Phil Jackson’s hiring as head coach of the Chicago Bulls brought to an end a long and varied apprenticeship. After prepping in sports-crazy Williston, he had played pressure defense under Bill Fitch in college for three years while studying religion, philosophy, and psychology. From there he spent a decade in Red Holzman’s much-needed academy of common sense, with more pressure defense. Summers were reserved for graduate courses in counseling and therapy. He also learned a meaningful lesson in the limits of a pro basketball player’s body. Next came his three seasons in New Jersey, a synthesis of playing and coaching and media; followed by a period of induced humility with his failed business in Montana; and then his protracted internship in the Continental Basketball Association, aided by summer school in Puerto Rico. His doctoral work had been performed in Jerry Krause’s Intense Finishing School, two seasons under the individual tutelage of two old masters, Johnny Bach and Tex Winter.
Now it appeared Phil Jackson was ready—except that he needed one final brush-up.
After accepting the job that July, Jackson rushed to coach the Bulls’ team of draftees and young free agents in the NBA summer league. The summer team was always Tex Winter’s domain, but Jackson took the time to examine the triangle one final time to decide which parts of it, if any, he could use that first season. There simply wasn’t time to get the whole thing in. As badly as he wanted to see his offense in place, Winter knew that as well.
“It is complicated and it does take a lot of experience,” Bach said. “Phil found parts of it that he liked better than others. Phil himself began to understand the triple-post. He spent a lot of time with Tex.”
They both agreed that before the offense could be fully installed, a lot of prep work had to be done with the players, beginning with Jordan. That would be Jackson’s job. And it wasn’t just about the offense. It involved the entire culture that had grown around Jordan. Jackson as an assistant coach had been careful to cultivate a good relationship with the star. But now Jackson would have to elevate the nature of that relationship. He had to keep Jordan as an ally while effecting big changes. Winter would later marvel at the effort and quiet tenacity that Jackson brought to the task.
By the time Jackson took over as head coach of the Bulls in 1989, Michael Jordan was twenty-six years old and facing explosive fame and wealth. His annual off-court income was ballooning from $4 million to $30 million. Overnight he had become a cultural icon. As an assistant Jackson had watched Jordan struggle personally to cope with this newfound status. Now, his immediate fear as head coach was that both Jordan and the team might well be consumed by it.
“I was nervous when I took over the Bulls,” Jackson admitted, “but it wasn’t the kind of nervousness where you lose sleep at night. I wanted to do well. I was anxious about having a good relationship with Michael. I was anxious about selling him on the direction in which I was going.
“You knew what Michael was going to give you every single night as a player. He was gonna get those 30 points; he was gonna give you a chance to win. The challenge was, how to get the other guys feeling a part of it, like they had a role, a vital part. It was just his team, his way.
“He had such hero worship in the United States among basketball fans that living with him had become an impossibility,” Jackson explained. “Traveling in airports, he needed an entourage to get through. He had brought people along on the road with him. His father would come. His friends would come on the road. He had just a life that sometimes alienated him from his teammates. It became a challenge to make him part of the team again and still not lose his special status because he didn’t have the necessary privacy.
“I had roomed on the same floor of hotels as he did. Michael always had a suite because of who he was, and the coaches got suites, too, because we needed the space for team meetings and staff meetings. Michael basically had to have someone stay in his room with him. I’d hear murmuring in the hallway, and there’d be six or eight of the hotel staff, cleaning ladies, busboys, getting autographs and standing in the hallway with flowers. It was incredible, and he was constantly bothered.”
Most coaches, particularly first-year coaches, wouldn’t have dared to begin changing the rules for Jordan, especially if those new rules separated him from his entourage of family and friends. But Jackson began that process.
“I knew,” he explained, “that we had to make exceptions to the basic rules that we had: ‘OK, so your father and your brothers and your friends can’t ride on the team bus. Let’s keep that a team thing. Yeah, they can meet you on the road, but they can’t fly on the team plane. There has to be some of the team stuff that is ours, that is the sacred part of what we try to do as a basketball club.’”
Jackson had decided that dealing with and controlling the ever-growing media contingency would be another major task. He figured Jordan and the team needed a shield as much as anything. And behind the shield he wanted to create a sanctuary, an inner place that was only for the team.
“I got a curtain for our practice facility, so that practice became our time together,” he explained. “It was just the twelve of us and the coaches, not the reporters and the television cameras. It wasn’t going to be a show for the public anymore. It became who are we as a group, as people. Michael had to break down some of his exterior. You know that when you become that famous person you have to develop a shell around you to hide behind. Michael had to become one of the guys in that regard. He had to involve his teammates, and he was able to do that. He was able to bring it out and let his hair down at the same time.”
The effort would involve getting Jordan to rethink his own personal parameters—a major undertaking, because those parameters were growing and changing daily. “Over his years in pro basketball, Michael had learned to mark out his own territory,” Jackson explained. “He had his own stall at every arena where he might find the most privacy, or he might find a territory in the trainer’s room. He had two stalls in the old Chicago Stadium. That was his spot because there were twenty-five reporters around him every night.
“We continued the protocol of all that, but we also made efforts to create space for him within the team. If we hadn’t done that, the way he was going to treat us was that the rest of the world was going to overrun us, if we hadn’t done things the right way. So we said, ‘Let’s not all suffer because of his fame. Let’s give ourselves space and exclude the crowd.’ I guess I created a safe zone, a safe space for Michael. That’s what I tried to do.”
“Phil’s handled Michael so well,” John Paxson would say later. “If I could ever take a page out of the manual for handling a superstar, it would be the way Phil’s handled Michael Jordan.”
One of Jackson’s delights as a Bulls assistant was to spend hours studying videotape of Jordan’s performances—many of them absolutely phenomenal athletic feats, things no one had ever done in basketball. “Some nights he could take on a whole team,” Jackson explained. “They’d say, ‘That son of a gun, he beat us all to the basket.’ As a coach, you can run that tape back all day. You say, ‘Look at this guy go around that guy and that guy. He beat four guys going to the basket that time.’ That’s destructive. That’s something that Michael’s been known for, and I know it grates at the heart of the other team. It’s an amazing feat this guy has been able to accomplish. But I think his power is very addictive. You know the fans were there looking for him. Everybody’s waiting. They loved it. He had this tremendous vision of basketball. He was this tremendous entertainer.”
Jordan’s “greatness,” however, was tempered by that same old issue: Was he the kind of player who could lead a team to a championship? Could he make his teammates better?
As an assistant, Jackson had come to appreciate the exceptionally keen nature of Jordan’s mind. As a head coach, he relished the opportunity to fully engage that mind to pursue the goal that both of them wanted badly. He wanted to challenge his player, but only mentally. He wanted to use Jordan’s mind to bring about the discipline that the Bulls so badly needed. Jackson suspected that Jordan would respond to a mental challenge, if it was issued on a daily basis—not issuing directives as Collins had, but suggesting paths and leaving Jordan and his teammates free to choose.
“When Phil came along, I thought he did much more than adopt the triple-post offense,” Bach observed. “I think Phil threw the game back to the players. ‘It’s your game. You’re out there on the floor. You make the decisions.’ It sounds like wild freedom, but it was not wild freedom, just a change in philosophy.”
Such an approach required immense advance work to prepare the players to make their own decisions, in practice and in the discussions that Jackson began with Jordan.
“He has more psychological sayings to make you think about things,” Jordan observed in those early days. “He reminds me of Dean Smith a lot. Dean used to play a lot of mind games. Both of them make you think about your own mistakes. Instead of yelling at you, Phil makes you think about it and you eventually realize that you made a mistake. That type of psychological warfare sometimes can drive a person crazy, yet it can drive you to achieve, too. I like mind games, so Phil is great for me.”
These subtle changes soon gained notice by the rest of the team.
“I think there came a point where he understood his greatness was going to be defined by winning,” John Paxson said of Jordan. “That’s why I saw a change in his real commitment to winning championships and, to that end, dealing with teammates and getting guys he felt comfortable with, that were able to play with him. It was really that understanding that championships mean a lot, when it comes down to who’s the greatest. There are great NBA players who’ve never won championships, and it’s always been a blot on their careers.”
Jackson took quick measure of the messages he was sending to all those involved with the team. As with his players, he assigned substantial latitude to his assistant coaches. Each member of the staff had assigned duties and was given ample room to perform them, a development that the players quickly picked up on. Unlike many coaches who were control freaks, Jackson seemed eager for his coaches to have free input.
He hired Jim Cleamons, an old Knicks teammate, as the team’s third assistant. Cleamons, in his early forties, actually didn’t know Jackson all that well. They had both been reserves for the Knicks in Jackson’s last season there. Cleamons remembered that they had played well together in practice, had approached the game the same way. But he hadn’t seen Jackson in years until he came to Chicago in the spring of 1988 to visit Brad Sellers, who had played for Cleamons at Ohio State. At the time, Cleamons was the coach at Youngstown State. He came to the Bulls’ practice and saw Jackson (an assistant at the time) and had a nice chat. Several months later, Cleamons got a phone call from the Bulls. He assumed they wanted to ask him about a college player. Instead, it was Jackson, asking whether he wanted to come for an interview. The next thing Cleamons knew, he was back in the NBA doing the advance scouting chores that Jackson himself had done.
Winter focused on offense, and Bach was the defensive specialist. Like Winter, Bach relished debating Jackson. “He was his own man; he loved to play devil’s advocate,” trainer Mark Pfeil said of Bach. “Sometimes people took him too seriously. I always called him Doctor Doom. I don’t care what we were doing, he always thought the worst was going to happen.”
Jackson was keenly aware of Bach’s influence on players, an issue that would develop as an undercurrent over the coming seasons. “Phil had called Johnny the locker room coach, which meant he was the liaison with the players, especially for Horace Grant,” explained radio reporter Cheryl Raye. “Horace was extremely sensitive, took everything at face value. So Johnny was there to explain everything. While Phil would be screaming at him, Johnny would be there, ‘OK, Horace.’ He’d be stroking him and telling him everything was all right. So Johnny was very close to Horace. The players had so much respect for him, especially defensively.”
With so many questions about their offense, Jackson and his assistants knew that their ability to play defense would buy them time to evolve at the other end of the floor. They knew they had the personnel to pressure the ball, which could produce turnovers and easy baskets, another factor in taking pressure off the offense.
“When Phil came in, our first training camp was as difficult a camp as I’d ever had,” recalled guard John Paxson. “It was defensive-oriented. Everything we did was, start from the defensive end and work to the offensive end. Phil basically made us into a pressure-type team. Defensively, he knew that was how we would win.”
“We were gonna play fullcourt pressure defense,” Jackson said. “We were gonna throw our hearts into it.”
In many ways, the players seemed to draw their defensive identity from Bach. “They seemed to take their pride from him,” Cheryl Raye observed. “It just rubbed off, especially the defense. When he put the Aces up, the military term that signaled for the pressure, it got everybody going.”
Coming out of camp, the players and coaches knew they were much better, and the energy was tangible as they finished the preseason 8–0. Yet everyone knew that a big adjustment lay ahead. The Bulls had to find a comfort level playing in the strange new offense. And then there was the matter of Cartwright. Michael Jordan openly resented the big center, who seemed to have trouble catching the ball in traffic. It wasn’t just Cartwright, because Jordan cast a hard eye at any teammate who was not ready or willing to get better.
“I guess I expected more from a lot of them,” Jordan said. “But some of them didn’t want to take more responsibility … We were inconsistent and I was frustrated.”
“He was always challenging you in little ways,” Paxson said of Jordan. “The thing you had to do with Michael Jordan is you had to gain his confidence as a player. You had to do something that gave him some trust in you as a player. He was hard on teammates as far as demanding you play hard, you execute. So there had to come some point where you did something on the floor to earn his trust. That was the hardest thing for new guys coming in, and some guys couldn’t deal with it. Some guys could not play consistently enough or well enough, or they would not do the dirty work or little things. That’s one of the reasons why Michael liked Charles Oakley, because Charles played hard. He did little things on the floor that Michael appreciated, but a lot of guys didn’t understand that.
“Michael demanded nothing less than playing hard. If you missed shots when you were open, he didn’t want to see that either. If Michael came off the screen and roll a couple of times and threw a quick pass to Bill Cartwright and he couldn’t handle it, Michael wasn’t going to go there again. That was kind of what happened early. If you do something and one of your teammates doesn’t respond to it, you’re going to think twice about going there. It’s a natural thing. You always sensed with Michael that he was looking for perfection out of himself. There’s a part of him that expected that of those around him, too.”
“I feel I’m very observant about the game and how it’s played,” Jordan would later explain. “I try to be aware when my team needs my creativity and scoring or my passing or rebounding. If things were going well, I didn’t have to score too much. I could stay in the background and get everyone else involved.”
“Michael challenged guys,” Paxson explained, “and for some, their game didn’t live up to that challenge. Brad Sellers, for example. It was tough for him to handle what Michael expected of him. Michael had a tendency to look at certain guys and say, ‘You’re capable of doing this. Why aren’t you? I look at your physical skills. Why can’t you?’ I’m sure he looked at me many times and said, ‘You’re not capable of doing that on the floor.’ But I had an advantage with Michael in our basketball relationship. We spent a month overseas together when we were in college as part of an international team in 1981. I made a shot to win a game over in Yugoslavia, and I’ve got to believe that in the back of his mind, Michael remembered that about me as a player. He was able to trust me. It’s all about earning his trust and his knowing that he could rely on you when there was pressure and the game was on the line. At the same time, I don’t remember Michael early on putting any pressure on Scottie Pippen or Horace. He knew that a lot of guys have to grow into the league.
“Michael was always more than fair with me. He was always positive with me and never said anything negative about me in the papers. That meant a lot to me. You can get battered down when the great player of the team says something critical of you personally. He didn’t do that. I thought early on he was too reserved toward players at times. I’m sure he felt he was walking a fine line. ‘Should I be critical? Should I just lay back and let these guys do their own thing?’ I felt the more vocal he became as a leader, the better we were. Once he really started challenging guys, it made us better. We had to learn how to play with Michael as well as Michael had to learn to play with us.”
They went 8–6 over the month of November, and there were few smiling faces. December, however, brought a trend: they would find bursts of momentum and consume the schedule with winning streaks. First came a five-game run right before the holidays, then another five heading into the new year. Their offense continued to struggle, but the secret was their defense. Across the league, other coaches began talking about it—and fearing it.
Then, just as suddenly, their magic faltered, and during a West Coast road trip things reached a low point with four straight losses. Even worse, Cartwright was struggling with sore knees and missed several games. Jackson saw their play without Cartwright as critical to their development. He was looking for much more from Grant and Pippen.
“My first year here you could read their facial expressions like a book,” Jim Cleamons would recall later. “They were easily frustrated when things did not go right. But over their first three years, they learned how to play, and they learned to keep their composure on the court. They matured and grew more confident.”
“I think the physical demands on Scottie were what got to him the most,” Cheryl Raye observed. “When he got here, he was very fragile mentally. I tie that to his being from a very small school, being from a different background, a different setting. Scottie never had any of the grooming that guys like Michael who went to big programs had. At the big schools, they groom those guys with the media. Usually they have some sort of maturity about them when they get to the NBA. Scottie did a couple of things on his own. He hired a speech coach from Chicago. She’s a radio person and worked on how he handled questions, what to say.”
“My first year or two, I admit that I messed around a lot,” Pippen said later. “I partied, enjoyed my wealth, and didn’t take basketball as seriously as I should have. I’m sure a lot of rookies did the same thing I did. You’re not used to the limelight or being put in a great situation financially … There were nights where I should have been more focused on basketball.”
Pippen’s career had been interrupted by back surgery in his second year in the league, but he was able to make a successful comeback. With playing time under Jackson, he made dramatic improvement, turning in stellar performances throughout 1989–90. That February of 1990, he was named an All-Star for the first time, joining Jordan on the Eastern Conference team.
“He’s on the cusp of greatness,” Bach said of Pippen. “He’s starting to do the kinds of things only Michael does.”
“It’s just a matter of working hard,” Pippen said. “I’ve worked to improve my defense and shooting off the dribble. I know I’m a better spot-up shooter, but I’m trying to pull up off the dribble when the lane is blocked.”
Jordan led in scoring, but it was Pippen who gave opposing coaches nightmares. Few teams had a means of matching up with him, particularly when they also had to worry about Jordan.
“Starting out, you could see Scottie’s possibilities,” Jackson recalled. “He could rebound yet still dribble. He could post up, but he also had those slashing moves. You knew he could be very good, but you didn’t know how good. He played a few times at guard in his first few seasons, bringing the ball up against teams with pressing guards, but mostly we used him at small forward. As more and more teams pressed, however, we decided we had to become more creative. More and more we had to go to Michael to bring the ball up. We didn’t want to do that. We came up with the thought of Scottie as a third ball advancer, of an offense that attacked at multiple points. From that position Scottie started to take control, to make decisions. He became a bit of everything.”
Fortunately, the All-Star break provided relief. Jackson’s players regained whatever confidence they’d lost, and won nine straight. They lost a game to Utah in Chicago Stadium, then won six of eight and followed that with another nine-game win streak.
The win streaks propelled them to a 55–27 finish in 1990, good for second place in the Central Division behind the 60-win Pistons, the defending world champions. And Jordan harvested another batch of honors: All-NBA and All-Defensive teams, and his fourth consecutive scoring title. Plus he led the league in steals.
With the playoffs approaching, Jackson cast an eye toward the scouting footage that Bach was putting together. “Phil wanted to put in the theme,” Bach recalled. Instead of the older assistant’s military motifs, Jackson, an outspoken advocate of gun control, offered up his own take. “He introduced Pink Floyd and the story of the white buffalo.”
Bach chuckled at the difference in their selections. “We are very different people,” he recalled. “His mother and father were tent preachers. My father was a maritime officer.”
The Bulls sailed into the playoffs with new confidence and Pippen playing like a veteran. First they dismissed the Milwaukee Bucks, then followed that by humbling Charles Barkley and the Philadelphia 76ers. But Pippen’s seventy-year-old father died during the series, and the young forward rushed home to Arkansas for the funeral. He returned in time to help finish off Philly. Next up were the Pistons and the Eastern finals. In essence, it was the big exam for Jackson’s new style of play. “Detroit was still an enigma,” the coach later recalled.
The series was a gauntlet. The year before in the playoffs, Pistons center Bill Laimbeer, one of the primary advocates of their physical style, had knocked Pippen out of Game 6 with an elbow to the head. The Detroit center claimed the shot was inadvertent, but that wasn’t the way the Bulls saw it. To win a championship, they knew they had to stand up to the Bad Boys.
Jackson said he had never had a cross word with Pistons coach Chuck Daly, yet Jackson had no doubts who issued the directives for excessively physical play.
“I thought they were thugs,” Reinsdorf said of the Pistons, “and you know, you have to hold the ownership responsible for that. I mean, Billy Laimbeer was a thug. He would hit people from behind in the head during dead balls. He took cheap shots all the time. Mahorn and lunatic Rodman, I mean, they tried to hurt people.
“They called themselves the Bad Boys, and they marketed themselves under that name. I would never have allowed that. You know I blame the league and David Stern a little bit for that, too. It was terrible.”
“There were times,” Pippen said, “a few years before the flagrant foul rules, when guys would have a breakaway and [the Pistons] would cut their legs out from under them. Anything to win a game. That’s not the way the game is supposed to be played. I remember once when Michael had a breakaway, and Laimbeer took him out. There was no way he could have blocked the shot. When you were out there playing them, that was always in the back of your mind, to kind of watch yourself.”
The Bulls, however, thought they were ready to challenge Detroit in 1990. At first, their conference final series seemed to develop as a classic, with each team winning tight battles at home to tie it at 3–3 heading into Game 7 at the Palace at Auburn Hills. The Pistons had home-court advantage, but the Bulls had worked for years to get to this point. Things went dreadfully wrong, beginning with Paxson limping from a badly sprained ankle and Pippen developing a migraine headache just before tipoff.
“Scottie had had migraines before,” trainer Mark Pfeil explained. “He actually came to me before the game and said he couldn’t see. I said, ‘Can you play?’ He started to tell me no, and Michael jumped in and said, ‘Hell, yes, he can play. Start him. Let him play blind.’
“Horace Grant kind of backed up a little bit that game, too,” Pfeil added. “It was more a matter of maturity than wimpin’ out. It took a certain period of time before they would stand up and say, ‘Damn it, I’ve been pushed to the wall enough.’ Scottie played with the headache, and as the game went on he got better.”
Pippen played, but the entire roster seemed lost. They fell into a deep hole in the second quarter and never climbed out. With the Bad Boys’ skull and crossbones banners flying and their “Bad to the Bone” theme music playing, the Pistons advanced easily, 93–74.
“My worst moment as a Bull was trying to finish out the seventh game that we lost to the Pistons in the Palace,” Jackson recalled. “There was Scottie Pippen with a migraine on the bench, and John Paxson had sprained his ankle in the game before. I just had to sit there and grit my teeth and go through a half in which we were struggling to get in the ball game. We had just gone through a second period that was an embarrassment to the organization. It was my most difficult moment as a coach.”
Furious with his teammates, Jordan cursed them at halftime, then sobbed in the back of the team bus afterward. “I was crying and steaming,” he recalled. “I was saying, ‘Hey, I’m out here busting my butt and nobody else is doing the same thing. These guys are kicking our butt, taking our heart, taking our pride.’ I made up my mind right then and there it would never happen again. That was the summer that I first started lifting weights. If I was going to take some of this beating, I was also going to start dishing out some of it. I got tired of them dominating me physically.”
With each Chicago loss in the playoffs, observers grew more convinced that the Bulls were flawed because Jordan made them virtually a one-man team. Some pointed out that it had taken Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West, and Oscar Robertson many years to lead teams to the NBA title. Some critics said Jordan fit into the category with those players. Others wondered whether he wasn’t headed for the same anguish as Elgin Baylor, Nate Thurmond, Pete Maravich, and Dave Bing, all great players who never played on a championship team.
Jordan was understandably angered by such speculation and by the criticism that he was a one-man team. He was also pained by the losses each year to Detroit. He and Pistons point guard Isiah Thomas weren’t fond of each other, which made the losses all the more difficult.
“When Scottie and Horace came in, Michael sensed the thing could be turned around,” trainer Mark Pfeil recalled. “But the thing that frustrated him was that they didn’t have the same attitude. They were young enough to say, ‘Hell, we get paid whether we win or lose.’ And it was good enough for them just to get close. In their second year, we went to the Eastern finals and lost. Then with Phil we lost again. After that second loss, Michael said, ‘Hey, now we’ve gotta go over the top, and I’m gonna take us there. If you don’t want to be on the boat, get off.’ I think those guys really matured. You had your petty jealousies, but Michael, to me, bent over backwards to help all kinds of people, from Oakley to Paxson to Scottie to Horace.”
The burden of the loss fell on Pippen. Everyone, from the media to his own teammates, had interpreted the headache as a sign of faintheartedness. Lost in the perspective was the fact that the third-year forward had recently buried his father.
“I’m flying back from the migraine game,” recalled Cheryl Raye, “and who should be sitting across from me but Juanita Jordan. And she says, ‘What happened to Scottie?’ I said, ‘He had a headache.’ She goes, ‘He had a headache!?!?’ And she just shook her head.”
“It grabbed me and wouldn’t let go,” Pippen later said. “It’s something the fans will never let die.”
In the wake of that first season, Jackson reflected on what he had learned. He learned that practice time was precious and that the emphasis in pro basketball had to be on defense, because that had the greatest impact on winning.
He also had learned much about his psychological approach. “When I was a player,” he said, “I went to graduate school in counseling psychology for three of the summers I was playing in the NBA. A lot of times at that point I thought that group psychology and group encounter sessions could be really important in basketball, getting guys to react and work together better. Of course, I learned that those things can be applied at times and can’t be applied at other times, particularly in our type of game, where a lot of it’s nonverbal—unlike the office situation or in motivational meetings in a corporation, where the verbal is more important and groups can come together and have discussions. There are a lot of things I thought at that time could possibly work and now that I’ve grown into adulthood, I’ve realized that some of the hopes I’ve had and aspirations for group behavior are not applicable to professional basketball. There’s a lot of envy and jealousy on a basketball team, where somebody’s making $200,000, somebody else is making $2 million, and those things can’t really be ironed out in a group situation. So there are a lot of limits to what hopes and aspirations can accomplish.”
One reporter discovered that Jackson was meditating and talking to his team about Indian lore. The coach tried to dissuade the reporter from disclosing those facts. “The NBA is a very closed world,” Jackson told him. “But I think there’s a lot of room to operate out on the fringe.”
The First Championship
June Jackson found herself celebrating her sixteenth wedding anniversary at a Bulls team luncheon in the fall of 1990. The occasion was the beginning of a new basketball season. Her husband had climbed high in recent seasons, but that hadn’t calmed her fears. From everything she could see, pro basketball coaching was a matter of quick rise, quick fall.
During that luncheon, Jerry Krause stood at the podium and told her husband, “I got the players for you. Now it’s up to you to make it work.”
The Jacksons had felt secure enough to begin a major addition to their home in Bannockburn in suburban north Chicago, but her husband had not had time for the details. Those would be left to her, as were all the other details of their lives. She asked Jackson about the house. He told her he only wanted to pick out the front door; the rest was up to her. “That sort of typifies our relationship,” she said at the time. “If it’s a major decision, then he’ll be part of it. But generally speaking, the kids, the finances, the social engagements are left up to me.”
Her husband, out of necessity, was consumed by basketball.
Despite the outcome, Jackson and his assistants had come away from the 1990 playoffs with tremendous optimism. They knew they would have to sell Jordan and his teammates on using the triple-post offense, and they would have to get tougher defensively.
Without question, Winter said later, it was the rise of Jackson to the position of head coach that made the use of his triangle offense possible. It was not, however, an easy transition.
Winter had spent years developing the triangle, or triple-post, offense. It was an old college system that involved all five players sharing the ball and moving. But it was totally foreign to the pro players of the 1990s, and many of them found it difficult to learn. Where for years the pro game had worked on isolation plays and one-on-one setups, the triple-post used very little in the way of set plays. Instead the players learned to react to situations and to allow their ball movement to create weaknesses in defenses.
Among the offense’s strongest questioners was Jordan.
“I’ve always been very much impressed with Michael as well as everyone else has been,” Winter once explained. “I’ve never been a hero worshiper. I saw his strong points, but I also saw some weaknesses. I felt like there was a lot of things that we could do as a coaching staff to blend Michael in with the team a little bit better. I thought he was a great player, but I did not feel that we wanted to go with him exclusively. We wanted to try and get him to involve his teammates more. Until he was convinced that that was what he wanted to do, I don’t think we had the chance to have the program that we had later down the line.”
“Tex’s offense emulated the offense I had played in with New York,” Jackson said. “The ball dropped into the post a lot. You ran cuts. You did things off the ball. People were cutting and passing and moving the basketball. And it took the focus away from Michael, who had the ball in his hands a lot, who had been a great scorer. That had made the defenses all turn and face him. Suddenly he was on the back side of the defenses, and Michael saw the value in having an offense like that. He’d been in an offense like that at North Carolina. It didn’t happen all at once. He started to see that over a period of time, as the concepts built up.”
“It was different for different types of players,” recalled John Paxson. “For me it was great. A system offense is made for someone who doesn’t have the athletic skills that a lot of guys in the league have. It played to my strengths. But it tightened the reins on guys like Michael and Scottie from the standpoint that we stopped coming down and isolating them on the side. There were subtleties involved, teamwork involved. But that was the job of Phil to sell us on the fact we could win playing that way.”
“Everything was geared toward the middle, toward the post play,” Jordan said, explaining his opposition. “We were totally changing our outlook … and I disagreed with that to a certain extent. I felt that was putting too much pressure on the people inside.”
“What Michael had trouble with,” Jackson said, “was when the ball went to one of the big guys like Bill Cartwright or Horace Grant or some of the other players who weren’t tuned in to handling and passing the ball. They now had the ball. Could they be counted on to make the right passes, the right choices? I brought Michael in my office and told him basically, ‘The ball is like a spotlight. And when it’s in your hands, the spotlight is on you. And you’ve gotta share that spotlight with some of your teammates by having them do things with the basketball, too.’ He said, ‘I know that. It’s just that when it comes down to getting the job done, a lot of times they don’t want to take the initiative. Sometimes it’s up to me to take it, and sometimes that’s a tough balance.’
“All along the way it was a compromise of efforts,” Jackson said. “Everybody made such a big issue of the triple-post offense. We just said, ‘It’s a format out of which to play. You can play any way you want out of the triangle.’ Because if it’s a sound offense, you should be able to do that. One of the concepts is to hit the open man.”
Jordan’s presence also stretched the flexibility of Winter’s concepts and challenged the older coach’s thinking. “There were times when Michael knew he was going to get 40 points,” Jackson said. “He was just hot those nights. He was going to go on his own, and he would just take over a ball game. We had to understand that that was just part of his magnitude, that was something he could do that nobody else in this game could do. And it was going to be OK. Those weren’t always the easiest nights for us to win as a team. But they were certainly spectacular nights for him as a showman and a scorer.”
“It took some time,” Paxson recalled. “Michael was out there playing with these guys, and unless he had a great deal of respect for them as players, I think he figured, ‘Why should I pass them the ball when I have the ability to score myself or do the job myself? I’d rather rely on myself to succeed or fail than some of these other guys.’ The thing I like about Michael is that he finally came to understand that if we were going to win championships he had to make some sacrifices individually. He had to go about the task of involving his teammates more.”
“A lot of times,” Jackson said, “my convincing story to Michael was, ‘We want you to get your thirty-some points, and we want you to do whatever is necessary. It’s great for us if you get 12 or 14 points by halftime, and you have 18 points at the end of the third quarter. Then get your 14 or 18 points in the fourth quarter. That’s great. If it works out that way, that’s exactly what it’ll be.’ Who could argue with that? We’d tell him, ‘Just play your cards. Make them play everybody during the course of the game and then finish it out for us.’ I think that’s why sometimes Michael has downplayed the triangle. He says it’s a good offense for three quarters, but it’s not great for the fourth quarter. That’s because he took over in the fourth quarter. He can perform.”
“Phil was definitely set on what we were going to do and he wouldn’t waver,” Winter recalled. “Even though the triple-post offense evolved through my many, many years of coaching, Phil was sold on it even more than I was at times. There’s times when I would say, ‘We should get away from this. Let Michael have more one-on-one opportunities.’ And Phil was persistent in not doing so. It’s to his credit that we stayed to his basic philosophy of basketball.”
Jackson’s tenacity in keeping with the offense in the face of all that opposition is what defined him as a coach, at least in Winter’s thinking.
The key to the Bulls’ defensive toughness was Cartwright. His career had featured one frustrating battle after another with injuries, but what the Bulls saw in him was the defensive intimidator they needed. Either way, Michael Jordan was not pleased to have him on the roster. Jackson, however, had seen his value, not only as a defender but as a leader. The coach began calling Cartwright “Teacher,” and the name stuck.
More than that, his teammates and opponents around the league knew Cartwright for his elbows. He held them high when he rebounded or boxed out, something that Jackson liked and could understand. Cartwright’s elbows weren’t as notorious as the Pistons’ style of play, but they were close. “You had to be cognizant of those elbows because they could hit you any time,” recalled Bulls backup center Will Perdue. “I got hit constantly in practice. That’s just the way Bill played. He was taught to play with his arms up and his elbows out.”
Jordan, however, was irritated that Cartwright sometimes had trouble catching the ball, and often set up in the lane, in the way of Jordan’s drives to the hoop.
The relationship eased as Jordan realized that Cartwright could anchor the Bulls’ defense. “I’ll never forget the battles Willis Reed had to fight against Kareem to get to the championship in 1970,” Jackson recalled, “the fight Willis had to wage against Wilt Chamberlain in both ’70 and ’73. We, the Knicks, had to have this guy who said, ‘You’re gonna have to come through my door, and you’re gonna have to get over me to win a championship.’ At some level, that sacrifice had to be made. That’s what Bill Cartwright brought to the Bulls as a player. He was the one who said, ‘You’re gonna have to come through me.’
“Bill’s an extremely stubborn person, and he believes you’ve got to work real hard to get what you want in life. He gave us that element, that ‘I’m-gonna-work-real-hard-to-get-this-accomplished’ attitude. He was dogged, dogged persistence. One of the things that got to us was that Detroit used to have a way of bringing up the level of animosity in a game. At some level, you were gonna have to contest them physically, if you were gonna stay in the game with them. If you didn’t want to stay in the game with them, fine. They’d go ahead and beat you. But if you wanted to compete, you’d have to do something physically to play at their level. Bill stood up to the Pistons. Bill’s statement was, ‘This isn’t the way we want to play. This isn’t the way I want to play. But if it is the way we have to play to take care of these guys, I’m not afraid to do it. I’m gonna show these Detroit guys this is not acceptable. We won’t accept you doing this to us.’ You can’t imagine how much that relieved guys like Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant, guys who were being besieged constantly and challenged constantly by more physical guys like Dennis Rodman and Rick Mahorn.”
With Cartwright providing the necessary toughness, Jordan and his teammates matured into a determined unit over the 1990–91 season, although their progress was sometimes frustrating and difficult. Jordan again led the league in scoring at 31.5 points per game (to go with 6 rebounds and 5 assists per outing). Another key development came with the 6′7″ Pippen. He had been stung by criticism, most of it stemming from his migraine headache in Game 7 of the 1990 Eastern Conference finals. A gifted swing player, Pippen performed with determination over the 1990–91 campaign, playing 3,014 minutes and averaging nearly 18 points, 7 rebounds, and 6 assists.
“I thought about it all summer,” he said of the migraine. “I failed to produce last season.”
Pippen made the transition from wing to point guard, Jackson said. “He became a guy who now had the ball as much as Michael. He became a dominant force.”
Other key factors were power forward Horace Grant (12.8 points, 8.4 rebounds); point guard John Paxson (8.7 points while jump shooting .548 from the floor); and center Bill Cartwright (9.6 points and interior toughness on defense). Jackson also made great use of his bench with B. J. Armstrong, Craig Hodges, Will Perdue, Stacey King, Cliff Levingston, Scott Williams (a free-agent rookie out of North Carolina), and Dennis Hopson, who had come over in a trade with New Jersey, all contributing.
These efforts resulted in impressive displays of execution. In December, the Bulls’ defense held the Cleveland Cavaliers to just five points in one quarter at Chicago Stadium. Crowds there presented an atmosphere that no opponent wanted to face. The Bulls lost to Boston there in the third game of the season. They wouldn’t lose at home again until Houston stopped them March 25—a run of 30 straight home wins.
The Bulls won the Eastern Conference with a 61–21 record, and Jordan claimed his fifth straight scoring title with a 31.5 average. During the playoffs, he was named the league’s MVP for the second time. The Bulls, however, had seen all that window dressing before. The only awards they wanted came in the playoffs. They opened against the Knicks and won the first game by a record 41 points, then went on to sweep them 3–0. Next, Charles Barkley and the Sixers fell 4–1, setting up the only rematch the Bulls wanted: the Pistons in the Eastern Conference finals. To prepare for the playoffs, Jackson had taken to splicing footage of the Wizard of Oz in and around sequences of his own players, which had them laughing until someone pointed out that Jackson was suggesting they had no courage, no heart. It was a challenge.
The Bulls answered by hammering the Pistons, who were reeling from injuries, in three straight games, and on the eve of Game 4 Jordan announced they were going to sweep. “That’s not going to happen,” responded an infuriated Isiah Thomas. But it did.
At the end of Game 4 the next day in Detroit, Thomas and the Pistons stalked off the floor without congratulating the Bulls, a snub that angered Jordan and thousands of Chicago fans.
“I have nothing but contempt and disgust for the Pistons’ organization,” Reinsdorf said later. “Ultimately, David Stern felt the pressure and made rules changes to outlaw their style of play. It wasn’t basketball. It was thuggerism, hoodlumism … That’s one of the things that made us so popular. We were the white knights; we were the good guys. We beat the Bad Boys, 4–0, and they sulked off the court the way they did. I remember saying at the time that this was a triumph of good over evil. They were hated because they had used that style to vanquish first the Celtics and then the Lakers, who had been the NBA’s most popular teams for years.”
Actually, Brendan Malone, a former Pistons assistant, recalled that it was Jackson’s mind games that angered the Pistons that day and induced them to walk off without shaking. Jackson’s comments in the press had infuriated Detroit’s players. They felt he had disrespected their two NBA titles, Malone explained. “They were angry at Phil and the disrespect he showed them.”
Krause, meanwhile, was deliriously happy as he got on the team plane after the game. “He comes in the front of the plane and he’s celebrating,” Jackson recalled. “He’s dancing, and the guys are going, ‘Go, Jerry! Go, Jerry!’ He’s dancing or whatever he’s doing, and when he stops, they all collapse in hilarity, this laughter, and you couldn’t tell whether it was with him or at him. It was one of those nebulous moments. It was wild.”
The Portland Trail Blazers had ruled the regular season in the Western Conference with a 63–19 finish, but once again Magic Johnson and the Lakers survived in the playoffs, ousting Portland in the conference finals 4–2.
For most observers, the Finals seemed a dream matchup: Jordan and the Bulls against Magic and the Lakers.
Although the 1991 Finals wouldn’t be a one-on-one matchup of the superstars, it still provided a great opportunity to see them battle. Many observers, including former Lakers coach Pat Riley, figured the Lakers’ experience made them a sure bet. Los Angeles was making its ninth Finals appearance since 1980, and had five titles to show for it.
“The Lakers have experience on us,” Pippen said as the series opened in Chicago Stadium, “but we have enough to win.”
Just as important, the Lakers’ James Worthy had a badly sprained ankle, which took away much of his mobility. Some insiders figured Worthy’s injury would cost the Lakers the series. Others figured that without Abdul-Jabbar (who had retired after the 1989 season), Los Angeles just wasn’t as potent as a playoff team. Game 1, however, seemed to confirm Riley’s prediction. The Lakers won 93–91 on a three-pointer by center Sam Perkins with 14 seconds left in the game. The Bulls got the ball to Jordan, but his 18-foot jumper with four seconds left went in the basket and spun out. It seemed that Jordan was human after all and that the Lakers’ experience just might deliver them.
Suddenly, the pressure was on the Bulls for Game 2, and they struggled with it. Then, a huge basketball accident occurred. Jordan got into early foul trouble, and, forced to make a decision, the Bulls’ coaches switched the 6′7″ Pippen to cover the 6′9″ Magic Johnson. In retrospect, that would seem logical, but at the time there was an assumption that the twenty-five-year-old Pippen would struggle to handle the wily Johnson, the master point guard of his time.
Just the opposite happened. The long-armed Pippen was on Johnson like a hydra, and just like that, the momentum in the championship series shifted. Pippen harassed Magic into 4 of 13 shooting from the floor while Pippen himself scored 20 points with 10 assists and 5 rebounds as the Bulls won Game 2 in a swarm.
The tale of terror was written on Johnson’s face. “I can’t believe this is happening,” he told reporters as the Bulls swept four straight games from Los Angeles.
“It’s true,” Jackson said in 1998 when asked if the switch of Pippen covering Johnson was entirely accidental.
“We started to see that we were wearing him down from a physical standpoint,” Pippen happily recalled, “especially myself being able to go up and harass him and trying to get him out of their offense. He wasn’t as effective as he had been in the past against some teams, being able to post up and take advantage of situations. I saw the frustration there.”
The Bulls blew out the Lakers in Game 2, 107–86. The Chicago starters shot better than 73 percent from the floor, with Paxson going 8 for 8 to score 16 points. “Does Paxson ever miss?” the Lakers’ Sam Perkins asked.
Paxson shrugged at reporters’ questions and said his job was to hit open jumpers. “When I’m in my rhythm, I feel like I’m going to make them all.”
Jordan himself had hit 15 of 18 to finish with 33.
Even with the loss, the Lakers were pleased. They had gotten a split in Chicago Stadium and were headed home for three straight games in the Forum. The pressure was on Chicago.
But the Bulls met the challenge in Game 3. Jordan hit a jumper with 3.4 seconds left to send the game into overtime. The Bulls then ran off eight straight points for a 104–96 win and a 2–1 lead in the series. Jordan was elated, but he refused to dwell on the victory. The Lakers had plenty of experience in coming back, he said.
Yet experience proved no match for the Bulls’ young legs and determination. For Game 4, Chicago’s weapon was defense. The Bulls harassed the Lakers into shooting 37 percent from the floor. Chicago won, 97–82. The Lakers’ point total was their lowest since before the shot clock was adopted in 1954. They managed a total of 30 points over the second and third quarters. Perkins made just 1 of his 15 shots.
Suddenly, Jackson’s Bulls were on the verge of the improbable.
“It’s no surprise, the way they’ve been defending,” Lakers coach Mike Dunleavy said of the Bulls. “They are very athletic and very smart.”
And very hot.
On the eve of Game 5, Jordan publicly acknowledged the team’s debt to Cartwright. “He has given us an edge in the middle,” he said. “He has been solid for us … This guy has turned out to be one of the most important factors for this ball club, and he has surprised many who are standing here and who play with him.”
Told of Jordan’s comments, Cartwright said, “That stuff really isn’t important to me. I’ve always figured what goes around comes around. What’s really important to me is winning a championship.”
“We went up 3–1 and had a long wait, from Sunday to Wednesday, for Game 5,” recalled Bulls equipment manager John Ligmanowski. “Those three days took forever. Before we had even won it, Michael would get on the bus and say, ‘Hey, how does it feel to be world champs?’ He knew. That was a pretty good feeling. We just couldn’t wait to get it over with.”
As Jordan predicted, the Bulls turned to their offense to claim the title in Game 5, 108–101. Pippen led the scoring parade with 32 points, and Paxson did the damage down the stretch, hitting five buckets in the final four minutes to score 20 points and seal the win. Time and again, Jordan penetrated, drawing the defense, then kicked the ball out to Paxson, who hit the open shots. In the bedlam on the Forum floor following the victory, Lakers super-fan Jack Nicholson hugged Jackson, and Magic Johnson tracked down Jordan to offer his congratulations. “I saw tears in his eyes,” Johnson said. “I told him, ‘You proved everyone wrong. You’re a winner as well as a great individual basketball player.’”
By the time Jordan squeezed through the crowd to the locker room he was openly weeping. “I never lost hope,” he said, his father James and wife Juanita nearby. “I’m so happy for my family and this team and this franchise. It’s something I’ve worked seven years for, and I thank God for the talent and the opportunity that I’ve had.”
It had been a long haul.
The tears flowed freely for Jordan. “I’ve never been this emotional publicly,” he said.
“When I came here, we started from scratch,” he said. “I vowed we’d make the playoffs every year, and each year we got closer. I always had faith I’d get this ring one day.”
Jackson and Jordan agreed that the key to the game had been Paxson hitting the open shots. “That’s why I’ve always wanted him on my team and why I wanted him to stay on my team,” Jordan said.
“It was done and over, and it was dramatic, like a blitzkrieg,” Jackson recalled. “Afterward, there was a lot of joy. There was Michael holding the trophy and weeping. For me, it was doubly special because the Forum was where I had won the championship as a player nearly twenty years earlier, in 1973. This was the same locker room where the Knicks had celebrated. With the Bulls, what made it extra special was the way we won it, to split our first two games at home and then to sweep three on the road. It was special.”
Afterward, the Bulls’ quarters at the Ritz Carlton became Party Central. “I remember going up to Michael’s room,” equipment manager John Ligmanowski said. “He told me to order like a dozen bottles of Dom Perignon and enough hors d’oeuvres for forty people. We’re at the Ritz Carlton, and I call down to the concierge. I said, ‘Yeah, send up a dozen bottles of Dom and hors d’oeuvres for forty people.’ So they were like, ‘Wait a second.’ They didn’t want to send it up because they knew it wasn’t Michael on the phone. So I handed the phone to him. He grabbed the phone and said, ‘Send it up!’”
As the parties wound down in the wee hours before sunrise, Jackson headed to the elevator to go up to his room. The doors popped open and there were Jerry and Thelma Krause, headed for the hot tub in their bathing suits.
“It was a perfect cap to the evening,” Jackson recalled years later with a chuckle.
The Bulls returned to Chicago and celebrated their championship in Grant Park before a crowd estimated at between a half-million and a million. “We started from the bottom,” Jordan told the screaming masses, “and it was hard working our way to the top. But we did it.”
The Second Championship
Perhaps the most amazing thing about the Bulls’ second championship was the amount of discord and controversy they had to overcome to win it. Long-festering resentment surfaced during the 1991 championship celebration when Michael Jordan decided not to join the team in the traditional Rose Garden ceremony with President George Bush. Much of the discord stemmed from the relationship between Horace Grant and Jordan.
“I think it was a situation,” Jackson later observed, “where Horace felt demeaned, felt that he was made light of, and he wanted to be a person of importance. There were some things about Horace that bothered Michael. Basically, Horace says whatever comes into his mind in front of the press. One of the situations that was exacerbating to Michael came after our first championship when Horace and his wife and Michael and his wife went to New York. They went to dinner and to see a play. While they were out, Michael basically told Horace that he wasn’t going to see President Bush. Michael said, ‘It’s not obligatory. It’s on my time, and I have other things to do.’
“Horace at the time had no problem with it,” Jackson added. “He knew about this in a private situation and said nothing. Yet when the press came into the picture later, after the story became public, and asked Horace if it bothered him, he made a big issue of it. Basically, the press had put the words in his mouth, and he felt it was a good time to make this kind of statement. It was immediately team divisive and made Michael look bad and basically got that whole thing started. That bothered Michael about Horace, that he would do something personal like that. Horace had problems in that area, where a lot of times he said things that the press had put in his mind, or in his consciousness. I would call him in and remind him that he could be fined for making comments that were detrimental to the team. I’d say, ‘Horace, I have every reason to fine you, but I’m not going to because I know the press put words in your mouth.’ He would say, ‘I’m not ever gonna tell lies.’ I told him, ‘No one’s saying you have to tell lies. You have to be conscious of what you’re saying. You don’t want to be divisive.’”
Another major source of controversy was the book The Jordan Rules by Chicago Tribune sportswriter Sam Smith. Marketed as the inside story of the Bulls’ championship season, the book and its unflattering portraits of Jordan and Jerry Krause rocked the franchise just as the 1991–92 season opened.
“Those kinds of stories there’s no reason for,” Jackson would say later, without disclosing his role as an anonymous source. “And people believe it’s the truth. I read about seventy pages of it, and I realized there’s a lot of things represented that I didn’t believe to be true, or that I knew didn’t happen to the team. I felt, ‘This is like anything else. It’s one guy’s perspective on life. Another guy knows it’s not real.’ When I sat down with Jerry Krause the week after that book came out, he had a list with 176 things on it. Of lies. One hundred and seventy-six lies.”
“I went to the best libel lawyer in the country,” Krause said. “He said I couldn’t do a thing because I was a public figure. Sam Smith made some money on that book. I hope he chokes on every dollar.”
At the time, Jackson did not acknowledge his major role as an anonymous source. Later, he tried to bring about a reconciliation between Krause and Sam Smith. “I tried to patch those two guys, Smith and Krause, up a couple of years ago. Sam said, ‘You know, Jerry, I’ve never really hurt anybody.’ Jerry knew right there he couldn’t believe that,” Jackson said later, adding with a smile that at least the Smith book was something Krause and Jordan could agree on.
“The Jordan Rules was very divisive to the team,” Jackson said later. “But the one great thing about this group of guys. They never let the external stuff bother the team’s play on the floor.”
Indeed it didn’t. Krause set the roster with a November trade, sending disgruntled Dennis Hopson to Sacramento for reserve guard Bobby Hansen. The Bulls raced out to a 37–5 record—including a 14-game winning streak, the longest in history. They slipped over late January and February, going only 11–8. By the first of March, the Bulls were back on track and closed out the schedule with a blistering 19–2 run to finish 67–15, the franchise’s best record. Jordan claimed his sixth straight scoring crown and won his third league MVP award. He and Pippen were named to the All-Defensive first team, and Pippen earned All-NBA second team honors.
“We really had an outrageous year,” Jackson said. “We won 67 games, and basically I felt like I had to pull back on the reins, or they would have tried to win 70 or 75. The playoffs were an entirely different story from the regular season. We had injuries, and we had to face New York. And teams were coming at us with a lot of vim and vigor. We lost seven games in our championship run. It wasn’t as easy this second time. There had been a challenge to our character as a team.”
In the first round of the playoffs, the Bulls faced the Miami Heat, a 1989 expansion team making its first postseason appearance. Chicago quickly claimed the first two games in the best-of-five series, then headed to Miami for Game 3.
“In Miami’s first playoff game ever, it was clacker night,” recalled Bulls broadcaster Tom Dore. “What they said was, any time Michael gets the ball or shoots a free throw, go nuts with those clackers. Make all kinds of noise. Well, it worked in the first quarter. The Heat had a big lead. And in fact, we were wondering, can the Bulls come back from this? And Michael stopped by the broadcast table and looked at Johnny Kerr and me and said, ‘Here we come.’ That’s all he said. Boy, did he ever. He went absolutely berserk, scored 56 points, and the Bulls won, swept the series.”
Next up were the New York Knicks, now coached by Pat Riley and employing a physical style strikingly similar to the Pistons. The Knicks used their muscle to claim Game 1 in Chicago Stadium. B. J. Armstrong helped even the series at 1–1 by hitting big shots in the fourth quarter of Game 2. Then the Bulls regained the home-court advantage in Game 3 in New York when Jordan finally broke free of New York’s cloying defense for his first dunks of the series.
The Knicks, powered by Xavier McDaniel, fought back to even it with a win in Game 4.
In the critical Game 5, Jordan took control by going to the basket. The Knicks kept fouling him, and he kept making the free throws—15 in all—to finish with 37 points as the Bulls won 96–88. “Michael is Michael,” Riley said afterward. “His game is to take it to the basket and challenge the defense. When you play against a guy like him, he tells you how much he wants to win by how hard he takes the ball to the basket.”
The Knicks managed to tie it again with a Game 6 win in New York, but the Bulls were primed for Game 7 in the Stadium and walked to the win, 110–81. “We got back to playing Bulls basketball,” Chicago guard B. J. Armstrong explained.
They resumed their struggle in the conference finals against the Cavaliers, who managed to tie the series at 2–2, but the Bulls had just enough to escape Cleveland 4–2. “John Paxson turned to me in the locker room and said, ‘What a long, strange trip it’s been,’” Jackson confided to reporters. “And he wasn’t just quoting the Grateful Dead. It has been a long, strange trip. Last year was the honeymoon. This year was an odyssey.”
The NBA Finals against the Portland Trail Blazers brought more turbulence, which was intermittently calmed by Jordan’s memorable performances. The Blazers—driven by Clyde Drexler, newly acquired Danny Ainge, Cliff Robinson, Terry Porter, and Buck Williams—answered with a few performances of their own. Ultimately, though, the glory was Jordan’s. In Game 1, he scored 35 points in the first half—including a record six three-pointers—enough to bury the Blazers, 122–89.
“The only way you can stop Michael,” said Portland’s Cliff Robinson, “is to take him off the court.”
“I was in a zone,” said Jordan, who had focused on extra hours of practice shooting long range before Game 1. “My threes felt like free throws. I didn’t know what I was doing, but they were going in.”
In Game 2, the Blazers’ hopes dimmed when Drexler fouled out with about four minutes left. But they rallied with a 15–5 run to tie the game, then somehow won 115–104 on the strength of Danny Ainge’s nine points in overtime. “Momentum is a fickle thing,” Ainge mused afterward.
“It was a gift in our hands and we just gave it away,” Horace Grant said.
The Blazers had their split, with the series headed to Portland for three games. But the Bulls’ defense and a solid team effort—Pippen and Grant scored 18 each to go with Jordan’s 26—ended thoughts of an upset with a win in Game 3, 94–84. Later, Jackson would explain that the Blazers rushed to take a late flight home after Friday night’s Game 2, which cost them important sleep, while the Bulls waited until Saturday to travel. “They controlled the tempo; we shot poorly and never got in the groove,” Portland coach Rick Adelman admitted.
Having regained their rest, the Blazers struggled to stay close through most of Game 4, then moved in front with just over three minutes left and won it 93–88 on a final surge. The outcome evened the series at 2–2.
But Game 5 was another Jordan showcase. Going to the hole repeatedly, he drew fouls and made 16 of 19 free throws to finish with 46 points, enough to give the Bulls a 119–106 win and a 3–2 lead. Again, the Blazers had stayed close, but Jordan’s scoring had kept them at bay over the final minutes. His raised fist and defiant grimace afterward served notice to Portland.
Game 6 back in the Stadium should have been a Chicago walk, but the Bulls fell into a deep hole, down 17 points late in the third quarter. Then Jackson pulled his regulars and played Bobby Hansen, B. J. Armstrong, Stacey King, and Scott Williams with Pippen. Hansen stole the ball and hit a shot, and the rally was on. Strangely, Jordan was on the bench leading the cheering.
With about eight minutes to go, Jackson sent Jordan back in, and the Bulls powered their way to their second title, 97–93, bringing the Stadium to an unprecedented eruption.
“The final against Portland was a dramatic night for us and all Chicago fans,” Phil Jackson recalled. “We came from 17 down at the end of the third quarter to win the championship. What followed was an incredible celebration.”
“The team had gone down to the dressing room to be presented with the Larry O’Brien Trophy by David Stern and Bob Costas,” remembered Bulls vice president Steve Schanwald. “Jerry Reinsdorf and Jerry Krause and Phil Jackson and Michael and Scottie stood on a temporary stage and accepted the trophy. But we didn’t have instant replay capability, so the fans were not able to share in that moment. Up in the Stadium, we were playing Gary Glitter on the loudspeaker, and the crowd was just reveling in the championship. It had been a great comeback in the fourth quarter, really initiated by our bench. So the victory was a total team effort. I went down and asked Jerry Reinsdorf if we could bring the team back up. He said, ‘It’s all right with me, but ask Phil.’ I said, ‘Phil, the fans are upstairs. They’re not leaving; they’re dancing. We’ve got to bring the team back up and let them enjoy this thing.’ Phil thought for a moment, and Bobby Hansen was standing nearby. Phil asked Bobby what he thought, and Bobby said, ‘Let’s do it!’ Phil has the ability to whistle very loud. He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled over all that noise and champagne and everything. He got everything quieted down. He said, ‘Grab that trophy. We’re going back up to celebrate with our fans!’ With that, Michael grabbed the trophy, and we went back upstairs. When we started emerging through the tunnel, we started to play the opening to our introduction music. It’s very dramatic. It’s ‘Eye in the Sky’ by the Alan Parsons Project. So the crowd knew when the music started playing something was happening. The team came up through the tunnel, and all of a sudden the crowd just exploded. It was a ten thousand-goose bump experience. All of a sudden some of the players, Scottie and Horace and Hansen, those guys got up on the table so that everybody could see them in the crowd. Then Michael came up and joined them with the trophy, and they started dancing. It was just an electrifying experience, and I think for anybody that was there it was a moment that they will never forget as long as they live.”
“They told me the fans were still celebrating up top,” Jackson said. “Everybody said, ‘Let’s go up.’ I heard that and went upstairs with the players into this scene of bedlam. But I got tripped up by some television people, from the cables on their equipment. It occurred to me that this was a little bit wilder than I wanted it to be. I got hit and got tripped. I thought, ‘I guess this really isn’t something I have to be a part of. This is a time for the fans and the players.’ I stood and watched them for a while celebrating on the tables. Then I went back downstairs and collected myself and my thoughts. My family stayed up there and was a part of the celebration. But I went back downstairs and enjoyed some private thoughts. How the first championship had been more of a glory ride, and the second one was more of a journey. It had been a special time of nine months together. Things had been up and down, but we had had this one goal together, and despite our differences, we had focused on that one goal. I told the guys, ‘A back-to-back championship is the mark of a great team. We had passed the demarcation point. Winning that second title set us apart.’”
The team opted for another rally in Grant Park a few days later to rejoice with their fans. Again, hundreds of thousands gathered to scream and celebrate. “We will be back,” Bill Cartwright promised.
“Let’s go for a three-peat,” Pippen suggested, and the crowd’s roar in response made it clear that no one in Chicago doubted that it was possible.
The Third Championship
Jerry Krause had hoped that Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan would decline their invitations to play for the United States on the Dream Team in the Olympic Games in Barcelona over the summer of 1992. Krause wasn’t being unpatriotic; he just wanted the Bulls’ superstars to rest. They both agreed to the honor, however; and despite the United States’s easy breeze to the gold medal that August, both players came home thoroughly tired by the experience.
Horace Grant, who had said many times that no one understood his importance to the Bulls, seemed jilted by the attention showered on Jordan and Pippen. And when Jackson allowed the two stars to take a casual approach to training camp in early October, Grant complained to the media about “double standards” and “preferential treatment.”
Later in the season, he would accuse Pippen of arrogance. Ultimately, this sniping would prove to be a minor rift between the two friends, but both agreed that they weren’t as close as they had been.
Besides the “divisiveness” that Jackson loathed, the Bulls encountered a rash of physical ailments. Cartwright, thirty-five, and Paxson, thirty-two, had offseason surgery on their creaky knees, and Pippen was troubled by a bad ankle for most of the season. For Jordan, the pains were first his arch and then his wrist.
B. J. Armstrong, who had long struggled with the Bulls’ triple-post offense, finally found enough of a comfort level to replace Paxson in the starting lineup. Finding his playing rhythm coming off the bench clearly stumped Paxson, and the media kept steady track of the difficulties brought on by the shift. But no rift developed between the two guards. The twenty-five-year-old Armstrong was simply better equipped to play in the Bulls’ pressure defense, and that would make the difference in the playoffs. Plus, he would lead the league in three-point shooting, hitting better than 45 percent.
For the regular season, however, Jackson backed off from the pressure defense, thinking that he needed to conserve the players’ energy and health. But the other problem for this veteran club was boredom, and the slowed pace worked against them. At one point during the season, Jordan called a conference on the court and told his teammates to resume the pressure. Later, Jordan debated Jackson’s strategy with reporters. “Maybe we gamble and we lose our legs,” Jordan said. “I still don’t think we get conservative now. When we try to slow down, things get too deliberate.”
All of these wrinkles ultimately proved no hindrance. Their only real opponent was the sameness. Jordan called it “monotony.” For most teams, that might have meant 38 wins. For the Bulls, it meant another divisional championship, 57 wins (their fourth straight 50-win season) and a seventh straight scoring crown for Jordan, tying him with Wilt Chamberlain.
On January 8, Jordan scored his twenty-thousandth career point, having reached that total in just 620 games. The only man to do it faster was Wilt Chamberlain, who reached the milestone in 499 games. “It looks like I fell short of Wilt again, which is a privilege,” Jordan said. “I won’t evaluate this until I’m away from the game. I’m happy about it, but we still have a long season to go. I’m sure as I get older, I’ll cherish it more.”
In another game, an overtime loss to Orlando, Jordan scored 64 points, although Pippen complained afterward that Jordan had taken too many shots.
Jordan would be named All-NBA first team again, and both he and Pippen would make the All-Defensive first team. In the NBA Finals, Jordan would collect an unprecedented third straight MVP award.
For Jackson, December would bring his two hundredth win; he had reached the mark faster than any coach in league history. Even with the accomplishments, it was not a regular season to treasure.
“Guys were hurt,” Jackson explained. “Pippen with his ankle, Jordan with his plantar fascia. All of those things prevented us from getting a rhythm. We weren’t in great condition. So when practices were done hard and precise, we ended up suffering in our game effort.”
“I have always liked practice,” Jordan said, “and I hate to miss it. It’s like taking a math class. When you miss that one day, you feel like you missed a lot. You take extra work to make up for that one day. I’ve always been a practice player. I believe in it.”
“They were tired,” recalled Bulls trainer Chip Schaefer, who had replaced Mark Pfeil in 1991 and would become a close Jackson friend. “No question. Michael and Scottie were tired in the fall of ’92. That was just a tough, long year, and really a tough year for Michael. It seemed like one thing after another. The press was picking on him, things just happening all year long. As soon as one thing would let up, it seemed like another came into play. There was one book or one incident constantly. It got to be not about basketball but personal things that really shouldn’t have been part of it at all. You could just see it starting to wear on him a little bit. In some private moments, he expressed that. It was really evident that he was getting tired. Tired physically, tired mentally of the whole thing.”
Jackson’s answer was another series of psychological ploys to motivate his players. “Phil played a lot of mind games,” Jordan recalled. “He waged psychological warfare to make you realize the things you have to do to be a winner.”
“It’s a funny thing to look at the history of the NBA and the way teams kind of rise and fall,” Schaefer noted. “For all intents and purposes, it looked like it was going to be New York’s year. They paid their dues. The Knicks absolutely destroyed us, beat us by 37 points in late November that year. They played like it was Game 7 in the playoffs. We went in kind of yawning. No big deal. Michael sprained his foot early in the game, and they just crushed us. We still won 57 games that year, but we just kind of foundered.”
For two years, the New York Knicks had seen their championship hopes end in seven-game playoff battles with the Bulls. With good reason, they figured they needed the home-court advantage to dethrone Jordan and his teammates. So coach Pat Riley turned the full force of his considerable intensity to driving New York to 60 wins and the home-court advantage in the Eastern Conference.
The Bulls, meanwhile, slipped quietly into second place and seemed almost distracted heading into the playoffs. But they quickly picked up the pace, sweeping three from Atlanta in the first round, then devastating the Cleveland Cavaliers again by winning four straight. Jordan capped the series with a last-second game winner in Cleveland that closed the chapter on his domination of the Cavs.
“Once the playoffs rolled around,” Schaefer recalled, “Michael managed to turn it on again. But we faced New York again. We didn’t have home court so there really wasn’t much reason to be optimistic about it.”
Jordan loathed the Knicks’ brutish style. “They play like the Pistons,” he said testily. Perhaps New York’s frustration made them worse. Plus, Jackson and Riley made no great effort to hide their dislike for one another. In Game 1 in Madison Square Garden, the Knicks banged Jordan into a 10 for 27 shooting performance and won 98–90. “I told the team I let them down,” Jordan said afterward.
The acknowledgment did little good, because the same thing happened in Game 2. Jordan missed 20 of 32 shots, and the Knicks won again, 96–91. Afterward, the smugness in New York was tangible. “Now the Bulls are down two games and have to beat the Knicks four games out of five games if they are going to have a chance at three titles in a row,” crowed New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica.
A media firestorm then erupted after a New York Times report that Jordan had been seen at an Atlantic City casino in the wee hours before Game 2, suggesting that perhaps he wasn’t properly rested for competition. The headlines brought Jackson and Krause quickly to his defense. “There is no problem with Michael Jordan,” Krause told reporters. “He cares about winning and is one of the great winners of all time.”
“We don’t need a curfew,” Jackson added. “These are adults … You have to have other things in your life or the pressure becomes too great.”
With this issue hovering over the events, the series moved to Chicago.
“The Bulls came back for practice at the Berto Center,” recalled Cheryl Raye. “I’ve never seen as much media gathered for an event. Michael stepped out of the training room, and I said, ‘Michael would you just go over the chain of events for us? Would you tell us what happened and where this story is coming from?’ He did, and then a television newsperson from a local Chicago station started grilling him as though he were an alderman being convicted of a crime. Chuck Gowdy from Channel 7 was saying things like, ‘Do you do this before every game? Do you have a gambling problem?’ He kept hammering and hammering away, and eventually Michael just shut up and walked away. He didn’t talk until the first game against Phoenix.”
Jordan ceased speaking with the media, and his teammates followed suit. With Pippen taking charge, the Bulls won big in Game 3 in the Stadium, 103–83.
“The moment I knew we were going to win that series was after Game 3,” Schaefer recalled. “After we’d beat them pretty soundly and brought the series back to 2–1, Patrick Ewing made a comment that, ‘We don’t have to win here in Chicago.’ As soon as I heard him say that, I knew we were going to win the series. If you have that attitude, you may lose a game and lose your edge. You can’t assume you’re going to win all of your home games. As soon as he said that, it told me he was counting on winning all their home games, which wasn’t going to happen. It was Scottie who got us that series. He always seemed to have a knack when Michael might have been having a tough time, to step up and do what needed to be done.”
Jordan scored 54 points to drive Chicago to a win in Game 4, 105–95; and Jordan’s triple-double (29 points, 10 rebounds, 14 assists) dominated the statistics column in Game 5, when Chicago took the series lead 3–2. But it was Pippen’s successive blocks of putback attempts by New York’s Charles Smith late in Game 5 in New York that closed off the Knicks’ hopes. Then, when the Bulls completed their comeback in Game 6 in Chicago, it was Pippen again doing the final damage, a corner jumper and a trey, in a 96–88 victory.
The Bulls had persevered to return to their third straight NBA Finals. This time, Charles Barkley, now with the Phoenix Suns, was the opponent. After several frustrating and troubled years in Philadelphia, Barkley had been traded to the Suns before the 1992–93 season—and just like that he was reborn, earning league MVP honors and leading the Suns to 62 wins and a trip to the Finals.
It was a memorable series—not so much for the basketball, but for the extracurricular activities, which included sightings of Barkley and Madonna at a Phoenix restaurant. In the championship matchup with Jordan, Barkley was a fitting opponent. Having come into the league together in the fall of 1984, the two superstars had formed a solid friendship over the years. While Barkley had shown no forethought, no hesitation in trashing his own public image during his early NBA seasons, the more circumspect Jordan had proceeded cautiously, always saying and doing the correct corporate things while persistently building Chicago into a winner. At times, when Barkley’s occasional bar fights or misguided public statements boiled over into controversy, Jordan had even taken on the task of trying to explain his friend to writers and reporters, the primary message being that Charles may tend to run his mouth before thinking, but he’s an honest, genuine person and a tough competitor.
For these defenses and for Jordan’s friendship, Barkley was quite grateful—in fact, some said too grateful to be successful in the 1993 championship series. Later, Scottie Pippen, Jordan’s teammate, would berate Barkley for “kissin’ Michael’s ass,” an accusation that left Sir Charles bristling. Yet it would remain one of the great unanswered questions of his career. The Lakers’ Magic Johnson and the Pistons’ Isiah Thomas had formed a similar friendship in the 1980s, but that relationship fell apart when their teams met in the 1988 and 1989 Finals. There was no way, Johnson later admitted, that their intense competition could not get in the way of their friendship.
Faced with the same tough choice of building and nurturing an intense dislike for his championship competition, Barkley had chosen to remain a good guy and Jordan’s friend. The Suns had won 62 games and had the home-court advantage for their brand new America West Arena. The Bulls, though, had plenty of confidence. They had always done well against Barkley’s Philadelphia teams. Pippen’s and Grant’s defense would shackle him again, and B. J. Armstrong had the quickness to stay with Phoenix point guard Kevin Johnson.
Those plans eventually worked out, but in the short term there was more turbulence ahead. No sooner had Jordan’s Atlantic City casino jaunt slipped out of the news than Richard Esquinas, a San Diego businessman, stepped forward with a book claiming that Jordan owed him $1.2 million from high-stakes losses from betting on golf games.
In a taped interview on NBA at halftime of Game 1 of the Finals, Jordan answered, admitting that he had lost substantial sums to Esquinas, but nowhere near the figure claimed. Questions about whether this distraction would hinder the Bulls were quickly put aside when Chicago claimed the first game, 100–92. Jordan hit for 31, Pippen for 27, while the Bulls’ defense harassed Barkley into shooting 9 for 25.
“I don’t think anybody was scared or had the jitters,” said Phoenix guard Kevin Johnson, a statement that was met with no amens. Frankly, the Suns seemed quite nervous. And they sank deeper into trouble in Game 2. Barkley and Jordan both scored 42 points, but the Bulls’ defense clamped down on Kevin Johnson and Phoenix guard Dan Majerle to take a 2–0 series lead, 111–108. Bulls assistant Johnny Bach had devised a defensive scheme, deployed by Armstrong, that had Johnson talking to himself and sitting much of the fourth quarter.
Suddenly, Phoenix faced three games in Chicago and the prospect of a sweep. The Suns answered by scratching out a 129–121, triple-overtime win in Game 3. This time Johnson had played an NBA Finals record 62 minutes and scored 25 points with 7 rebounds and 9 assists. Majerle had scored 28 and Barkley 24.
“I thought it was never going to end,” Jackson said afterward.
Sensing a vulnerability in his team, Jordan came on strong in Game 4, scoring 55 points and driving the Bulls to a 108–98 win and a 3–1 series lead. The Suns had allowed Jordan time and again to glide inside for handsome little dunks and bank shots. Phoenix was only down two, but Armstrong’s pressure and a key late steal propelled Jackson’s team to a 111–105 victory. Jordan’s point total tied Golden State’s Rick Barry for second place on the all-time single-game list. The record was held by Elgin Baylor, who had scored 61 in a game against Boston in 1962.
The Bulls were up 3–1 with Game 5 on their home floor. However, they strangely teetered at the brink of their accomplishment. Jordan swore to his teammates that he wouldn’t accompany them back to Phoenix if they failed to deliver the championship in the Stadium. Regardless, the Bulls stumbled, and the Suns busied themselves with defense. Jordan’s easy baskets disappeared as Phoenix congregated in the lane. Suns rookie Richard Dumas scored 25 points. “It was just a matter of slipping into the open spots,” he explained. “There were a lot of them.”
With Johnson scoring 25 and Sir Charles 24, the Suns got the win they needed, 108–98, to return the series back to their home court. Afterward, Barkley forecast a Suns title. “It’s just that I believe in destiny,” he said.
There had been speculation that if the Bulls won Game 5 in Chicago, the city would be racked by the riotous celebration that had marred the team’s previous championships. In fear of that, many merchants had boarded up their stores.
“We did the city a favor,” Barkley said as he left town. “You can take all those boards down now. We’re going to Phoenix.”
So was Jordan, contrary to his vow, and the Bulls were fighting feelings that they had let their best opportunity slip away.
“Michael seems to sense what a team needs,” recalled Bulls broadcaster Tom Dore. “They had just lost. But Michael walked on the plane going to Phoenix and said, ‘Hello, world champs.’ He’s got a foot-long cigar, and he’s celebrating already because he knows the series is over. He knew, going to Phoenix, that they were going to win. It wasn’t a question with him, and I think that’s what the team had. They just had this arrogance. They weren’t mean about it. They just felt like they were going to win.”
Barkley had claimed that “destiny” belonged to the Suns, but over the first three quarters of Game 6 it seemed the Phoenix players were feeling pressure more than anything else. Meanwhile, the Bulls’ phalanx of guards—Jordan, Armstrong, Paxson, and seldom-used reserve Trent Tucker—fired in nine three-pointers over the first three periods to take Chicago to a 87–79 lead.
From there, however, it was the Bulls’ turn to succumb to the pressure. They missed nine shots and had two turnovers the first eleven times they got the ball in the fourth quarter. The Suns closed within a point, then surged to take a 98–94 lead with 90 seconds left. Then Jordan pulled down a defensive rebound and wound his way through traffic to the other end for a short bank shot. It was 98–96 with 38 seconds to go. Majerle’s shooting had helped Phoenix back into the series, but on their next-to-last possession he shot an air ball.
The Bulls had another chance with 14.1 seconds to go. After a timeout, Jordan inbounded the ball to Armstrong, then got it back and passed ahead to Pippen. The ball was supposed to go back to Chicago’s Superman, but Pippen saw that Jordan was covered and motored into the lane, where he was greeted by Suns center Mark West.
Alone on the near baseline was Grant, who had scored a single point in the game, and who had almost thrown the ball over the backboard on a stickback opportunity moments earlier. Pippen whipped him the ball, and, scrambling out of his personal terror, Grant passed up the shot to send the ball out to John Paxson, all alone in three-point land to the right of the key. “I knew it was in as soon as Pax shot it,” Jordan said.
Paxson’s trey and a key Grant block of Johnson’s last shot moments later delivered the Bulls’ third championship.
“That’s instinct,” Paxson said of the shot afterward. “You catch and you shoot. I’ve done it hundreds of thousands of times in my life. Horace gave me a good pass.”
Reporters converged upon Jordan afterward to ask if he planned to retire. “No,” he assured them. “My love for this game is strong.”
Time would reveal that it was more than a matter of love. Still, the effects of Paxson’s big shot and three straight championships would linger sweetly in Chicago.
“It was like a dream come true,” Paxson recalled in 1995. “You’re a kid out in your driveway shooting shots to win championships. When you get down to it, it’s still just a shot in a basketball game. But I think it allowed a lot of people to relate to that experience, because there are a lot of kids and adults who lived out their own fantasies in their backyards. It made the third of the three championships special. It’s a real nice way of defining a three-peat, by making a three-point shot.
“I’m not sure what winning did for us outwardly, but inwardly it justified all the effort and hard work that we put into it. It confirmed our belief that we could win, and with that comes a confidence that carries over into your personal life as well as your professional life. I saw that in a lot of my teammates after we won the first one and we continued to win. It was like, outside of Michael and Scottie, who were already established stars, the other guys kind of blossomed. It was recognition. We all became a little more noticed as players. For so long, it was Michael Jordan. Can these other guys hold up their end and help him win? We proved to the basketball world that we could.
“That’s the greatest part about winning, is how you feel as a group. You’re happy for one another. You look at small plays that happen in a game, the people who come off the bench and provide something that the group needs. In our first championship run, Cliff Levingston provided some key minutes in the games out in Los Angeles. Craig Hodges did the same thing. You understand how important each individual is to your success. It’s not just the best player. It’s from one to twelve, the coaches included, and your appreciation for each is very high.”
For Jackson, the exhilaration somehow outlasted his exhaustion. For four seasons, he had juggled between being a teacher, a coach, a friend, and a counselor.
“You have to be all of them,” he said. “You have to be able to wear all of those hats. At times you have to be a person who is concerned, as you obviously are, about the welfare of the individuals who are under your care, people who are directly responsible to you for their production or performance level. Other times you have to be able to give advice as far as basketball goes or regarding personal life. And sometimes you have to be able to call people to perform at a greater level because they’re not living up to their expectations—you have to get more from them.”
He had gotten everything from this group of Bulls, but the circumstances were about to change dramatically. The negative energy had steadily collected about his team, and it was something that no burning sage could drive away.