12/1 at Cleveland; 12/4 v. Phoenix; 12/7 v. New York; 12/8 v. Portland; 12/11 at Milwaukee; 12/14 v. L.A. Clippers; 12/15 v. Cleveland; 12/18 v. Miami; 12/19 at Detroit; 12/21 v. L.A. Lakers; 12/22 v. Indiana; 12/25 v. Detroit; 12/27 v. Golden State; 12/29 v. Seattle
THE BULLS WERE HEADING INTO THE CALMEST PART OF THEIR schedule. December would bring only three road games out of fourteen, and the first one was against the Cavaliers, who were about to learn that night that their star guard, Mark Price, would be out for the season. The Cavaliers were forced to start guards John Morton, the worst shooter in the league the previous season, and Gerald Paddio, a free agent from the CBA who had failed with several teams.
The game was a quick rout, with the Bulls bolting away by 17 in the first quarter and leading by 30 before the third period was half over. Fewer and fewer NBA games were being decided in the last two minutes since expansion hit; the dilution of talent had weakened many teams and created so many have-nots that a team with talent, like the Bulls, would have an easy time many nights.
Jordan was enjoying himself on the ride home after the game, joking about the Cavaliers, against whom he’d enjoyed so much success. Stretching out a stat sheet, Jordan, with 32 points in thirty minutes, had some lighthearted instruction for the younger players: “That’s the kind of game where you get your points and get out of there,” he told Armstrong.
Horace Grant shook his head.
He and Jordan had become antagonists a few years back when he became the first Bulls player ever to challenge Jordan, although not publicly. It was on a plane ride home from a playoff loss against Detroit, and tensions were high. Jordan had scored 18 points and wasn’t too happy about it, and he had taken a beating. Grant, the Bulls’ power forward, had just 1 rebound, and had supplied little protection for Jordan. Jordan enjoyed taunting Grant, whom he felt was not very bright, but Grant, who could be as sensitive as an open wound, finally tired of the kidding.
“Screw you, M.J.,” Grant shot back. “All you care about is your points and everyone knows it. You don’t care about anything but yourself.”
“You’re an idiot,” Jordan screamed at Grant. “You’ve screwed up every play we ever ran. You’re too stupid to even remember the plays. We ought to get rid of you.”
The rest of the players sat stunned as the verbal assaults continued back and forth, Jordan being derisive and Grant warily fending off the arrows, until the two were finally separated. And after the season, Jordan tried to get management to trade Grant for Buck Williams.
But Grant had bigger concerns than Jordan as the season headed into its second month. In the rout against Cleveland he played just twenty minutes, far fewer than any of the other starters, and he was taking it as an ominous sign. His playing time, PT in the players’ vernacular, was diminishing, and he saw the team trying to move King in as a starter to justify the high pick in the draft. Jackson had outlined an expanded role for Grant when he became head coach because of Grant’s speed; he’s the fastest runner on the team, and Jackson envisioned getting Grant open downcourt ahead of the opposing power forward for easy baskets. But Grant was also the Bulls’ best rebounder, so he had to stay back to rebound. Meanwhile, he was invariably assigned to guard the best offensive forward, making it difficult for him to break quickly downcourt. And even when he could, it really didn’t matter, given Jordan’s demands for the ball and his feelings about Grant.
“I have a dream,” Grant would sing one day later in the season on the team bus after a few players had gone to the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center in Atlanta. “I’m going to get the ball.”
But it didn’t stop him from trying. Grant had become perhaps the hardest-working player on the team, spending every day in the off-season working out with strength coach Al Vermeil, brother of former Philadelphia Eagles coach Dick Vermeil. Grant could now lift weights with the strength of a football defensive lineman. When Grant came to the Bulls as the tenth pick in the 1987 draft, he was known in coaches’ talk as a three and a half: He had the height of a big forward (a four), but without the power and strength to play the position, and he wasn’t deft enough offensively to handle the scoring at the small-forward position (a three). But eventually Grant would build up to nearly 230 muscular pounds from less than 210, his rookie weight.
The adjustment to the NBA had been hard for Grant. He was from a rural Georgia town and had been raised by a single parent. When he was young, his ambition was to be a marine. “I’d watch the commercials on TV about how they wanted a few good men and I was fascinated by the nice suits and the swords and everything,” Grant recalled. He was not a good student, but he started to develop as a basketball player, earning himself and twin brother, Harvey, scholarships at Clemson. “We were a package deal,” Horace remembered. But Horace always was a little ahead of Harvey, and when Harvey didn’t make the varsity team as a freshman he started missing class and eventually transferred to Oklahoma, where he was a teammate of Stacey King’s.
Harvey would eventually come to add to Horace’s frustration, although unintentionally. Every year they played together, Horace was dominant—in high school, in college, and even in the NBA during Harvey’s first two seasons with the Washington Bullets. Horace always averaged more points and was the bigger star. And the joke between the twins was that Horace flaunted it. “He’s nine seconds older,” Harvey once explained, “so he thinks he can boss me around.” But with the lack of talent in Washington, Harvey became a featured player—he averaged nearly 20 points per game and was touted as the league’s most improved player in 1990–91. “I’d just once like to get that many shots,” Horace would say, “just to see what would happen.” Horace averaged about 8 shots per game for the Bulls, about a third of Jordan’s total, while Harvey was getting 16 to 18 per game in Washington. “I know I’ll never get the chance to find out what kind of player I can be here,” said Grant.
And it was getting to him. He’d brought his scoring average up to 13.4 in 1989–90 and his rebounding to about 8 per game, including a fierce playoff run against Detroit in which he had six straight games with 10 or more rebounds. But he also wanted to share in the offense. He felt he worked so hard that he deserved a chance. Instead, Bach prepared him an edited tape of Buck Williams’s play. Williams was not a big scorer, but a hard worker who did the dirty work inside. The message was clear to Grant: You rebound and play defense and let others run the show.
Grant had thought everything would be okay when he signed a three-year contract extension at $2 million per year after the 1989–90 season. During the 1989–90 season, he was among the lowest-paid Bulls because he was still bound by his rookie contract, which he had signed when he was a backup to Oakley. But when he became a starter, he began to believe he was underpaid, and his frustration led to a late-season demand to be traded.
Grant is perhaps the least egomaniacal of the Bulls’ players and certainly the most popular. These were traits Jackson would use later in the season, for he knew the players always would rally around Grant.
Grant offered fans little of the fake celebrity of sport and much of the earnest reward. He truly stood for what the Wheaties box suggested: hard work, loyalty, trust, support, and modesty. He has remarkably soft features, with honest brown eyes and an open smile. He’s the most likely to say what he feels and react to what he hears or sees. That was especially true as the 1990–91 season unfolded.
When Grant came to the Bulls he was something of a wild colt. The team had to hire a cook for him during his rookie season to get him to add weight, for he was eating most of his meals at fast-food restaurants. But it was the late-night menu that frustrated the team the most. He was what’s called “a runner” in the NBA, a player who hits the night spots regularly in every city. The Bulls grew anxious about Grant’s habits and eventually would trade Sedale Threatt because they believed he was poisoning both Grant and Scottie Pippen with his late-night adventures.
Grant and Pippen had a bond that appeared unbreakable. They met at the NBA draft in New York in 1987, and when both were selected by the Bulls they became friends, if only for protection. Rookies still endure hazing in the NBA, even though Bulls coach Phil Jackson curtailed the practice when he replaced Doug Collins. Rookies no longer had to carry other players’ bags, but the veterans still played pranks on the rookies, and Grant and Pippen closed ranks after the veterans charged almost $1000 in food and gifts to their rooms one night.
The two became like Castor and Pollux, the twin heroes in Greek and Roman religion; they were giants in battle on the court, and patrons of adventure afterward.
They’d call one another up to a dozen times a day, even on game days. They purchased identical Mercedes SELs, Grant’s white and Pippen’s black. They drove the same demonstration cars for the same local sponsor. They lived within a few hundred yards of one another in the same North Shore neighborhood of Chicago. They were married within weeks of each other and were each other’s best man. They both have sons (this was not planned). They bought the same breed of dog. They share the same agent and they vacation together in the summer. They went out together at every road stop, and in the Bulls’ yearbook, when Pippen was asked, “Who would you take with you if you were going to the moon?” he responded: “Horace Grant.”
But Grant was undergoing some personal changes, and while the pair remained good friends, they drifted apart somewhat. Pippen got divorced and Grant began to fear he was next. “My wife and I were having a lot of problems,” he admitted. “And a lot was my fault. I wasn’t treating people right, especially my wife.”
So with her help, Grant began a conversion to Christianity.
“I was sliding spiritually,” said Grant, who would become a regular at pregame chapel services, which are available to all NBA players before games. “I knew I had to do something, so I personally gave myself to the Lord. I realized He gave me so much, but I wasn’t really giving back to Him all that I should. He gave me this talent to play professional basketball. He could have given it to so many others, but He gave it to me. I was abusing this talent and my body and that was not what He gave it to me for. The reason was to praise His name and be a positive role model for young people.”
For Grant that meant staying home. He quit the local nightclub scene populated by several of his teammates and began staying in his room on the road and reading the Bible. Pippen’s agenda was somewhat different, so they began to spend less time together. And Grant also began to look at his friend more critically. One question in particular kept arising in Grant’s mind: “Why was Scottie trying to be so much like Michael?” he wondered.
Pippen had become closer to Jordan, moving into his private berth on the team plane along with Cliff Levingston, who’d attached himself to Jordan like a fly to glue as soon as he joined the Bulls. But Pippen also had his contract on his mind, and after his near holdout he had decided he needed to produce statistics, for that’s what the Bulls would measure him by. “They talk about winning,” said Pippen, “but if I don’t score more, they won’t pay me. I’ve got to go for statistics this year.”
Pippen would begin to imitate Jordan’s play, as Winter had noticed, thus removing opportunities for others and setting up a developing conflict with Jordan over just who should be taking the shots.
“This team has got to move the ball,” Grant told reporters in Cleveland without mentioning any names, although the message was clear to his teammates. “We’ll have a lot to learn from championship teams like Boston, the Lakers, and Detroit until we do that.”
The Bulls romped through an easy 155–127 win over the Suns on December 4. It was their sixth straight win, all by wide margins, and it left Suns coach Cotton Fitzsimmons to remark, “At least it took them longer to blow us out than their last few opponents.”
The starters sat out most of the fourth quarter, leaving the action to reserves like Craig Hodges, Will Perdue, Scott Williams, and Cliff Levingston. But Jordan’s tongue was a little too sharp after the game. He had played part of the fourth quarter with Dennis Hopson, Stacey King, and B.J. Armstrong, and he complained to Pippen, “I hate being out there with those garbagemen. They don’t get you the ball.”
Hodges overheard the exchange. Though not a great overall talent, he took pride in his role.
“Hey, I ain’t no garbage player,” he told Jordan. “I was playing in this league when you were still trying to figure out how to put your pants on.”
“Hey, I wasn’t talking about you, Hodg,” Jordan interrupted, quick to extinguish Hodges’s fire.
The tension broke, but it remained close to the surface despite the winning streak.
The Knicks were next, and this suggested another easy win. The Bulls matched up well with the Knicks. They’d knocked them out of the 1989 playoffs when the Knicks were at their best, and now the Knicks were faltering in a halfcourt game with players developed for former coach Rick Pitino’s pressing style. They had little depth, the first two players off the bench this night being rookie Jerrod Mustaf and Brian Quinnett. And it was against Mustaf that Jordan would electrify the Stadium crowd again en route to a 108–98 Bulls victory.
Gerald Wilkins posted Jordan up for a jump shot, which usually infuriates Jordan. He hates to be isolated for a score and almost always comes back to go one-on-one with the player who does this to him. This annoys the coaches, because it means Jordan is going to ignore the offense, but they let it go because he usually scores. It’s most aggravating to his teammates.
“The difference,” says B.J. Armstrong, “is that in our offense, if your man goes at you, you can’t go back at him—you have to run the offense. But Michael doesn’t. Sure, he’s better than everyone else, but you just hate to watch him get to do that without anything being said, and then if you try, watch out.”
Jordan started dribbling near the three-point circle to the right of the free-throw line. He went through his legs once, twice, three times and back again, Wilkins trying to watch not the ball but Jordan’s eyes. Quickly, Jordan moved the ball to his left hand and flashed by Wilkins. It’s one of the moves that makes Jordan unstoppable. “He can get through cracks in the defense that other players don’t even see,” marvels John Bach. And with his explosive quickness off the dribble, few players can move their feet quickly enough to get in front of Jordan.
In his way was Mustaf, the athletic six-foot-ten-inch rookie. Mustaf jumped. Jordan jumped over him and slammed the ball, sending the Stadium fans into a frenzy.
On the bench, coach Phil Jackson smiled.
It’s difficult to read Jackson sometimes. He has an impish sense of humor and can be found sometimes drawing hangman’s nooses in his office before games while he watches “The McLaughlin Group” or “The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour.” He knows there’s no play in his scheme that calls for Jordan to dribble for ten seconds and then fly down the lane against four players and slam. But it was hard not to appreciate the spectacular athletic move, and as a former player he had some understanding of the imperative of payback.
Jackson has a great fondness for the Knicks—by which he means the old Knicks, the team he was part of. He owns perhaps the only reversible leather coat in the world with a Bulls logo on one side and a Knicks emblem on the other. His days with the Knicks represent a kind of basketball nirvana for him: the unselfish play, the bonding among the guys. Jackson even had a chance to return to the Knicks as an assistant coach when Rick Pitino was hired; he was still stuck in the CBA when Pitino offered him a spot, but he was too wary of the Knicks’ corporate ownership to sign on. He had clashed with management after Gulf + Western bought the Knicks and the personnel moves became more and more capricious. “These guys didn’t know anything about basketball, about men coming together and bonding their talents,” he said. “They’d say, ‘Let’s go get us Spencer Haywood. Uh-oh, he’s not working. So we’ll get ourselves a Bob McAdoo.’ We had built a team with Frazier and Reed and [Mike] Riordan and Jackson, basically unheralded basketball players. And from this unlikely group of players, second-round draft picks, you have a team. You don’t build a team by going out and getting stars.”
Jackson may have avoided corporate pressure, but the Bulls management had its own quirks. His name was Jerry Krause.
Jackson has dealt with Krause’s paranoia far better than any of the recent Bulls coaches. He’s sometimes had to leave his office to take phone calls at a public phone because Krause was concerned someone might overhear the conversation. He’s registered under false names at a Chicago hotel during the draft so only Krause could find him. He’s listened to Krause threaten to fire anyone on the staff who talked to reporters after supposed “inside” information appeared in newspapers, including one memorable occasion when the leak was something Krause himself had inadvertently let slip.
“Jerry Krause sees the NBA as a covert operation,” says one general manager. One of the team’s minority owners adds, “He goes into a closet to change his mind.”
So, despite having to handle the most dominant offensive force since Wilt Chamberlain, while working for the NBA’s version of Professor Moriarty, Jackson’s generally thrilled to have the job. “I’m having a great time,” he’d tell friends. “This is fun.”
And Jackson felt no different the next night, even though the Bulls lost for the first time at home in eighteen games through the regular season and playoffs, a 109–101 loss to Portland, as the Trail Blazers continued the hot streak that had put them out ahead of the league. It didn’t help that the Bulls’ bench faltered; Hopson scored just 1 basket while the Trail Blazers turned a 3-point lead into a 12-point margin in the second quarter when the reserves were playing. The Bulls led by a point late in the fourth quarter, but a weary Jordan, who put up 28 shots, committed a turnover and drove wildly into three Trail Blazers, his shot missing the mark. Clyde Drexler then beat Jordan downcourt for an easy basket from which the Bulls could not recover.
Jackson was diplomatic. It was a test, he said, and now the Bulls had an idea how much farther they had to go to play with the league’s best. Danny Ainge’s words were more direct: “We’re just a balanced team. Every night someone different steps up to carry us. We had more weapons.”
The next loss, against Milwaukee, would be harder. The Bulls had dominated the Bucks the last three years, eliminating them from the playoffs in 1990 and winning fifteen of the last seventeen games between them in the regular season. It drove Bucks coach Del Harris nuts. He almost always drew technical fouls in Bulls games, and although he tried to remain calm and diminish the game’s importance in the pregame meetings, his neck would stiffen and his words became more clipped when he discussed the Bulls. Jackson did the same thing when the Bulls prepared for Detroit; he went over every play Detroit ran in detail and so often that the players felt they knew the plays too well and were thinking about what Detroit might do rather than reacting to what they actually did. The Bulls were to Milwaukee what the Pistons were to the Bulls.
But Milwaukee was healthy for the first time in several years and had won ten straight at home. And with Frank Brickowski rebounding and giving the Bucks second chances, Milwaukee held off the Bulls, 99–87. Jordan scored 31 points, but he was out for key stretches and, despite playing thirty-nine minutes, he was angry with Jackson for keeping him off the floor. During games, Jordan rarely wants to rest, and it takes all of Jackson’s restraint to keep him off the floor; Jordan shouts out the names of players he wants to go in for. Jackson was certain that Jordan would wear down by the end of the playoffs as a result of the load he carried all season long, so Jackson had cut Jordan’s playing time to thirty-six or thirty-seven minutes per game.
Some of Jordan’s irritation flared after the game. A factor in the loss, Jackson told reporters, was the fact that the floor was slippery. When Jordan was asked about it, he denied it was any problem, and when someone started to ask B.J. Armstrong about it Jordan shouted across the locker room, “Don’t make any excuses.”
“I hate when P.J. does that,” Jordan said afterward. “We stink. That’s the problem.”
Part of the problem, Jordan thought, was the Tex Winter-inspired offense. During the game, Winter had said pleadingly to Jackson, as both Jordan and Pippen went on mad dashes to the basket, “They’re sabotaging the offense. They’ve got to pass the ball.”
Cartwright, an increasingly strong presence on and off the court, had his own views on the subject. He believed in Winter’s offense; Jackson was trying to get Cartwright the ball in a position where he could do something with it. But every Cartwright mistake was seized upon by Jordan. On this night, Cartwright took a pass down by the baseline in the third quarter and spun to the basket, but was called for traveling. The Bulls called time-out soon after, and as they walked back to the huddle, Jordan was furious with Cartwright.
“You’ve got to give me the ball,” Jordan demanded.
“But M.J., you had two guys on you,” snapped Cartwright.
“Yeah, but one was Fred Roberts,” Jordan shot back.
Jordan and Cartwright had crossed swords before, although by this season, Cartwright’s third with the Bulls, an uneasy truce had developed. Jordan could even joke about Cartwright’s flailing elbows, of which he’d been a victim in practice. Overhearing Cartwright talking about playing golf, Jordan once asked him if he’d ever elbowed any of the players in his foursome.
Cartwright could laugh about such remarks now, but when he first came to the Bulls, he didn’t anticipate the problems that would develop between him and Jordan, even though he quickly recognized their differences. While Jordan is demonstrative, Cartwright is remote. Jordan is congenial, Cartwright is seclusive. Cartwright wears a goatee stained with a splash of white and has a mysterious look about him: sad, with gentle doe eyes and a tiny head that often is enveloped in his large hands when he’s working out a problem. One such problem was how to deal with Jordan.
Cartwright was a star of some magnitude, the nation’s leading rebounder in his senior year at the University of San Francisco and the No. 3 pick in the NBA draft, just like Jordan, only five years earlier. He averaged 21.7 points and 8.9 rebounds and made the All-Star team as a rookie and added 20.1 points and 7.5 rebounds his second season. But it was his misfortune to join the NBA the same season as Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, and greatness would elude the seven-foot-one-inch Cartwright as if it were thick smoke: He could see it, almost smell it, but he couldn’t quite grab it. There were no Olympics for Cartwright, no team promotional campaign like the one the Bulls ran in Chicago for Jordan: “Here Comes Mr. Jordan,” the ads went, a takeoff on the classic 1941 film. New York didn’t exactly react that way for Cartwright, who has been described as having the grace of a berserk crane. Centers are the rarest of birds in the NBA, though, and Cartwright was one, even if he reminded few of an athlete. Cartwright didn’t even remind himself of an athlete. Sometimes he’d find himself marveling at Jordan or Scottie Pippen flying toward the basket for a slam and say to himself, “Wouldn’t it be something to be able to do that, to be an athlete?” Cartwright, as the man said in the Dirty Harry movie, knew his limitations. He also knew that his time would be short in New York when Rick Pitino replaced Hubie Brown as coach.
“Rick wasn’t looking for basketball players,” said Cartwright after leaving New York. “If you happened to be a basketball player, fine, but Rick wanted guys who can run and jump, athletes.”
Cartwright knew he didn’t fit into that category. But don’t tell him he’s not a basketball player. There is no forge of athleticism in his movements, but rather the determined precision of a craftsman. Cartwright knows the game. He studied hard under Hubie Brown those years in New York when his Knick teams got close to being great, once taking the Celtics to a seventh game in the Eastern Conference semifinals. But Cartwright always had his critics. He rarely dunks the ball or blocks shots or dominates on rebounds. He’s got an unorthodox jump shot in which he grabs the ball as if he’s holding an axe, goes into a downward chopping motion, brings the ball up behind his ear while twisting away from the basket, and then squares up and leans in. It was good enough to make him among the league’s best percentage shooters his first five seasons, when he averaged about 18 points per game. But he twice broke his foot, missed almost all of two seasons, and became a scapegoat for the Knicks’ problems after being replaced by the superior Patrick Ewing. But he never lost his wry wit or keen sense of observation. He’s a student of politics and government, a self-made philosopher whose father was a farm laborer and whose mother was a domestic, yet someone who espouses archconservative views. Not only does Cartwright favor capital punishment, for example, but he advocates public executions.
“Sure, it would be great for everyone,” he says with just a hint of a smile so you’re not exactly sure he’s serious. But he is. “You’d have to have them on late after the kids went to sleep, maybe midnight. And you could show them on cable TV and make enough money to hire more police. It would be a great deterrent. Sure, it would be great. It would work.”
And while Cartwright liked to play the remote tough guy, he was as softhearted as they came. Cartwright’s home would often seem like a halfway house, with down-and-out friends staying for months at a time without a demand from Cartwright that they get a job.
But Cartwright didn’t get much playing time in New York after returning from those foot injuries. Patrick Ewing had come along by then, and Brown tried a twin-towers approach with Cartwright and Ewing. That approach had come into vogue when Houston, with Akeem Olajuwon and Ralph Sampson, upset the Lakers in five games in the 1986 Western Conference finals; suddenly everyone wanted two centers. But Ewing didn’t care to play forward, and when Brown was replaced, Cartwright took a seat on the bench behind Ewing. He didn’t like it, but he started to get used to the idea.
“It was like being retired,” Cartwright recalled. “I’d get eighteen, maybe twenty minutes against the backup center. It was hardly like playing.” Cartwright did average 11 points and shot 54 percent in about twenty minutes per game that last season in New York (1987–88), but by then life had become particularly uncomfortable, although more for Cartwright’s family than for him. He’s a stoic man, quiet, almost impervious to criticism. “I know what I can do and the people I care most about know what I can do, so who cares what anyone else thinks?” he’d say.
His strength was tested often. New Yorkers railed at Cartwright for his fragility. Acerbic New York Post columnist Pete Vecsey nicknamed Cartwright “Medical Bill” and “Billy Idle” for his injuries and time spent on the disabled list. It didn’t help that Cartwright’s injuries came right after he signed a new contract. He was further tested by the health problems of his son, Justin, who had developed a rare heart condition and needed surgery to save his life. It would be successful and he would go on to have a normal childhood, but there were many terrifying moments for Cartwright then, none of which the public or media ever knew about.
One story, though, typifies that period for Cartwright. He was at the hospital waiting out the vigil of Justin’s surgery. It was just after his own foot surgery and he was walking with crutches. He was standing outside the operating room with his wife, Sheri, when one crutch hit a wet spot and slipped out from under him. His gangly body collapsed under him and he went sprawling, one of the crutches catching Sheri, who collapsed on top of him. The two of them lay there struggling to get up while their son lay fighting for his life.
“This is typical of my life,” Cartwright said to Sheri as she tried to help him up. “I’ve got to do everything the hard way.”
Week after week there’d be another trade rumor once Cartwright recovered. Cartwright never complained, but he did tell a friend after being traded to the Bulls in 1988, “It’s going to be interesting if New York doesn’t win this year. It always seemed like if they could get somebody for me, they’d win. So who are they going to blame it on now?”
Rick Pitino? Al Bianchi? Ewing? Mark Jackson? Gulf + Western, which owned the Knicks? John Lindsay? Ed Koch? Take your choice.
The night Cartwright was traded to the Bulls for Charles Oakley, Michael Jordan was at the Mike Tyson-Michael Spinks fight in Atlantic City. Reporters started coming up to him: What do you think of the trade?
“What trade?” asked Jordan. When he was told, Jordan was stunned. He had adopted Oakley, the big, strong kid from Division II Virginia Union University, as sort of a little brother, albeit a little brother with broad shoulders and massive arms that gave Jordan a sense of security he felt with few other players. Oakley had become his bodyguard. In those days Jordan was making his points principally by hurtling toward the basket; the understanding around the league was, knock him down and you were going to get a shot sooner or later from Oakley. It gave an opponent pause. Jordan took Oakley under his powerful wing, brought him to the All-Star game as his guest in Oakley’s first season, and began riding to home games with him. Oakley would occasionally complain about a lack of shots, which many viewed as jealousy of Jordan, although that wasn’t totally the case; Oakley wanted to be an All-Star himself, and he knew in the NBA that meant scoring. He was frustrated by being left out of the offense. But even as he remained close to Jordan, Oakley realized what management was doing to the team, with its promotional campaigns for Jordan and the succession of coaches who relied completely on the game’s greatest individual player. “You can’t expect the rest of us to score all of a sudden when they shut down Michael and we haven’t had shots all season,” Oakley would tell Doug Collins. Oakley also didn’t keep his feelings from the media, and when he was traded, several players felt the message was clear: Speak out about Jordan, even obliquely, and you were gone.
Still, Oakley’s outbursts never affected his relationship with Jordan, for Jordan probably needed Oakley more than Oakley needed Jordan. The two often talked by telephone after the trade, and it was Jordan whom Oakley called the next season when he thought he had a chance to make the All-Star team and didn’t.
And traded for whom? Jordan thought. Bill Cartwright? Jordan never cared much for Cartwright’s play and wondered immediately who would be his policeman now. Not the bumbling Cartwright, or the then-210-pound Grant, who would take Oakley’s place in the starting lineup. “I don’t know about trading a twenty-four-year-old guy for a thirty-four-year-old guy [Cartwright was actually thirty-one then],” Jordan said at the time.
The big question was Cartwright’s knee. “It was always ‘I’m okay’ when I asked him how he was,” said Phil Jackson. “He’d always say he was ready to go. You couldn’t even get him out of practice. He’d say he needed to keep in condition for the game.” But by playoff time of 1990, Cartwright’s knee was so wretched he couldn’t sit in a car for more than a few minutes with his knee bent. On the team bus to games, he’d have to lie flat in his seat. But he never talked to anyone about it or complained. He just went out and played, often poorly because of his limited mobility, but even in that condition he was so much better than the team’s backup centers, Will Perdue and Stacey King, that he had to be out there.
Meanwhile, Jordan, as if to emphasize Cartwright’s clumsiness, began to lay out banana peels for Cartwright to slip on. He’d already proclaimed before the season that he would have to concentrate more on rebounding with Oakley gone. Knowing Cartwright was not a reflexively sharp athlete, he’d dart into the lane and shoot Cartwright a no-look pass. Invariably, it would bounce off Cartwright’s hands and go out of bounds. “He’s causing me too many turnovers,” Jordan would tell reporters, always making sure Cartwright could hear. And Jordan would shake his head and look toward Collins disgustedly after a Cartwright mistake, stretching his arms out with his palms upward, as if saying, “What more can I do?”
Cartwright refused to break. He might never truly earn the fans’ respect, but he did come to gain the respect of the players. Around the Bulls, they began to call Cartwright “Teach,” as in teacher. In recognition of this, Jackson named Cartwright cocaptain (with Jordan) when the team returned home from its western swing this year.
“The coaches would always say that if you want to know how to get things done, you watch Bill Cartwright,” said Jackson. “He’s a skilled, veteran player in a clumsy body, but with good skills. He’s got the best footwork on the team. We’d tell them to watch how he moves, how he gets position, how he moves his feet, his recognition of the offense. Everyone calls him ‘Teach.’ I don’t think I’ve ever heard Michael call him that, though.”
Not likely. Jordan didn’t feel Cartwright could score a basket in an empty gym.
Cartwright didn’t actually much care what Jordan thought. Winning was all he thought about. He was no different if he scored 30 points or 3: He believed in working hard, keeping your mouth shut, and doing what you could for your team. He couldn’t understand why Jordan’s fits of pique were always excused in the media as merely a competitor’s desire to win. Did it mean the rest of them weren’t trying as hard to win, didn’t want to win as much, or perhaps didn’t deserve to win because they weren’t as talented?
Jordan liked to belittle Cartwright in the locker room. He’d imitate Cartwright’s unorthodox shooting style with wild exaggerated moves that left many of his teammates trying to contain laughter when Cartwright was nearby. Cartwright would just look away and blame immaturity.
But Jordan went one step too far in the 1988–89 season. He was angry over the Bulls’ slow start and had already gone to Krause during the western trip in November to ask that he make some trades. “I need help,” he told Krause. Krause explained the Bulls had salary-cap problems, which Jordan neither understood nor cared to hear about. So Jordan made some decisions. One was that he would have to do just that much more himself. And to do that, he couldn’t have Cartwright fouling things up, especially late in the game.
So he told Grant, Vincent, and Pippen—three players who were usually on the floor at the end of games with him—that they were not to pass Cartwright the ball in the last four minutes of a game. “If you do that,” Jordan said, “you’ll never get the ball from me.” And suddenly, plays called by Collins were being ignored as Jordan took the ball to the basket. But who could really complain, since the Bulls had started to win? Eventually, though, word got back to Cartwright. He didn’t do or say anything to anybody until late that season, when he told Jordan he needed to talk to him.
There was little small talk exchanged. “I don’t like the things I’ve heard you saying about me,” Cartwright told Jordan.
Jordan stared at him.
“If I ever hear again that you’re telling guys not to pass me the ball,” Cartwright continued, “you will never play basketball again.”
That was it. But as Cartwright began to move better after surgery following the 1989–90 season, Jordan began to accept him more. He realized that neither Will Perdue nor Stacey King could adequately play center for the Bulls, and perhaps Cartwright could do some things to help the team. He didn’t block shots or rebound that well, Jordan thought, but he appeared to be able to score. And opposing centers, whether they feared his mad elbows or not, seemed not to exert themselves that much against Cartwright.
Jackson had offered Jordan a piece of advice, for as much as Jackson liked Cartwright, he realized one problem was that Jordan was too quick and too good an athlete to play easily with Cartwright. “When you pass him the ball,” Jackson told Jordan, “throw it at his nose. He’ll catch it then. You’ve got to try to hit him in the face or he’s not going to get it.”
“I think Michael can accept the job Bill does out there,” Jackson said in naming Cartwright cocaptain.
And Jordan did make a peace offering: He no longer throws Cartwright passes he doesn’t believe Cartwright can handle. He does throw them at his nose when he can think of it. But Jackson also knows he must tread carefully with the two, and as a rule he never places Jordan on a team against Cartwright in a scrimmage.
“Phil knows I’ll take him down if I have to,” Cartwright says.
The Bulls started a new winning streak after the losses to Portland and Milwaukee, but no one was fooled. They beat the Clippers, who were playing without Benoit Benjamin and Charles Smith, by 40. They beat Cleveland by 18 after taking a 36–5 first-quarter lead in an astonishing display of ineptitude by the Cavaliers, whose starting backcourt of Darnell Valentine and Gerald Paddio went scoreless in the game. They beat Miami, which was playing without center Rony Seikaly, by 9.
The only real amusement was in the Miami game. Rookie Willie Burton blocked a Jordan shot and started taunting Jordan, who was bothered by the flu and was to some extent coasting through the game. Sophomore Glen Rice chimed in, saying the Heat were going to embarrass Jordan on his home court. This was not smart. It seemed to revive him. Jordan stole the ball from Burton and dunked after the Heat had pulled to within 1, 96–95. Then Jordan blocked an Alec Kessler shot and hit Pippen for a breakaway lay-up. Jordan then stole the ball from Sherman Douglas, was fouled, and hit two free throws. Suddenly the Bulls were ahead by 7 with two minutes to go and the game was over.
Miami coach Ron Rothstein told Burton and Rice after the game never to say anything to Jordan again.
***
Despite the three wins, everyone knew there were problems. “We’re not winning because of talent,” said Jordan after the Miami game. “We’re just beating bad teams.”
The coaches met and talked about the bench, which had given up lead after lead. Jackson couldn’t find a suitable combination; he had been playing the reserves as a separate unit, but he decided to start playing them more with starters.
King remained overweight after coming to camp some 30 pounds over his 245-pound playing weight; the players were calling him everything from “Juicy Juice” to “Doughboy.” He looked as if he were wearing a coat under his uniform. Armstrong, too, was growing frustrated with his role on the second team. He had worked and improved during the summer, but Jackson liked the way John Paxson ran his offense and complemented Jordan. He felt Armstrong was too loose with the ball. So Armstrong sulked and his performance faltered. Dennis Hopson and Cliff Levingston continued to struggle in the offense, as Hopson tried to hide his slow return from off-season knee surgery. And Jackson was still wondering how to get five guards into the game. He wanted to play Craig Hodges more, but he was committed to trying to use Hopson and worried about Hodges’s defense.
“They start posting him up as soon as he gets off the bus,” Jackson joked in the meeting. The coaches called him “Highway Fourteen,” as in “Everyone comes down Highway Fourteen.” Fourteen was Hodges’s uniform number.
Tex Winter said they should release him and let him catch on somewhere where he could play.
“Hey, we may need him sometime,” said Bach. “You’ve got to remember, these are Hessians, hired soldiers. He’s a piece that may win a game for us someday. You just don’t give that away.”
But there was a more important matter ahead: the Pistons in the Palace of Auburn Hills.
The players were loose in the locker room before the game, much as they were before the seventh game of the conference finals last June, when they were pummeled by the Pistons. Armstrong was throwing his hands around in an exaggerated manner in front of the blackboard in the dressing room, saying, “Who’s this?” Everyone laughed.
It was an imitation of Krause, who after that seventh-game loss last June had told the team he never again wanted to be in such a position, as he threw papers down and slammed the blackboard. Krause had been coughing madly and trying to clear his throat and the players weren’t quite sure what he was saying.
Sometimes the coaches worried that the Bulls were too loose. They were young and liked to joke with one another, although the humor often had a hard, cutting edge. They teased about everything from girlfriends and wives to their long noses and funny ears with an often roguish insouciance. Before the New York game earlier in the month, Jordan, Pippen, and Grant, all of whom had boys under three at the time, had debated for a half hour about whose child had the biggest penis. They eventually agreed it was Pippen’s.
Before games, one of the coaches charts all the opponents’ plays on a blackboard. NBA scouting has become so sophisticated—and assistant coaches John Bach and Jim Cleamons, the third and youngest of the assistants, were primarily responsible for this with the Bulls—that as soon as the opposing coach signals a play, the Bulls staff can relay it to the players on the floor. Once, when Miami’s Sherman Douglas paused to hear his coach’s instructions, Jordan yelled, “He wants a high screen roll.”
Tapes of opponents’ games are also edited and left rolling on a television in the locker room before the game, but Bulls players aren’t always very studious. Cartwright and Paxson usually watch carefully, and Jordan does more often than most. But the younger players rarely do, and on this night it showed.
The game went as so many have in the Palace. The Bulls hung on for a quarter, but the pace was slow, which always worked in the Pistons’ favor. The Bulls need to run and scatter the game against Detroit, but they can’t because the Pistons dominate the rebounding. When that happens, it’s just a matter of time before the Pistons pull away. In this game, the Bulls got dismantled in the second quarter and eventually lost by 21. Jordan scored 33, but no one else hit double figures. Pippen shot 2 for 16 and Hodges, Hopson, and Levingston combined to shoot 1 for 15. The entire bench was scoreless on 15 shots through three quarters.
Grant attempted 8 shots and was outraged again about the failure of Jordan and Pippen to pass the ball to anyone or run the offense. “We’ll never beat good teams that way,” he said as he walked briskly to the waiting team bus. The reserves felt they were being blamed for the team’s failures, and the new rotation in which the all-reserve unit was broken up made things tougher. They were getting less time and even fewer shots because neither Jordan nor Pippen would pass any of them the ball, then when they did miss, they were singled out for the losses. “How are you supposed to average fifteen a game when you get three shots?” wondered Hopson.
Afterward, Jackson talked about changes in personnel and in the lineup if the Bulls could not come back a week later on Christmas Day to defeat the Pistons.
It was a quiet trip home, filled with glassy eyes and glum looks. Jordan unfurled the stat sheet on the bus and offered: “Headache tonight, Scottie?”
The Lakers were next, but the Bulls were still stewing about the Pistons. After the coaches watched the films, a regular postgame practice in the NBA now, they became even further enraged by Detroit’s bullying tactics. Cliff Levingston had been kicked in the groin by Vinnie Johnson, and the Pistons again were allowed more latitude by the referees than other teams, the coaches felt.
“It’s their style,” fumed Jackson. “The referees get accustomed to the way you play and allow you to play within those parameters. So Detroit is allowed to play more physically.”
The Bulls were so frustrated that they felt they had to do something. They decided to complain to the league, as the Pistons had years ago, a tactic that had resulted in fewer trips to the foul line for Jordan. Krause and Jackson complained intensely to operations director Rod Thorn that they could not compete with Detroit if the Pistons were allowed to play this way. They would send tapes.
At the same time, Jackson tried to encourage the team to get more physical. “You’ve got to hit someone,” Jackson counseled Grant after the Detroit game. “When we play Detroit, you’ve just got to hit guys, anyone. Punch someone. Get thrown out of the game. Just do some damage.”
Grant listened, but he was hesitant; that wasn’t his game. Bach agreed. “Sure, we need to hit someone, but who’s going to do it?”
The Bulls could fly, but they could also be as harmless as birds.
The game against the Lakers showed just how magnificent the Bulls could be in full flight. The Bulls were too quick and athletic for the Lakers; both Jordan and Pippen missed triple doubles by just 1 assist. They forced turnovers, slashed to the offensive boards, and grabbed most of the loose balls. In Jordan, Pippen, and Grant, they had perhaps the quickest “two-three-four” trio in the league. It was their ultimate strength. But Bill Cartwright also bullied Vlade Divac out of the way, and in the fourth quarter, when the Lakers pulled within 3, it was Jordan, Pippen, and Grant scoring 22 of the team’s 24 points.
The next night, the Bulls blew by the Pacers to take a 14-point first-quarter lead, this time with John Paxson hitting his shots; he would get 23 points for the game. The Bulls led by 20 before halftime and relaxed. The Pacers made a run, but the Bulls regrouped behind Pippen and Jordan, who scored 7 straight after the Pacers got within 1, 104–103, in the fourth quarter. The Bulls coasted to a 10-point victory.
But all thoughts were still on the Pistons, who were coming in next, on Christmas Day. And Jackson had an idea.
The Bulls, especially Jordan, knew they needed more scoring to defeat Detroit. They once had hopes that either Hopson or Walter Davis would come to the rescue. But Davis had decided to stay in Denver, although he was now on the market and the Bulls were talking about trading for him. And Hopson couldn’t seem to find his way in the Bulls’ system and seemed almost to resent the coaching at times; a wall was going up between him and Jackson that would only grow bigger as the season progressed. Jackson had toyed the previous year with the idea of starting King in hopes of getting him into the offense and bringing Grant off the bench. But Grant was in a fragile emotional state for much of that season because of his contract negotiations, and Jackson feared Grant would read the move as an attempt to lessen his bargaining power, so he stayed with him.
But now Grant had a new three-year deal and Jackson felt it was time to make the change. Perhaps Grant could score more coming off the bench, and Jackson liked the matchup of Grant coming in to play John Salley, who gave the Bulls trouble. Jackson also thought a start might jump-start King’s game, which had been drowning under his massive ego. He’d already had a pair of scoreless games—King said he’d never had one in his life—and a third of his shots were being blocked. King seemed to be getting desperate; he told Bach he was going to change his number to change his luck, but Bach informed him he couldn’t do that during the season. He got a trendy haircut in which several geometric designs were shaved into his head above his ears; Jackson, seeing one was triangle-shaped, asked him if he was trying to learn the offense by osmosis. But Jackson felt he needed King, and always believed if he left King on the court long enough he would score, maybe 14 to 16 points per game. So he decided to let King start against the Pistons.
Word began to circulate on the players’ grapevine. King was upset about playing little, even if he’d rarely played well. The talk was that King’s agent, the powerful David Falk of ProServ, had threatened the team: Play King or we are going to blast the Bulls in the press. Actually, Falk had merely talked to Krause about King’s status. But there were rumors. And Grant believed the rumors.
And with good reason. When King first came to the Bulls, he was all confidence and swagger. He loved to talk. He made up nicknames for himself, like “Sky” and “the Pearl.” He was a journalism major and he had a great story: He was an Oklahoma kid whose father had served two tours of duty in Vietnam and was decorated for drenching himself in water in order to put out a fire threatening a munitions dump. His mother was tough and demanded a good education for her son; when Oklahoma tried some questionable recruiting tactics, she told the newspapers, “I don’t want my baby to go to Oklahoma. I want him to be able to read a stop sign.”
King did have academic problems—yes, even at Oklahoma—when he started; he lost his eligibility as a freshman and struggled somewhat as a sophomore. But with opposing defenses geared to stopping Harvey Grant, he blossomed and became a big-time scorer. The knock on him was that he was “soft,” in the pro scouts’ vernacular—that he didn’t rebound well despite that 10-per-game average, and he didn’t guard the middle. He played in an offense suited to his quick style, so he didn’t have to power to the basket as he would in the pros. But all that was forgotten as the draft drew near; he was projected as the Bulls’ power forward of the future, but for now he would play behind Horace Grant.
This was made clear when King arrived, and King said all the right things. But privately he boasted about becoming a starter, and King’s girlfriend, when she met Grant’s wife, Donna, boldly said, “My boyfriend’s going to take your husband’s job.”
Donna, a shy, sensitive South Side Chicago girl who’d met Horace at a local club when he was a rookie, was devastated. She cried about the meeting, and would again when the starters were introduced on Christmas Day with King at power forward and the girlfriend in the stands taunting her. “Told you, told you,” King’s girlfriend, Lisa, shouted from about six rows behind Donna in the wives’ section. “My boyfriend is the starter and Horace is never going to get it back.” Eventually, Jackson would have to call both players in and tell them to tell the women to cool it.
The Bulls beat the Pistons on Christmas Day and they even got rough; Grant pushed Joe Dumars in the fourth quarter and was ejected. Bullies? By then, though, the Bulls were ahead by 12 and the game was pretty much decided. They shot well, 52 percent, which they didn’t do against Detroit in Auburn Hills; Grant did hold Salley down, although Salley tends to coast in the regular season and play harder in the playoffs. But King was a bust, shooting 2 for 7 and scoring 6 points. Mostly, the Bulls won with an aggressive third quarter. Since they have no shot blocker and aren’t an exceptionally strong rebounding team, they rely on their defense to create opportunities and their quickness to stymie shooters. They held Detroit to 4-of-17 shooting and 14 points in the third quarter and went from 5 down at halftime to 9 ahead. They pretty much controlled the game afterward.
The win didn’t exactly trigger a celebration. They had defeated the Pistons at home before, three straight in Chicago in the 1990 conference finals; what had they proven?
“We’re supposed to win at home,” said Hodges. “It’s like Eddie Murphy said, ‘Show me something. Here, Stevie [Wonder], you take the wheel and drive.’ Now that’s something. We haven’t shown anything.”
And the Bulls marketing staff was disappointed. For the big national-TV Christmas Day game they had hoped to put the Bulls in red uniforms, but the league had rejected the request. They had wanted the team to wear green uniforms for Saint Patrick’s Day the year before, but Jackson had squelched that. They were hoping to revive an indoor fireworks display they had tried earlier in the season, but the players complained about being hit by falling debris from the rafters of the elderly hulk that was Chicago Stadium. It was a constant battle Jackson would fight with management. “What’s all this stuff with mascots and dancing Blues Brothers and blimps floating all over the place?” he’d say. “Why can’t it be just basketball? They seem to do all right with that in Boston.”
It’s the NBA, he was told. It’s Fan-Tastic.
The Bulls had little trouble with Golden State two nights later, although the game became something of a spectator event for everyone but Jordan and Pippen.
The latest results in the All-Star voting had come out and Pippen was fifth in the fan balloting for the two Eastern Conference forward positions. He studied his statistics before the game, and while they were good, he knew Bernard King was having an All-Star season after knee surgery and Dominique Wilkins and Kevin McHale were always coaches’ favorites for the team. Charles Barkley and Larry Bird were sure to be selected by the fans as starters and it was unlikely more than three more forwards would be selected by the coaches. “I’ve got to get myself up there in the voting,” he said.
So he started taking the ball to the basket, and by halftime he had 15 points and 11 shots, 1 more than Jordan. “The General’s not going to like that,” Hodges whispered to Paxson as the teams left the court at halftime with the Bulls ahead by 14.
Sure enough, Jordan took 6 of the Bulls’ first 7 shots of the second half and scored 18 points in the third quarter, although Pippen would not quit: He added 14 as the Bulls went ahead 105–85.
“It’s just two guys,” Grant said later, having scored 1 point off the bench. “Two guys are doing what they want and the rest of us don’t seem to matter.”
On the bench, Winter was threatening to quit. “They won’t run the offense,” he told Jackson. “If we don’t want to run the offense, I’ll just leave.”
Were Jordan and Pippen being selfish? Jackson was asked afterward.
“We like to call them scorers, not selfish,” Jackson offered.
Jackson finally gave Pippen a long rest in the fourth quarter, and he would finish with a career-high 34. But Jordan had 42, and an AP wire-service reporter summed up every writer’s defense for not featuring Pippen in the game story: “You’ve usually got to lead with the high scorer,” he explained.
King had started again, and after he scored only 2 points and shot 1 of 4, Jackson had to admit the experiment was a failure. With Seattle coming in, Jackson decided to go back to Grant as a starter to face Shawn Kemp. “He’ll be jumping over Stacey and standing on his shoulders,” Jackson told his coaches.
Again, the game was no problem. The starters gave the Bulls a 38–27 lead after one quarter. Seattle pulled within 8 at the half, then the Bulls took a 17-point lead after three quarters and had it up to 29 before calling in the end of the bench. But there wasn’t enough time to get Scott Williams into the game.
The rookie free agent had been the surprise of the training camp and the early season. He hadn’t been drafted because of shoulder problems—the pros had figured he’d need surgery. But the Bulls signed him, and despite several excruciating episodes in which his shoulder popped out of place, Williams insisted on playing through the season. And he would play so well at times later in the season that Jackson would use him ahead of King and even Grant.
Jackson, though, generally believes in seniority, so Williams had to wait his turn. He was doing that on the bench as the Bulls stretched their lead to almost 30 against the SuperSonics in that last game of December 1990. Finally, Jackson called for him to go in, but as he waited at the scorer’s table no fouls were called, the clock didn’t stop, and the game ended.
In the locker room afterward, Williams sat crying.
Jordan whispered something to him. They’d put the rookie next to Jordan because Jordan had helped recruit him for North Carolina and had wanted him with the Bulls. Rookies can get lost sitting next to Jordan. It was harder on 1989 rookie Jeff Sanders, whom Jordan didn’t care for because of his lazy attitude. Jordan often demeaned the slow-moving, slow-talking Sanders as he sat not three feet away. Once when Sanders rebounded and slammed in practice, Jordan shouted, “Hey, the No Doz must have worn off.” Before the season, the Bulls traded Sanders to Miami, which later released him. He went to the CBA and got called up on a ten-day contract by the Charlotte Hornets; “It’s probably a twelve-day,” Jordan said when he heard about it. “He needs two days to wake up.”
But Jordan liked Williams and sympathized with him. He knew what the problem was, and it wasn’t just that Williams had become frustrated by not getting into a blowout game.
“It’s worst for him around the holidays,” said Jordan. “I don’t say much to him, but I’ll usually ask him home for dinner or try to do something with him.”
Three years earlier, on October 15, 1987, Williams’s father, Al, estranged from his wife, Rita, waited for her in the garage of her California home. Rita was on the way home from work as an insurance executive. Al, a department-store manager, shot her dead before she could get out of the car, and then turned the gun on himself.
Scott Williams, at 6-10 and 240 pounds, had been a high school star in Hacienda Heights, California. Bill Cosby called him on behalf of UCLA, as did Tommy Lasorda, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and John Wooden. UCLA didn’t want to let this big local talent get away. But Dean Smith and North Carolina won, with the help of alumni such as Jordan, James Worthy, and Sam Perkins. Williams became Dean Smith’s first West Coast recruit. He performed below expectations in college, though satisfactorily, as he was overshadowed by J. R. Reid. Scott Williams was just preparing for his sophomore season in North Carolina’s senior-dominated scheme when the murder-suicide occurred.
“Obviously, it had an effect on him,” Dean Smith said. “No one could ever be the same after something like that.”
Williams never averaged more than the 14.5 points and 7.9 rebounds he reached in his senior season, and went from being a sure first-rounder to being undrafted. His brother would move to North Carolina after the tragedy so the two could comfort each other. Williams, a powerfully built kid with a fast smile and hard eyes, grew remote and often wandered the campus pensively.
Williams doesn’t talk about the deaths of his parents. He prefers to remember how his father raised money so his high school team could have state championship rings, and how his mother would miss work to get to his games and pitch batting practice to the two boys when they were trying to make the Little League team.
He just plays through pain and disappointment. He says that he knows now he can handle any sort of adversity, that no matter what he has to face it cannot overshadow what has happened to him. He doesn’t say anything about it. There’s no need to.
Williams wiped his eyes as the other Bulls dressed. It was December 29 and the team would not play again until January 3; they’d have the next two days off and return for a light practice on New Year’s Day. They were 20–9, the same record they’d had last year after twenty-nine games, when they went on to win fifty-five, the second-most in team history. Grant made fun of Pippen’s shoes and Pippen joked about Armstrong’s cologne. Hodges had departed quickly while Hopson slowly pulled his clothes on. He had taken the corner locker, the one Dave Corzine always had, where Corzine would sit for an hour after the game. Hopson, for some reason, was often the last out of the locker room, too. “Noon, Jan. 1” was scribbled on the blackboard. The Bulls’ locker room is cramped and the players don’t linger much other than Hopson and Jordan, who usually plows patiently through twenty minutes of interviews. Reporters and TV technicians jockey for position. Paxson swept out quickly with his son, Ryan, who attended the game, and Jackson finished a beer and a cigarette, a postgame ritual. The interviews over, Jordan turned to the still red-eyed rookie.
“Come on, Scott, let’s go get something to eat,” Jordan said softly.