8

Strange Days

At the conclusion of the 1993 playoffs, Michael Jordan sat atop the NBA mountain, too weary to look back and find much joy in his swift climb. One championship had somehow become three, and the immense energy needed to claim the third had emptied him. Years later, Jackson and his assistants would look back and realize that three championships in a row was about all that Jordan could stand in any one burst of success. They said this with some amazement, because they had just watched this very unique man bump up against his limits. For the longest time, Jackson and his lieutenants had wondered if Jordan had any limits at all.

For the casual fan, Jordan’s magnificence became such an assumption that his winning almost seemed easy. To those with him, though, there was nothing easy about the grind of what he accomplished. Jordan had been successful because he had infused his teammates with huge doses of will, mental strength, and leadership.

From their earliest days together, Jackson had shown a strong intuitive sense of what Jordan would need to realize and sustain his talent. Jackson, then, became Jordan’s companion and guide on this unusual quest. And Jordan did the same for Jackson, their ideas and separate visions invigorating one another. The tool Jackson employed most often was the mind game, the deceit, the motivational hide-and-seek, and then—when necessary—the rarest frank assessment, or even confrontation. As their time together went on, the nature of Jackson’s effort became more political, more soothing and understanding. The respect he showed Jordan presented an obvious double standard.

“Phil would make references to things with Michael as ‘We need to do this,’” Bill Wennington explained. “Whenever there was a problem with Michael in a meeting, it was like ‘We need to do this.’ If it was me, it was like, ‘Bill, you have to go box out.’ When it was a Michael thing, it was a ‘we’ thing. For us, it was, ‘Steve, you need to take that shot.’ Michael would maybe miss a boxout, and it was like, ‘Well, WE need to box out now.’ Just little things like that. But if you understand the reason for it, and the reason that the team was good, it’s all part of it.”

They all understood that the reason was Jordan, Wennington said.

In his earlier seasons in the league, most of his teammates hadn’t achieved that understanding, and more than a few found Jordan to be an impossibility. He was walled off by his talent and celebrity and his demanding nature, which allowed the conflicts and resentment to fester.

Jackson’s efforts to take down those walls when he first arrived as coach helped immensely in calming some of those conflicts.

But by and large, it was the triangle offense that answered the bigger question. It provided a format that allowed Jordan to relate to his less talented teammates. The structure of the triangle demands that the ball be passed to the open man. Once Jordan began complying with that, once he trusted enough to do that, the tension began to ease.

There quickly evolved a system in which Jordan would play within the triangle for three quarters, and then—depending on the pace and rhythm of the game—would break out of the offense in the fourth quarter to go on scoring binges.

Jordan’s conspirator and early instigator in these departures was Bach himself, who whispered his opinion. “Johnny would say, ‘Fuck the triangle. Just take the ball and score. Get everyone else to clear out,’” Jordan recalled.

Jackson would tolerate Bach’s insubordination only so long, but it played a role in the evolution of the team’s style of play.

These fourth quarters each night produced a sizable tension of their own, with Tex Winter on the bench anxious that Jordan was trying to do too much by himself. Many nights he would, and the team would stumble. But far more often, Jordan would do too much, and everyone in the arena would become mesmerized.

That had certainly been the case in 1993. To claim that third title, he had averaged 41 points per game during the NBA Finals, breaking the championship series record of 40.8 points per game set by San Francisco’s Rick Barry in 1967.

Jordan had never seemed more masterful, yet Jackson and other close associates could see that he had grown weary of the grind, of the lack of privacy. In his public comments during the 1993 season, Jordan had made oblique references to his retirement. Then, in the euphoria of the locker room victory celebration in Phoenix, Jordan had relented, saying he would return for another campaign come fall.

Just two weeks later, in July, Jordan’s popular father, James Jordan, was found murdered in South Carolina, ostensibly the victim of a random roadside killing. Yet the news of Mr. Jordan’s death was followed quickly by wild speculation that somehow Jordan’s golf wagering might be a factor. That, as much as anything, seemed to be the final insult.

“That’s what killed us about Norm Van Lier, who works as a broadcaster here in Chicago,” Jackson would explain later. “He was broadcasting theories about Michael’s father’s death and gambling and the NBA and all this stuff. Michael had to go talk to Van Lier and say, ‘Norm. Cool this stuff about gambling and the NBA and the grand scheme and all this other stuff about my father’s death. There’s no conspiracy going on here.’ That’s the paranoia that builds in people’s minds and sometimes drives you crazy.”

As training camp neared that fall, Jordan informed Jerry Reinsdorf that he was prepared to retire. The owner recalled that he asked Jordan if he had spoken with Jackson, and Jordan replied that he was hesitant to do that.

“Knowing Phil, the psychology major, he was going to try to get in my head and see where I stood,” Jordan recalled.

Jordan, though, knew what he wanted. While Jackson certainly knew how to push his buttons, the coach made no such effort. He pointed out that Jordan possessed a great gift from God and that leaving the game would deny millions of fans the benefit of that gift. Jordan was firm that it was his time to go. But before they concluded their half-hour discussion, Jordan had a question of his own for Jackson. He wanted to know how the coach would get him through another 82-game regular season, because he had absolutely no motivation to do it ever again, saw no challenge in it. Jackson tried, but had no good answer for it. Jordan simply didn’t want to end his career on a down note, with declining skills and facing excessive criticism, the way Julius Erving had ended his career.

So Jackson changed course one final time and asked Jordan if he had thought about a sabbatical. Jordan wanted no lingering, no loose ends.

Jackson realized it then, and told Jordan he was on his side. Then he told him that he loved him and began weeping. Although he had braced himself for a difficult encounter, Jordan was caught off-guard by the depth of the emotion. He realized then that people could spend years working together and not know the depth of their feelings for each other until it came time to move on.

On October 6, 1993, Jordan announced his retirement from the Bulls. The move came so swiftly that he didn’t even have time to notify his mother. “I was in Kenya with Michael’s mom and a group of school kids,” recalled Bulls vice president Steve Schanwald. “It had been so peaceful out there. We were on safari in a remote portion of Kenya, living in tents. No newspapers, no radio, no TV, no nothing. I told the people that the world could be coming to an end, and we wouldn’t know. Two days later we flew back to Nairobi, back to civilization for the first time in about ten days. I got off the plane and got on the bus that was going to take us to have lunch. The bus driver was reading a newspaper, a tabloid called the Daily Nation, Kenya’s national newspaper. On the back page, there was a picture of Michael, and the headline said, ‘Michael Jordan Retires.’ I thought it was somebody’s idea of a bad joke. But two days earlier, Michael had announced his retirement. Apparently, Michael’s mom didn’t know. I went up to her and thanked her for lending us her son for nine great years. She said, ‘What are you talking about?’ I said, ‘Mrs. Jordan, your son retired two days ago.’ She said, ‘He did! I don’t believe it.’ So I went and got the newspaper and showed her. That was how we found out about Michael retiring.

“That night at dinner I bought some champagne for everybody, and we toasted Michael on his great career. But by the time I got back to Chicago, the festive mood was gone. People were definitely depressed. It happened with such suddenness, it was so out of the blue, that it kind of took the wind out of people’s sails.”

Perhaps the greatest emptiness was felt in the NBA’s administrative offices, where staff members began trying to figure out how to replace the greatest attraction in basketball history.

Jordan soon announced that he would try his hand at minor league baseball in the Chicago White Sox farm system with the hopes that he might someday make it to the big leagues.

“It was really his father’s dream that he play baseball,” Jackson pointed out. “His father wanted to play pro ball and did play semi-pro. When his father passed away, I think Michael was kind of living out his father’s dream. That’s one of the things I thought when I heard it. ‘Geez, this guy wants to go play baseball in the major leagues!?’ But then I realized basketball players are always fantasizing that they could play baseball.”

The situation brought to mind Jackson’s own playing days. He remembered DeBusschere, who had been a big-league pitcher, and Bradley getting into a debate that spilled over into a challenge one day. Bradley was contending that he could hit DeBusschere.

“OK, Bill, let’s see if you can hit,” DeBusschere said. “We’ll go out to Shea Stadium.”

“I jumped in,” Jackson recalled with a smile, “saying ‘I was a pitcher, too. I want to be part of this.’”

Bradley had cast a dubious glance at the wild-haired, bearded Jackson and said, “I won’t stand in for any pitches that you throw.”

“I used to tell Danny Whalen, who was the manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, ‘Danny, you think I could come back and play baseball?’ I was twenty-five or twenty-six and I had this desire to go play baseball,” Jackson recalled. “He said, ‘Phil, you been a basketball player for how long now, four or five years? You haven’t thrown a baseball hard in four years? Forget about it. Just stick to basketball. It’s been pretty good to you.’ I think there are a lot of players who would like to play [two] sports, like Deion Sanders has been able to do. Looking back on it, it was a beautiful thing Michael did. What a risk he took trying to play baseball. The whole idea that he’s going to go out and give up everything to try that at his age. That’s the wonderful thing about it. Michael is such a special person.”

Jordan’s abrupt retirement came just as training camp was set to open in 1993. Suddenly, Jerry Krause found himself hustling to patch together a replacement combination for the backcourt. As he once explained, it had been nearly impossible to keep a young off guard as an understudy for Jordan because his immense competitiveness consumed them in practices. Now, Krause had to pull together a group of free agents. Ultimately, the coaches decided to go with an old standby—Pete Myers, a hard-working, scrappy journeyman who made Tex Winter remember why he loved coaching. Myers moved into the starting lineup on opening night and played solidly and consistently all season.

There were several other new faces on the roster. After years of trying, Krause had finally lured 6′11″ Croatian Toni Kukoc. Krause had pursued Kukoc since the Bulls drafted him in the second round in 1990. It had never been a move popular with Jordan, Pippen, Grant, and other Bulls, but Krause had persisted, even after Jordan and Pippen made a point of trying to humiliate Kukoc when the U.S. played Croatia in the 1992 Summer Olympics.

The general manager had also signed free agent Steve Kerr with the idea that he would eventually replace Paxson, who, like Cartwright, was struggling to return for one more season. For the frontcourt, Krause signed 7-foot journeyman Bill Wennington and later traded Stacey King to Minnesota for 7′2″ Luc Longley.

There was immediate speculation that these newly reconstituted Bulls would fail miserably without Jordan. But just the opposite happened. Jackson and his assistants did what some observers saw as their best job in Jackson’s tenure with the team. And Scottie Pippen, Horace Grant, and B. J. Armstrong showed that they had developed into outstanding players in their own right. All three were picked for the All-Star team, the first time that three Bulls had been selected.

Amazingly, these Jordanless Bulls won 55 games and made a strong-but-controversial run into the 1994 playoffs. Their first-round opponents, the Cavaliers, fell easily, leaving the Bulls to face Pat Riley’s Knicks in the Eastern semifinals.

“We’d used more energy to get 55 wins than we’d ever had to use in the past,” Jackson recalled. “Maybe my better job was holding them back a little bit in years past so that when we went into the playoffs we had energy and expertise that could be unleashed. This time, it was a matter of how much did we have left for the playoffs.”

In Game 1 in New York, the Bulls had a 15-point lead but seemed to run out of energy and suffered a bitter, frustrating loss, the kind that Jackson feared could do harm to his team. So instead of practicing, he decided they needed a break, which turned out to be an impromptu ride on the Staten Island Ferry.

“One of the things I like to do in New York is observe its grandeur,” Jackson explained. “Sometimes when you step away from it, you can see it for what it really is. New York can be overwhelming if you’re on its streets, if you’re in the canyons between the skyscrapers. Something about New York in Game 1 overwhelmed us. We had a 15-point lead and we got overwhelmed, with the intimidation of the crowd and the team together. That home court got to us. I just wanted to take that away. These guys knew how to play. They were in great shape. There wasn’t any strategy change that we had to have. We had two days off between games. But yet we had to do something together as a group.

“One of the things I’ve always enjoyed was the Staten Island Ferry ride. In fact, sometimes I’d come back from Jersey and go through Staten Island just to take the ferry ride back to New York City. So I misdirected the bus. I didn’t let anybody know. I misdirected the bus because where we were practicing, the downtown YMCA was about six to eight blocks from the Staten Island Ferry. What I didn’t know was that the press was following us in cabs. I thought they were already at the YMCA. Then I’d have the excuse, ‘Well, while we were going down there, I got this idea…’ But the other thing I didn’t anticipate was that the Staten Island Ferry runs every fifteen minutes or so. There’s a clock on it. When I got there, there was still ten minutes on the clock. I thought we’d be lucky and hit the clock late. But I knew the guys on the Staten Island Ferry would treat us great; they’re great guys; they’re city employees. They hustled right up to the top of the ferry. We rode on the top of the ferry out and back. We could go in the pilot’s house; we had complete freedom. There was some stuff there, where the press got ahold of us. I was disappointed that we couldn’t just jump on the ferry and escape all that. But it was beautiful, because President Clinton was flying in. They had a helicopter hovering over the pad, where he was gonna land down by Wall Street. It was a beautiful day. We had a neat ride and a lot of fun.”

Radio reporter Cheryl Raye was among the media contingency that day. “We were at practice, and all of a sudden we see the bus drive by,” she recalled. “The bus takes them to the ferry, and Phil shows them the sights of New York. They get back on the bus, and go back to the hotel. We see the bus going back the other way, so we hop in a cab and get back to the Plaza.”

Desperate for interviews, Raye got into the lobby in time to see an elevator about to close with some players on it. “I jumped on,” she said, “and there’s Bill Cartwright and John Bach and B. J. Armstrong, so I say, ‘Can I talk to somebody about this?’ So I get up to Bill Cartwright’s room and he tells me, ‘You know Phil. He’s got these ideas in his head. But I know New York. I know what’s going on. But Phil was trying to relax the guys, and he’s telling them the history of Staten Island and the history of the Statue of Liberty. Most of these guys could care less.’ Bill said, ‘To be awakened to go to practice is one thing. But to be awakened to go on a tour?’ That was one of Phil’s ways of handling the stress and handling New York and the media.”

“I think they were feeling the stress,” Raye said. “Here they were, defending champions, playing the Knicks without Michael. It was one of those times where you said, ‘That’s Phil. What other coach could do that?’”

“It was OK,” Horace Grant told reporters. “I was hesitant about getting on a big boat like that because I get a little seasick. But we had fun.”

“Phil was pointing out all the different boroughs,” Scott Williams said. “It was kind of cool. It was the first time I ever saw the Statue of Liberty, and it was a lot smaller in person.”

“Phil is great,” Wennington recalled. “He cancels practice and we go on the ferry ride to the Statue of Liberty. Things like that are just phenomenal. The team was really stressed and we were feeling down, and it was something to just break everything. Like, ‘You know what? We’re here, and we’re good. We know what we have to do. Let’s go and forget about it for two hours, have fun, get our minds straight, and tomorrow we’ll go take care of business.’”

The trip on the ferry, played out in front of the New York media, brought a new level of focus to Jackson’s unusual approach. “That’s the thing that makes coaching really enjoyable and fun for me,” he said later when asked about his beliefs. “You need diversification. If you have that, you can keep it interesting for these guys.”

He pointed out that the NBA was populated by career coaches so focused on basketball that they hardly realized the world included anything else. “You get on the treadmill of pro basketball,” he said. “You just keep running on the treadmill and you can’t get off. It’s something that can be generated from a season to one year to ten years to twenty years. You look at some of these guys, they’ve been around the game for thirty years. And they just stay in that same pattern. But you should try to make the pattern just a little bit better. Sometimes I think you have to jump off the treadmill, step back a little ways from it, relook it, and rethink it.”

He had gained notoriety at first for giving his players books to read, as if he were a college coach who also happened to be teaching a section of English lit. “Horace Grant really likes to read,” he said. “I started him out with some simple books. Joshua. I knew he was into religion. I’d read the book. Somebody gave it to me. He liked it, and he trusted me a little bit. Then I gave him To Kill a Mockingbird. He loved To Kill a Mockingbird. So Horace and I had this communication through reading. He liked a lot of the stuff I picked out for him. What I liked about Horace is that he is not stagnant. He always wanted to learn more. He believed in self-involvement and self-improvement. And he’s got this optimistic attitude about life.”

Deft as his coaching touches were, the ferry ride did not bring his Bulls a win in Game 2 of that 1994 playoff battle. The Knicks strong-armed a second victory, and the series moved to Chicago with the Bulls down 2–0. There, in Game 3, they seemed poised to fall off the edge. The score was tied at 102 with 1.8 seconds left. Chicago had the ball and called a timeout, where Jackson issued instructions for the ball to go to Kukoc for the final shot. Pippen was infuriated. He was the superstar of the team, burdened all season with the load of carrying the Bulls alone. He believed the shot should have been his to take. So he refused to go back in the game. Cartwright was at first stunned, then furious. Unflustered, Jackson substituted, and Kukoc hit the game-winning shot.

“Those times are the moments in games that you live for,” Pippen later explained. “And I thought it was an injustice the way Phil treated me, and I had to say something, right or wrong. So it wasn’t what people wanted to hear.”

“Phil defuses confrontations so quickly and easily,” Bill Wennington offered. “It’s amazing how fast he can just get a situation under control. Once we got into the locker room Scottie realized that he had made a mistake and was really feeling bad for it. Bill Cartwright was talking and had words to say. Everyone was just really disappointed at the time, but Phil was there in control of the situation. He just said, ‘Enough said. We don’t need to talk about this anymore.’ And that was really in my eyes the perfect way to handle it. He just let it go at that.”

The moment illustrated a key factor in Jackson’s approach: he was not a believer in confrontation. “He never did anything openly,” Wennington explained. “I’m sure he had to talk to players about things, but he did that sort of thing behind closed doors where it was just sort of taken care of between him and the party involved. He never brought things out into the open for all eyes to see when it was a private matter. He didn’t want to demean anybody, didn’t want to take anything away from anyone’s manhood. He wanted you to feel proud on the court, not to feel belittled or threatened by something he was gonna do. Because he was gonna be there every day coaching you and asking you to do things for him and trying to motivate you. He didn’t want any feelings to get in the way of that.”

Jackson did, however, leave the locker room that day and go to the postgame media session. Reporters were unaware of the situation until Jackson began discussing it. Certainly he couldn’t have kept it quiet, but again, the series involved the Knicks, meaning that New York reporters were there to magnify the incident, to throw it on the global agenda.

Krause was furious with Pippen and immediately began planning to trade him, leading to the many heartaches and frustrations and disagreements that would follow. There had long been an undercurrent of discontent with the Bulls, of dislikes and difficulties. But this was the incident that loosed a putrefaction upon the organization, bringing a flare-up in long-simmering hostilities between Krause and Pippen, which in turn would finally prompt Jackson to rebel against his mentor. If they hadn’t been so successful as a group, it might have ended quickly. Instead, it would drag out over four seasons, three of which were overwhelmingly successful, so that all of their lives—especially Jackson’s—would be a mix of the highest and the lowest, the best and the worst.

Somehow, the team shook off the Pippen incident and claimed a 12-point win in Game 4 to even the series. The Bulls then could have won the crucial Game 5 in New York, but they let it slip away by a point. In the closing seconds, the Bulls had the lead, and seemingly an assured win, when referee Hue Hollins whistled Pippen for a late foul on New York’s Hubert Davis. The incredulous Bulls protested, and supervisor of officials Darrell Garretson later said the call was terrible. But it still cost Chicago the game and the series, and a chance to win a fourth straight championship.

Back in Chicago for Game 6, the Bulls played well and evened the series at 3. But the Knicks had home-court advantage, and a week of ferry rides wasn’t going to break the spell that cast on Jackson’s team.

In the wake of the loss, Jackson fired Johnny Bach.

“That’s the twist in life that fate does to you,” Bach said.

He had come to the team as Doug Collins’s chosen man, and Jackson had come to view him perhaps as an unnecessary filter in his communication with his players. Krause had continued to despise Bach since The Jordan Rules, and he appeared to express his displeasure at every little turn, in staff meetings and casual discussions alike.

“It was Jerry Krause’s relationship with Johnny Bach that created a very uncomfortable situation,” Jackson explained a few months later. “It made this have to happen eventually. It had gone all wrong. It was bad for the staff to have this kind of thing because we had to work together.”

Krause had also set out to trade Pippen, but it had been extremely difficult to find a deal that would bring a player of comparable value to the Bulls. Finally, he had put together a deal with Seattle that would have brought power forward Shawn Kemp plus a draft pick that would possibly have given the Bulls Eddie Jones out of Temple. But Seattle’s owner backed out of the trade at the last minute, and a series of news stories followed that revealed Krause’s plans. Pippen, who was already unhappy over his contract, was further enraged that the team planned to trade him.

The ensuing turmoil had left the fans and the media eager to pump up the volume on their rejection of Krause. He, in turn, responded by withdrawing even deeper into his suspicions and unhappiness.

“Poor Jerry’s been kicked around from pillar to post by everybody, including me,” observed longtime Chicago sportswriter Bob Logan. “But he got what he wanted in life. He’s running the franchise. He’s got three championship rings. Yet I don’t think he’s ever spent a day where he’s completely satisfied. There’s always something else he wants, or something that doesn’t quite work out.”

A classic example of that misery followed a few months later, in November 1994, when the team held “A Salute to Michael,” a ceremony to retire Jordan’s number 23 jersey in the United Center. It was the night the team unveiled a bronze statue of Jordan in action, called “The Spirit,” just outside the building.

The event quickly became something of a nightmare for the Bulls’ staff. The trouble, it seems, began when NBA Entertainment took control of the event away from the Bulls to make it into a nationally broadcast program for Turner Network Television. As first envisioned, the “retirement” was to be a night of intimacy and warmth involving Jordan, his coaches and teammates, and the fans. Instead, NBA Entertainment turned it into a dimly conceived TV special in which every line was scripted. Rather than a memorable evening with the Chicago crowd that followed Jordan’s every jump stop on his rise to greatness, the session unfolded as a vapid showcase of television business connections.

Instead of a circle of friends, there was a “cast,” including broadcaster Larry King and actors Craig T. Nelson, Kelsey Grammer, Sinbad, George Wendt, Woody Harrelson, and Robert Smigel, all of whom had little or no real connection with Jordan and the Bulls. The show moved from one hollow segment to another. The script writers had effectively removed any emotion from the format, except for odd moments when the crowd grew impatient with the awkward silliness of this staged event.

Sadly, the only impromptu moment of the evening was one of profound embarrassment, especially for Krause. When he and Reinsdorf were introduced, the crowd of twenty-one thousand booed lustily.

“C’mon, now,” Jordan chastised the fans. “Both Jerrys are good guys.”

It was an uncomfortable moment, but not unprecedented. At virtually every rally or celebration of the Bulls’ three straight championship seasons from 1991 to 1993, Krause had been the target of merciless booing from Chicago crowds. Never mind that by just about all accounts his personnel moves factored heavily into their success; the fans took a special delight in deriding him.

This night, however, was perhaps the worst for Thelma, Krause’s wife of many years. She began crying, and Krause himself grew furious. For years, he had ignored the booing and hardened himself to the fans. “I learned long ago that when we won, Michael would get the credit,” Krause has explained, “and when we lost, I would get the blame. I knew that. It was something I accepted.”

But this was different. The booing had finally gotten to his wife, and she was openly weeping.

“One of the really sad moments that I’ve seen before,” said former Bulls trainer Chip Schaefer, “is at the retirement function for Michael at the United Center when Jerry was roundly booed, and Michael had to say, ‘Don’t be hard on him.’ I could see from where I was sitting Thelma Krause just broken down in tears over it.”

Later, Dean Smith came up to Thelma and sought to console her. Smith pointed out that it was nice of Jordan to speak up for Krause. The comment sparked the pent-up anger and emotion in Thelma Krause, and she told Smith in clear terms what she thought of Jordan’s effort. It was too little, too late, she said angrily. “Too damn late.”

Smith and Jordan had often been at odds with Krause over the years, particularly when it came to the Bulls’ personnel decisions regarding University of North Carolina players. Both Jordan and Smith had lobbied long and hard to get Krause to draft Joe Wolf in the first round of the 1987 draft, and their efforts had created a tension-filled draft day dilemma for Krause. But then Reinsdorf told the general manager to “go with his gut” because his instincts on personnel had served the franchise well. So Krause selected Grant, who developed into a key player. Wolf, meanwhile, went on to become an underachieving career role player.

So Thelma Krause had no compunction about telling Dean Smith off that night. Krause himself didn’t seem to mind it too much either.

Faced with a diminished roster and dissension within the organization, Jackson held a certain dread for the 1994–95 season. Later, after Jackson had found himself thoroughly mired in hellish circumstances, trainer Chip Schaefer, Jackson’s good friend, said he was almost sure it would be the coach’s last season. Things had simply become too difficult.

But then Jordan abruptly returned that March, Schaefer said, and the entire team’s spirits were lifted, especially Jackson’s.

It had been the kind of season to chase away even the best of coaches, and the trouble and swirl of changes had started long before the first tipoff. Angered by Jackson’s assessment that he would spend his NBA career as a bench player, Scott Williams became a free agent and accepted a lucrative offer to play in Philadelphia. “Have a nice life,” Krause had told him.

Then the re-signing of Horace Grant got mired in nasty dispute, and he left the Bulls for the Orlando Magic after publicly exchanging insults with Reinsdorf. His departure, combined with the retirements of John Paxson and Bill Cartwright (who would abruptly unretire when the Seattle Sonics offered him a substantial two-year contract) left the roster noticeably weaker.

The bottom line to these changes meant a significant struggle over the first months of the season. The game-related battles were made worse by a public dispute between Pippen and management over his efforts to have his multiyear contract renegotiated. Pippen asked repeatedly to be traded. Tangled in the mess and offering much less firepower, Jackson’s team struggled to stay above .500.

By January, Pippen and Krause were engaged in an open war of words in the press, a development that brought the first public cracks in what would become a rupture of Jackson’s relationship with his boss.

“The thing that happened with Pippen was avoidable,” Jackson would confide after the season. “The things that have happened in the past were avoidable. Somehow or other they got pushed to greater limits. But that’s part of who Jerry is. He wants to directly confront when he feels that there has been a problem. He wants to challenge and overrun people and be brusque. He’s very brusque and sets people on edge just by walking into the locker room sometimes. We’ve had to talk to him about his manner in the locker room. On the other hand, Jerry keeps his space very well. He doesn’t overrun us, the coaches. He allows a coach to do what he wants to do as far as strategy and how he wants to handle the players. Jerry has a very good attitude about protocol.

“He’s just a very unusual guy.”

Informed that Jackson had labeled him brusque, an angry Krause called Jackson into his office. He saw the comment as one of the first signs of betrayal. Jackson countered that he had meant nothing of the sort, that he was only trying to maintain an air of cooperation with his team.

But how Bulls employees viewed the issue would go a long way in deciding where their loyalties fell. Some perceived Jackson as being the instigator of these troubles in that he coaxed and reinforced Jordan and Pippen’s dislike of Krause. Jackson’s supporters saw him as only trying to maintain his relationships with his star players.

One thing was certain: Krause needed no help in fomenting disagreements. His life had been a virtual whirl of conflicts in and around pro sports. With the media. With fellow NBA executives. With players. It was a pattern that had existed long before he met Jackson. But as Jackson grew weary of his trials with Krause, he seemed to focus more on his boss’s shortcomings.

“Jerry’s never been able to project a good personal image,” Jackson offered in 1995 as the issues with Krause heated up, “and that’s been the thing that’s destroyed his public persona as far as the audience goes here in Chicago. They see him as someone like the mayor. The mayor always gets booed in public. Jerry represents that kind of guy. He has to do a lot of the dirty jobs. The fans remember the dirty jobs, and they remember his comments. What has happened with Jerry is that he has alienated a lot of sportswriters, and the sportswriters form the public opinion.

“Jerry Krause is an enigma to the athletic world. He’s not what you would consider an athlete. So it’s everybody’s challenge to define him as a person. He’s a Damon Runyon-type character who is undefinable. But Jerry’s a watchdog. He keeps the press away, he keeps the public away, he keeps company policy always. He’s ever vigilant at mind control and spin control to the point that it wears people out. He has a tendency to alienate people. I don’t know if there’s ever been a story done on him here in Chicago where he hasn’t had a conflict with the writer.

“He’s willing to call people up on the phone and challenge them. ‘Why did you say this?’ And, ‘That’s a lie!’ And, ‘You missed the point!’ He’d done that to the point where he’s sort of made himself an unlikable character.”

Actually, trainer Chip Schaefer had seen the beginning of trouble three years earlier with the building of the team’s fancy practice facility, the Berto Center, in suburban Deerfield. “There are events that happen in the course of life that are like pebbles in a pond, that sort of ripple off of it,” Schaefer said. “As wonderful a facility as the Berto Center is, I think a lot of it started with the building of the Berto Center in 1992, when people were all forced to really be around each other a lot more. Prior to that, when we practiced at the multiplex, there were people who worked downtown, which meant there wasn’t as much contact. I don’t think Phil and Jerry saw each other as much. Once the Berto Center was built, we all had to be together every day, and I think that may well have been the start of it.”

The new building meant that the coaching staff began sharing space with Krause’s organizational staff, which engendered little misunderstandings between the two groups. Slowly, all those involved came to see two distinct and often opposed groups: the team, meaning Jackson and his assistants and the players; and the organization, consisting of Krause and his scouts and the rest of the front office. Over time, the two groups became polarized, Schaefer explained. “The Bulls became a house divided, and you were either Jerry’s guy or Phil’s guy, whether you wanted to be or not. I think it was a situation where Phil had his coaches, Jerry had his scouts … Sometimes what I think happens, because they’re being combative, they draw people close to them, whether you want to be or not. There were times on issues that Phil pulled me to him when in fact I may well have wanted to remain neutral on that issue…

“I’m trying to remain neutral, like Switzerland, and I just can’t. I’m getting pulled to one side or the other and it’s really difficult. There was no one activating event. I think it was a series of events. If you have personalities that don’t exactly mesh, then familiarity breeds contempt. If you don’t care for somebody, but you’re around them twice as much or three times as much as before, then you notice everything.”

Over time, the “team” became the code word for Jackson’s clan and the “organization” was Krause’s domain.

“The ‘team’ was the group of people you’d see on the bench during a game,” Schaefer said. “But I never wanted it to be that. It was kind of a shame. I think people are going to look back years from now and say, ‘What a shame. What a shame that we all couldn’t kind of rise above it.’”

The major complication would come with the 1995–96 season as Jackson entered the last year of his contract. Around the NBA, a number of untested coaches from college were receiving large sums to move to the pro game, which prompted the accomplished Jackson to expect a proportionate pay raise. It was an issue that would soon divide the coach and general manager. Krause had long insisted that the Bulls would not pay such sums for a coach, that the NBA was a players’ game, that coaches had minimal impact if the “organization” did its job.

Jackson was willing to concede that Krause had been pivotal in his own opportunity to coach. “One of the things that he does well is that he hires the best people that he can find,” he said. “That is really important. And when he does that he gives them the autonomy to move inside the field, even though he sometimes has a controlling tendency. He likes to keep things under the lid, he’s very good at that.”

Yet even Krause’s intense focus on finding and developing talent annoyed Pippen and Jordan no end. Pippen, in particular, bristled at the idea that Krause “discovered” him. “How the hell is he gonna find me in the draft if I’m the fifth player picked?” Pippen said. “If he ‘found’ me in the draft, I would have been picked in the second round, not the fifth player taken in the draft and not to the point that he had to work his way up to draft me from the eighth pick.”

The resentment Pippen and other players expressed about Krause was that in his boasting about deals, he came across as if he were taking credit for their careers.

He’s Back

By early March, the Bulls were struggling to stay above .500, and speculation abounded that once the season was over Pippen would be shipped to another team. Observers figured that, short of some miracle, the roster would have to be rebuilt, and the Bulls would have to start over.

Then came word that Jordan was about to abandon his baseball career and return to the Bulls. The next ten days brought the greatest tease in the history of sport. Was Michael Jordan returning to basketball or not? From Warsaw to Waukegan, the planet clamored to know.

Then on Saturday, March 18, 1995, he broke his silence with a two-word press release, issued through his Washington-based agent, David Falk:

“I’m back.”

Sure enough, the next day, shortly after noon, he emerged with his Bulls teammates from the visitors’ locker room at Market Square Arena in Indianapolis, where the Bulls were scheduled to meet the Pacers.

Standing before the crowd gathered in the hallway outside the locker room was Superman himself, chomping his gum fiercely. Jordan was ready to resume the career that had been prematurely interrupted by an eighteen-month “retirement.”

Camera bulbs flashed, and people wiggled with excitement. “This is just like the president appearing,” commented one Chicago TV reporter.

“Are you kidding?” somebody else said. “Michael’s more important than that.”

Only now, just as he was raring to take the floor and restart his career, something was wrong. Jordan’s face tightened.

Somebody was missing.

The Bulls did a quick head count. Only eleven. “Who’s not here?” Jordan asked as he searched the faces around him.

They all turned to see Pippen sheepishly slipping out of the locker room.

With his jaws working the gum and his glare policing the roster, Jordan gathered his teammates in their traditional huddle.

“What time is it?” somebody yelled.

“Game time!” they answered in unison.

With that, the Bulls broke and made their way out into the arena, opening the latest chapter in a strange, dramatic saga.

Air Jordan was back, and the news flashed around the world. “He is like a gift from God to the basketball game,” Huang Gang, a twenty-one-year-old professional player in Beijing, told reporters. “We try to imitate his ground moves. But you can’t copy him in the air. He is unique.”

Waiting for the competition to begin that Sunday in Indianapolis, Pacers coach Larry Brown quipped that the atmosphere was so zany, it seemed like “Elvis and the Beatles are back.”

The proceedings did have a dreamlike feel about them. But Jordan had always been defined by his ability to suspend reality. The circumstances were never more ethereal than that March, when the first rumors leaked out that he was contemplating another career move.

Without question, the Bulls were caught off-guard by Jordan’s decision to abandon the professional baseball career he had launched upon leaving basketball. Many people in baseball had questioned his skill level after he immersed himself in the White Sox minor league farm system, but no one doubted his work ethic. In his determination to learn to hit big-league pitching, Jordan came early and stayed late each day at practice.

But the futility was obvious almost from the start. He was too tall, some said, and presented too big a strike zone. “He is attempting to compete with hitters who have seen 350,000 fastballs in their baseball lives and 204,000 breaking balls,” Rangers pitching instructor Tom House appraised shortly after Jordan joined the AA Birmingham Barons for the 1994 season. “Baseball is a function of repetition. If Michael had pursued baseball out of high school, I don’t doubt he would have wound up making as much money in baseball as in basketball. But he’s not exactly tearing up Double A, and that’s light years from the big leagues.”

If he was light years away, Jordan, a thirty-two-year-old .200 hitter, certainly didn’t have time to waste with the protracted baseball strike that loomed over the game for six months. Hoping it would soon be resolved, he reported to spring training in Florida only to realize that the fight between owners and players over money wasn’t going to end anytime soon. So he packed up and went home.

Within days of his departure from Florida, a Chicago radio station reported that Jordan was secretly working out with the Bulls and contemplating a return to basketball.

On March 10, he announced his retirement from baseball, saying his minor league experience had been powerful because it allowed him to rediscover the work ethic that had made him a great basketball player. “I met thousands of new fans,” he said, “and I learned that minor league players are really the foundation of baseball. They often play in obscurity and with little recognition, but they deserve the respect of the fans and everyone associated with the game.”

Jordan hadn’t failed baseball, Jackson would later note. “Baseball failed him.”

Soon the Bulls confirmed that Jordan was working out with the team, and Jackson revealed that Jordan had actually been contemplating a return since October.

Like that, the situation exploded. Scores of media representatives from the major networks and national publications converged on the Berto Center in anticipation of Jordan’s holding a press conference announcing his return.

Yet each day at practice, large screens covered the picture windows through which reporters observed Bulls practices. The media could hear the shouts, the squeaking of sneakers on the gym floor. They were told that Michael was practicing with the team but that he hadn’t yet made up his mind about returning, that the details were being worked out.

On the Berto Center floor, Jordan displayed the intense competitiveness that for years had charged Bulls practice sessions. Wearing the yellow vest of the second team, he ran point guard against the regulars. “Just to be able to play with him is fun,” said center Will Perdue. “Just to be able to watch him.”

Yet Jordan wavered that week, pausing, as he would later explain, to contemplate whether he was returning to basketball out of disappointment over the baseball strike, or if he was in fact returning because he loved the game. While the media speculated and fans kept the lines buzzing on sports radio talk shows, Jordan remained silent. The closest he came to making a statement was the revving of his burgundy Corvette, warning the media to get out of the roadway as he left practice each day. His silence drove reporters and fans alike to distraction, with some callers on Chicago’s sports radio talk shows claiming that Jordan was toying with the public.

Meanwhile, USA Today reported that the stock value of companies that employed Jordan as a spokesman had zoomed up $2 billion on the various stock exchanges in recent days, leading to further speculation that Jordan was engaged in some kind of financial manipulation.

Finally, on Thursday, March 16, Jackson told Jordan not to attend practice that day because the media crowd at the Berto Center had gotten too large. After practice, Jackson revealed to a swarm of reporters that Jordan and Jerry Reinsdorf were engaged in negotiations and that a decision was three or four days away.

That Friday night, the Bulls capped a three-game winning streak and raised their record three notches above .500 by defeating the Milwaukee Bucks in the United Center. Speculation had been high that Jordan might make a sudden appearance in uniform for that game, but only his security advisers showed up to evaluate the arena.

Early the next morning, the Chicago radio waves were abuzz that Jordan would make his announcement that day, and that he would play Sunday on the nationally televised game against Indiana. Down on LaSalle Street, the managers at Michael Jordan’s Restaurant heard the news and decided that they had better restock the gift shop yet again. The restaurant’s business had been slow in February, but the hint of Jordan’s return had turned March into a boom, with crowds packing the place virtually every night. ESPN hosted an NCAA tournament special there, and the various TV crews in town appeared every night to interview fans and “capture the atmosphere.”

As a result, the gift shop was doing a whopping business, selling miniature bats, trading cards, jerseys, posters, coffee mugs, and other trinkets. Other fans gathered at the Jordan statue outside the United Center. Revealed at his November “retirement” ceremony, the statue had quickly become a hot spot for fans and tourists in Chicago. On this Saturday, as the anticipation grew, small groups were drawn to the statue.

“This is like the Colts returning to Baltimore,” said one fan, “with Johnny Unitas as quarterback!”

Over at the Berto Center, crowds of fans and reporters milled about, with many fans hanging from the balconies and walls of the Residence Inn next door. Nine different TV satellite trucks hovered over the building, waiting to blast the news around the world.

Suddenly practice was over, and just like that, Jordan’s Corvette appeared on the roadway, with him gunning his engine and the fans cheering wildly as he sped off. Next came Pippen in a Range Rover, pausing long enough to flash a giant smile through the vehicle’s darkly tinted windows.

Moments later, NBC’s Peter Vecsey did a stand-up report outside with the fans rooting in the background. He told the broadcast audience that Jordan was returning; that the superstar had negotiated to keep Pippen, guard B. J. Armstrong, and Jackson with the team; and that Jordan would play against Indiana on Sunday and probably wear his old number 23, which had been retired in November.

Chicago, quipped one radio sportscaster, was in a state of “Jorgasm.”

Jordan did not fly to Indianapolis with the team that Saturday night. A crowd of fans and media gathered at the Canterbury Hotel, awaiting the Bulls’ arrival. When a limousine with a police escort pulled up, the crowd surged forward. But out stepped a bride and groom. “Who are these people?” the stunned bride asked her new husband.

The team showed up moments later and was roundly cheered. But Jordan flew down the next day on a private jet and showed up at the arena with an armada of limousines carrying his security force of twenty to help hold back the crowds.

Outside the arena, tickets were going for $150 to $200, and the Wheaties marketing staff was creating a stir by passing out five thousand T-shirts and about ten thousand posters that read “Jordan’s Back, and He’s Eating His Wheaties.”

Shawn O’Grady, Wheaties marketing manager, said the company had hastily printed the posters and T-shirts the night before in Minnesota and air-freighted them to Indiana. The company, he added, was already working on a special edition cereal box to be distributed May 1 as the playoffs opened.

Jordan wore jersey number 45, his minor league and junior high number, instead of the number 23 that he had made so famous. Number 23 was the last number his father James saw him compete in, Jordan later explained, and he wanted to keep it that way.

Champion, the sportswear manufacturer that holds the NBA license for jerseys, immediately added an extra shift and began producing more than two hundred thousand number 45 jerseys for sale around the world.

Jordan played against Indiana like someone who had taken two years off. He made just 7 of 28 shots, but his defensive intensity helped the Bulls take the division-leading Pacers to overtime before losing. Afterward, Jordan broke his silence, saying he had been “embarrassed” by all the hoopla of the preceding ten days. “I’m human,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting this. It’s a little embarrassing.”

He said he had taken his time evaluating his love of the game and had come to the conclusion that it was real. That, he said, was the reason he returned, not financial considerations. He pointed out that the league had a moratorium on renegotiating contracts while it worked out a new labor agreement with the NBA Players Association, so he was required to play for the $3.9 million salary he left behind in 1993. He also added that he received no assurances about Pippen, although he asked.

His return, he said, was based solely on his love for basketball.

“I wanted to instill some positives back into this game,” he said of his return, indicating his displeasure at some of the NBA’s highly paid young players. “There’s been a lot of negatives lately, young guys not taking care of their part of the responsibility, as far as the love of the game. I think you should love this game, not take advantage of it … be positive people and act like gentlemen, act like professionals.”

For months, fans and media had speculated that Jordan’s retirement had been a deal with NBA commissioner David Stern to serve as punishment for revelations in 1993 that Jordan had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling on golf. “I had to let him know what some of my thoughts were,” he said of Stern, “and to see if he wanted me back in the league.”

But as to implications that he was suspended, Jordan said, “It was strictly my decision.”

So it was.

Three nights later, he scored 27 points by shooting 9 of 17 from the floor in a win over the Celtics at Boston Garden. In two short games he had served notice that he was indeed back—which, in turn, led to a revival of the NBA’s fortunes. Sagging television ratings abruptly jumped, and suddenly the whole country was watching Michael Jordan’s return.

“Everybody was complaining about the season,” Jackson said. “It was a lackluster year. It wasn’t any fun. All of a sudden Michael comes back, and suddenly people start paying attention to the NBA. They see there’s a lot of dynamic things going on here. A couple of television people told me, ‘It brought back our audience.’ And the NBA really enjoyed a very good post-season tournament because people got their minds set on pro basketball again because of this great attraction.”

The circumstances engendered an overwhelming belief among Chicagoans that Jordan was about to perform his grandest miracle of all: he would return after a two-year absence, play just 17 games of the regular season, then lead an undermanned Bulls team into the playoffs to capture a fourth title.

It had all the appeal of a storybook ending, which is what it proved to be. Instead of magic, Jordan’s return engendered mostly unrealistic expectations. The Bulls finished in fifth place in the Eastern Conference and had no home-court advantage in the playoffs. Still, they managed to oust the Charlotte Hornets in six games. But it became increasingly obvious that Jordan still lacked the stamina and timing to deliver a miracle.

In the second round, against the Orlando Magic with Shaquille O’Neal, Anfernee Hardaway, and Horace Grant, the Bulls and Jordan found themselves out of sync—particularly in Game 1 in Orlando, when Jordan committed two late turnovers that cost the Bulls the game. From there, Jordan missed shots, made miscues, and watched Grant and the Magic celebrate a 4–2 series victory.

What made the loss worse was that the Bulls’ primary executioner was Horace Grant. In preparing to defend Orlando center Shaquille O’Neal, Jackson had decided to double-team the Magic post while leaving Grant unguarded. It was a logical move. The rest of Orlando’s starters were deadly three-point shooters. Jackson figured that leaving Grant open would mean that if he made shots, they would only be two-pointers. Logical as it seemed, Jackson’s move backfired. Grant, who always felt that he had been disrespected during his playing days in Chicago, took umbrage and answered Jackson’s strategy by scoring early and often, a performance that further emphasized Chicago’s weakness at power forward. The final insult came when the Magic closed out the series on the Bulls’ home floor, and the young Orlando players hoisted Grant to their shoulders and carried him off in celebration.

Bad as it seemed, the loss hurt most because the Bulls’ coaching staff studied the tape of the series in the aftermath and came away with the firm conclusion that Chicago could have, should have, won the series and possibly even swept it.

“We should have won all six games,” Jim Cleamons said of the 4–2 outcome. “The reality of it was we didn’t win, but we weren’t that far from winning … We lost games at the end of the clock, on last-second shots and turnovers, matters of execution. Good teams close the doors; they end the case. The teams that are trying to become good teams have those straggling situations, those dangling participles, if you will. They just don’t quite get the job done.”

Strange as it seemed, the Orlando loss left the Bulls realizing that they now resided in the latter category: a team trying to become good. It wasn’t a status they wanted to inhabit very long, “The day after we were out of it we started planning for next year,” team chairman Jerry Reinsdorf said.

The only acceptable goal would be winning the team’s fourth NBA championship.

One critical aspect of that would be reestablishing a home-court advantage in Chicago. For years, that had been a foregone conclusion when they played in the creaky old Chicago Stadium, the “Madhouse on Madison,” whose thundering crowds and intimidating acoustics had hammered many an opponent into submission. But the Stadium was now headed toward life as a parking lot, having been razed to make way for the United Center, the fancy new $175 million building just across Madison Street.

Brand new when the 1994–95 season opened, the United Center seemed awkward and foreign to Jordan, who had once vowed never to play there. He relented, but didn’t like it and quipped that he’d like to “blow it up.” The remark was something of a setback to the Bulls’ administrative staff, who had hoped to establish the United Center as the “New Madhouse on Madison,” a snazzier, high-tech version of the old barn. But then the Magic won two playoff games in Chicago, and those hopes dimmed.

Rebuilding

In the aftermath of the 1994–95 season, Chicago’s sports radio talk show airwaves were filled with anguished calls for changes, particularly for ditching Winter’s triple-post offense. The offense had played a large role in the team’s three championship seasons, but now even Winter expressed doubt. In all their years of working together, Jordan had never told Winter what he thought of the offense. In the wake of the Orlando loss Winter wanted to know, so he pushed Jackson to discuss the issue with Jordan in the season-ending conference Jackson held privately with each player.

“With his impulsiveness, Tex said, ‘Phil, I’d like you to ask him, does he think we need to change the offense,’” Jackson recalled. “‘Is it something we should plan on using next year? I want you to ask him just for me.’ So I did, and Michael said, ‘The triple-post offense is the backbone of this team. It’s our system, something that everybody can hang their hat on, so that they can know where to go and how to operate.’”

For others, the concern wasn’t the offense or the United Center but rather Jordan himself. It seemed pretty clear that his time as the game’s dominant player had passed, which meant that the Bulls’ fortunes were declining as well. There was even speculation among some Bulls administrative staff members that Jordan might retire again rather than deal with the hassles of NBA life. Failing his team against Orlando had been a setback for Jordan, one that bruised his giant pride. For years he had thrived on taking the Bulls’ fortunes on his shoulders and lifting them with brilliant performances in front of millions of witnesses. Now the public phenomenon was his fall. “We agonized for him when he went through the postseason trauma,” Jackson explained later that summer. “But knowing Michael so well, I put my arm around him after that first game in Orlando when he lost the ball and said, ‘As many times as we’ve won behind you, I never expected to see this happen. Let’s use it for our tool. Let’s use it to build a positive. You’re our guy, and don’t ever forget that.’

“Michael’s not the same player,” Jackson added. “He’s aged like everybody else has aged. But he’s still Michael Jordan. He’ll go back and shoot 50 percent this year, you can bet your bottom dollar on that. Will he break through all the defenses that people bring at him, the double teams and triple teams? No. But he’ll probably start knowing where to pass the ball better. Michael lost perspective of where the passing would have to come from a lot of times.”

Missing out on the teamwork of an 82-game season had hurt Jordan, Jackson said. “But we see Michael returning to form … He saw and heard the criticism that went on in the postseason. There was a lot of the blame game going on in Chicago, a lot of people whining and gnashing teeth. Michael’s going to use that for this strength.”

It was obvious that Orlando’s talented young team would be the main contender in the Eastern Conference, and if the Bulls hoped to win another championship they would have to rebuild their team with one purpose in mind: improving their matchups with the Magic. Specifically, the Bulls would have to find a power forward and strengthen their post play. Plus, they would have to find bigger guards to counter Orlando’s trio of Anfernee Hardaway, Nick Anderson, and Brian Shaw.

With this in mind, the Bulls decided to leave veteran B. J. Armstrong, a fan favorite from the championship years, unprotected in the upcoming expansion draft. The coaching staff didn’t have to look far to find a bigger guard to replace Armstrong. Already on the roster was former All-Star Ron Harper, whom Bulls vice president Jerry Krause had originally signed in 1994 to help fill the void created by Jordan’s retirement. Harper’s bountiful athleticism had declined with a series of knee injuries since his days as a young superstar with the Cleveland Cavaliers, but the Bulls figured he still had promise.

“When we brought Harper in initially, we felt that if he could regain some of his old skills, his old abilities after the knee injuries he’d had, he could be an ideal player for us because of his size,” Tex Winter said.

The problem was, Harper had struggled most of the 1994–95 season to get the hang of the complicated triple-post offense; and just when he had started to come around, Jordan returned, taking most of his playing time. Soon the whisper circuit around the NBA had Harper pegged as finished, his legs gone, his game headed for mothballs. The circumstances had left Harper understandably despondent, struggling through the lowest point in his nine-year career. “Suicide was an option,” he would say later, only half-jokingly. “Last season was something I learned from. It was frustrating, but my friend had a frustrating year, too,” he said, referring to Pippen, who had spent much of the ’95 season fighting with management, “and we both grew.”

In the wake of the Orlando loss, Jackson realized that Harper could be part of the answer and told him so in their season-ending conference—if Harper would dedicate himself to offseason conditioning. “Phil let Ron know that we very definitely were counting on him to be a big part of the team,” Winter said. “I think that helped Ron no end. Phil put it to him in no uncertain terms: ‘You gotta go out and get yourself ready to play.’ And Ron did that, he really prepared himself.”

“Phil asked me what my role was going to be on this team,” Harper recalled, “and I told him, ‘When Michael returns, I’ll be a player who plays defense and fills the spot. If there’s a chance to score, I’ll score.’ I think that we felt as a team that we had something to prove. And on my own I had something to prove. I figured this was going to be a very good ball club … I trained hard. I felt that last year I definitely didn’t have the legs to play the style here. I had to learn that, too.”

Jordan faced the same task, rebuilding his conditioning and mind-set from the months of basketball inactivity, losing what Reinsdorf called his “baseball body” for a leaner basketball body. Jordan was scheduled to spend the summer months in Hollywood making an animated Bugs Bunny film with Warner Brothers. On another team, with another player, the coaches might have been concerned about a major summer conflict taking away from the intensity of the star player’s offseason work. But this was not an issue with the Bulls’ coaches.

“We didn’t worry about Michael,” Winter said. “We figured Michael could take care of himself.”

Indeed, Jordan made it clear that the situation was his source of motivation. “The game taught me a lesson in the disappointing series I had last year,” Jordan would later say. “It pushed me back into the gym to learn the game all over again.”

For the most part, his “gym” would be a temporary floor in the Hollywood studio he occupied while making his film. There, Jordan could work on his game yet be within reach of the film crew when he was needed to shoot a scene. “I’ve never seen anybody work harder than Michael Jordan,” trainer Tim Grover would later say. “He fulfilled his normal summer obligations—shooting commercials, making some personal appearances—and he shot a movie. But his conditioning program always remained his primary objective.”

For Jordan, the torturous offseason program was just the beginning of a year-long effort to regain the dominance he had enjoyed in the NBA as a younger man. He was nearing his thirty-third birthday, trying to prepare himself to face not only the game’s talented young players but the specter of his own legendary youth. No matter what he did as an aging comeback player, he would have trouble measuring up to the standard he had set from 1986 to 1993, when he lorded over the league, leading the NBA in scoring for seven straight seasons and driving the Bulls to three straight world championships. Now, the older Michael Jordan was taking on the younger, magical version.

“I’m the kind of person who thrives on challenges,” Jordan explained, “and I took pride in people saying I was the best player in the game.

“But when I left the game I fell down in the ratings. Down, I feel, below people like Shaquille O’Neal, Hakeem Olajuwon, Scottie Pippen, David Robinson, and Charles Barkley. That’s why I committed myself to going through a whole training camp, playing every exhibition game and playing every regular-season game. At my age, I have to work harder. I can’t afford to cut corners. So this time, I plan to go into the playoffs with a whole season of conditioning under my belt.”

Heading into the 1995 playoffs, it had been Krause’s concern that the Bulls lacked the meanness and nastiness in the frontcourt necessary to win another championship. After Cartwright retired, the Bulls had come to rely on a trio of centers—Will Perdue, Luc Longley, and Bill Wennington—to get the job done in the post. Perdue could block shots, Wennington had a feathery offensive touch, and Longley had the huge body necessary to struggle against giant forces like Shaquille O’Neal. None of the three Chicago centers was a complete force on his own, but collectively they formed what the press had taken to calling a “three-headed monster,” a patchwork solution assembled by the coaches.

Ideally, the Bulls wanted to get a complete center to match Orlando for 1995–96—but there just weren’t any around. The answer for the Bulls had been to try to develop a solid center. In this effort, Longley was their leading candidate, primarily because he was young (twenty-six), and had the big body (7′2″, 290 pounds) to fit the specifications. “The kid’s a solid worker,” Jackson said in assessing Longley’s upside in June 1995. “He’s got a great desire to play the game. He’s very intelligent. He doesn’t have fear. But he’s not mean, that’s one of the things that we know about him. He’s not rugged mean like that. Some people think that you have to have a center that’s ferocious, that threatening type of defender.”

The Bulls’ coaches figured that with Jordan back full-time and committed to winning a championship; with Pippen, Longley, and Toni Kukoc maturing; with Ron Harper refurbishing his game, they had just about all of the major pieces in place, except for one.

“We still needed a rebounder,” Jim Cleamons said.

The Worm

Dennis Rodman had been one of the NBA’s great mysteries since the Detroit Pistons first selected him in the second round of the 1986 draft. Although some people in the Pistons’ organization would later claim that Rodman was fundamentally troubled, many in Detroit saw him as simply a fun-loving, immature guy who could be surprisingly sweet. One of his favorite pastimes was hanging out with teenagers in mall game rooms (growing up in Dallas, he had gotten the nickname “Worm” from his antsiness playing pinball). He was unlike many other NBA players in that he had not come up through the ranks of the great American basketball machine. He had not been on scholarship his entire life, wearing the best shoes and equipment and staying in fancy hotels where the meal checks were always paid. Rodman had missed all of that.

Former Pistons coach Chuck Daly recalled that Rodman’s first efforts in training camp were rather disappointing, but he recovered and soon found a place in the league by focusing on playing defense and rebounding. He performed these chores so well that most observers considered him a key factor in the Pistons’ claiming back-to-back league titles in 1989 and ’90. To accomplish goals as a player, Rodman had come to rely on a natural hyperactivity that supercharged his frenetic playing style. “My friends knew I was hyper. Real hyper,” he once said of his days growing up in Dallas. “They knew I wouldn’t settle down, I wouldn’t sleep. I’d just keep going. And now I just focus my energy in something I love to do. Now, I just play basketball, go out there and have a lot of fun and enjoy.”

Daly had persuaded him to use these advantages to become a superb rebounding specialist and defender. Rodman bought into the plan and worked to make himself a marvelously versatile sub. Quick enough to stay with a big guard/small forward. Motivated enough to play power forward. Even tough enough to survive at center against much bigger bodies.

Rodman moved into the starting lineup for 1989–90 and helped the Pistons to yet another championship. It was during this period, as the Pistons shoved aside Jordan and the Bulls in the playoffs for three straight seasons, that fans in Chicago came to absolutely despise Dennis Rodman, Bill Laimbeer, and all the other Pistons Bad Boys.

Eventually, however, Detroit’s guard-oriented offense declined. The Pistons were swept by Chicago in the 1991 playoffs, and although Detroit made a playoff run in 1992, Daly moved on to coach the New Jersey Nets, leaving Rodman without the fatherly coaching connection he badly wanted. Besieged by personal and off-court problems, Rodman’s frustrations built, leading to clashes with Pistons coaches and management.

That October of 1993, the Pistons traded Rodman to the Spurs, thus igniting the next amazing stage in the transformation of Dennis Rodman. From all accounts, he came to San Antonio a changed man. As Rodman explained it, “I woke up one day and said to myself, ‘Hey, my life has been a big cycle. One month I’m bleeding to death, one month I’m in a psycho zone.’ Then all of a sudden the cycles were in balance.”

This new “balance” left him searching through a series of tattoo shops, piercing pagodas, alternative bars, and hair salons to find the new Dennis, the one with the electric hair. The old Dennis, however, still played basketball like a wild man.

Jack Haley, a free agent signed as the Spurs’ twelfth man, was assigned a locker next to Rodman. “I walked in,” Haley recalled of that first day, “and said, ‘Hey, howyadoin? I’m Jack Haley.’ He wouldn’t even acknowledge I was in the room or shake my hand. We sat next to each other for almost three months and never spoke a word. I would try occasionally. I’d say, ‘Hey, howyadoin?’ I’d get no response. Just like the rest of the team.”

Haley watched in amazement that winter of 1994 as Rodman moved in and silently took control of the power forward spot in San Antonio, giving Spurs center David Robinson the kind of help that he’d never enjoyed before. Soon Rodman was regularly pulling down 20 rebounds a game, an astounding feat.

Rodman’s main problem, it seemed, was that he had almost nothing to say to his teammates, particularly David Robinson. They stood in stark contrast to Rodman, with his constantly changing hair colors, his body piercings, and the cornucopia of New Age symbols etched into his well-muscled arms, shoulders, and back.

He seemed intent on living by his own rules, being late to practices and games, wearing bizarre clothing and jewelry in practices, and generally violating much of the protocol that had been established for pro basketball teams over the decades. Spurs coach John Lucas had decided the best way to keep Rodman happy and motivated was to allow him to live by a different set of rules than the rest of the Spurs, which is to say almost no rules at all.

When Rodman acted up in the 1994 playoffs, and the Spurs lost to the Utah Jazz, the policy of appeasement cost Lucas and general manager Bob Bass their jobs. Next San Antonio brought in general manager Gregg Popovich, who had a military background, and coach Bob Hill with the idea that they would provide a more structured, disciplined system.

The Spurs won plenty of games over the winter and spring of 1995, but Rodman’s differences with management dogged the team like a running skirmish. The Spurs had their rules, and Rodman answered with an insurrection that cost him tens of thousands of dollars in fines.

“They were fining him $500 and they were fining him every single game,” Haley would later confide. “I’m talking about every single day, $500 a day. Because Dennis made a concentrated effort to be late. It was his way of sticking it in their side.”

Rodman’s disruptions continued right through the 1995 playoffs, where the Spurs advanced to the Western Conference finals against Houston. But, enraged by behavior they called detrimental to the team, Spurs management suspended Rodman for the pivotal fifth game in the series. San Antonio lost that game and the next to fall 4–2 to the Rockets. Immediately afterward, Spurs management began looking around to see if someone would take their Dennis the Menace in a trade.

Rodman’s contract with the Spurs held only one more season of guaranteed money. But Rodman indicated that he wanted the Spurs to give him $15 million to play another season there. He had no options for imposing that demand other than some type of work disruption, and the Spurs had had enough disruptions. He had turned thirty-four on May 13, 1995, an age when most hoops stars are looking at limited futures. It was clear that the Spurs wanted to trade him, rather than deal with another year of headaches. But they were having trouble finding takers. Rodman’s ideal scenario was to get with another team for the last year of his contract, perform well, and sign a new two- or three-year deal in the neighborhood of $15 million. “I’ll put $5 million in the bank, live off the interest, and party my ass off,” Rodman told reporters, just the kind of talk that made NBA general managers very nervous.

“Everybody in the league was scared to death of Dennis,” said Toronto Raptors coach Brendan Malone, an old Rodman friend.

Yet Rodman did have a small group of supporters, including Krause, who said he remained interested only because of Bulls scout Jim Stack. “Jim Stack came to me early in the summer and asked me to look at Rodman,” Krause said. “When I put him off, he finally pleaded with me. He talked me into finding out if all the bad things we had heard were true. Without Jim’s persistence, we wouldn’t have looked behind all the rumors to see what the truth was.”

Bulls chairman Jerry Reinsdorf wasn’t surprised when Krause came to him about the possibility of getting Rodman, because the Bulls had looked at Rodman a year earlier. “I thought it was a great idea as long as he didn’t play dirty,” Reinsdorf said, “and Jerry and Phil could satisfy themselves that he was a good bet to not self-destruct. I didn’t know Dennis. I only knew about the stories, like sitting in a parking lot with a gun in Detroit, and the problems he had with other teams. I told Jerry that if you can satisfy yourselves that it’s a good risk, then I’m all for it, because we need to rebound the ball better. But I wanted him and Phil to be sure that the odds were with us, so that’s why they spent a great deal of time talking to Dennis.”

Friends, enemies, former coaches, former teammates—the Bulls contacted a whole group of people in their investigation of Rodman. Chuck Daly told them that Rodman would come to play and play hard.

Encouraged by what he heard, Krause invited Rodman to come to Chicago for an interview. Rodman was immediately skeptical, but agreed to come. They met at Krause’s house for what turned out to be a long, frank discussion about Rodman’s past. Rodman talked about his problems with Spurs management, how he felt the team had made him specific promises then failed to follow through. As they talked, Krause came to the realization that he liked Dennis Rodman. Krause was confident in his ability to judge people, and he thought Rodman was a good person. Krause also knew that Rodman had the potential to be a problem, but he believed that Jackson could take care of that.

“Anyway,” Krause told Sports Illustrated, “Phil’s no virgin. He’s had his confrontations. He came from the CBA, so I guess he knows about problem children.”

Satisfied, Krause sent Rodman to speak with Jackson, who spent hours talking to the forward, trying to read his attitude about the team system. It was obvious that Rodman wanted to come to the Windy City to play with Jordan. He even allowed the Bulls to talk to a psychiatrist he had been seeing.

“Phil told me I was not going to average the 15 to 16 rebounds I was used to averaging,” Rodman recalled. “He told me the figure would be more like 10 or 11.”

Rodman said, “No problem.”

“Phil and I thought very carefully about this,” Krause would explain later. “It’s been under consideration for quite some time. We certainly did an awful lot of homework and were satisfied with the results we got.”

Yet even after Krause’s investigation turned up good news, he and Jackson hesitated before moving forward. After all, Jordan and Pippen had loathed Rodman as a Piston. “When he played in San Antonio, I used to absolutely hate Dennis Rodman,” said Bulls guard Steve Kerr. Pippen, in particular, held a dislike for Rodman, who had shoved him into a basket support during the 1991 playoffs, opening a gash on Pippen’s chin that required stitches. Pippen still had a scar from the incident.

“If he’s ready and willing to play, it will be great for our team,” Pippen said. “But if he’s going to be a negative to us, I don’t think we need that. We could be taking a huge step backwards.”

Jackson admitted as much. “There are no assurances with anything,” he said. “We’re just talking about trying to take some good chances with the basketball club to put them in a championship state.”

Jordan and Pippen thought about it, then told Krause to go for the deal, which sent Bulls longtime backup center Will Perdue to San Antonio for Rodman in early October, just days before training camp opened. That news elated Rodman, who badly wanted to find a basketball home. “I had no choice,” he said. “I feel like I had a lot of negative energy going on in my life, and that was the best way to get rid of it.”

Jackson thought of his own rebel days as a Knick and felt confident that he could coach Rodman. So the move was made, and as extra insurance for communicating with Rodman, the Bulls signed Haley to a $300,000 contract. Haley would be placed on injured reserve and kept there all season, which allowed him to practice and travel with the team.

Rodman appeared at the press conference announcing the deal with his hair dyed Bulls red with a black Bull in the crown, and his nails done in a nifty layered Bulls motif. “I understand that they’re a little leery and a little cautious of having someone like me in here,” he said. “They wonder how I will respond to the team. I guess they’ll find out in training camp and during the preseason. I think Michael knows he can pretty much count on me doing a good job. I hope Scottie feels the same way.”

The Strangest Bull

The announcement of the trade set off the expected firestorm of media and fan interest in Chicago. But just days into training camp, Bulls insiders began to have doubts that the situation was going to work. Rodman still hadn’t spoken to any of his Chicago teammates, and his silence was getting stranger with each passing day.

“It was a tough training camp because everybody was guarded,” Haley offered. “Again, you’re Michael Jordan. You’re Scottie Pippen. Why would you have to go over to Dennis? Michael Jordan made $50 million last year. Why would he have to go over and basically kiss up to some guy to get him to talk? They came over and shook his hand and welcomed him to the team, and this and that. But other than that, it was a slow process.”

“I think everybody was skeptical of what might happen,” recalled assistant coach John Paxson. “But we were also optimistic as to what could happen. The optimism stemmed from Phil’s personality. We felt that if there was anyone around the league who could get along with Dennis and get Dennis to respect him as a coach, it would be Phil.”

Sports Illustrated came into town the first week of the preseason and wanted to pose one of the Bulls’ star players with Rodman for a cover shot. Jordan, who had a running feud with SI since the magazine had ridiculed his attempt to play professional baseball, refused to pose. The previous spring, Rodman had appeared on the cover of the magazine in a dog collar and a bustier, one of the strangest posings in SI history. Apparently, this time Rodman wasn’t going to wear a strange getup; still, Pippen also declined, saying privately that he didn’t want to make a fool of himself. Finally, the magazine got Jackson to do the shot, which was never used.

It was just one of an avalanche of media requests for interviews set off by Rodman’s becoming a Bull. In fact, several gay magazines approached the team about securing an interview because of Rodman’s racy comments. Haley, however, chalked much of that interest up to Rodman’s having learned to manipulate the media while dating Madonna two years earlier. He had discovered he could generate substantial news coverage by projecting a conflicted sexuality.

“He spent time with Madonna, and when he was with Madonna that increased his time in the public eye and made him more of a star,” Haley explained. “So now all of the things he does are because of the shock value. He talks about, ‘Oh, yeah, I hang in the gay community and I hang out with gay people in gay bars.’ That’s all shock value. We’re best friends; we’re together every single night. In the two years I’ve known him, we’ve been to one gay bar. But he talks about it all the time, because it’s part of his aura and his stigma.”

“Have you ever played on a team where one of your teammates lives with his male hairdresser?” one Chicago reporter asked Michael Jordan during the preseason.

Jordan said he couldn’t think of any.

Yet the interest in Rodman’s sexuality wasn’t the reason his presence seemed a threat to team chemistry. More central to the uneasiness was the relationship between Rodman and Pippen.

“No, I have not had a conversation with Dennis,” Pippen acknowledged early in the year. “I’ve never had a conversation with Dennis in my life, so I don’t think it’s anything new now.”

Fortunately, things seemed to take a sudden turn for the better with the Bulls’ first two exhibition games. They opened play in Peoria against the Cleveland Cavaliers, whom the Bulls defeated easily with Jordan scoring 18 points and Rodman getting 10 rebounds.

“Once he gets a little more familiar with everybody out on the floor and there’s more continuity, he’s going to start to shine,” Jordan predicted.

Team chemistry got another boost in the second preseason game when Rodman rushed to Pippen’s aid after Indiana’s Reggie Miller made some threatening moves. “I’m looking forward to a lot of brawling around here,” he told reporters. “We need brawling on this team.”

While Rodman was a surprise early fit, the other factors would take time. Jordan wasn’t so sure that his pairing with Harper in the backcourt was going to work, but Jackson advised patience. Harper’s presence meant that Jordan was handling the ball more. With his offseason work he had regained his basketball conditioning. Jordan seemed like his former self on the floor. The confidence was tangible. Pippen, too, seemed more at ease with Michael back. Pippen’s private life had gone through some changes, and Jackson noticed that he seemed more focused than ever.

At center, Luc Longley seemed eager to face the challenge of the coming season as a starter, and veteran Bill Wennington was comfortable in his role as a backup. For additional insurance in the post, Krause signed thirty-nine-year-old James Edwards, himself a former Piston and a friend of Rodman’s, in late October, thus assuring that the Bulls would have post depth—and the oldest roster in the league. Krause had also brought in guard Randy Brown to work with Steve Kerr as backcourt reserves. Also coming off the bench were Jud Buechler, Dickey Simpkins, and first-round draft pick Jason Caffey out of the University of Alabama.

The other bubble in the mixture was Toni Kukoc’s reluctance to play the sixth man, or third forward. He wanted to start instead of coming off the bench, but his role in the lineup had gone to Rodman. Jackson talked to Kukoc about the success that Celtics greats Kevin McHale and John Havlicek had enjoyed as sixth men, but it was not a concept that Kukoc embraced immediately.

“I’m very pleased with Toni,” said Jackson, who had been particularly rough on the Croatian in his first two NBA seasons. “His rebounding is much better. His defensive awareness is good. He can play a variety of types of people. He’s hitting key shots. He’s moving the basketball. He’s getting assists. He’s not what I would ask for in a prototype power forward. But he has played well for us.”

Changing Kukoc’s mind would take patience, Jackson reasoned, but there was a whole season ahead and there would be plenty of time.

The only remaining question was Rodman. Early on, his behavior had been strange but acceptable. But how long would it last? Would he take his act too far? Could he destroy this team despite Jordan’s strong will and leadership?

Rodman was obviously thrilled to be a Bull. “People have to realize that this team is going to be like a circus on the road,” he said. “Without me, it would be a circus. But Michael, Scottie, and me, it’s more of a circus. A lot of people want to see the Bulls again.”

Indeed, Rodman’s presence made the Bulls even more of a magnetic attraction, if that were possible. Yet where Jordan and Pippen had always taken a businesslike approach to winning, Rodman brought a fan-friendly, interactive, fun-filled style to the game that always seemed to set any arena on edge. What was he going to do next? was the question in everyone’s mind.

Rodman admitted that even he didn’t know sometimes.

“The very first preseason game of the year,” Haley said, “Dennis goes in the game, Dennis throws the ball up in the stands and gets a delay-of-game foul and yells at the official, gets a technical foul. The first thing I do is I look down the bench at Phil Jackson to watch his reaction. Phil Jackson chuckles, leans over to Jimmy Cleamons, our assistant coach, and says, ‘God, he reminds me of me.’ Whereas last year in San Antonio, any tirade Dennis threw, it was ‘Get him out of the game! Sit him down! Teach him a lesson! We can’t stand for that here!’ Here in Chicago, it’s more, ‘Get it out of your system. Let’s go win a game.’”

Rodman had discovered that rather than fine him $500 for being late to practices, as the Spurs had, Jackson handled the matter with a light hand. Fines were only five bucks. “Here, the first couple of days, he walked in one or two minutes late,” Haley said. “Nobody said anything. So once Dennis realized it wasn’t a big deal, he was on time.”

Reporters and observers began noting that Jackson, who was sporting a beard grown during the offseason, seemed to be taking a more relaxed approach to the game.

“Somewhere about the middle of training camp I realized I was having a lot of fun coaching this team,” Jackson later explained, “and Dennis Rodman to me brings a lot of levity to the game. I mean, I get a kick out of watching him play … He’s such a remarkable athlete and has ability out there. There are some things about his individuality that remind me of myself. He’s a maverick in his own way.”

Most important, though, Jackson did a dipstick check on his own intensity levels. The season had opened with the NBA’s regular officials on strike, which meant that the league had put together two-man replacement crews from the Continental Basketball Association. Jackson had always expended a good deal of energy each game riding the refs, but dealing with the replacements’ unorthodox calls brought him to a new revelation. “I realized that it didn’t matter what referees do out there, there’s not much you can do walking up and down the court and yelling,” he said. “I decided I was going to have to sit down and shut up and enjoy the game and coach at the timeouts and coach at the practices rather than on the floor, and practice what I preached a little bit.”

The unspoken truth was that the coaches couldn’t expect Rodman to behave better if they weren’t doing the same. Jackson still had his moments of animation—especially when Kukoc took an ill-advised three—but he turned his demeanor down yet another notch, much to the delight of his players.

The rush of seasons had been exhausting and Jackson had found himself in 1995 heading into his fiftieth birthday with a depleted store of energy for the task of rebuilding the Bulls and coaching them back to a championship level.

For rejuvenation, he decided that he needed to step back even further from the game. That began with the process of finishing his book, Sacred Hoops, during which he spent time reflecting what his seasons coaching the Bulls had meant to him. Putting that in writing, interpreting his unique approach for the fans, helped him better understand it himself.

Asked about Jackson early in the year, Rodman said, “Well, he’s laid-back. He’s a Deadhead.” Later in the season, when John Salley came to the roster, he gained an immediate appreciation for Jackson’s style. “A lot of coaches on other teams get mad that Phil just sits there,” he said. “It makes them look bad. But he sits there because that’s his seat. He prepares us enough in practice, trust me, that he doesn’t have to do all that whooping and hollering, all those sideline antics. A lot of coaches get into that yelling and whooping and hollering, carrying on and trying to demean a guy. They say, ‘Well I’m trying to get them to play harder.’ Well, no, some coaches are just angry, frustrated fans.”

The 1995–96 season marked Jackson’s seventh consecutive campaign coaching the Bulls, the second longest tenure in one job among the NBA’s twenty-nine coaches. He had accomplished those things by overcoming the elements that had made casualties of many of his peers—the exhausting grind of the 82-game schedule, the daily practices, the shuffling and reshuffling of priorities, and always the pressure to win. Jackson’s simple answer had been to find his sense of self elsewhere.

If that meant preaching to his players about the great white buffalo or giving them obscure books to read or having them pause amid the looniness of the NBA for a meditation session, so be it. On more than one occasion, Jackson’s approach left his players shaking their heads in amusement. “He’s an interesting guy,” Steve Kerr said of Jackson. “He keeps things very refreshing for us all season. He keeps things fun. He never loses sight of the fact that basketball is a game. It’s supposed to be fun. He doesn’t let us forget about that. But at the same time, this is our job, too, and he doesn’t let us forget about that either. The amount of work involved and what it takes to win, and finally the feeling of success when you do win. He’s constantly reminding us of all that.”

That’s not to say that Jackson would hesitate to get in a player’s face, Kerr added. “But when he does it you know it’s not personal. That’s his strength. He always maintains authority without being a dictator. And he always maintains his friendship without kissing up. He just finds that perfect balance, and because of that he always has everybody’s respect. And ultimately that’s the hardest part of being a coach in the NBA, I think, is having every player’s respect.”

Revival

It was during the preseason that veteran Sun-Times columnist Lacy J. Banks predicted that the Bulls would win 70 games, which brought hoots of derision. But the seed had been planted. Jordan himself reasoned it would help him make the perfect statement. He had returned in the spring of 1995 to find a Bulls roster of new faces. And that had proved to be almost as much of an adjustment as his conditioning. He seemed closer to Pippen, but his relationships with his newer teammates seemed strained. Some of them thought he was aloof, unless they happened to elicit his competitive anger. Then they felt a singe.

Steve Kerr quickly learned that in training camp that fall. “I had heard stuff about him,” Kerr said, “but I hadn’t experienced it firsthand. I was surprised how he just took control of the entire team’s emotional level and challenged every single player in practice to improve, and never let up on anybody.”

Jordan’s approach was a revelation that left Kerr thinking, “Maybe this is what it takes to win a championship. This guy’s been through it. He’s won three of them. If this is what it takes, then it’s well worth it.

“His personality raised the level of our practices each day, which in turn made us that much better,” Kerr said.

Yet it also led to a fight between Kerr and Jordan one day in training camp. “It was a case of practice getting out of hand,” Kerr recalled, “just a lot of trash-talking and their team was just abusing us. It was during training camp. Michael was out to prove a point and get his game back in order. So every practice was like a war. And it just spilled over one day.”

It was the first and only fistfight in Kerr’s life. “We were barking at each other, and it got out of hand,” Kerr said. “He threw a forearm at me, so I threw one back at him, and he kind of attacked me from there.

“He was just letting us know how they were kicking our ass. I knew they were kicking our ass. He didn’t have to tell me about it. Why wouldn’t that piss me off? It’s natural. Other guys were pissed off too. He just happened to be guarding me at the time.”

“He knows he intimidates people,” Jackson said of Jordan. “I had to pull him in last year when he first came back. He was comfortable playing with Will Perdue … He was tough on Longley. He would throw passes that, at times, I don’t think anybody could catch, then glare at him and give him that look. And I let him know that Luc wasn’t Will Perdue, and it was all right if he tested him out to see what his mettle was, but I wanted him to play with him because he had a big body, he wasn’t afraid, he’d throw it around, and if we were going to get by Orlando, we were going to have to have somebody to stand up to Shaquille O’Neal.”

Jordan tempered the fire directed at his new teammates without banking his competitiveness. Instead, he refocused it to drive his offseason conditioning fervor. He knew that he would need the added strength during the 1995–96 season to overcome the nagging injuries that accompany age. Yet even there, he had an edge. “Between games, Jordan can bounce back from injuries that would sideline other players for weeks,” Bulls trainer Chip Schaefer pointed out. “He has a remarkable body.”

His capacity for recovery, his restraint with teammates, and his unique commitment would amaze the many witnesses to his 1995–96 performances, beginning with the very first tipoff. He scored 42 points on opening night in a victory over the Charlotte Hornets at the United Center, setting in motion a momentum that would carry his team to five straight wins, the best start in Bulls history.

Sensing he had latched on to a whirlwind, Rodman told reporters, “We’re mean here. In San Antonio we had guys who liked to go home and be breastfed by their wives.”

Yet no sooner had Rodman started to settle in with the Bulls than a calf muscle injury sidelined him for a month.

Even with Rodman out of the lineup, Jordan continued on his tear. If the five quick wins did anything to dull Jordan’s sense of purpose, the Orlando Magic were there with a reminder in the sixth game, just as the Bulls were breaking in their new black with red pinstripes road uniforms. Penny Hardaway outplayed Jordan, giving the Magic a key home victory. The Bulls responded with two quick wins back in Chicago before scorching through a West Coast road trip, winning six of seven games. The trip opened in Dallas, where Chicago needed overtime and 36 from Jordan (including 6 of the Bulls’ final 14 points) to win 108–102. “As far as I’m concerned, he’s still one of the best in the game,” the Mavericks’ Jason Kidd said of Jordan. “He still finds a way to win.”

“This is a very aggressive basketball club and very confident,” Jackson said afterward. “I think people are surprised who we are, or are surprised how we are playing, or they’re not comfortable with our big guard rotation. It is giving us some easy offensive opportunities, so we are getting going early.”

On December 2, they closed out the trip at a sizzling 6–1 with Jordan scoring 37 in a win over the Los Angeles Clippers. “I feel I’m pretty much all the way back now as a player,” Jordan said, reflecting on the first month of the season. “My skills are there. So is my confidence. Now it’s just a matter of me going out and playing the way I’m capable every night.”

Indeed, his shooting percentage, a stellar .511 prior to his return, had dipped to just .411 during his 17-game run over the spring of 1995. Now it had jumped to .493. His scoring, too, was headed back up to a 30-point average from the nine-year low of 26.9 in 1995.

“He’s right where I knew he’d be about now,” Ron Harper told the writers covering the team. “And that’s leading the league in scoring and pulling away from the pack. He’s removing every shadow of a doubt that he’s the greatest player of all time.”

“I’m old,” Jordan admitted. “Agewise, I think I’m old. But skillwise, I think I’m still capable of playing the type of basketball I know I can play … The question [people] end up asking me the most is, how do I compare the two players, the one before baseball and the one after.

“Quite frankly, I think they are the same. It’s just a matter of putting out the stats to show that they are the same. And I think by the end of the year, hopefully, you will see that it’s basically the same player with two years in between.

“Right now, I’m still being compared to Michael Jordan,” he said, “and according to some people, I’m even failing to live up to Michael Jordan. But I have the best chance of being him because I am him. In the meantime, I’m improving and evolving … And I’m pretty sure that I’m turning some of you guys into believers.”

The Bulls finished November with 12–2 record. Then December passed at 13–1. With each victory, speculation mounted as to whether Chicago could win 70 games, breaking the all-time record for wins in a season set by the 1972 Los Angeles Lakers with a 69–13 finish.

Jerry West, the Lakers’ vice president for basketball operations who was a star guard on that ’72 Los Angeles club, pegged the Bulls as dead ringers to win at least 70 games—unless injuries set them back.

The success also prompted reporters to ask Jordan to compare this Bulls team to other great NBA clubs. “I look at the Celtics back in ‘86 back when they had Bill Walton and Kevin McHale coming off the bench,” Jordan said. “Those guys were tough to deal with. Those guys played together for a long time. We’re starting to learn how to play together, but those guys were together for a period of time. They knew arms, legs, and fingers and everything about each other. We’re just learning fingers.”

It was pointed out to Jordan that most great NBA teams had a dominant low-post defender, someone to stop other teams in the paint. “We don’t have that kind of animal,” he admitted. “But I think Pippen compensates for that. I don’t think any of those teams, other than maybe the ’86 Boston Celtics, had a small forward that was as versatile on offense and defense as Scottie Pippen is.”

Even without a dominant center, the Bulls seemed to have power to spare. During their big start, they had toyed with opponents through the first two or three quarters before flexing their might and finishing strong.

Observers began pointing out that with expansion, the NBA had grown to twenty-nine teams, which had thinned the talent base, making it easier for the Bulls to win. Those same observers had conveniently forgotten that the ’90s talent base had been broadened by the drafting of European players and that in 1972, when the Lakers won, the American Basketball Association was in operation, meaning there were exactly twenty-eight teams fielded in pro hoops between the two leagues. Not only that, the NBA had just expanded dramatically before 1972, adding six teams in five years.

When the Bulls burned their way through January at 14–0, Jackson began talking openly of resting players just to lose a few games and slow things down. In other words, he was worried that his team would get so drunk with winning during the regular season that they wouldn’t play sharp ball in the playoffs. If necessary, Jackson planned to slow them down.

“You can actually take them out of their rhythm by resting guys in a different rotation off the bench,” he explained. “I have considered that.”

Such talk by the coach only seemed to drive the Bulls harder to keep winning.

“What amazes me most about our team,” said Jack Haley, “is that we probably have the league’s greatest player ever in Michael Jordan, we have the league’s greatest rebounder in Dennis Rodman, and we have what is probably this year’s MVP in Scottie Pippen, and what amazes me most is the work ethic and leadership that these three guys bring to the floor night in and night out. With all of the accolades, with all of the money, with all of the championships, everything that they have, what motivates them besides winning another championship? How many months away is that? And these guys are focused now.”

Particularly Rodman, who, with his constantly changing hair colors, his raving style, diving for rebounds, challenging opponents, piping off outbursts of emotion, was creating one funny circumstance after another. Each night he would cap off his performance by ripping off his jersey and presenting it to someone in the home crowd.

“I think they like me,” Rodman said of the fans in the United Center. “People gotta realize this business here is very powerful. They can love you or they can hate you, but … Chicago fans, they hated my guts, and now all of a sudden, I’m like the biggest thing since Michael Jordan.”

Not everybody, however, was completely taken with the circumstances. As the team’s designated worrier, Tex Winter had concerns that Rodman was so intent on getting rebounds and winning another rebounding title that he was neglecting to play his role in the Bulls’ triple-post offense. Beyond that, Winter and Jackson wondered if Rodman really had a handle on his emotions.

Still, the juggernaut pushed on, cruising through February at 11–3. And although March was interrupted by a Rodman outburst, after which he was suspended for six games for head-butting an official, the Bulls still finished the month at 12–2. The 70-win season became an increasingly real possibility, bringing with it constantly mounting pressure—which the Bulls answered with more wins.

About the only unanswered question as the Bulls headed to Milwaukee seeking win number 70 on Tuesday, April 16, was the color of Rodman’s hair. A few days into his return, he had reverted to blond, but with a swirling red streak. Then, headed into the team’s historic week, he had opted for a flamingo pink. That worked for victory number 70, and 86–80 triumph over the Bucks.

After beating Milwaukee and Detroit, and losing to Indiana, they closed the regular season with a road win in Washington for a 72–10 finish. From there, Jackson refired the engines for an astounding playoff push. The Miami Heat fell in the first round in three quick games. Then came a grunting contest with the Knicks, who managed an overtime win at home before stepping aside, 4–1. Next was the rematch the Bulls had waited a whole year for—the Orlando Magic in the conference finals.

To prepare his team, Jackson spliced shots of Pulp Fiction, the story of two hired assassins, into the scouting tapes of Orlando. The message was clear. He wanted the Bulls playing like killers, which they did. Rodman held Horace Grant scoreless for 28 minutes of Game 1, until the Orlando forward injured his shoulder in the third quarter and was lost for the rest of the series. A slew of injuries followed, and the Magic went poof in four straight games, an immensely satisfying outcome for Jackson and his staff in that it confirmed their notions about retooling their roster.

The Fourth Championship

After battling all season to be crowned NBA champions, the Chicago Bulls climbed close enough to see their glittering prize, only to discover they’d have to sit back a while and twiddle their thumbs.

The matter of winning their fourth title developed into a waiting game over late May and early June. Their sweep of Orlando in the Eastern finals set up the problem. The Seattle Sonics had taken a 3–1 lead over the Utah Jazz in the Western finals, only to watch the Jazz fight back and tie the series. The net result for the Bulls was a nine-day layoff waiting for Seattle to claim the seventh game so that the championship round could begin. At last, the 1996 NBA Finals opened on Wednesday, June 5, but even that didn’t mean the Bulls’ waiting was over. What lay ahead were several unexpected delays in Seattle.

The Bulls were 10-to-1 favorites to defeat the Sonics, who had won an impressive 64 games during the regular season—which meant that the Finals carried the anticipation of an unfolding coronation. The NBA had credentialed approximately sixteen hundred journalists from around the globe to cover the event. The whole world would be watching, which had become standard procedure for just about all of Jordan’s performances, particularly since the Bulls had added Rodman as a court jester. The team’s resident rebounder did his part by showing up with a wildly spray-painted hairdo, a sort of graffiti in flames, with various red, green, and blue hieroglyphics and symbols scribbled on his skull.

As with every other Bulls opponent, Seattle’s big concern was holding back Jordan, who was asked by reporters if he could still launch the Air raids that made him famous. “Can I still take off? I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t been able to try it because defenses don’t guard me one-on-one anymore. But honestly, I probably can’t do it … I like not knowing whether I can do it because that way, I still think I can. As long as I believe I can do something, that’s all that matters.”

As an added measure, Seattle coach George Karl had hired recently fired Toronto coach Brendan Malone to scout the Bulls during the playoffs. Malone, during his days as a Pistons assistant, had helped devise the infamous “Jordan rules” to help defeat Chicago. The Sonics hoped that his perspective might help them find a deployment to slow down Jordan, who had averaged 32.1 points during the playoffs.

“You have to try to match their intensity,” Malone advised. “Forget Xs and Os. They are going to try and cut your heart out right away, right from the first quarter.”

For Game 1, the United Center crowd greeted the Sonics with a muffled, impolite boo that seemed to imply a lack of respect. In keeping with this mood, Rodman ignored Seattle forward Shawn Kemp as they brushed past each other heading toward center court for the opening tip.

The Sonics opened the series with 6′10″ Detlef Schrempf playing Jordan, but when he posted up, guard Hersey Hawkins went immediately to the double team. Seldom one to force up a dumb shot, Jordan found Harper for an open three. The surprise move by the Bulls was having Longley cover the athletic Kemp, who responded by dropping in a pair of early jumpers. Longley used his size to power in 12 first-half points, with the Sonics obviously intent on forcing Jordan to pass. Pippen and Harper both found their offense, leading to Chicago opening an 11-point lead by the third quarter.

The Sonics had seemed to drag a bit, the obvious after-effects of a seven-game match with Utah in the Western Conference finals, but they found their legs and pulled to 69–67 as the fourth quarter opened. It was then that Kukoc, injured and in a slump for much of the playoffs, regained his form.

To go with his scoring, the Bulls turned on their pressure, forcing seven turnovers in the fourth quarter alone, and won big, 107–90. Jordan topped the Bulls with 28 points, but Seattle’s defensive effort had meant that his teammates got off to a good championship start. Pippen scored 21, Kukoc 18, Harper 15, and Longley 14.

Rodman finished with 13 rebounds and watched as the officials ejected Seattle reserve Frank Brickowski for a dubious attempt to engage him in a scuffle, a silly little ploy played out before the network cameras.

The circumstances left Karl furious. “Dennis Rodman is laughing at basketball,” the Seattle coach said before Game 2. “It’s silly to give him any credibility for what he does out there.”

“A lot of people don’t give me enough credit for being an adult,” Rodman replied. “Yesterday was a perfect example that I can be under control.”

Rodman answered in Game 2 with a 20-rebound performance, including a record-tying 11 offensive rebounds that helped Chicago overcome 39 percent shooting. Rodman’s total tied a Finals record set by Washington’s Elvin Hayes in 1979.

Time and again, Rodman’s rebounding helped the Bulls get through their all too frequent offensive lulls. Others played a factor as well. Although he struggled, Jordan willed 29 points into the baskets. And the defense forced another 20 Sonics turnovers, including a batch during a three-minute stretch of the third period when Chicago pushed the margin from 66–64 to 76–65. Once again, it was Kukoc off the bench contributing the key offense. He hit two three-pointers. Then Pippen got a breakaway jam after a steal, which was followed by a Kukoc slam on a pass from Jordan, whose anger had prompted the outburst in the first place.

“Are you scared?” he had asked Kukoc. “If you are, then sit down. If you’re out here to shoot, then shoot.”

Kukoc did, and the run provided enough margin. The Bulls had escaped with a 92–88 margin but had other concerns. Harper, the key to their pressure defense, had reinjured his creaky knees, requiring that fluid be drawn off one of them just before the game. That allowed him to play and contribute 12 points and key defense, but it also meant that he would miss all or most of the next three games.

Karl found himself having to acknowledge just how important Rodman was to Chicago. “He’s an amazing rebounder,” the Sonics’ coach said. “He was probably their MVP tonight.”

“The second opportunities, the little things he does,” Jackson said appreciatively. “He finds a way to help the team out.”

With Harper’s knee hurting, the Bulls figured they were in for a fight with the next three games in Seattle’s Key Arena. But the Sonics were strangely subdued for Game 3. With Kukoc starting for the injured Harper, the Bulls were vulnerable defensively. But Chicago forced the issue on offense from the opening tip. With Jordan scoring 12 points, the Bulls leaped to a 34–12 lead by the end of the first quarter. For all intents and purposes, the game was over. By halftime, Chicago had stretched the lead to 62–38, and although Seattle pulled within a dozen twice in the third, the margin was just too large to overcome. The second half was marked by Rodman’s smirking antics that once again brought the Sonics’ frustrations to the boiling point. Brickowski was ejected for a flagrant foul with six minutes left, and the Key Arena fans, so rowdy in earlier rounds of the playoffs, witnessed the display in numbed silence.

Jordan finished with 36, but the big surprise was 19 from Longley, who had struggled in Game 2. Asked what had turned the big center’s game around, Jackson replied, “Verbal bashing by everybody on the club. I don’t think anybody’s ever been attacked by as many people as Luc after Friday’s game. Tex gave him an earful, and Michael did, too. I tried the last few days to build his confidence back up.”

Apparently it worked, because Longley’s size was one of several elements of the Bulls’ attack that troubled the Sonics.

“I saw Chicago with killer eyes,” Karl lamented.

“These guys, once they get the grasp on a team, seem to be able to keep turning the screws down more and more,” Jackson agreed, and later advanced the notion that Seattle might have been tired from taking a flight immediately after Friday night’s game. “They might be learning that you don’t take a Friday night flight in a situation where you have a day off and a game on Sunday afternoon,” Jackson said. “You get in at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning, and it changes up things. We’ve always made the statement that when you get here you better be prepared for it. It’s a tough experience. The lack of sleep, the duress of travel. The energy that the games take … The critiquing and the overcritiquing. Sometimes a team comes apart, or joins together, in those kind of activities. Fortunately for our team, it has bonded them and helped them out, and they’ve become stronger because of it.”

Jackson said his team reminded him of the 1973 Knicks’ team, which had been built from players drafted in the ’60s who grew up together. In the wake of the team’s 1970 title, a host of new players were brought in. “We made some trades after we won the first championship, and Earl Monroe and Jerry Lucas came in,” he recalled. “All of a sudden we had people going in different directions, with different interests. They didn’t personally like each other as friends, but they liked to play ball together. This group reminds me of that group; they like each other on the court just fine. Personally, they’re probably not gonna go out to dinner together. Some of them are. We tell them that’s fine; that’s good. Before the season started, we told them, ‘As long as you keep your professional life together, the rest of the things don’t matter.’ I get them in the same room a lot of times. I believe in bringing them together so that they have to hear the same message, breathe the same air, so to speak.

“They’re not that close, and they’re not that distant. They respect each other, and that’s the most important thing, especially at this level, when guys are working in this type of business, an entertainment business, where they’re vying for glory and fame and commercial success. Guys understand and respect each other’s game and territory. Michael and Scottie have given credence to Dennis’s commercial avenue that he runs down, and they’ve all sort of paid homage to Michael and his icon that he carries. And Scottie’s been able to take this team and do things as a leader that are very important for us. And there’s plenty of room for guys who have an international appeal like Toni Kukoc and Luc Longley. Those things have all worked very well together.”

With the victory, the Bulls were up 3–0, on the verge of a sweep that would give them a 15–1 run through the playoffs, the most successful post-season record in NBA history.

With Game 4 set for that Wednesday, the next two days of practice took on the air of a coronation, with the media hustling to find comparisons between the Bulls and pro basketball’s other great teams from the past. ESPN analyst Jack Ramsay, who had coached the ’77 Trail Blazers to an NBA title and served as general manager of Philadelphia’s great 1967 team, said the Bulls just might be the greatest defensive team of all time. “The best defenders in the game are Pippen and Jordan…,” he said. “They’re just so tough. In each playoff series, they take away one more thing from the opponent, and then you’re left standing out there naked, without a stitch of clothes. It’s embarrassing.”

“They play as a team, and there appears to be no selfishness,” Ramsay said. “There’s no evidence of ego. The guys from the bench, they go in the game, and when they come out, you don’t see any of them look up at the clock and look at the coach. They go over and sit down. When they come in, the guys on the floor bring them right into the game and get shots for them. They all know their roles, and they all can fill their roles.”

Tex Winter was worried that the Bulls were being seduced by all the talk about the greatest team ever, and later he would kick himself for not complaining louder about it. But it wasn’t just the talk that did them in. Ron Harper had been unable to practice for more than a week, and his availability for Game 4 was in doubt.

Harper had vowed he would be able to play—and sure enough, he was in the starting lineup. But his knees allowed him no more than token minutes, which left a huge gap in the Bulls’ pressure.

It took the Sonics a few minutes to discover this. They missed their first four shots, but got on track shortly thereafter. The outcome was really settled by a second quarter blitz from which Chicago never recovered. In a series sorely lacking in drama, the Bulls had finally managed to produce some—by falling behind by 21 points. The Bulls pushed as Jordan furiously berated both his teammates and the officials, but without Harper the defense offered no real pressure, because there was no one to free Jordan and Pippen to do their damage.

At the next day’s practice, Jackson was asked if he feared that the Sonics had gotten their confidence. No, he replied, at this level it was a matter of more than confidence.

Once again, Harper was unable to play in Game 5, which put Kukoc in the lineup. The Bulls struggled to play well, but again had no pressure in their defense. The Sonics had only two unforced turnovers at halftime. Still, the game stayed tight. The Bulls trailed 62–60 at the end of the third and pulled even tighter in the fourth.

With eight minutes to go, Pippen put home a Randy Brown miss to pull to 71–69, but the Sonics answered with an 11–0 run that the Bulls couldn’t answer. Up 80–69, the Sonics crowd pushed the decibel level above 117. On the floor, a fan held up a sign that said, “Dennis’s Departure Will Leave Us Sleazeless in Seattle.”

Rodman showed his anger when Jackson replaced him with Brown in the fourth period. Haley tried to calm him, but Rodman knocked his hand away. Jordan and Pippen, too, had shown flashes of anger, and the media that had been ready to crown them just two days earlier began noting that the Bulls seemed fragmented and tired.

Finally, it ended, 89–78, and for the second straight game, the arena air glittered with golden confetti. The series, miraculously, was returning to Chicago. “The Joy of Six,” the Seattle newspapers declared the next day in a headline.

The Bulls had shot 37 percent from the floor and only 3 for 26 from three-point land, 11.5 percent. Tex Winter looked very worried.

“It’s all on them now,” Seattle’s Gary Payton said.

Jackson’s team was rattled, but heading back home with a 3–2 series lead. Now the Sonics had to face the task of winning in the United Center. So much hinged on whether Harper could play. In the locker room before the game, he vowed he would. He had never taken so much as an anti-inflammatory, saying he didn’t believe in putting drugs of any kind in his body. But he said he would play with pain. And that was all his teammates needed to know.

Game 6 was played on Father’s Day, June 16, and Jordan felt the rush of emotion as he thought of James Jordan, his father, friend, and advisor. “He’s always on my mind,” Jordan said. His answer was to dedicate the game to his father’s memory. Would it be too much to handle? Even Jordan didn’t know that answer.

Once again the Bulls stayed in the locker room during the anthem, but no sooner had Jesse Campbell started singing than the United Center crowd launched into a large noise. Across the arena they were calling for the Bulls to come out and end this matter.

As introductions were set to begin, another loud prolonged applause, drowning out anything electronic, spread across the building, bringing the fans to their feet to pound out the noise. The very mention of the Sonics brought a deep and troublesome boo.

“Anhhnnnd nooww,” announcer Ray Clay began the introductions, but you could hear no more after the twenty-four thousand saw that Ron Harper was in the lineup.

Taking all this in, the Sonics stood courtside, chomping their gum and setting their jaws. At tipoff, the audience sent forth another blast of noise, just in case the Bulls didn’t get the message the first time. Then yet another explosion followed moments later when Pippen went to the hoop with a sweet underhand scoop to open the scoring.

With Harper back, the Bulls’ pressure returned, and they picked the Sonics clean time and again. On the day, Harper would play 38 minutes, and when he paused, an assistant trainer would coat his knee with a spray anesthetic. Spurred by his presence, Pippen pushed the Bulls out of the gate in the first period with 7 points and 2 steals, giving Chicago a 16–12 lead.

The Bulls used more of the same to extend the lead in the second, as Jackson leaned back in his seat with his arms folded. Fifty feet away, Karl strolled the baseline, downcast, his hands jammed in his pockets. The Bulls saved their killer run for the third, a 19–9 spurt capped by Pippen dishing to Rodman on the break, with the eccentric forward flipping in a little reverse shot, jutting his fists skyward, bringing yet another outburst from the building, which got louder yet when Rodman made the free throw for a 62–47 lead.

Just when it seemed they would be run out of the building, the Sonics responded with a 9–0 run. To turn Seattle back, Kerr launched a long three over Perkins, and the Bulls ended the third period up 9, 67–58.

Jackson had left Jordan on the bench for a long stretch at the end of the third, so that he would be fresh for the kill in the fourth. But with Jordan facing double teams and his own rush of emotions, at least some of the momentum would come from Kukoc, who canned a three from the corner to push it to 70–58.

Later, Kukoc would knock down another trey for a 75–61 lead. Rodman, meanwhile, was on his way to grabbing 19 rebounds, including another 11 offensive rebounds to tie the record that he had just tied in Game 2. Kerr hit a jumper to drive it to 84–68 at 2:44, and the whole building was dancing. In the middle of this delirium, the standing ovations came one after another. The dagger, Pippen’s final trey on a kickout from Jordan came at 57 seconds, and moments later was followed by the last possession of this very historic season, Jordan dribbling near midcourt, then relinquishing to Pippen for one last delirious air ball.

As soon as it was over, Jackson stepped out to hug Pippen and Jordan, who broke loose to grab the game ball and tumbled to the floor with Randy Brown. Pippen gave Kukoc a big squeeze, then grabbed Harper, his old buddy, to tell him, “Believe it! Dreams really do come true.” Nearby, Jackson shared a quiet hug with Rodman. Then Jordan was gone, the game ball clutched behind his head, disappearing into the locker room, trying to escape the network cameras, searching for haven in the trainer’s room, weeping on the floor in joy and pain over his memories on Father’s Day.

“I’m sorry I was away for eighteen months,” he would say later after being named Finals MVP. “I’m happy I’m back, and I’m happy to bring a championship back to Chicago.”

In a nod to 1992, the last time the Bulls won a championship at home, the players jumped up on the courtside press table for a victory jig to acknowledge the fans. With them was Rodman, already shirtless. “I think we can consider ourselves the greatest team of all time,” Pippen said with satisfaction.

Strangely, it was Karl who put the whole show in perspective. “This Bulls team is like the Pistons or Celtics, or some team from the ’80s,” he said. “This is the ’90s, but they play with a learned mentality from an earlier time. This is an old-time package.

“I don’t know about the Bird Era or the Magic Era. They were great teams, but this Bulls team has that same basic mentality. I like their heart and I like their philosophy.”

Which had Jordan already gazing into the future. “Five is the next number,” he said with a smile.

It was at the height of this greatest season that the relationship between Krause and Jackson came undone. Later, Jerry Reinsdorf would point out that the two men actually had very few differences in regard to basketball philosophy. Their disagreements were more personal in nature, the team chairman said. “It’s the methods, not the philosophy,” Jackson agreed. “It’s how things are done.

“Jerry and I lost our cooperative nature, and it was just through the hardship of negotiations,” Jackson would explain later. “I just felt that the negotiating wasn’t done in a good manner. But negotiations can be difficult. Coaches and general managers, when they get caught up in it, sometimes get on the other sides of the fence from each other. That happened to us a little bit, and it’s been tough to mend the bridge.”

“We had a couple of negotiating things that weren’t good,” Jackson recalled. “And Jerry would talk to my agent and then call me up and say, ‘Phil, there’s no way we can do this.’”

The contract talks, sometimes emotional and acrimonious, dragged on into the playoffs, right in the midst of the NBA Finals between Chicago and Seattle. As the season wound down, the debate began about whether Jackson, Jordan, and Rodman, all at the end of their contracts, would come back for another season. Reinsdorf ultimately answered that question by agreeing to ante up a league record $59 million in salaries (not including $5 million for Jackson) for the 1996–97 season. But the negotiating was marked by turmoil.

“There was a situation in Seattle that was unfortunate,” Jackson recalled. “There was all this stuff going on about coming back. I was caught in the middle of this thing. Michael was in the last year of his contract at $4.5 million or whatever he was making. We had a couple of other guys in that situation. We had a 72–10 season that year. And we were in the Finals, and there was a lot of press going on about it, and there was some bad tension about the division of the labor here.”

Jackson was conducting a team practice at Key Arena in Seattle between games of the championship series when he noticed that Krause and some of his assistants had shown up. “We were practicing,” the coach recalled, “and I kind of asked Jerry on the side, ‘Is there a reason for you guys coming?’ He said, ‘We’re gonna do our business here.’”

Krause and his assistants were busy conferring over the upcoming draft. The GM was so busy, Jackson recalled, that Krause spent most of the session with his back to the court, talking things over with his staff. During the Finals, each practice session was followed by a thirty-minute session of media interviews during which reporters are allowed onto the court to question players and coaches.

About 12:30 that day, the NBA public relations staff people notified Jackson that his team’s media session was over. The NBA liked to closely control the scheduling of these events, because the league didn’t like to leave one team waiting for the other to leave the floor, the coach pointed out.

Upon being notified the Bulls’ interview time was up, Jackson used his trademark shrill, fingers-in-the-mouth whistle to get his players’ attention and announce, “OK, everybody on the bus.”

“The bus was right off the court,” Jackson recalled. “So we wait five minutes, and Jerry doesn’t show. And I drive out. The team bus leaves, and Jerry was irate at this situation. He didn’t call me, but he called my trainer and everyone else. Well, one of the things is, I always call the shots on that. I’m the guy that runs the bus and the plane and that kind of stuff. It’s the team. I left him behind in that situation. Now, whether he got caught with the press or what else…”

Jackson’s implication was that Krause could have done his draft work back in Chicago, but moved his operation to Seattle to be closer to the worldwide press covering the championship series. The coach’s decision to leave his boss behind rather than keep the players waiting would quickly become a factor in both their negotiations and their relationship.

“With the negotiations that were going on at the time, that was kind of an overload situation for him,” Jackson said of Krause. “And at that point, when we came back to Chicago and we won, I saw Mr. Reinsdorf heap all the praise on Jerry in the final announcement.

“They started doing a spin on the fans being so great in Chicago. The reality is that Michael had come back and proven a tremendous point. He had retired and spent a year and a half away from it. Then he’d come back and had a failure of a return in 17 games. The ’95 season was not successfully finished. We had lost to Orlando, which was one of the most difficult spots for Michael to be in.

“Then for our team to win the championship on a 72–10 year was just an absolute pie a la mode,” Jackson said. “I don’t care where the credit should have gone for whomever. But it was just an obvious slap in the face of the team. It was just like a pure snub.”

Angered, Jackson said he considered leaving the Bulls. “The players all came to me,” he recalled, “and said, ‘Don’t leave us. Don’t go. Find a way to come back. Because we’re all here. Scottie’s here. Michael’s gonna come back.’”

Jackson ultimately agreed to a one-year contract for the 1996–97 season, but his relationship with Krause had suffered heavy damage. That became apparent with the meetings the coaching staff and general manager hold with each Bulls player shortly after the end of each season. These sessions are essential, Jackson says, because the coaching staff uses them to bring “closure” to the season, discussing with each player his accomplishments and his plans for offseason conditioning and his role on the team for the upcoming campaign. For example, it was during the 1995 meetings that guard Ron Harper and the coaches discussed his pivotal role for the 1995–96 season, a role that was a key factor in the Bulls’ winning their fourth title.

“We had a day off after the win,” Jackson said of the 1996 end-of-year sessions, “and then we go into our team meetings where we debrief the players. We got into that thing. It was just a certain amount of rhythm. There’s a half-hour for each player. You bring them in and talk. Some players only go fifteen minutes. But they have the team meeting.”

The time was also used to give each player his share of playoff bonus money.

“Jerry wasn’t there to start it out at 9:00,” Jackson recalled. “He was in his office and couldn’t get there. So all of a sudden, it was 9:30, 10:00, and we had three players backed up now. And I hate to have that happen to the players. They come in early to get it done. So we started doing players in a hurry, and started just cutting through what we normally would do with young players. I realized that he didn’t care about this session. We had always gone through with the players and established what we wanted to do in the summertime. Established what they had to work on in terms of what their year was gonna be like the next season.

“In between the sessions, Jerry was like cold,” Jackson said. “We couldn’t get a conversation going on. I didn’t try. I mean I was just kind of feeling it out. Then suddenly he had to disappear at a certain time, and he took another forty-five minutes off. We had more guys come through. I finally went to his door and said, ‘Jerry, you gotta come and finish this off, or else cancel it. One way or another we cannot do this to people. You can’t just not do it.’”

It was obvious that the general manager wasn’t eager to work with him, and that had an effect on the quality of the sessions, Jackson said. “All of a sudden they were like meaningless.”