted that a lot of smaller conflicts over the years had added up to a big one. “It’s with those type of things, where Jerry doesn’t know boundaries,” the coach said. “That’s really what irritates the players almost more than anything, even more than the way he has dealt with the team, the trading and not trading of players, the rumors, and everything else. Just his intrusion into the society where he doesn’t belong. He just shows a lack of the idea of boundaries as to where the players stop and management begins. Those are the things you don’t like to bring up, but these are the things that just alienate Jerry from the team, his behavior.
“I talked to Jerry when I took the job. I talked to Jerry in subsequent years about this really being a problem,” Jackson added. “One of the things that’s a great measure of an individual is how he treats people when he has nothing to benefit by it. Jerry comes up failing all the time in that territory. This is one of the things we talk about. What is important in life and what isn’t. So Jerry has sort of run to the end of the rope with the guys.”
There were longtime Bulls employees who had the utmost regard for Jackson and Jordan yet maintained a loyalty to Krause. They respected the general manager for the difficult stances he had taken over the years in pursuing the vision that he and Reinsdorf had for the team. The problem, said several of these employees, was that Krause seemed to harbor an unrealistic urge to “be one of the guys.”
“He can’t be one of the guys,” said an employee who admired Krause. “It’s hard to be on the bus and around these guys all the time. And then he’s got to decide on their livelihoods and their contracts? I think he’d get a lot more respect if he weren’t around the players all the time. He can see them during the holidays, at the Christmas party, even talk to them once in a while if he has something to say, but otherwise he should stay away. He can watch them from afar to evaluate the team. They don’t even have to know he’s there. If they have a problem, they should be able to go see him and respect him, instead of giving him shit on the team bus or avoiding him.”
Asked about his relationship with Jackson, Krause said, “I think we’ve had a professional relationship that’s been basically good. We’ve been very successful as a team. There haven’t been too many other combinations that have been that successful. I respect Phil as a good basketball coach. We have our differences. We will probably have our differences the rest of our lives. But that’s life, that’s gonna happen.”
Krause loyalists in the organization cited the bus incidents as just another sign that Jackson had grown arrogant and was trying to seize control of the team. Asked about arrogance, Jackson said, “I’ve tried to be really fair and tried to stay on base and on cue and not get insulted by questions that keep coming back through the media. I’ve done the little things that I think have kept everything on the square with the team. But that might be their view, that I’m arrogant.”
As for his ambition to be general manager, Jackson said he was the person best suited to handle relationships between management and the players. “I’m the kind of person to handle both those kinds of things and find solutions for those things,” he said.
But did that translate into a hunger for power? Jackson said it did not. “I’ve never gone behind Jerry’s back to the owner,” the coach said. “I’ve never done anything to get power.”
Jackson did admit that money was a big factor in his dispute with Krause. He said that was partly because the pay for coaches has exploded, exemplified by the huge contracts and power given to coaches such as John Calipari with the New Jersey Nets. “Kind of the payoff structure for coaches has been destroyed by John Calipari getting the kind of money he’s getting in New Jersey,” Jackson said. “So there’s precedence. Here’s a guy that hadn’t won at any level who is coming into the game because some team thought they were valuable at this level.
“Jerry’s got a salary that hasn’t done this same thing,” Jackson said of Krause. “General managers’ salaries didn’t move up. Coaches make more than general managers. You look at it, and you say this is real tough for a guy like Jerry to negotiate. He’s looking at it like, ‘This guy’s more valuable to the organization than I am.’ I know all the personal things that must be going through his head as he’s negotiating it. So it’s very difficult for him to do it.
“That was my argument with Jerry Krause eight years ago,” Jackson said. “I told him, ‘Coaches’ salaries are gonna go over a million dollars. They’re gonna get paid what players are getting paid, Jerry.’ He said, ‘That is never gonna happen. I tell you this: It’ll never happen with this organization.’ And I said, ‘Well, that may be true with this organization, but you know better than anybody else, this is something you should root for, because as general manager you’re gonna make money on top of it, too, because of that.’
“You could see the wave coming, that this is what was going to happen,” Jackson said. “Now, guys like Jerry Krause are becoming, you know, like an oddity in a way in this league. Because teams are giving total control to coaches in places like Portland and around the country. In New Jersey and Boston, you just keep seeing these teams are now making this wholehearted venture into a coach who’s gonna be president and general manager. There must be seven or eight of them by now. Houston. And Miami.”
The fact that Pat Riley, his rival in Miami, had that power, income, and control was particularly galling to Jackson.
The coach pointed out that Krause and Reinsdorf didn’t want to give him the money he asked for in his last contract negotiations because other coaches he compared himself with were also being paid as GMs. “That actually became kind of a marketing chip against me in the last contract negotiations,” Jackson said, “which I kind of laughed about because I said, ‘That’s not a chip. They hired these guys to be coaches, and they can employ a personnel guy for $300,000 to do the job of general manager.’ That’s an argument against Jerry Krause, is what that is.”
The ugly contract process had started all over again when the Bulls defeated Utah for the 1997 title and Jordan stepped to the microphone to issue a plea that he, Jackson, Pippen, and Rodman be allowed to return for the 1997–98 season and a shot at a sixth championship. Krause wanted to terminate Jackson’s relationship with the team after the 1997 season, but Reinsdorf wouldn’t let him, the coach said.
Certainly Jackson was a big question, but no bigger than Pippen. An unrestricted free agent at the end of the 1998 season, Pippen would have to be traded, or the team would risk losing him without getting compensation for his immense talent.
Eventually all the details would be worked out to keep the team and Pippen intact, but not without another bloody round of negotiations.
Because the deals couldn’t be worked out immediately, Jackson’s status with the team was in limbo on Draft Day 1997. At the time, Reinsdorf and Krause were trying to decide whether to trade Pippen. Both Jackson and Jordan had said they would not return to the Bulls if Pippen was traded.
Usually Jackson and his staff made themselves available for Krause and his assistants on Draft Day, although the coaching staff had become increasingly dismayed over Krause’s selections in recent seasons. When Jackson arrived at the Berto Center that day, Krause informed him his presence wasn’t required.
“He just said, ‘You’re not needed here,’ ” Jackson recalled.
Soon word leaked out on sports talk radio that Jackson had been “sent home.”
“Jerry has a definite sense of respect for me,” the coach explained later. “It wasn’t like he sent me home.”
Jackson had informed Krause and Reinsdorf that if Pippen was traded, then it would also be time to change coaches because Jackson did not want to oversee the difficult process of rebuilding the team.
Jackson recalled that Krause said, “Phil, until we make a decision on this ball club, as long as we’re seeing what the trade is for Scottie Pippen, whenever that’s gonna be, and because of your desire not to come back if Scottie doesn’t come back, there’s no need for you to come in if we go in another direction, if we trade Scottie and you’re not gonna be the coach. Today, you might as well let the coaching staff out.”
“That was made known to me a couple of times during the draft time,” Jackson said. “If they were going in another direction, if they were going to get a draft pick in a trade for Scottie Pippen, these were the guys who were gonna come in. And I wasn’t going to be a part of the judging of the talent.”
Krause’s response was particularly jolting for Jackson, who realized that his dismissal on Draft Day might just be the last day in his long, successful relationship with the team. While it wasn’t a disrespectful situation, the coach said it had the air of a brusque ending. “It was purely business,” he said. “I was doing a piecemeal job. I was doing a job of handling this group of professional athletes only. That was OK with me. I understood exactly what I was asked to do. The word got out. I don’t know how. I didn’t try to make it public. I tried to correct it. Other people may be dismayed, annoyed, thinking that I’m not rationally handling a snubbing situation, but I’m not snubbed at all. I’m not bewildered at all. This is what my job has come down to. If I’m not on ‘their team,’ then I’m out. I’m basically out.”
The situation resulted in the coaching staff canceling plans to hold the Bulls’ annual end-of-season meetings with the players. As a result, there was no sense of closure after the 1997 campaign, Jackson said.
Draft Day passed without the trading of Pippen, and contract negotiations with Jackson became one of the team’s priorities. At first, talks went surprisingly well.
“The structure that was set up for it was that Jerry is Mr. Reinsdorf’s agent, Todd Musburger is my agent,” Jackson said. “And so it went pretty well for a while, and then it was just explosive. It got explosive between Mr. Reinsdorf and Todd. Jerry Krause had a license from Mr. Reinsdorf to malign Todd Musburger and as a consequence was totally disrespectful and unfair.”
When the negotiations stalled, Krause released detailed information stating that the team had offered Jackson the highest-paying contract for a coach who wasn’t also a general manager. The tactic infuriated Jackson.
“He aggravated the situation entirely,” the coach said of Krause, “and then it became a public issue in the community. They put a spin on it that made us look really negative, that I’d been offered the highest-paid pure coaching job in the NBA. It was really distorting to put out a twenty-five-page thing like that. Everybody knew it was distorted, but it was their bargaining point. It’s really hard to sit still when those things are done and not come back at them.”
The talks had begun while Jackson was in Montana taking care of family business. “On a Sunday afternoon while I was in Montana, Todd stepped into Jerry’s office,” the coach said. “There was no one there but Todd and Jerry. Todd went through a half an hour, saying, ‘Jerry, you know there’s a lot of praise for everybody in this organization. We know that you’ve had a big part. The responsibility has fallen on your shoulders for five championship teams. Phil’s had a big part, and Michael’s had a great part. Michael’s really the one.’ Todd had a whole buildup about it.”
Then came the part where the agent informed the general manager of Jackson’s asking price. “As soon as he went to the salary we were asking for, he was [thrown] out of the office,” Jackson said. “Threw him out of the office. Todd had to sit out in the hallway by the aquarium. Jerry Krause said, ‘You gotta get out of the office. I’m gonna make a call. I can’t believe that you’re actually asking for this. I can’t believe what you’re thinking and what you’re trying to do.’ So he put him out of the office, and twenty minutes later he comes out and says, ‘You’ll have to leave. I’ll talk to you again next week, and you’ll have to come back with an offer that’s better.’ That was it. No counteroffer. We said, ‘OK, it’s gonna be negotiations. They started out, and there’s gonna be negotiations.’ But it came down to, ‘This is our offer, and this is it. This is what our offer is.’ And the next thing was purely business. It was not personal. It was over the phone, and it was totally dragging him through the mud. He tried to cross Todd.
“Jerry just spent three minutes cussing Todd out on the phone,” Jackson said, “just threw all the invective and spiteful things he could say. Just cussed him out. And when he was through cussing him out, Todd said, ‘Jerry, did you get it all said? Because I hope you’ve gotten it all said.’ Todd tried to remain as calm as he could. And Jerry went through another litany of things that he said to him. The kind of things he said to him really was the final bridge for my agent. To that time, he was dealing pretty well with an uphill situation, and that just kind of put him over the edge.”
It was then, Jackson said, that he realized that he was going to have to enter the fight. He told his agent, “Todd, listen. It didn’t work out. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. They’re not gonna use you obviously. They’re gonna try to disregard you. They want to negotiate with me. They want me at some level, because this is what they do. They tear it apart. They make it tough. They try to win contracts. They can’t stand it. But I can deal with it. I’ve been able to deal with it.”
“I have a good relationship with Mr. Reinsdorf,” Jackson says. “In a way, I respect a lot of the things he does. That, I don’t respect. That part I don’t respect.”
The coach was particularly angered by management’s assertions that he was trying to duck dealing with Reinsdorf during the negotiations, that he was going out of his way to keep from meeting with the team chairman.
“I was traveling,” Jackson said. “I was in Idaho picking up my mother, who’s in a situation where she has to be in a wheelchair. She’s in a walker. She’s at a senior facility. So I was overnight on the road, and this kind of boiled over. And I didn’t check with my agent that night. Then I came back to Montana in the late afternoon, and it’s out in the media that I didn’t call the owner in twenty-four hours. He wanted to hear from you. I didn’t have any problem with getting ahold of him. I didn’t dodge him or anything else. Unfortunately, when I talked about Mr. Reinsdorf having a good organizational sense, they didn’t try to take it out on me. They tried to take it out on Todd.
“I don’t think it needs to get like that,” Jackson said. In the end, Reinsdorf met with Jackson in Montana and they worked out the details for the coach to return for the 1997–98 season. Reinsdorf later confided that Jackson had turned down a five-year contract offer with the team. Jackson said if such an offer was made, it was made in passing, and during 1996 negotiations.
Jackson recalled that “Mr. Reinsdorf said, ‘Tell me if I’m right or wrong. From what I understand, you want to coach this team if we provide the personnel that would make it a championship team, Scottie and Michael and so forth. Because if that’s the case, we’d like to offer you a five-year contract. And you’d go ahead and coach here and help us rebuild.’ And I said, ‘I need a break. That’s really nice, but I need a break.’
“That may be what they consider a long-term offer,” Jackson said. “But it wasn’t clear. I said I think I’ve coached a couple of years too long actually for the kind of stress that this puts a person under. And for my own health, personal and mental and physical.”
On July 23, the Bulls announced that Jackson had signed a one-year contract worth nearly $6 million. “I wasn’t looking to do anything that would be outrageous,” Jackson said. “I wanted to be fair, and I think Jerry Reinsdorf wanted to be fair. And it got to a fair point in this thing that was good.”
Yet the negotiations had left Jackson’s relationship with Krause in shreds. That became apparent when the general manager called a news conference to announce Jackson’s signing. Krause emphasized that no matter what, even if the team went “82–0,” the 1997–98 season was definitely Jackson’s last with the Bulls.
“The announcement that came out of my signing was negative,” Jackson said. “It was very negative. Rather than saying, ‘We’re gonna be able to pull this year together. We started it out by signing Phil. And now Michael and Dennis are the next two to sign, and we’ve begun to rebuild the championship team and allow this team to go on.’ Instead of something positive like that, it started out with a negative thing: ‘This is going to be the last year that Phil’s going to come back and coach.’
“You could tell,” Jackson said. “All you had to do was see the videotape of when I signed. It was pretty obvious that Jerry mismanaged that press release and kind of let his own feelings out.”