Jerry Reinsdorf was a reserved man given to grand statements. One of his statements was the new Comiskey Park, where his White Sox played. Another was the United Center. Easily the most emotional statement of Reinsdorf’s career in business and sports was the Berto Center, the Bulls’ fancy practice facility in suburban Deerfield named for Sheri Berto, Reinsdorf’s longtime personal assistant and friend who died in 1991 at age forty. The Bulls finished out the 1991–92 season wearing a patch on their uniforms in her honor.
The old Boston Celtics’ mystique was represented by the Boston Garden, a basketball temple where the ball echoed off the chipped and aged parquet floor and sixteen championship banners hung in the rafters. Since Chicago Stadium was razed, the place that came closest to that type of expression for the Bulls was not the United Center but the Berto Center. The real fun of coaching the Bulls, said Tex Winter, was practice, “where we get to work with the greatest players in the world.”
The building offered every imaginable aid or device for training and competition, from a state-of-the-art weight room to an indoor track, even a lap pool for rehabbing injuries. “It’s an ideal facility for a basketball player to get a workout,” said Bulls rookie Rusty LaRue, who spent many hours in 1997–98 alone in the building, working on defensive slide drills and other facets of his game. “To have the opportunity to have the weights, the medical equipment, and the pool and the sauna and all that right there as well as the court, it’s really ideal. You got it all in one place. You got your track there to do your running, whatever you want to do.”
Yet the most significant of these enhancements was the atmosphere itself. On the first level, the main hallway into the gym featured a giant mural photograph of fans’ faces during the 1993 league championship series in old Chicago Stadium. One fan was holding up a sign that read, “We Will Defend What Is Ours.” Each day as they came and went, the players could feel the expectation in those faces. It was a subtle yet powerful reminder of the tremendous loyalty the Bulls enjoyed from their supporters, a loyalty they had to earn each day on the practice floor.
A vital aspect of the building was the privacy. For much of the NBA’s history, its teams had left their practice sessions open to the media, mainly because pro basketball always seemed to be a struggling business in need of any attention it could get. That situation began to change with the popularity that Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and Jordan brought to the game in the 1980s. Jordan’s popularity, in fact, swelled so suddenly that it threatened to overrun his team.
A big part of Jackson’s drive to create breathing space for Jordan and the team was to close off practices from the hungry Chicago media. When the team moved into the Berto Center, Jackson further enhanced the privacy by placing a large retractable screen over the windows to the press room in the building. The result of this effort was the Berto Center, a haven for all of the organization, including Krause and his assistants. Upstairs, looking over the floor, were the administrative offices of the coaches and general manager, which served as the inner sanctum for the team. There are the meeting rooms, the film rooms, the offices where the Bulls’ plans and strategies for competition and personnel moves were concocted.
The media, of course, were kept at arm’s length with a series of electronically locked doors, but it was a comfortable arm’s length. The Berto Center press room was a cozy, well-lighted working facility, with cubicles for reporters and a bank of phones.
In this and so many other regards, the Berto Center was an extension of Reinsdorf’s personality. He was intensely private, yet treasured the relationships with the people who worked for him. His car was a late-model, drab brown Cadillac, which created a contrast when parked in a loading dock at the United Center along the fancy vehicles of his highly paid athletes. His taste in dress ran to the same drab browns and muted plaids. He hardly ever inhabited a slickly tailored power suit.
“Jerry Reinsdorf is the most loyal person that I’ve ever met, particularly to the employees that have done well for him,” said longtime Chicago radio reporter Bruce Levine. “Sheri Berto was his confidant and one of his very best friends. What more proof do you need than naming a building after her and making sure that her family is taken care of?”
Perhaps it stood to reason that a man who cherished his privacy and close relationships would have a disdain for the process of public relations. Unfortunately, that had been one of Reinsdorf’s failings. A Brooklyn kid, he loved baseball and had expended much energy in the running of the White Sox, but his involvement in baseball had created one public relations disaster after another. By Reinsdorf’s own admission, his early threats to move the team out of Chicago if he didn’t get public cooperation in building a new Comiskey Park became the bedrock of his negative public image. In the wake of that came his role in the ugly relations between baseball’s owners and its players. Added to that have been the machinations over his tinkering with the White Sox roster.
With the feud between Krause and Jackson taking on an increasingly public tenor, Reinsdorf found himself once again thrust into public view, just as he found himself trying to monitor the internal debate among his prominent employees.
That debate soon matured into hostilities within the Berto Center offices as the Bulls prepared for the 1997–98 season. In September, the Krauses had not invited the Jacksons to their daughter’s wedding, but Krause had invited Iowa State coach Tim Floyd, long rumored as Jackson’s replacement. Jackson had begun referring to Floyd in public as “Pinkie,” an obvious attempt to irritate Krause.
“Pinkie Floyd was there,” Jackson said of the wedding. “He was sitting at the table with Jerry Reinsdorf, and it was an occasion that Jerry Krause used as a business opportunity to bring Floyd to meet everyone.”
The Krauses further deepened the snub by explaining it to a newspaper reporter. “Thelma [Krause’s wife] spoke of it this year,” Jackson said. “It was in the paper. The big deal was, ‘Phil’s a professional. He’s an office worker. We didn’t invite all of our office workers. Steve Schanwald wasn’t invited.’ It was that kind of thing. Jerry explained that to me the next day. But when it came out in public, that was what Thelma said. The reality is, that Jerry is all professional. He’s all business. There is no personal. He’s business twenty-four hours a day.”
The late September wedding snub soon led to a blow-up between Jackson and Krause at the Berto Center. “He kind of was hanging around the coaches’ offices acting friendly,” Jackson recalled. “And he walked in the office where we were just kind of joking around as an office group. So I just stood up and walked out. He was acting like nothing had happened.
“I just walked out and went down and checked on the players,” Jackson said. “When I came back upstairs, his secretary came in and said, ‘Jerry wants to see you in his office.’ And I said, ‘Tell him he can come see me in my office.’ And I went in my office. Then she called back said, ‘He wants you to know that you are to meet him in his office and that he’s still the boss here.’ So I went in his office and told him, ‘Don’t come around and act friendly and everything else when you know that you’re not friendly.’ He said, ‘Well, I didn’t invite Frank (Hamblen, assistant coach), and I didn’t invite (Bulls VP) Steve Schanwald.’
“I said, ‘Well, you crossed a bridge right there by your definition, by your snub or whatever else. Believe me, I don’t care. But when you invite the next coach that’s coming in and you use that as an opportunity to introduce him to the people in the community and to the owner and stuff, and then tell me it’s not business, it’s personal.’
“Then he came back,” Jackson said, “with how Pinkie Floyd had been his friend for five or six years. I said, ‘Sure, Jerry, I know he’s your friend.’ I’ve been in that same position where Floyd is. One of his puppies. He’s been watching him for a while.”
Very quickly, the discussion escalated into an argument, Jackson said. “It went from there to ‘Well, that’s why I wanted to have the owner meet you. We wanted to make sure you understand this is your last year. I don’t care if you win 82 games or not. This is your last year.’ That kind of shut the door for me.
“We had an ensuing fight that lasted about ten minutes, and it was pretty loud and pretty boisterous,” Jackson said. “But at the end we settled down. And he said, ‘This is what the owner was gonna tell you. Instead of him telling you, I will tell you what he was gonna tell you. Make sure that the drift of your thing comes out that this is the way that it has to be. And make no doubt about it that this is our intention that this is your last year.’ And I said, ‘Jerry, I’ve known that it’s been my last year since Mr. Reinsdorf came to Montana and we talked about it.’ And we went through a few things that had been a hardship. And we aired a lot of things that had to be aired, and we’ve been much better since that time. There had been animosity and we were coming apart, so we kind of cleared the air.”
Media Day
Just ahead on the schedule was Media Day, the opportunity for the press to conduct preseason interviews, which would bring a national contingent of sportswriters and broadcasters to the Berto Center. The scent of conflict was high around the Bulls, meaning that a larger than usual group of reporters showed.
Just before Media Day, Krause read some comments Jackson had made to reporters in which the coach seemed to be waffling about his status with the team. “He called me up to the office that day,” Jackson recalled, “and he said, ‘I want you to get this straight. This is indeed your last year. We want to get that straight to the media. We don’t want any of this hedging.’”
Jackson testily prepared to comply and waited for the media to interview Krause before going onto the practice facility floor where the sessions were being conducted.
At first only two or three reporters gathered about Krause on the Berto Center floor. But then their number grew until around twenty encircled him. The GM began by discussing the effects of the NBA’s new labor agreement, how unsettling it was, how it would take three years or more to understand how it would affect the economics of the league.
A reporter pointed out that the “finality of Phil rubs people the wrong way. Around town Phil leaves doors open at times in comments.
“What is the real story?” the reporter asked.
“It’s both of our decisions,” Krause replied. “I think you ought to ask Phil about it. But it’s both of our decisions, you know. I don’t see why…”
He paused then and started over by referring to the public reaction to his July press conference announcing Jackson’s new contract. “I think when people thought that I made the statement at the press conference, it was in the press release,” Krause said. “It was right there for everybody to see. And I think when I made a statement … the last time I talked to you guys, some people … Or one of the last times I talked to you as a group, some people thought I was saying something that wasn’t in the press release. It was there.”
His comments left the reporters around him with increasingly confused looks. “We had agreed to it,” Krause said finally, “and that’s the way it is. I don’t know why it would rub somebody wrong. There’s a time in life when people separate.”
“People think you are saying it in such a way that you take joy in it,” a reporter said.
“No, there’s no truth to that at all,” Krause said. “I don’t take … I think people think … I’ve heard some people say that I’ll take joy in the day when Michael leaves. I have no such thoughts in my mind. Hell, I’ll probably cry when he leaves. But the point being that you have to go on. You know, this is an organization. We’ve been very successful. I’m really proud of what the organization has done.
A reporter pointed out that if a lot of players leave at once, a team suddenly finds itself scrambling to find the right players to replace those who left.
“A lot of them have left before,” Krause replied. “We have a team that won three championships, and two years later we won a championship with ten new players. So this isn’t something we haven’t done before. We’ve done this before.”
He used that example to explain that players and coaches alone don’t win championships, that sound organizations do. But as he made the remark, Jackson stepped onto the floor to begin his interview session. And as they often do, reporters hurriedly departed their current interview so as not to miss anything newsworthy Jackson might say.
Within an hour after the media session had ended, a befuddled Krause found his way down to the press room looking for reporters who might have a recording of his comments. He was sure he had been misquoted, that he had said coaches and players “alone” don’t win championships. Unfortunately, few media representatives remained in the press room. Eventually, Krause would get in touch with John Jackson of the Sun-Times, who would confirm that Krause had said that “coaches and players don’t win championships, organizations do.”
“I was right there when it happened,” Terry Armour of the Tribune agreed. “He was heavily misquoted. I saw everybody run from him midway through the quote and run over to Phil. They didn’t even get the end of the quote.”
The group of reporters went to Jackson and told him that Krause had said that coaches and players don’t win titles: “It’s organizations that win championships.”
“He would say that,” Jackson said. “The organization is based on loyalty. Scottie sees that and has to wonder what loyalty really does mean.”
The comment would come to be a theme for the players throughout the season, galvanizing their disdain for Krause and Reinsdorf. Even team employees loyal to Krause would express dismay at the GM’s choice of words, at his decision to attempt to discuss the situation with the media, because Krause’s comments would set in motion a nasty public relations battle that would come back to haunt the two Jerrys again and again.
Even Jackson privately expressed sympathy for Krause and how the situation had blown up in the GM’s face.
Later, Krause’s associates would complain privately that Jackson could have spoken up and taken the pressure off Krause. The worst part about Krause’s ill-timed statements was that it left both Krause and Reinsdorf in limbo. If they defended themselves against the public anger, then it seemed they were attacking Jordan and Jackson, both very popular figures, which only made the situation worse.
As for Jackson, the coach merely followed Krause’s instructions on what to tell reporters. “It would take wild horses to drag me back this time,” Jackson said on Media Day. “This is the final year. It’s time to start something different. In the conversation I had with Jerry Reinsdorf in negotiations, this would be the last year. We’re not having any illusions, like last year. We don’t want the same situation … if something should happen like we accidentally win a championship. I assured [Jerry Krause] I’d walk out at the end of the season, and he assisted me in that belief.”
Jordan had not made himself available to the press on Media Day. But the next day, after the team’s first day of practice, Jordan was ready to address Krause’s comments. “I’m very consistent with what I’ve always said,” Jordan told reporters. “That’s what I mean. If Phil’s not going to be here, I’m certainly not going to be here.”
What if Jackson goes to another team next season? a reporter asked. Would Jordan follow?
“No,” he said. “Totally. I would quit. I wouldn’t say quit, I’d retire.”
The assembled reporters went on to ask Jordan a host of questions, including the following:
What do you think of Krause’s comment that players and coaches alone don’t win championships; organizations do?
“I don’t agree with him in that sense, because as a player, I feel we go out and do our job, we do what we have to do each and every day when we step on the basketball court. Sure, they [the team’s management] have responsibilities to do whatever to make our jobs easier, to do what they have to do for the organization, but I mean, I didn’t see any of the organization playing sick last year. In Game 5, I would have liked to see some of those organization guys step out there and play. And I didn’t see that.”
Were you offended that management seemed to be pushing Phil Jackson out the door?
“I think that’s very obvious, because management has already said that this is Phil’s last year. So, I don’t know if that’s Phil’s step. I know Phil’s not gonna go against a situation where he’s not wanted. He’s looked at it as if this is probably his last year. We just gotta go out and play the game of basketball this year and deal with what we have to deal with. Certainly we don’t know what the future is going to hold. That’s the organization’s decision. That’s not our decision. If Phil’s not going to be here, then I’m not going to be here.”
Could you use your influence with Reinsdorf to bring Phil Jackson back?
“I don’t know. I’ve never really looked at it in that sense. I don’t know what my influence is. You see how Jerry Reinsdorf operates. My influence doesn’t have anything to do with his decision making. I’m not gonna sit here and knock heads with Jerry. If he has his own vision for this team and what its future holds, then we take that and we deal with it. If that means Phil’s not here, that means Phil’s not here.”
Did the disagreement between Jackson and Krause make for a bad way to end the Bulls’ great run?
“It’s a bad way to end an unbelievable run. You would want it to be better down the stretch, or when the curtain is finally closing. I think that we as players can’t worry about that. We have to go out there and have our own individual, our own team, goals to live up to. The management stuff is something you’ll have to worry about in the future.”
Although they were measured, Jordan’s comments only helped cement the impression that Krause and Reinsdorf were forcing Jackson and him from the team.
Jackson then made a point of discussing Krause’s comments in a meeting with his players. “We talked about it as a team actually and said, ‘We have to have good mental health as well as good physical health.’” the coach said. “This is part of the mental health.”
With Scottie Pippen facing foot surgery and Rodman disgruntled, Jackson was worried that the team would open the season struggling and that the discord with management would become a major distraction.
“The challenge is if the paranoia or insecurity linger with failure,” Jackson said privately. “Those things can breed the kind of dark thoughts that can sway the mental health of a coach or a team. Those are the things that we have to watch for. I feel real confident about my team, about our relationships, the team’s relationships. About my staff, about our dedication towards winning this year. All those things are real strong, so I can’t see anything upsetting the apple cart as far as the mental or spiritual aspect of it. We’re pretty unified as a team as to what we’re gonna do regardless of what happens, the innuendo that are gonna go on or the slights that are gonna happen, the backhanded comments that might be made.”
Krause’s comments and the responses from Jackson and Jordan brought a round of media commentary nationwide lambasting the Bulls’ front office. Typical of the response was a column by Gwen Knapp of the San Francisco Examiner, who wrote, “Krause could have let the players age gracefully into the sunset, let Jackson’s natural curiosity lead him elsewhere. Instead, the general manager has sullied the whole outfit. And he hasn’t even done it artfully … Krause’s gig is charisma free, all unembroidered pettiness.
“In Krause’s fantasy basketball league,” she said, “Michael Jordan is just a tool, easily replaced. And the photocopier is more valuable than Phil Jackson. Last week, Krause pointed out that the team trainer has five rings.”
Later, Krause and Reinsdorf would fume privately that Jackson didn’t speak up more to ease the public relations nightmare that grew out of Media Day. But the coach wasn’t about to extract the GM and team chairman from the circumstances. “They created this animal,” Jackson said later, “and I’m not bailing them out. I made a decision. I’m just a person they plugged into this thing, this situation. It was the right thing they plugged in, and everything’s worked graciously for us behind all that. That’s great, but this isn’t a real estate holding, or the stock market, where you just happened to buy a lucky piece of stock. These are people you’re dealing with. And that’s the thing that I think they’re missing.”
Shaky Beginning
In reality, the Bulls’ biggest concern in October had little to do with “future considerations.” Rather, it was the soft tissue in Pippen’s foot, injured against Miami in May in the playoffs and slow to heal. That, too, entered into the controversy when Krause faxed Pippen a letter in September threatening to take action against the star if he played in his own charity game.
It wasn’t so much the content of the letter that infuriated Pippen, but the harshness of its tone and the manner in which it was delivered.
The real issue, though, was corrective surgery and the timing of the operation. Decisions were difficult in the charged atmosphere of training camp. But four days after camp opened, the surgery was performed, and the Bulls announced the star forward, so critical to the team’s success, would miss a minimum of two months.
“Each year we start off with some sort of challenge and this makes it even more so,” Jordan told reporters.
The week brought more news in that Rodman agreed to a one-year contract with a $4.5 million base and performance incentives that could boost it to $10 million. But then he refused to sign it, supposedly because he feared some of the incentives would be impossible to reach.
Reinsdorf had said Rodman would be welcomed back only if he gave up the bad behavior that had stained his 1996–97 performances. At first, Rodman had offered to play for free, but later changed that to a demand for $10 million with “a money-back guarantee.”
“I’ve learned one thing: don’t predict anything from Dennis,” Jackson told reporters. “If you do, you just set yourself up.”
Jordan pointed out that with Pippen’s injury, the team needed Rodman to be on his best behavior. But a stalemate developed and dragged on through training camp and the start of the ambitious exhibition schedule.
After a preseason opener at home, the Bulls jetted to Lawrence, Kansas, to meet the Seattle Sonics in humid Allen Field House on the University of Kansas campus. After Kansas, it was back to Chicago briefly for an exhibition loss, followed by a transatlantic jump to Paris to play in the McDonald’s Open in mid-October. The city was still in shock from the death of Princess Diana in an auto wreck six weeks earlier. The Bulls landed and headed immediately to practice. “Bonjour, bonjour,” Jordan, accompanied by his son Jeffrey, told a crowd of French teenagers after the workout.
Joining Chicago in the international exhibition tournament were Paris—St. Germain, Atenas de Cordoba of Argentina, Benetton Treviso of Italy, FC Barcelona, and Olympiakos Piraeus of Greece. The Bulls made quick work of the tournament field, but not without a cost: Jordan developed a sore toe. “It hurts him and he can’t jump,” Jackson told reporters. As the team headed back to Chicago, it was announced that Jordan would miss the final three exhibition games, although the injury wasn’t viewed as serious.
A much bigger concern was Rodman, who still had not signed his contract by the time the team got back home. Immediately Jordan and Jackson went to work on him. “I talked to Michael a couple of days here and there,” Rodman said. “He says, ‘Don’t leave me out here hanging to dry.’ The guys gave me a lot of support. The least I can do is give something back.”
With the proper prodding, the thirty-six-year-old forward signed up for another season. “The players and the people of Chicago, they gave me a lot, so I figured I might as well come back and give them one more year,” he told reporters.
That Friday, October 24, Rodman accompanied the team to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for an exhibition game at the Dean Smith Center on the UNC campus. At first, it was announced that Jordan would not play, which created a swell of fan disappointment. Then came the calls from Jordan’s old friends back home. With his toe feeling better, he decided he’d better suit up after all.
Up to that point in the young season, there had been no friction, no embarrassing moments between Krause and the players. But just before game time at the Smith Center, Jordan went to use the restroom and spied Krause’s feet dangling underneath the stall. From that point, Jordan, as he had explained to Jackson, couldn’t help himself. Krause was just too inviting a target for a round of humorous salvos.
“He was in there,” Ron Harper recalled, “and Michael said, ‘I’m not going in there yet, Phil. I ain’t goin’ in until Jerry leaves.’ It was almost time to go out on the court. It was a sad scene then. He was killing him in the can. It’s a thing where Jerry will embarrass himself if Jerry gets a chance. You won’t have to embarrass him. He’ll find a way to embarrass himself. So we tend to let Jerry embarrass himself, and guys just laugh at him. But the guy wants to be a part of it.”
“It’s a ribbing situation,” Jackson said. “Jerry ends up using the bathroom when the team’s trying to get ready. You know, the players use a pecking order. It goes down to Dennis is taking a shower, Harp’s in the bathroom, Michael’s in the bathroom. And that’s it. It usually goes in that kind of routine. Michael goes in the bathroom, and Jerry’s in there in the bathroom. You know, it’s like, ‘What are you thinking about?’ I don’t go in the player’s bathroom. This is a place where a guy wants to be alone and get his business done before a game. This is a team kind of thing. Those are the things that Jerry gets himself embroiled in that have just alienated himself from the team a number of times. So he goes back there and gets some kind of grief. I don’t know what was said. I never know what’s said in that situation. I just hear kind of a ruckus going on.”
With one final exhibition against the Sacramento Kings the next night in Chicago, the Bulls finished their preseason schedule and turned their thoughts to the opening of the regular season the following Friday, October 31, and how they would survive without Pippen. Jordan called the upcoming season, his thirteenth in the league, “my biggest challenge ever.”
He told reporters he would play 48 minutes a night if that was necessary to deliver the sixth championship. “I’m gearing myself up for a long season—all 82 games and 15 playoff games,” Jordan said. “I don’t know what burnout is. I haven’t burned out so far, so why worry about it?”
“We don’t want to wear him out,” Jackson said. “But he just wants to win, as usual. He just wants to win.”
That Friday night, October 31, they opened the season in Boston, and it became immediately apparent just how much they would miss Pippen. The Bulls pushed to a big first-quarter lead against the Celtics, but without Pippen there to control the tempo of the game, Chicago couldn’t hold the edge. And the young Celtics ran and pressed and ran and pressed some more, leaving the Bulls grabbing their shorts and sucking wind.
Chagrined, they headed home with a loss. The next night at the United Center, they held their ring ceremony and revealed the team’s 1997 championship banner, to hang alongside banners from 1991, 1992, 1993, 1995, and 1996. The rings featured a Bulls logo made up of 46 diamonds and five sculpted NBA title trophies and inscriptions “World Champions” and “Team of the Decade.”
The twenty-minute ceremony before Chicago’s home game against Philadelphia brought another brace of boos for Krause. Reinsdorf was present, but wasn’t introduced.
Pippen was obviously emotional when he stepped to the microphone and thanked the fans for ten years of “wonderful moments.”
“I’ve had a wonderful career here,” he said. “If I never have the opportunity to say this again: thank you.”
“I said then that we’d win a championship by the time I leave,” Jordan told the crowd. “Well, we’re the five-time champions, going for six, and … we’re certainly going to win the sixth.”
In the short term, though, their destination was frustration.
Early setbacks leveled their record at 4–4, and observers suggested that perhaps Jordan was carrying too much of the burden. He was averaging 26 points a game but, with an inflamed right wrist and sore right index finger, his usually stellar field goal shooting had drooped to 38 percent. “When he does try to do too much it means that he feels there’s a lack of aggressiveness by his teammates,” Jackson told reporters. “They don’t know what to do or they’re floundering. So he picks up the ball and starts carrying it on his own, and right now he’s not shooting well enough to do that.”
What was worse, neither were his teammates. As a team, Chicago was shooting 41.5 percent and scoring 87.5 points per game. For 1997, the Bulls had averaged 103 points per game. Without Pippen, they had failed to score 100 points in any of their eight games. “Our offense has always been able to provide Michael space to score, and the other players an opportunity to hit open shots when he’s double-teamed,” Jackson said. “Right now, what’s really frustrating is that he’s finding guys off the double team and we’re not making those shots.”
Despite the charged atmosphere between the coach and GM during the 1997 offseason, Jackson had again attempted to persuade Krause not to travel with the team.
“Basically, in my conversation with Jerry in the preseason,” Jackson said, “I had asked him not to go. I said, ‘You always insist on going. I don’t think this is a good year to go.’ He said, ‘I know you could stop this stuff if you wanted to.’ I said, ‘Jerry, it’s what they feel like. If I stood up in this situation and tried to stop this, I would alienate this team.’”
Jackson viewed the extended trips as a time for the players and coaches to bond together, to seal their unity and commitment for another championship run. Because of that, he decided to bring the injured Pippen along. The forward wouldn’t be able to play, but he would undergo limited workouts and spend extra time with his teammates. “I brought Scottie along to get him back in stride with the guys, to practice with the team,” Jackson explained. “There was a chance he was going to be able to come back December 10. We didn’t want him to be out too long, and this was an opportunity, his first practice chance. He wouldn’t have the opportunity to practice if he stayed behind.”
At the time, the Bulls were not a team brimming with confidence. They had lost all three of their road games in the young season and badly needed to reestablish their prowess in the hostile environment of another team’s arena. It was a dramatic turnaround. The two previous seasons they had rung up phenomenal road records of 33–8 and 30–11. “The circumstances are different,” Steve Kerr, who had a bruised knee, told reporters. “I’d be surprised if we could pull off 6–1, frankly. We’re not playing well enough.”
“A certain understanding of going into the enemy’s territory and bonding together,” is how Jordan, who was averaging just under 25 points a game while shooting just under 40 percent from the floor, summed it up. “This is a great time for it, knowing we haven’t had much success on the road.”
This time around, the Bulls were scheduled to open with a Thursday night game at Phoenix; then visit the Los Angeles Clippers, Sacramento Kings, and Seattle Sonics; then stop by Chicago for a two-day break at Thanksgiving before visiting Indiana, Washington, and Boston.
Without Pippen, the Bulls were averaging only 88.4 points per game, ranking them 28th among the 29 NBA teams in scoring. Worse yet, they weren’t shooting the ball well and were turning the ball over 18 or 19 times a game. Without Pippen, the game also became much harder for Jordan, because other teams found it much easier to double- and triple-team him.
“You hate to keep harping on his return, but let’s be honest—the guy is one of the great players ever … and he affects every aspect of the game,” Kerr said. “Until he’s back, I don’t think we can consider ourselves the real Bulls.”
Pippen would later admit that he wasn’t exactly unhappy with the circumstances. After yet another offseason in which Krause again explored trading the star forward, the Bulls were now getting a scorching lesson in just how essential he was to their chemistry. Without him, the Bulls had no teeth.
To ease up the offensive pressure on Jordan, Jackson figured he would try starting sixth man Kukoc, which gave Chicago something of a three-guard offense. The main problem there was that doctors had just discovered Steve Kerr would miss several games with a cracked femur, meaning that the struggling bench would get dramatically weaker.
Jackson had told his assistants of his intention to make this final season one of great fun, but just weeks into the schedule it was clearly not fun. Tex Winter watched Jackson struggle with not only his own emotions but those of his players. “We have been working on the physical, mental, and spiritual sides of these players,” Jackson admitted to the reporters covering the team, “to increase their appetite for the game, their hunger for playing, making basketball fun.”
Winning, though, was fun, and the Bulls couldn’t accomplish that against the Suns. “We lost the game in Phoenix in which Dennis had a wide-open layup down the stretch and he missed it,” Jackson recalled. “We lost a game we probably should have won on the road again.”
Normally, when the Bulls were dominant, the team was willing to overlook Rodman’s indifference on offense. But with Pippen out, that indifference grew as yet another item in Jordan’s craw.
On the plane that night from Phoenix to Los Angeles, Krause decided to approach Jordan, Pippen, Randy Brown, Scott Burrell, and Ron Harper as they were playing their usual card game at the back of the plane. The team had decided that Steve Kerr, who was injured, could go home to be with his pregnant wife. But that created a problem in that Kerr and little-used rookie Keith Booth were scheduled to make a promotional appearance with Jerry Reinsdorf in Sacramento. The team chairman had not been around the team since the 1997 playoffs (when Reinsdorf made a point of telling reporters, “I’ve never had any regrets” about Jordan’s big contract). With Kerr heading home, Krause now had to find another player as a replacement. So he decided to approach the group playing cards.
“I saw him going back there from the front of the plane,” Jackson recalled. “I knew it was gonna be trouble. I just had that feeling, ‘Gosh, he shouldn’t go back there. That’s really a dangerous place to go.’”
What made the circumstances worse was that Krause had a speck of cream cheese on his face from a postgame snack, creating shades of his earlier days with the team, when players concocted the “Crumbs” nickname. From several accounts of the incident, the ribbing he received was substantial. Krause spoke to the players for a few minutes but had no success in finding a replacement for Kerr. So he returned to the front of the plane.
Then, about fifteen minutes later, the GM made another run back to the group to try again. According to accounts of the incident, he still had the cream cheese on his face.
Krause’s second visit to the card game reportedly drew some chiding barbs from Jordan along the lines of, “What’s the matter with you, Jerry? Didn’t anybody ever teach you how to eat?”
“We all know that Jerry likes to eat,” Harper would say later. “He don’t know that he has food on his face, though. But he likes to eat, though. MJ told him. MJ said some words to him and we laughed at him. But, you know, Jerry wants to be part of the team. He’d be very successful if he stayed away.”
Jordan’s answer to the losing streak was his biggest scoring outburst of the regular season, 49 points against the Clippers, the 150th time he had scored more than 40 in a game. In the game’s second overtime, Jordan scored all 9 of Chicago’s points, giving him a run of 13 straight points, for the 111–102 win.
“I Want to Be Traded”
After the game, Daily Herald writer Kent McDill noticed Pippen sitting alone in the locker room. “There was a chair next to him,” McDill recalled. “So I just went over to say hi and see how things were going, when he thought he was gonna come back. And I said something about what game are you aiming for. And he said, ‘Well, I’m not gonna play for the Bulls anymore.’ Ron Harper was standing next to him, and Ron looked down at him and made some sort of snide remark. Scottie was laughing, and then he went on: ‘I’m tired of the way I’ve been treated, and I don’t want to play for any team that Jerry Krause is on or represents. I don’t want to represent Jerry Krause.’ He said a bunch of that stuff. Then he and Harper started laughing about where they were going to end up, what team they were gonna play for and this other stuff. Then Scottie finally looked at me and said, ‘I want to be traded.’
“It was all too jocular for me to actually write it,” McDill said. “It all seemed kind of silly. I knew that the Bulls probably wouldn’t trade him even if he wanted to be traded.”
McDill didn’t write the story after the Friday night game in Los Angeles. But on Sunday in Sacramento he saw Pippen again. “Before the game, he was standing there before introductions,” the reporter recalled. “And I just said to him, ‘When are you going to have your press conference to announce that you want to be traded?’ He said, ‘As soon as you write the story.’ So I asked a couple more questions. Then I went into the press room and started writing down the stuff that had happened Friday night as well. At halftime, I saw him again, and he said, ‘Are you gonna write it?’ I said, ‘To be honest with you, I already did.’ I told him what the story was gonna say, and he said, ‘That’s exactly how I feel. I want to be traded. I don’t want to play with the Bulls anymore.’
“It obviously wasn’t a well thought-out decision,” McDill said, “because the Bulls aren’t going to trade a player just because he wants to be traded. It’s not like they were gonna get what they wanted for him in value, when a player announces he wants to be traded. At the time he was angry and had things he wanted to say, and I’m sure he wanted to stir the pot a little bit. Which he did.”
Indeed, Pippen’s comments made headlines across the country. “I ain’t coming back,” he had told McDill. “I want to be traded. I want to go to Phoenix or L.A.” Even worse, he had insinuated he was malingering, saying, “Maybe I’m healthy” now.
“He hasn’t said anything to me,” Krause said when asked about the comments. “We spent a lot of money to bring everybody back and try to win a championship. I don’t know anything about it.”
The good news for the Bulls was that they got a second straight road victory, 103–88, that Sunday against the Kings, and their defense showed some real teeth. With an 8–5 record, the Bulls set out for Seattle, the scene of their strangest hour. On the flight up, they partied to celebrate another win. Although the news of Pippen’s comments had yet to hit the streets, he partied a bit too much, perhaps over his recent freedom of expression.
“It was a trigger to a very big event this year that was rather embarrassing,” Jackson said. “Unfortunately for the players, it was an opportunity for them to unload against Jerry. It set about a mechanism between the two of us. It was embarrassing. I had to discipline the players about it, or else. And risk losing by standing in between [them and management] on what they considered an affront to their world. Or I could sit there and incur the embarrassment that followed. For the most part, I pulled them aside and talked to them personally about it. Not to do this because it’s embarrassing to the whole bus basically.”
When the team landed in Seattle, there were two buses waiting to carry them to their hotel, one for the players and coaches and one for the broadcasters and staff people. Krause chose to ride the team bus.
“Scottie began his tirade right after that,” Jackson said. “That was the thing that sprung it all open.”
Obviously intoxicated, Pippen began yelling at Krause about signing him to a new contract or trading him. The harangue went on and on and turned increasingly uglier.
“Why don’t you trade me?” Pippen screamed.
“I finally turned around,” Jackson said, “and grabbed a bottle of beer and held it up to Pippen and pointed to it like, ‘Beers. You’ve had too many beers to drink.’ Joe Kleine thought I was toasting him. He said, ‘Were you toasting Scottie? I’ve never seen anything like that.’ I said, ‘No, I was holding up a beer and pointing at it, saying, You’ve had too many. You better quiet down. I didn’t want to have to get up.
“This is beyond what normally goes,” Jackson said. “I didn’t like it at all. Jerry said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I can take it. Don’t worry about it at all.’”
“These days and age, if you stare at a guy something can be said,” Ron Harper said of the incident. “I think that Scottie was just letting some of his frustrations out. So he said some things.”
Asked later about his conflicts with Krause, Pippen replied, “I can’t say exactly where they come from. We don’t have any type of relationship. There are a lot of little things that have gotten to the point where they’ve turned into things that are big.”
“That’s something that we will never understand,” Jordan said later when asked about Pippen’s relationship with Krause. “How that relationship formed and bridges were burned. The situation deteriorated even more when I was gone from the game and then even more when I came back.”
“From my standpoint, I would love to have finished my career in Chicago,” Pippen says. “It’s a great tribute. And to go out on your own and not be forced out of the game.”
That, in part, was his motivation for putting aside his feelings about his contract, which left his salary ranked 122nd in the league despite the fact that he had been named to the league’s list of its 50 greatest players of all time.
“I had accepted the fact that I was fairly underpaid and that with the way the new collective bargaining agreement was done, it was something I was gonna have to deal with,” Pippen said. “It was a process, something I was gonna have to deal with. So, you know, just go ahead and play the game.” So the anger had built in Pippen until the alcohol emboldened him to unleash it on Krause in Seattle. The incident would remain hidden from the public until after the season. As it was, Pippen might have been able to undo some of the damage the next morning when he again encountered Krause on the team bus headed to practice.
“Good morning, Scottie,” Krause said.
“Go to hell, Jerry,” Pippen replied.
Upon hearing that Pippen made trade demands to the media, Jackson tried to make light of it, knowing that the emotional Pippen was capable of misspeaking, particularly if reporters were gauging his sensitivity with questions. “I think he’s just joking the press, personally, and throwing a barb out there,” the coach told reporters that Tuesday in practice.
“We know that he’s not happy with his contract,” Jordan said. “He didn’t have to go public but he did. I’m not shell-shocked by anything that happens. This organization is at a crossroads.”
“For Scottie’s situation, everything kind of broke,” Jackson said. “The venom kind of broke, and he said, ‘I can’t play for this team anymore.’ He had crossed a bridge with the organization. It was very disappointing. And it took him a while. We had to come back here and really work with Scottie. ‘That doesn’t mean you have to leave the team,’” Jackson told him.
“Scottie thought he had shown himself the door, because he had had too much to drink,” the coach explained. “It was over the edge.”
The team returned to Chicago just before Thanksgiving, and Jackson arranged for the team’s therapist to spend some time with Pippen counseling him on his anger. Over the break, Pippen phoned Jackson late one night for a long discussion during which the coach realized that Pippen seemed fairly set in his position not to play for the Bulls again. The coach knew that the team couldn’t be successful without Pippen, that changing his mind would take the best efforts of a variety of people, including Jordan, Harper, Jackson himself, and several teammates.
“Unfortunately, it took him a while,” Jackson said. “He wasn’t ready to play for another two months. And so it was a situation where he had time to cool out, to look at it and say, ‘Well, my options aren’t very good. I really don’t have another place to go, and this is the right thing to do.’”
Part of the strategy, though, included Jackson and Jordan openly expressing their displeasure with Pippen’s position. That Monday, December 1, the coach and star player both suggested that they felt betrayed by Pippen’s demands. “It’s all right to hold it against Scottie,” Jackson told reporters. “We care about Scottie, but we’re going to hold this against Scottie because he’s walking out on us, there’s no doubt about that. Some things are personal and some things are public. Publicly, we like Scottie, but personally there’s always going to be a … residual effect of having gone to bat for Scottie.”
Jackson and Jordan said they wouldn’t have returned to the team if they had known Pippen was going to leave. “There is that kind of feeling: ‘Hey, we came back to do this job together and Scottie ducked out the door,’” Jackson said.
“It would have made a big difference in terms of me and Phil and a lot of other players,” Jordan said.
Jackson recalled for reporters that Jordan had come out of retirement in 1995 due in part to Pippen’s great urging. “I don’t think Michael forgets the fact that when Scottie was here alone in ’94 and ’95, that he was … saying, ‘Come on back, come on back, Michael, and help me out with this load,’” Jackson said. “So I’m sure Michael’s going to get back at Scottie, hold his feet to the fire.”
A little more than a week after Pippen’s explosive verbal attack against Krause, Latrell Sprewell of the Golden State Warriors ignited a media firestorm by attacking coach P. J. Carlesimo and choking him at practice, then leaving the building only to return later and throw punches at the coach. The entire incident, Sprewell said later, was aimed at forcing the team to trade him.
The Pippen incident was far too private for any of his teammates to discuss publicly. But the Sprewell news only emphasized the seriousness of the Bulls’ situation.
One of Pippen’s ways of dealing with the anger was to pick up the phone and call Reinsdorf for their first chat in years. “I talked to him for about twenty minutes and he was supposed to call me back but he never did,” Pippen revealed later. “He just sort of talked his way around some things. I’m still waiting on that call.”
December, then, became a month marked by a quiet nervousness. Would Pippen return to the team, or was the championship run about to come to a premature end? Unable to answer that question, Jackson and his players had to turn their attention to a milestone.
The game against Phoenix on December 15 marked the 500th consecutive sellout for the Bulls, the longest such streak in the league.
It was no coincidence that the next game, against the Lakers, brought Jackson’s 500th regular-season victory as the Bulls’ coach. He had reached the milestone sooner than any coach in league history, a fact that didn’t help the public understand Krause’s apparent desire to see the coach leave. “To get the guys, when they have one ring or two rings, to go out and play hard, there’s the challenge,” L.A. Clippers coach Bill Fitch, Jackson’s old college coach, told reporters. “He ought to be able to coach here as long as he wants to coach.”
His players used the occasion of his 500th victory to marvel at the circumstances of his impending dismissal. “It baffles me to understand that he’s not welcome,” Jordan said. “He certainly still knows how to coach the game.”
In fact, the Bulls’ star rated Jackson an equal to the much revered Dean Smith. “I think they’re very similar in the fundamental aspects with which they coach the game,” Jordan said. “With their caring about the players. Players first, management, everything else is second. I think their dedication to spreading the wealth is very evident. Their overall love for the game. I think you can see it in the way they coach. They’re very poised in pressure situations. They don’t let the game or the situation speed up their thought process. As a player, if you see that, then you tend to maintain a certain poise in pressure situations. So I think those are key components to winning.”
Jackson used the occasion of his 500th win to do something he had said he wouldn’t do—take the pressure off Krause and Reinsdorf. Their selecting him as Bulls coach in 1989 “was a miracle for me,” Jackson said. “It’s a great success story. A lot happened in this organization that just all clicked: the players, ownership, general manager. Motivation isn’t something you teach players. They have to bring that themselves. This organization, Jerry Krause and his staff, have found players who have that kind of motivation.”
Asked if he was being “squeezed out,” Jackson replied, “I don’t think there’s any squeezing going on. This is a mutual agreement that we’ve made, Jerry Reinsdorf and I. We look at it as an opportunity—not as a farewell, see ya later. This is not a last gasp.”
Jordan, though, refused to accept that. “It’s too obvious to see the guy’s success in such a short amount of time to say, ‘Now, we need a change.’ It’s something deeper than what you see on the basketball court,” he told reporters.
The star pointed out that Jackson had guided the Bulls through difficult circumstances after taking over in 1989. “We had coaches coming in and out of here,” Jordan said. “We found a good one and we stuck with him and … he gave stability to my career. We all have so much respect for him.”
That respect once again proved to be the bedrock of the Bulls’ superior chemistry as they worked their way through yet another challenging season. It could be seen in the excellent year Dennis Rodman was having. “He treats you like a man,” the mercurial rebounder said of Jackson. “He lets you be yourself.” Rodman’s December hair decoration was yellow, with a smiley face in the crown.
“Dennis has had problems with other coaches, but he knows Phil is on his side,” Ron Harper observed.
Jackson, though, pointed out that one of the major differences with Rodman was the behavior clauses in his contract. “The Bulls put [behavior clauses] in the contract,” Jackson said. “Rather than being a rebel, he’s chosen to do the things that are appropriate. He’s having a lot more fun. And he’s right back at the top of the league in rebounding.”
And wearing a smiley face in his hair. “I love having the most famous hair in the world,” Rodman conceded to reporters. “People wonder what’s going to happen next. It was Chip Schaefer’s doing. Chip told me, ‘Be a happy face, shock everybody.’ Well, here it is.”
Yet all the players knew that Jackson’s respect faced a bigger challenge than Rodman’s behavior. Much goodwill would be needed to lure the angry and frustrated Pippen back to the team. Fortunately, Jackson understood this and was working discreetly to pull Pippen back into the team circle. As December passed, there were clear signs that his efforts were working.
In the middle of the month, the forward appeared at the team’s annual holiday party, where eight-year-old Derameo Johnson asked Pippen, “Are you going to get back on the team?”
“Yeah,” Pippen replied with a shy, soft smile.
A week and a half later, he began practicing with the Bulls. “I’m just trying to get myself healthy,” he said. “If I have to come back and play here, then, you know, that may be the way it has to be.”
No one was more pleased than Jackson to see the return. And perhaps no one appreciated Pippen’s greatness more than the coach. He often thought of Pippen’s role in the 1991 championship series and his coming of age against the Pistons in the Eastern Conference playoffs that same season.
“The real buildup was in that Detroit series when Rodman head-butted him,” Jackson recalled. “He got beat up, he got thrown to the floor. He had to guard Laimbeer. He played through a physical, combative series, in which the stories were, ‘They’ll beat him up, and he’ll pussy out in the end and he’ll get a migraine headache or something will happen.’ They tried to make it a negative thing about Scottie, but the truth was that Scottie was extremely tough and resilient. He has magical games, really big games.”
A perfect example was the 1997 championship series, Jackson added. “If anybody looks at Michael’s game against Utah last year in Game 5, and sees how Scottie Pippen played in conjunction with Michael Jordan, with Michael just playing offense and Scottie telling him, ‘Look, I’ll take care of the defense.’ He just ran the defense and ran the floor game brilliantly. He played an absolutely terrific ball game. The combination of the two of them was devastating.”
Just how badly the Bulls needed Pippen was emphasized January 8 with a smashing road loss in Miami. The Bulls took a 28–20 first-quarter lead over the Heat but scored only 44 points the rest of the way and lost, 99–72.
“There’s no explanation for it,” Jordan told reporters. “You just have to grin and bear it.”
Jackson, of course, hated to lose to any Riley team and showed his disdain by getting ejected just before halftime for arguing with the officiating crew, which included one of the league’s first two females refs, Violet Palmer. “The only thing I’ll say is I’m disappointed with the league for sending a crew like that out to referee a game like this,” Jackson said. “From the very first play, there was a problem.”
Two nights later they journeyed to New York for their first game of the season in the Garden, where Jordan tantalized the Big Apple media by saying that he would “love” to play for the Knicks. The next night, January 11, the Bulls returned home, and Pippen appeared in uniform for the first time since the ’97 championship series. The United Center crowd greeted him with joyous applause. He played 31 minutes and scored 14 points in an 87–72 win over hapless Golden State. The timing for his return was right. The Bulls had won 13 of their last 15 games and boosted their record to 25–11.
He was asked if his relations with the team’s front office had been repaired. “I don’t think they’ve been repaired at all,” he said. “We haven’t tried to repair them. I don’t think they can be repaired. I’m just going to do my job and just allow them to do theirs.”
There remained the possibility that he still might be traded before the late February 19 trading deadline, although Krause had told reporters that any deal for Pippen would have to be highly favorable to the Bulls. When asked by reporters if he was convinced Pippen wouldn’t be traded, Jackson said, “I remain unconvinced about anything. It was a time in which there were hard feelings, some feelings about the loyalty issue. Some of those issues had to be worked out. The understanding that the greater glory or the greater effort had to be for the team. I felt Scottie would take the high road and I feel he has.”
Back to Business
A week later, just days after Jordan had praised his good behavior, Rodman stirred the pot by missing a pregame practice after a night of carousing at a strip club in New York.
Jackson’s response was to fine him, suspend him a game, and send him home from New Jersey.
“I thought it was fair and I thought Phil sending me home was the right thing,” Rodman told reporters later. “When I came back from flying home by myself, I went straight to the practice facility and started to work out. I messed up and that is it. It’s as simple as that. I didn’t feel good physically and I stayed out a little too late.”
The Bulls returned home from New Jersey and found the Utah Jazz waiting. Karl Malone scored 35 and powered the Jazz to a 101–94 win that ended Chicago’s 17-game home winning streak.
Immediately afterward, the Bulls departed on their second West Coast road trip of the season, with games against Vancouver, Portland, Golden State, the Lakers, Denver, and Utah that would lead right up to the All-Star break in New York.
At 30–13, the Bulls were showing definite signs of life. “It’s a bonding trip,” Jordan said of the Western swing. “It’s for improvement of our basketball skills, our continuity, our chemistry.”
The last time he had made such a statement, the journey had turned ugly and sour, producing anything but bonding. This time, Krause would remain home, busying himself with scouting college talent. But the general manager would still find a way to reach out to the team, setting up the next round of controversy, yet another exercise in wasted effort.
It all made perfect sense in a Zen sort of way. For the third straight season, the Chicago Bulls had faced an uncertain future. They were a great team, yet the slightest disruption to their modus operandi would likely have been taken as an excuse for the team’s chairman and general manager to break them apart. That meant that a major injury, internal squabbling, or just plain old everyday fear run amok could have spelled their doom. Yet that hadn’t happened. One of the reasons was the Zen concept of “living in the moment,” not losing concentration, not giving in to their concerns about the future.
“It doesn’t affect him at all,” Steve Kerr said of Jackson. “And that’s to his credit. He always preaches being in the moment and living for the moment and enjoying each day for what it is. He’s got a lot of little pet quotes and sayings that allude to that, and he practices that. It could be the last run for all of us, and he’s gonna have fun.”
Jordan agreed, saying that Jackson’s dealing so smartly with the adversity of the season had been good for him “because he finally gets some notoriety as a coach. He’s a wise, smart coach, not just the guy who coached Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman. He uses his talent to blend everybody together to have one focus. And he’s doing a heck of a job of that.”
By all rights, the separation anxiety alone should have been enough to splinter the Bulls into factions. But they all believed in Jordan, Pippen, and Jackson, and that bound them even tighter. Jackson loved the unity of it. Zen warriors. In the moment. Doing battle.
As the season unfolded into February, it became clear that there was plenty of battle to do, on and off the court. They opened their trip with wins in Vancouver, Portland, and Golden State, then got waxed by the quick young Lakers in Los Angeles, and one night later righted themselves against lowly Denver.
It was in Utah, on the eve of their rematch with the Jazz, that word came that Krause had decided to unburden his mind to Tribune columnist Fred Mitchell.
Jackson would definitely not be back, Krause emphasized. “We would like to have Michael back,” he said. “But Michael is going to have to play for someone else. It isn’t going to be Phil.”
Krause also said that Jackson wasn’t “being run out of here. Phil agreed that this would be his last year. He did not want to go through a possible rebuilding situation. Nobody is running Phil out of town. It was a well thought-out decision.”
Krause also offered up an opinion on the difficulty of rebuilding with Jordan still on the roster. “Obviously, with Michael and the salary he is making now, it would be very tough to improve our team. Our cap money would be gone. It is a highly complicated thing. I would say that no NBA team has faced this type of situation before, cap-wise.”
Krause should have known Jordan would take the statement as a challenge. After all, the GM had worked with the star for thirteen seasons. Krause also should have known that Reinsdorf would be angered by the statement. After all, the chairman’s philosophy was to make no decision, to take no heat, until necessary. Krause had done just the opposite. He had spoken prematurely. No matter what he said, his words only cemented the impression that he was eager to pack up the current championship team, to clear the salary cap, so that he could begin rebuilding.
Krause’s words created a mild media frenzy that morning at the Bulls’ shootaround before the Utah game. Jordan again emphasized that if Jackson weren’t retained, he would move on, too. “It still stands true,” Jordan said. “That’s been my thought process for the year, pretty much. I felt that management has to make a decision in terms of what they want to do with this team, the direction they choose to go in. They have to make their choice.”
The Bulls lost that night in Utah, allowing the Jazz a season sweep of the two-game series and home-court advantage if the two met in the 1998 Finals. While the rest of the team returned home to rest during the All-Star break, Jordan journeyed on to New York to take part in the All-Star events. A gathering of global media awaited, more than a thousand journalists, and Jordan was ready to fire back at the two Jerrys.
“Why would you change a coach,” Jordan said, “who has won five championships when he has the respect of his players and certainly the understanding of his players to where they go out and play hard each and every day. Why?”
Question: Management contends that Phil Jackson has become arrogant. Have you seen arrogance on Phil’s part?
“I’m pretty sure that he’s probably getting tired of Krause. And I’ve been there, a long time ago. I understand [Phil’s] frustrations. Maybe they view that as arrogance. But what I see in Phil is an attitude to work with the players to achieve the best as a team. That means a lot to us.”
If Phil were back, and the core of the Bulls were back, how badly would you want to play another season? Would it be something you’d really cherish?
“If they’d keep everybody intact? I’d love to do that.”
Why not another coach?
“I’ve never had a guy come in and pacify me. I like Phil. I think Phil comes in with a certain motion, a certain thought process, a team concept, that everybody fits within that. We grew to where we respected each other, and he knew certain things to apply to me and to apply to other players. I don’t want a coach to come in and say, ‘Well, what do you want to do? Do you want to do this? Do you want to do that?’ That doesn’t motivate me. That doesn’t challenge me. And now you’re asking me to go into that situation unknowingly? At this stage of my career? If the system doesn’t suit me, and I don’t feel comfortable, or my game starts to suffer, or certain things start to change, then you leave yourself open for all kinds of speculation, which I’m not afraid of. But why would I take the risk of changing it?”
It almost sounds like a superstition.
“It’s a comfort. It’s a comfort. It’s a respect. It’s knowing what I’m getting instead of not knowing what I’m getting.”
In the wake of Jordan’s comments, Reinsdorf issued a statement calling for an end to premature comments about the team’s future. Word spread around the Bulls’ offices that Reinsdorf was angry with Krause, that the GM had lost face because of his comments.
“That’s one thing that Jerry Reinsdorf does very well,” Steve Kerr observed. “He stays away and doesn’t get involved in all of it. He lets Jerry Krause and Phil and everybody else go about their business. Obviously, he’s ended up sort of in the middle of this. But usually Krause is the front man.”
Practice resumed at the Berto Center on Monday after the All-Star break, and afterward Jackson spoke with reporters, emphasizing that he was leaving. “There is no other option,” the coach said. “We’ve made an agreement that that’s what is going on and that is the direction we are going as a basketball team. It’s going to be hard to say good-bye. It’s going to be really tough.”
Then he quibbled, leaving the door ajar that indeed he might find a way to return, which left Krause furious but muzzled.
“I’m not saying our beds are made,” Jackson said, “but they are laid out and ready to go. Early in training camp I sat down with Jerry Krause and Jerry Reinsdorf and we expressly went over this again and said this is our swan song as a team.”
Then he said, “Michael has a tremendous sway in this game, as we all see from the effect he had in the All-Star Game. Michael is the only one who could change it.”
About Jordan’s threatened retirement, Jackson said, “It makes me feel like I am standing in the way of him continuing his career. Some of it does. The other thing is that the organization is a bit to fault in it, too.”
Jackson then predicted that Krause wouldn’t change his mind. “That’s not going to happen,” Jackson said. “I think the amount of intensity we’ve had over the last two seasons, the directions we’ve changed and the divergent paths that both Jerry and I have gone on just spelled the fact that the relationship had reached its course. It’s time for him to do what he wants to do in his management of this organization and it’s time for me to move on wherever I have to go. Michael can throw a monkey wrench into things, but that’s their decision and that’s the way we have to look at it.”
In his New York Post column during the All-Star break, NBC analyst Peter Vecsey had suggested that the Bulls were paying Jackson $500,000 in hush money not to speak out about the situation.
“I didn’t get back from the All-Star Game until Monday afternoon,” Jackson later recalled. “We had practice and I didn’t see his column. I had questions from reporters about this, and I didn’t understand it. It was totally misrepresented. There is not anything like that in my contract. Last year at some point during contract negotiations, we said at some point that if we don’t come to an agreement and we have to step away what’s going to happen? There was some talk about a severance. Because we actually began thinking, ‘We may not reach a common ground on this and this may become difficult for the franchise.’ So we talked about it in that context. But I had no intention of taking hush money, or whatever, to be quiet, or whatever it was meant as. But, you know, severance money is severance money.”
In the wake of the All-Star weekend, the atmosphere around the Bulls tightened as the trading deadline neared. Would Krause dare to trade Pippen? It seemed unlikely. Not with the uproar that his comments earlier in the month had caused.
But the team did send young forward Jason Caffey to Golden State for David Vaughn, an unproven player, and two second-round draft picks. The move set off immediate speculation that Krause was intentionally weakening the team.
“This is a horrible thing to say,” said one longtime team employee. “I wonder if Jerry and Jerry almost want us not to win this year, so they can have the excuse to rebuild. It’s an unbelievably dangerous thing to say, especially with a tape recorder on. I’m just wondering about their emotional state. You don’t want to think that, but you have to wonder.”
Jordan, meanwhile, was angry, pointing out to reporters that losing Caffey, an athletic rebounder, was like losing family.
“You don’t think it makes it easier to break up the team to say ‘See, we told you?’” the reporter asked.
“You know, maybe we should call Oliver Stone and he could make a movie out of it,” Kerr said. “He would have a field day with all of this.”
Sportswriter Terry Armour of the Tribune figured Krause had scored one against Jackson and Jordan with the trade, a perception that also registered with many fans. “The Caffey move,” Armour said, “to me is strictly—and I could be wrong here. I’ve been wrong before—‘see if you can win with a David Vaughn.’ To me, it just looks like, ‘OK, let’s make some minor moves that will make it hard for us to get there.’ But you know, who would want to do that? Realistically, who would want to weaken their case? You can accuse somebody of that, but realistically, it doesn’t make sense that somebody would want to do that.”
Behind the scenes, the Bulls’ assistant coaches had lobbied hard for Krause to keep Caffey, but Jackson quietly agreed with the deal. He knew that Krause had no plans to re-sign Caffey, who would be a free agent at the end of the season. Plus, Jackson was hoping that the Bulls would be able to find a player like Brian Williams, who was able to guard smaller, quick centers. Williams had been a godsend during the 1997 playoffs. Obviously, no player of Williams’s quality was available in 1998, so Jackson figured that a “Dickey Simpkins-type” player, someone about 6′9″ or 6′10″, might be available to help out defensively.
“I actually wanted to bid out Caffey [for a trade],” Jackson explained. “Jason wasn’t going to get a chance in this organization. He’d go through his free agency and he wouldn’t be re-signed by this organization. For a kid that I liked, it was a good opportunity for him to go. But I didn’t want to hurt the team. I wanted a bigger kind of a player like a Dickey Simpkins who could play centers that are small like Mourning. And Jason was a little too small to play the Shawn Kemps. He’s a 6′8″ guy as opposed to a 6′10″, 265-pound guy. So that’s the difference.
“I told them that what I wanted,” Jackson admitted privately. “We wanted a Brian Williams-type player. I’ve always had that type of center. Stacey King and Scott Williams.”
As it turned out, Simpkins was soon put on waivers by Golden State, allowing the Bulls to waive Vaughn after a few days and sign Simpkins.
“Dickey’s that kind of guy,” Jackson said. “The job is his to do. It’s not a heavy-minute role. We don’t see that guy coming in there and playing 30 to 40 minutes. But he can play 16 minutes a game for us and help us out if possible.”
Simpkins, whom the Bulls had traded in the fall of 1997 to Golden State for Scott Burrell, was truly elated to be back in Chicago. “It’s like going off to war, then coming back,” he said.
Or maybe vice versa.
Behind the scenes, Krause was furious with Jackson. The general manager alleged that the coach was supposed to explain the trade to the players, but that Jackson had failed to do so, opening the door to speculation that Krause was sabotaging the team. “Phil was supposed to take care of the team, and he didn’t do it,” Krause said. “He was supposed to explain it to the players. But once again he left me looking like the bad guy.”
With the tension, people in the organization increasingly complained to reporters that Jackson had grown arrogant. “I’ve heard from different circles,” Terry Armour said, “that one thing that Phil may have done to rub the organization the wrong way is that he came in on a winning situation and took it to the next level.
“The belief is that, whatever reasons Doug Collins was let go for, Doug would have done it,” Armour said. “Doug would have been right there to do it. Phil got arrogant. You know winning changes people, and that Phil went from being a team player as far as the organization is concerned, to saying, ‘Hey, maybe I’m the guy who did this.’
“He may come across as arrogant to some people because of the way he talks,” Armour added. “Some people take that as being a snob, or that he’s trying to show us how smart he is. But I don’t think it’s that way with him. I would not consider him arrogant in his dealings with the media. He knows how to play the game, too, as far as the PR thing. You can tell when people are arrogant with the media. They embarrass you when you question them. Phil is not like that. I think, if anything, Phil might be too honest with us. Maybe it’s a PR move, but Phil will answer our questions, good or bad, and he doesn’t really think about repercussions.”
With their “divided house” in full conflict, the Bulls entered the spring playing both for and against the organization. That seemed to work well enough. Jordan and company ran off eight straight wins, dumping Toronto, Charlotte, Atlanta, Detroit, Indiana, Toronto again, Washington, and Cleveland before finally losing again on February 25 when the young Portland Trail Blazers gave the Bulls only their third defeat of the season in the United Center. As they had done in the past, the Bulls answered defeat with another torrid burn of winning. They would roll through March at 13–1, emphasizing to opponents and fans alike at every stop that these Bulls were indeed back to their old dominant selves, or something close.
The head of steam was aided by nearly a week’s rest in the schedule after wins over Sacramento and Denver. The Bulls sat at home, healed their injuries, and stoked their fires. Jordan even had time to rummage through his closets to find a vintage pair of Air Jordans to wear for what was billed as his last visit to Madison Square Garden, the game against New York on March 9 when the Bulls resumed play. Never mind that the shoes were gaudy and flimsy; they were the perfect touch to send a public message, creating further anxiety about Krause and Reinsdorf shutting down the Bulls early.
His feet covered in red, Jordan treated the adoring Garden crowd and the television audience to an old-style performance, filled with whirling, impossible drives to the baskets and reverses and dunks and whatever else popped to the surface of his creativity, all of it good for 42 precious points.
“I played up in the air a lot today,” he admitted afterward. “I’m not afraid to play that way. There was a need there, and if there’s a need there, I have to address it. I’m not really thinking about the moves and how excited the fans are. The oooohs and aaaahs tell you that. Some of the moves seemed to be coming from 1984.”
With Jordan’s outburst and Pippen’s defense in full force, the Bulls drove to a 102–89 win.
Kent McDill of the Daily Herald said, “Krause doesn’t want to be the man who chases Michael out of the game. He just wants to get rid of Phil. He wants a coach who respects him. He likes to be a kingmaker, and he feels that Phil doesn’t give him the respect he deserves for putting him in a position to be considered one of the top 10 coaches in NBA history.”
“To be honest,” said John Jackson of the Sun-Times, “if I was Krause and I was in his position, I think I would want to change coaches right now too. I think it’s time. I think Phil’s a little burned out in this job. He has changed a lot, and he has gotten a bit arrogant. The decision to change coaches is a valid one, and I think Krause is right on about that. But the problem with it is, Jordan has aligned himself so heavily with Phil. Sometimes perception is more important than reality. And the perception is that if Krause makes a coaching change now, he and Reinsdorf are showing no loyalty to Phil, they’re just kicking him in the ass.”
“I don’t see any reason,” said Kent McDill, “why this whole thing just couldn’t keep on going.”
From their win in New York, the Bulls jetted back home briefly to notch a big win over the Heat before heading south for a two-game trip to Texas. First up were the Dallas Mavericks, a team stumbling through yet another misguided season.
From there, the Bulls went out and ran up a decent lead against the struggling Mavericks. Chicago was up by 18 with about five minutes to go, and the fans were leaving in droves. But then the Bulls lost focus and watched the Mavs stage a strange comeback, aided by a succession of Bulls miscues and questionable calls, to tie it in regulation and win it in overtime. It was only the Bulls’ second loss since the All-Star break, but later they would look back on it as the place where they lost home-court advantage against the Jazz. In the waning seconds of overtime, a disgusted Jackson sat on the bench, clipping his fingernails.
“Sometimes you give ’em away in this game,” the coach said afterward, “and we certainly gave that away. We had some help. The referees helped us give it away, but that’ll happen sometimes on the road like this.”
It was pointed out that Jackson seemed to be the kind of poor sport who never took losing well. “I don’t think any of us do,” Winter said. “Winning is nice, but losing is just awful. There’s a big difference. Sometimes when you win, you’re still not happy because of the way you played. But, boy, when you lose, it’s just devastating. We’ve never lost much. It’s so hard to take losing when you’re not used to it. Once you get the habit of losing, it doesn’t bother you quite so much.”
“There’s some anger and disappointment,” Jackson agreed. “Most of the guys went out in Dallas and blew it off. They got rid of it that night and slept it off. We looked at the tape and put it to bed, buried it. It’s past.”
The Bulls assured that two nights later by playing what Winter would call their most energetic game of the season later in rainy San Antonio. Jackson surprised nearly everyone by starting Kukoc against Spurs center David Robinson. An even bigger surprise was that it worked. The Spurs pushed hard, but the Bulls shoved right back. Having learned his lesson two nights earlier, Jackson worked the officials furiously, prompting a fan to yell, “Forget it, Phil, they won’t let you come back.”
After outdistancing the Spurs by 10, the Bulls continued their burn through March, returning home to buzz New Jersey, then dipping down to win a big game in Indiana. They got a Friday night home win against Vancouver, then headed north into a snowstorm that left them circling for an hour over Toronto and reminded equipment manager John Ligmanowski of a few seasons back when the team jet nearly got flipped by wind shear in Detroit.
Once they landed, the Bulls found the young Raptors as problematic as the snow.
Kukoc opened the game with a rebound, and Jackson wasted no time before barking at him. At the offensive end. Kukoc held the ball on the perimeter.
“Here, here,” Jackson shouted hoarsely, motioning to Pip inside.
Kukoc delivered the pass, “Now to the goal,” Jackson yelled. But Kukoc had anticipated and already cut, and Pippen hit him with the return pass for a nice two-handed jam.
Things were right in the Bulls’ world, at least for the moment. But that was all that Jackson wanted. On the next possession, Jordan scored and danced away from the goal with the trademark Jordan swagger, that mix of elegance and gameliness.
In the third period, the Bulls expanded the lead to a dozen, but then came the loss of focus, just as it had in Dallas. Somehow, Jordan and his teammates managed to just hold on at the end, allowing the younger Raptors to make the final mistakes. Jackson smiled. The Bulls were living on the edge, but Pippen was back, and they were winning. And best of all, they were alive in the moment. Right where Jackson hoped they would be.
The Moment
Jackson’s final weeks as coach of the Chicago Bulls were marked by more turbulence. But it was nothing that Michael Jordan couldn’t overcome. After all, the star lived for the playoff season, that time when every synapse in his competitive body was fused to every twitch of his muscle fiber, when his will was fully wired and hypercharged. Each spring, it seemed, Jackson and his staff would work on subtle means of reining in that immense force. Each spring, they knew the ultimate futility of their efforts. Their best hope was to preach togetherness, constantly reminding Jordan to include his teammates, to pull them along just enough so that when he needed them, they would be there to help.
Jordan knew this and complied whenever and wherever possible. He was gracious, diplomatic, and respectful. Yet that took him just so far. In the end, he was the only one who really understood his attack mentality. Only he could sense when to unleash it. And he would be the first to admit that it wasn’t perfect. But it was damn near close, eerily close some nights, when he would slip into his terminator mode late in a key game with important things on the line. “He’s just so damn confident,” Tex Winter said one playoff night after Jordan had teetered between success and failure, what Winter referred to as the “high-wire act.”
The suspense had never been greater, with the future of his team and his career on the line. In reality, the public relations campaigning of the regular season had been only fun and games, a diversion. In the end, Jordan’s play would send the one single message that trumped all others.
It began in late April with the very first playoff game in the first round against the New Jersey Nets. The Bulls played sluggishly, blew a late 14-point lead, and allowed the young Nets to take them to overtime, where Jordan stole the ball from Kerry Kittles with 90 seconds to play. He sped upcourt, tongue out, and dunked and growled. New Jersey’s Kendall Gill fouled him going to the basket, and he made the free throw, propelling Chicago to a 96–93 win.
The growl was a tad uncharacteristic, but these were emotional times. “We walk away feeling lucky more than anything,” said Jordan, who finished with 39 points.
“I see him being awfully close in similarity to the way he was when he left the game the first time in 1993,” trainer Chip Schaefer said of Jordan. “In the early ’90s, he would talk. We would have moments where we were alone while I was treating an injury of his, and he would speak of his frustrations. He would say, ‘I don’t think I can take this much longer.’ I always thought he was just sort of venting. I was shocked when he retired the first time. But there are some things that are similar to that now. You can see the intrusions onto what he likes to do. Just a look of weariness on his face sometimes that he didn’t have two years ago, or even last year. I don’t know what he’s going to do, I really don’t. I think there’s part of him that wants to stay. If it is winding down, it’s almost like these guys don’t want to let go, whereas months ago they spoke of wanting to end it and wanting to leave. Now, it’s like you’re ready to get that divorce and you think, ‘One more time. Let’s try it again, babe.’ They’re almost afraid to move on out and do something different.”
On the other hand, Schaefer had a perfect read on Jackson. The coach was clearly ready to move on, despite Jordan’s statements that he would quit if Jackson didn’t come back. The statements pressured both Krause and Jackson. “I can’t see Phil doing it again,” the trainer said.
The Bulls had been in a situation where everything worked. The spirit, camaraderie, emotion—all those elements had come together at a very special level for this team. Yet there was no question that the conflict had the potential to extinguish whatever had been achieved. That could be seen in the looks on Jordan’s and Pippen’s faces whenever Krause was mentioned. The situation had great potential for long-term hatred.
Even Krause and Reinsdorf showed some signs of recognizing that. But it was too late. Krause’s hopes of rebuilding the team in the future had cast a deep shadow over the present.
“Sometimes it just seems that these guys get themselves in trouble by almost trying to do too much,” Schaefer said of Krause and Reinsdorf. “Sometimes you just need to let it happen. They got a great coaching staff in place. They got a great roster of players. It’s been made so much more complex in a lot of ways than it has to be. There’s a lot of axioms about simplicity in life. It’s all gotten so complicated. I don’t understand how it got this way.”
In Game 2 against the Nets, Chicago missed 7 of 13 free throws. Once again, they managed to hang on for a win, with 32 points from Jordan, 19 from Toni Kukoc, and 16 rebounds from Dennis Rodman. Several newspaper accounts described them as vulnerable and perhaps even distracted by the internal conflict. “I’m pretty sure that’s what people have been writing,” Jordan said after the second game. “Some teams probably feel that way, too. But until they actually come in and do it [beat the Bulls], it’s just conversation.”
He emphasized that for Game 3 in New Jersey by hitting 15 of his first 18 shots and scoring 38 points as the Bulls swept the Nets with a 116–101 victory.
It was the third straight first-round sweep for Chicago. The Bulls had run up a 24–1 record in first-round games since 1991.
The opening of the playoffs also had coincided with the first issues of ESPN The Magazine. As a highlight, the magazine published excerpts from Jackson’s diary put together by Sun-Times columnist Rick Telander. At first, Jackson and Telander had been under contract to write a book based on the diary, but Jackson said he had decided to kill the book deal as the season began. The publishers prevailed upon Jackson to at least do the magazine story, and he agreed. The coach presented his diary with the understanding that he would be able to see any parts excerpted before publication. Unfortunately, there was a time squeeze, and Jackson never got the opportunity to approve what was published. It would prove to be perhaps the worst mistake of Jackson’s career.
There were references to his marital difficulties with wife June (Jackson would move into a Chicago hotel for part of the 1998 season after she discovered that he had had relationships outside the marriage), snide and unkind remarks about Krause, and what seemed to be egotistical ramblings about other teams. Jackson came across as a guy campaigning to take over as coach of the Lakers or Knicks, teams that already had coaches. It was quite outrageous. Even worse, the comments provided the first real opening for Krause to attack Jackson.
The next issue of ESPN The Magazine bore a second installment of the Jackson diaries that proved mostly to be an apology and retraction of things said in the first installment. Even the magazine itself lampooned Jackson in a subsequent spoof comparing the Last Run of the Bulls to the final episode of the long-running TV series “Seinfeld.” Each of the Bulls’ primary figures was projected as a member of the cast. Jackson was designated as the strange and daffy Kramer.
Krause was understandably angry about the publishing of the diary, but kept his anger behind the scenes. “As far as me being sensitive to this issue, I don’t know that I’ve been overly sensitive,” Krause said in a private interview for this book. “I think I know where things are coming from. When you know where the gun’s being aimed from, you really don’t worry about the result of the bullet.”
Krause also met with new Tribune columnist Skip Bayless and outlined his complaints against Jackson, according to one team source. Days later, Jackson sat down with Bayless in what the coach thought was a courtesy introduction. But the columnist launched into a series of inflammatory questions about Jackson’s relationship with Krause. “Bayless used Krause’s comments to get Phil going,” said one team source.
Jackson responded to Krause’s comments. “I’m not gonna let that be the final word,” the coach explained at the time. Yet when Bayless’s column appeared, there was little use of Krause’s comments, only Jackson’s angry response on issues, another situation where he appeared to be on the attack.
Bayless would then weigh in on Jackson during the playoffs as an egotist desperately seeking to take control of the team and maintain his image of being vital to the Bulls’ success. “You have to wonder about Phil Jackson’s motives,” Bayless would write later in the season. “You have to question why he says he’ll suggest to Michael Jordan that number 23 retire. Love and respect? Or revenge and insecurity? Has a vial of self-importance transformed Dr. Jackson into a wild-haired coach Hyde? Zen Master or Spin Master?
“Is Jackson trying to influence Jordan to retire prematurely in order to wreak revenge on Jerrys Reinsdorf and Krause?” the columnist asked. “Jackson despises General Manager Krause. Jackson blames Chairman Reinsdorf for sticking with Krause, who has stuck it to Jackson during contract negotiations.”
The combined effect of the ESPN article and the Bayless columns was to leave Jackson despondent and to play a major role in his ultimate decision to leave the team. “It has not been healthy for me to be here because I have gotten a reputation now as being a backbiter, as being devious, as being ungrateful,” the coach said in a private interview as the season wound down. “There have been a lot of things that I’ve had to suffer about my character that I’ve been very upset about. It’s not right. I think it’s a spin on the other side to portray me as that, or as worthy of being let go. I went to Mr. Reinsdorf and said I won’t have my character blotted. You know this is a situation that’s changing, and we can go through this without having to spoil a person’s being or character or reputation. That’s been my feeling, and yet it’s been allowed to happen. I don’t know if people seeded it.
“I may be responsible for seeding some bad things about Jerry Krause in the ESPN article, which I am sorry ever came out,” Jackson said. “It wasn’t supposed to be like that, although I did write it down and it was in my diary. The diary was in the hands of a writer. His responsibility was to let me edit it, which he didn’t. It got out of my control. So there has been some rebuttal because of that. As a result, it has been a situation in which to come back would be almost unthinkable, almost an impossibility.”
Tex Winter said he didn’t in any form believe Jackson was the egotist portrayed by Bayless, “but I can see from the way things have come down that some people might read it that way. It’s unfortunate that things came down the way they did. On the other hand, when you come out in a story, particularly one that’s taken out of a diary … I think the mistake was that he allowed somebody to be privy to his situation and thoughts. And Phil didn’t really intend that at all. That’s what really hurt Phil. But those were his personal thoughts.”
The assistant coach acknowledged that Jackson’s diary comments had hurt and angered Krause. “I like ’em both, sure,” Winter said. “I ride the fence. I’m a double agent. I find out what one side’s thinking. Then I’m on the other side, find out what they’re thinking. And I still don’t know what either one of them is thinking.”
The Final Days
In the wake of the New Jersey series, Krause granted an interview in his Berto Center office. His lung infections had given him fits all season, necessitating treatment with steroids. The steroids, in turn, had kept him awake most nights going to the bathroom. The illness, combined with the fan anger over the impending breakup of the team, made it a very difficult year. Was it the worst of all his years in Chicago? he was asked.
“On me personally? Oh yeah, this year’s been the toughest,” the GM said. “The first year [1985] was so damn tough because I didn’t know. I knew we were gonna do some things, but I didn’t know how we were gonna do ’em. The first year was pretty bad … We had Quintin [Dailey] go off in a drunk tank, and had all those injuries.”
Krause was asked to envision another title, more champagne, another moment with Jordan at the microphone. “That would be great with me,” he said. “I got no problem with that. Six is important to me. We kept it together to win six.”
Indeed, after the season he had suffered through, to not win another title would have been misery. As with the Bulls’ other key figures, Krause’s competitiveness was one of the elements of his success. Asked about the comment of a Bulls staff member that the friction between the coach and general manager had actually benefited the team, Krause said, “Phil and I think very differently in a lot of ways. We go at each other. It’s competitive all the time … I want the scouts to stand up and fight. I want the coaches to stand up and fight. I don’t mind that. I gotta sit and make a decision on what people tell me and what my own instincts tell me. But I’m gonna listen to everybody and try to think every thought they express in a meeting. Somebody has to pull the trigger.”
As for the current Bulls’ team, Krause said, “I’m not sure that we realize what we’ve done. It doesn’t hit you right away first of all. It hits you later in life. With me, I’ve been so busy doing it that I haven’t had the chance to sit back and smell the roses. Jerry [Reinsdorf] always tells me, ‘C’mon and sit back and smell the roses. They’re blooming.’ I gotta figure out a way to win next year. I think as I get older I will.”
As Jordan liked to say, the playoffs never really started until you lose a game at home. If that was the case, then the playoffs started for the Bulls after the second game of the second round against the Charlotte Hornets.
The Bulls had used their trademark defense to hold the Hornets to 32 second-half points while claiming Game 1 of the series. But late in Game 2, former Bull B. J. Armstrong found the groove with his jumper and propelled the Hornets to the 78–76 upset. Charlotte forward Anthony Mason also did a nice job on Jordan defensively, using his size to take away some of Jordan’s effectiveness in the post.
“It’s probably been three weeks since we played a real good game,” Jackson told reporters. “I thought that some of us are going through the motions and just letting everybody else take the responsibility, letting Michael take the responsibility for scoring and not carrying their own weight.”
In the wake of the loss, Reinsdorf finally broke his silence with an interview with the Chicago Tribune’s Sam Smith. He denied that he planned to break up the team.
“If we win the championship, I would be inclined to invite everyone back,” Reinsdorf told Smith. “Neither I nor Jerry Krause has ever said—anywhere—that we want to break up the team. We get accused of saying it. I read it all the time. I hear Spike Lee saying it on the Jay Leno show.”
Jackson’s agent Todd Musburger countered Reinsdorf’s claims by telling Chicago’s WMAQ radio that he wasn’t convinced of the chairman’s sincerity. “They are trying to put the responsibility on the players for not coming back, not the team,” Musburger said. “The Bulls are having a hard time taking the responsibility for what might happen. They told us loud and clear [during the previous summer’s contract talks] this would be the last year of Phil’s duties as coach of the team. They have had ample time to display what they want to do.”
Reinsdorf’s message was that it was Jackson, not Krause, breaking up the team. Jackson himself admitted that he had been eager to leave for the past two years. “But as it gets into the playoffs, it’s going to be harder and harder to say good-bye to this team,” he said, adding that he had no intention of coming back. “It’s being wanted back,” Jackson explained. “That’s the whole thing.”
Jordan admitted being confused by Reinsdorf’s timing. “I think all of it’s been a pretty trying season,” Jordan said. “We’ve still been able to get on the basketball court and play the game, and that’s what we’re going to be remembered for, not all this conversation that’s going on now.”
Asked if Reinsdorf was trying to put the blame for the breakup on Jackson and himself, Jordan replied, “If that’s the case, it’s a bad time, but it’s a lot of things that have been bad timing that have happened to us thus far. But I don’t know. It kind of caught us off-guard because we never really expected it. We didn’t expect any more conversation about next year until this year was over and done with. So his reasoning I really don’t know. But he certainly has the prerogative to make a decision like that.”
“That’s how out of touch things are,” Chip Schaefer observed, “when you have to win a title to have the owner be ‘inclined’ to ask everybody back. You know how hard it is to win 62 games?”
Shrugging off Reinsdorf’s comments, the Bulls rolled over the Hornets in Game 3, a contest that had the home fans heading for the exits early. At the next day’s practice in the Charlotte Coliseum, Ron Harper explained the mood of the players: “On our team we got some older guys, and we know we aren’t going to be around for a long period of time. We know this is our chance now to go out and to just show folks what a good basketball team we have.”
Pippen had produced a line of “Last Dance” hats for sale to the public. Harper was asked when he planned to start wearing his. “My Last Dance hat ain’t coming out till we get to the championship, the final round,” he replied, laughing.
The Bulls’ blowout win in Game 3 had left the Hornets in tatters, with Anthony Mason on the bench at the end of the game screaming profanities at coach Dave Cowens. That, in turn, set the stage for the Bulls to breeze in Game 4, 94–80, followed by a tighter win in Game 5 back in Chicago to close out the series.
Jordan finished with 33 points, while Rodman, playing on his thirty-seventh birthday, had 21 rebounds. Jordan scored 11 of his points in the fourth quarter. With less than a minute left, the crowd at the United Center began chanting “MVP, MVP.” Indeed, word had already begun circulating that he had outpolled Utah’s Karl Malone in balloting for the award.
As usual, Jackson had prepared his team for the playoffs by splicing pieces of a popular film around cuts from the game tapes. For the Indiana and Utah series in the 1998 playoffs, Jackson used Devil’s Advocate, a dark film starring Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves. Pacino was literally the devil, disguised as a New York law firm executive who specialized in finding and recruiting the best talent.
Asked if it was a thinly disguised reference to Krause, Jud Buechler laughed and said, “Don’t go there. Don’t even go there.”
“It’s a little far out,” Tex Winter said of Jackson’s decision to select a film in which the devil was a talent-scouting executive.
It wasn’t a message lost on the players.
“Who is the devil?” forward Dickey Simpkins said with a smile. “I can’t answer that question. That might be trouble. I got to wait until after I sign another contract before I answer that.”
The film also had ties to Jackson’s circumstances. Reeves played a young Florida lawyer recruited by the devil’s New York firm because he had never lost a case. In fact, Reeves was so intent on winning that he seemed willing to sacrifice his marriage in the name of competition. Jackson had made it no secret that his own marriage to wife June had suffered because of his intense commitment to the Bulls.
Jackson said the film had many applications, including several for Rodman. In the film, Reeves’s wife kept changing hair colors, trying to find her identity as she sank deeper and deeper into madness.
“It has applications where needed,” Jackson said, “and I try not to make a big distinction about who the applications are for. There are some things that are obviously for Dennis in Devil’s Advocate, dealing with the darker side of life. He loves movies so much. There are just some basic statements about free will and about self-determination, that, regardless of what you believe, you are a determinator of your own life. There’s other things that are about being possessed or losing control of your own life. It makes some sense to me that can be played around with.”
Played around with indeed. In some scenes, certain characters’ faces turn grotesquely ugly, and in another, Reeves’s wife cuts her own throat while in a mental hospital. Jackson spliced these scenes into sections of game tape that showed ugly play by the Bulls.
“We had a couple of cuts of the guy’s wife when she looked in the mirror and turned real ugly,” Winter said. “He had that in at a time when we had a couple of real ugly plays. Finally, when we did something really bad, it showed her slitting her throat. Committed suicide. The thing of it is, this devil’s advocate makes them do all these things, causes it all.”
These scenes were particularly useful if Jordan seemed too intent on one-on-one play, Winter explained. “Sometimes when there was too much one-on-one, he’d maybe get the ugly scene in there, or he’d suggest we’re cutting our own throat. You know.”
Jordan and his teammates laughed at the ways Jackson presented these notions to them, Winter said. “It’s a good way to get across points without your having to say much.”
Winter saw it as Jackson’s special way of speaking to Jordan, of reminding the superstar about the need to include teammates and to avoid trying to win games by himself.
“These guys, Michael and Scottie in particular, these guys have been with Phil just that long,” Winter said. “They’ve begun to interpret a lot of things now that they didn’t understand at all at first. But they’ve been there so long they can practically read his mind on it now.”
“Phil does a lot of stuff that if you just let it pass, you don’t really understand,” Bill Wennington said. “But if you think about it, he’s trying to get us motivated or thinking at a deeper level. Sometimes we catch on, and sometimes we don’t. I think Phil’s and Michael’s relationship is very special. They communicate in their own way on their own level, and they do so very well. There are a lot of times when things aren’t going well and we need to move the ball around, and it’s in Michael’s hands a lot. Phil relates that to Michael by saying, ‘Hey, you know, we gotta move the ball around a little bit,’ without demeaning him or saying, ‘You did it wrong.’”
The other members of the Bulls sensed that Jackson could say those things to Jordan while maybe no other coach could, Wennington said.
Asked if the film could be applied to the larger issues that the Bulls faced this season, Jackson said, “A lot of it is. The thing about being strangers in a strange land. And little stuff, like there’s a statement, ‘Behold. I send you as a sheep before the wolves.’ I’ve got the crowd in Indiana and Utah both and the referees’ calls, and all those kinds of little distractions that go on when you’re out there playing on the road. Both of those teams are involved in this movie, how you have to be self-reliant as a basketball team.”
“I’m not sure what the message is supposed to be,” Tex Winter said. “But there’s scenes in there that are very disturbing.”
The Indiana Pacers, coached by Larry Bird, stepped up as the Bulls’ foes in the Eastern Conference finals, but in the first two games Chicago promptly smothered the Pacers in pressure. Scottie Pippen, in particular, so hounded and harassed Pacers point guard Mark Jackson that he had Bird pleading for the officials to bring some relief. Harper, too, played his role by shutting down Reggie Miller.
The Pacers’ pain was measured by their 26 turnovers in Game 1.
“Pippen was hyped up and they let him hang on Mark to bring the ball up,” Bird fussed.
In the midst of it all, Bird still had to pause and pay homage to Jordan. “No question since I’ve been around, he and Magic are the best I’ve seen,” the Indiana coach told reporters. “Believe it or not, every year in this league you learn a little bit more. He might not have the skills like he did when he was young. He might not shoot as high a percentage. But you become a better player as you get older.”
The league acknowledged as much by naming Jordan the MVP before Game 2 of the series, making him, at thirty-five, the oldest to claim the award. It was his fifth time to earn the honor.
“It’s a cheap thirty-five,” Jordan said. “I didn’t play much of my second year [foot injury] and I sat out eighteen months [retirement and baseball], I don’t really have the time on the court a normal thirty-five-year-old would have if they played each and every game. To win it at this age means I made the right choice to still play the game because I can still play it at the highest level.”
As for Game 3, the Bulls were up 98–91 late in the fourth when Indiana scored 4 points in less than 10 seconds to pull to 98–95. When Jordan answered with a drive, he slipped but somehow managed to keep his dribble, get back up, and cut his way through a scrum of defenders to hit a runner that bounced around and in.
Next, he nailed a 14-foot fallaway on the baseline to kill the Pacers’ resurgence.
“Michael hit a lot of great, tough shots,” Bird said. “Tough shots for others, routine for him.”
He finished with 41 points, the thirty-fifth postseason game of his career in which he had scored 40 or more points. He shot 13 for 22 from the field and 15 for 18 from the line with 5 assists, 4 of Chicago’s 15 steals, and 4 rebounds.
Rodman, on the other hand, had only 2 points and 6 rebounds in 24 minutes after being held out of the starting lineup for the second straight game. He had spent a good portion of the night in the locker room riding an exercise bike. When Jackson wanted to insert him into the game, an assistant trainer had to be dispatched to fetch him. “It was irritating having to send for him,” Jackson admitted. “I will have a talk with him in the next couple days to see if we can set him straight.”
For some reason, Krause chose Game 2 as the time to approach Jordan in his private room in the Bulls’ locker room to discuss the star’s comments critical of team management in a recent New Yorker article. The result was a heated exchange between the star and GM. “For some reason Jerry wanted to do this,” a team employee revealed. “Jerry was representing Reinsdorf in saying they were really upset about what Michael said. Jerry tried to reason with him about the New Yorker article. Apparently, Michael went right back in his face, saying, ‘Don’t you dare try to challenge me about it, not with all the manipulating of the press you guys do.’ He’s not putting up with any of that shit.”
Another team official heard about the incident and remarked, “Oh, gee, that’s real smart, Jerry trying to go in there and smooth things over. He’s the wrong person to do that.”
Jordan emerged from the exchange on his way to the postgame media interview session. He looked at a team employee and said, “Fuck your two bosses.”
The media, unaware of the confrontation, focused instead on Rodman’s behavior during the game. “Dennis is fine, he don’t have no problem with anybody,” Harper told reporters. “He was late to a game. He’s late to every game. Who cares? We know Dennis as a team and the guys let him do what he wants to do as long as he steps on the basketball court and plays basketball.”
“I think Dennis has had to compromise his principles more than I have had to compromise mine,” Jackson joked, adding, “Dennis has given up his whole life—wrestling, movies, MTV. Think of the things he’s had to give up to play basketball.”
Yes, Jackson told reporters, Rodman came late to games and was tardy for virtually every practice. “He doesn’t like his money. We take it from him and find ways to give it back to him,” the coach quipped.
On Thursday, before heading to Indiana, the Bulls’ players had declined to speak with the media, which netted a $50,000 fine for the team from the NBA. In playoffs past, the players had sometimes made such refusals, and the team quietly paid the fine. But this time, Krause was incensed and lit into Jackson on the team plane in front of the players. “It’s your fault,” the GM yelled.
Later, on the tarmac at the Indiana airport, the two got into a screaming match as the players and support personnel watched from a waiting bus, unable to hear exactly what they were saying to each other.
Some staff members figured Krause was simply using the opportunity to vent his frustrations with Jackson. Asked about it later, Jackson said, “I did approach him in a private moment, because I thought in a private moment we could address it. I said, ‘There was a better way to handle this than that.’ And he didn’t want to hear it. He just wanted to go ahead and proceed down the same path he had chosen, which has the tendency to make me rigid. Especially when I had come over to try and get him back on the right page.
“I realize Jerry’s a…” Jackson said, then hesitated. “I don’t want to get into ethnic slander, but from what I’ve known of all my encounters living with Jewish society most of my life, when the kaddish is said, that person becomes a nonentity. And Jerry basically said the kaddish [a Hebrew death prayer] over me. And the funeral was said, and I’ve become a nonentity to him in his life. So it had become very difficult for him to talk to me, to address me personally, and I understood that. He is not going to address me personally again. That’s basically his feeling about it in some form or fashion. I’ve recognized that for the last couple of months. So I understood a little bit about his mentality, because he couldn’t really look me in the face when he was trying to get his piece said. I understood that he was doing something he felt he had to do. He didn’t want to have a personal contact with me. He still had to do this on some organizational level.”
Asked if he thought Krause had also said the kaddish over Pippen, Jackson again hesitated, then said, “Yes. He hates Scottie. Scottie has become a nonperson in his life because Scottie called him a liar. And that’s the worst thing you could do. Jerry won’t admit that he lies. It’s very difficult because the owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, doesn’t lie. And Jerry Krause also doesn’t want to be thought of as a liar. But when you’re a general manager, almost by virtue of your job, you have to tell lies. It’s unfortunate.
“You have to recuse yourself, is what you have to do,” Jackson said. “In this job, I’ve tried to make it an issue not to lie, although Jerry has accused me face-to-face of lying. To which I said, ‘Well, you know, Jerry, there are times I go to speak and I’m caught in situations,’ particularly in front of the press, where they ask, ‘Is Dennis at practice today,’ or something which we’re trying to avoid. I choose not to say something, or I choose to recuse myself.”
Asked if he thought Krause had said the kaddish over Jackson, Tex Winter said, “Yes, he probably has.”
With their internal conflicts flaming up before their eyes, the Bulls found a way to lose two spectacular games in Indiana over the Memorial Day weekend. Each time, Chicago had a solid lead in the fourth quarter only to see the Pacers take control in the closing minutes. In Game 3, Indiana won 107–105 to cut the series lead to 2–1. The Pacers’ bench, led by forward Jalen Rose and guard Travis Best, had helped sink the Bulls. Reporters asked Jackson about his opponent’s bench and he answered gamely “Wait until we get to Utah.”
He created further controversy on the eve of Game 4 by telling the press that Chicago’s dynasty was on its last legs. “Right now, it’s an end of a basketball team that had a great run,” he said.
Certainly the Pacers were trying their best to make that happen. Game 4 came down to an unusual series of events that left Jackson fuming about the officiating and countering that Bird’s politicking in the media was turning the tide with the referees.
For the packed house at Market Square Arena, the officiating only boosted the drama. Miller hit a three-pointer with 0.7 seconds remaining to give the Pacers a 96–94 win that tied the series at two games apiece.
Jordan got one last shot, but his 26-footer at the buzzer hit the backboard, then rolled around the rim and out, bringing a thunderous celebration. “There were so many debatable calls late in the game, but Reggie still had to make that shot,” Jackson told the gathered media. He blasted the officiating by likening it to the 1972 Olympic gold medal game when the United States lost to the Soviet Union on a bad call.
The Pacers had fought the whole game to catch the Bulls and finally took the lead, 88–87, with just over four minutes left when Derrick McKey hit a three-pointer.
The Bulls, however, led 94–91 and seemed in control until Best scored on a drive with 33 seconds to go. Then Rodman was whistled for an illegal offensive pick, sending the ball back to the Pacers. “The offensive foul by Dennis was an awful call,” Jackson said. What angered the Bulls’ coaches was the illegal down screens the Pacers had set all day long trying to free Miller from Harper’s cloying defense. The Pacers’ big men were constantly stepping out and giving Harper a forearm, which had Winter fussing. The officials, however, made no illegal pick calls until the one on Rodman in the final seconds.
Chicago was still leading 94–93 when Jordan blocked a jumper by McKey with 6.4 seconds left. Indiana retained possession, but Pippen then stole the inbounds pass after Harper tipped it. The Pacers quickly fouled Pippen, and there was an extended debate over whether Miller threw a punch at Harper.
No technical was called, leading Jackson to say the officials “backed off, acted like they were afraid,” words that would bring the coach a $10,000 fine from the league.
Pippen went to the line to shoot his free throws and promptly missed both. He squeezed his head in frustration as he came off the floor for the ensuing timeout.
The Pacers’ coaches called for Miller to come off yet another down screen, which he did. He ran to the top of the key and shoved Jordan backward and out of the play to get open for the winning three. The Bulls’ coaches screamed yet again for an offensive foul, but the arena was already awash in pandemonium.
The Bulls returned to Chicago and responded with a 106–87 blowout victory to regain the lead in the series, 3–2.
Jordan scored 29 in the rout, which pushed his career totals to 35,000 points, including regular season and playoffs—third all-time, behind Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Wilt Chamberlain.
Unfortunately, the Bulls had to return to Indiana for Game 6, where somehow the Pacers again managed to win with a late-game turnaround. This time the drama came when Jordan tripped on his way to the basket in the final seconds. There was no call, and the Pacers scooped up the ball and headed off with a 3–3 tie in the series.
“All teams are just kind of tired of all the things Chicago has done,” Indiana’s Antonio Davis said before Game 7. “They’ve beaten a lot of people—embarrassed a lot of people—so I’m sure there are a lot of teams out there that would like to see them lose.”
The key factor, though, was Chicago’s home-court advantage. They were 27–2 in playoff games in the United Center dating back to 1996. That didn’t stop the Pacers from pressing the issue. Indiana took an early 13-point lead, which prompted Jackson to abandon the six-man rotation he had used for most of the series. First he inserted Rodman for Kukoc, which produced a 7–0 Chicago run.
Then Jackson turned to Steve Kerr and Jud Buechler. Kerr would finish with 11 points and Buechler with 5 key rebounds and plenty of scrambling hustle.
“We were behind, so he wanted some offense. He kind of took a chance because Best outplayed me this series,” Kerr said of Jackson. “Then he went on a hunch and went with Jud, who had a great game. It says he trusts us, he trusts his bench.”
“I learned something about our bench: To stick with our bench and not back away from it,” Jackson acknowledged. “I think that’s what I have to consider and keep considering that we can still find ways to win ball games, even though sometimes we feel a little short-handed.” By halftime, the Bulls had eased back in front, 48–45. Then Kukoc took over in the third quarter as Jordan continued to struggle offensively. The Croatian would finish with 21 points, shooting 7 of 11, including 3 of 4 three-pointers.
Chicago opened the fourth with a 69–65 lead, yet even when Jordan returned with under 10 minutes to play he continued to miss shots. Finally, he began attacking the basket, driving into the Pacers’ defense and drawing fouls.
“His jump shot didn’t work but his free throws did,” Bird said, after Jordan’s show of will in the final minutes pushed the Bulls to the win. “He put his head down, went into traffic, and drew fouls.”
“It’s about heart,” Jordan said, “and you saw a lot of heart out there on the basketball court.”
His first five points of the game pushed him past Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the leading scorer in playoff history, with nearly 5,800 points. He finished the night with 28 points, 9 rebounds, 8 assists, and 2 steals, all enough to seal Chicago’s 88–83 win. “That’s why he’s the best player in the league and probably the greatest player ever,” Bird said.
“I’m pretty sure people are going to say that some of the swagger is gone,” Jordan said of his team’s narrow playoff escape. “Maybe. But nobody has taken anything away from us so far.”
Their next stop was the NBA Finals against the Utah Jazz, who had swept the Los Angeles Lakers in the Western Conference championship series and had been forced to wait ten days for the Bulls to advance.
“We may be a little tired, but our hearts are not tired,” Jordan said when asked if his team would be ready to travel to Utah for the next round. “We haven’t lost in the Finals, and that’s a great confidence to have. Sure, it was a battle to get there. But we’re there. Now let’s just do the job.”
The Sixth Championship
While there was much media speculation that the Bulls might be too weary to take on the well-rested Jazz, Chicago’s confidence was high. Utah had home-court advantage in the Finals format, which called for the first two games in Salt Lake’s Delta Center, the next three in Chicago, and the final two, if necessary, in Utah.
After defeating Indiana on Sunday, May 31, the Bulls jetted to Utah for Game 1, set for Wednesday the 3rd.
As expected, the Jazz seemed tight and the Bulls a bit weary in battling through a 17-all first period. Then Jackson went to his bench in the second period and quickly found disaster and a brace of turnovers. The Jazz jumped to a 7-point lead, and the Bulls’ starters spent the rest of the game trying to pull close enough to steal a victory at the end. Malone put Utah up by 4 with 55.7 left. The Bulls managed to tie it on two Pippen free throws and a Longley jumper with 14 seconds to go. From there, Chicago’s defense forced overtime, but in the extra period Stockton victimized Kerr on a late shot in the lane to give the Jazz a 1–0 lead in the series.
As was their trademark, Jackson and his staff made their adjustments for Game 2, which involved spreading their triangle offense and opening the floor up for easy baskets by their cutters.
In the first half, the triangle had never worked better. “Tonight it really shined bright for us,” Buechler said. “It’s an offense designed for everyone to touch the ball, to pass and cut. And the guys did that tonight, instead of going to Michael every time and posting up. Early on everyone got involved, and that really helped out for later in the game.”
“The first half was beautiful,” Winter agreed. “We followed through with our principles a lot better. Got a lot of cutting to the basket. And Michael gave up the ball. He was looking to feed cutters.”
Winter’s face, though, showed his frustration. “The second half we abandoned it, aborted it,” he said. “We tried to go way too much one-on-one. Michael especially forced a lot of things.”
If the Bulls had stuck with their scheme they might have won by a dozen, the coach figured. But Jordan had delivered a win against Indiana in Game 7 by going to the basket and drawing fouls. He attempted to do the same in Game 2 against Utah, but the officials weren’t giving him the call. Instead, Jordan wound up on his back while the Jazz scooped up the ball and headed the other way for easy transition baskets. Suddenly Chicago’s 7-point edge had turned into an 86–85 Utah lead with less than two minutes to go. “I don’t know what it is,” Winter said, shaking his head. “Michael, he’s got so damn much confidence.”
Jordan’s late bucket and ensuing free throw propelled the Bulls to a 93–88 win, the victory they needed to wrest away home-court advantage.
The series then shifted back to Chicago, where after a practice Winter paused and admitted that where he once held out hope that the team might remain intact, he now saw that as the remotest of possibilities. “I don’t think it’s necessarily a shame to break it up,” he said. “It’s too bad that has to be, but you have to have changes. And it could be well timed.”
Winter had figured the Bulls would struggle to win the title in ’97, yet here they were a year later, in solid position again to rule the league. If the team returned, it would likely be too far past its prime to meet expectations in 1999, the coach reasoned.
Besides, keeping the key parties together would take some Jackson-inspired therapy. But how would Winter heal the relationship between Jackson and Krause? Only Reinsdorf could do that, the assistant coach said. As it would turn out, the team chairman tried, but it just wasn’t possible.
“Well, I think time heals all wounds, but time can also wound all heels,” Jackson said, toying with a riddle when posed the question in a private interview. “There are a variety of things that you can throw into the message. This is one of them that you can kind of play with.
“In retrospect, at some point, we’re going to back away from this so that we’re not so close and say, ‘You know, this was a collection of pretty talented people. The Bulls were very successful. Even though we were enmeshed in the midst of it, we really were enjoying it.’ I’ve always felt that way.
“Perhaps we could have enjoyed it more if we could have appreciated it,” Jackson said. “I’ve really enjoyed it a lot, and as a consequence, I’ve really reveled in it the most. Tex doesn’t revel in it as much as I do. But the players do. The players have this association with it, and I have an association with that, too, because I was a player.”
The coach admitted that no matter how hard their feelings, he and Krause would always be bonded by their mutual success with the Bulls. In fact, their story was one destined to be told and retold.
Having acknowledged that, Jackson said there was almost no chance of his return. He said he had tried to make it clear to Reinsdorf in 1997 that it was virtually impossible for Krause and him to keep working together. The implication was that the team chairman had faced a choice, the coach or the general manager, and had clearly sided with Krause.
“Last year I felt that coming back, even though the ground had been seeded, the groundwork wasn’t good,” Jackson said. “I felt like my message about how a house divided against itself cannot stand wasn’t really listened to by Jerry Reinsdorf. I really like Jerry, and I have a tendency to like authority figures. And Jerry has been a good one as an owner for a coach to appreciate because he stays away and stays in the background and doesn’t intrude and allows things to happen. And yet he’s gotta coerce both of us to work together in this atmosphere. For this group to come back, I just don’t see how it’s gonna happen. Right now we’re in the throes of saying, ‘Look at the genius of this team. Look at the collective effort between the coaching staff and the team on the floor, all the strengths of the individuals.’ But the reality is that while no one wants to back away from another championship or another two championships, going through another long period of 82 games in that respect is going to be difficult. It’s not a good thought.”
Even so, Jackson couldn’t avoid leaving the door cracked. “If it comes down to a chance of Michael playing and not playing, then my responsibility would be to him and to the continuation of his career, and I would have to consider it,” he said. “I have to be a person that is loyal to the people who have been loyal to me. I feel that conviction. The only thing that would take me basically out of the mix would be my own personal well-being, my own personal physical and emotional health in dealing with this.”
Clearly, Jackson had been left emotionally frayed by the season and the struggle for control of the team. Plus, he had conflict in his marriage and had spent part of the season living in a local hotel room. Now, as the season drew to a close, there was hope that he might pull the relationship with June back together. Before he could focus on that, though, there was this business of another championship.
The stress eased for everyone in Game 3 as Pippen, Harper, and Jordan took turns overpowering Utah’s guards in the largest rout in NBA history. The performance established how absolutely dominant the Bulls could be as a team and Pippen could be as an individual defender.
The conclusion itself turned into the kind of dunkfest for bench players usually reserved for rec league blowouts. The game had opened with a blast of applause from the United Center crowd, followed by a brief scoring outburst from Malone. Then the Chicago defense closed out the proceedings and propelled the Bulls to a 96–54 victory. The margin was so great that a crosscountry airlines flight that had radioed in for a game update for a Utah fan had to call back a second time to confirm the score. It was the worst point difference in league history, either playoff or regular season.
Jerry Sloan expressed surprise when he was handed a box score. “This is actually the score?” the Utah coach said. “I thought it was 196 [points]. It sure seemed like they scored 196.”
“It was one heck of an effort, defensively, for our team,” Jackson said. “We were very quick to the basketball, and we defended their offensive sets quite well. Malone did shoot the ball well, but other than that, we stopped the rest of the team.”
“I’m somewhat embarrassed for NBA basketball for the guys to come out and play, at this level, with no more fight left in them than what we had,” Sloan said. “[The Bulls] got all the loose balls, all the offensive rebounds, and we turned the ball over [26 times]. I’ve never seen a team that quick defensively.”
Pippen had been assigned to guard Utah center Greg Ostertag, virtually a nonscorer, which left him free to terrorize Utah’s passing lanes. “It’s a luxury to have a defender like Scottie,” Jackson told reporters. “He can cover more than one situation at a time. He can play a man and play a play. He can hang tight on his man and he’s also able to rotate like that.”
In one game, the Bulls had sent a resounding rebuke to Krause’s plans to rebuild because they were too old. Tacked on was the emphasis that Pippen was too special a player to consider tossing away in any trade.
“I almost feel sorry for them,” Jackson said privately in discussing how Krause’s and Reinsdorf’s agenda had been shattered and how they might come to be viewed by Chicago sports fans.
Just when Chicago seemed to be soaring, Rodman changed the flight pattern by missing practice to slip off to appear at a professional wrestling event in Detroit as “Rodzilla.” Some accounts suggested he was paid as much as $250,000 for the appearance, while others reported that he was paid nothing. Privately, Rodman said the appearance was part of an $8 million contract.
The media took great interest in delving into the strange turn of events, which cost Rodman $10,000 in fines. When Rodman returned to practice before Game 4, Winter was ready with a lecture. “I just asked him what he thought he was doing,” the coach revealed privately. “He said, ‘Well, if you had a chance to give up $10,000 to make $8 million would you do it?’ That’s what he told me. I said, ‘Don’t kid me. There’s no way you made $8 million.’ He said, ‘Oh, yes, I did.’”
Behind his frown, Winter took the matter with a smile. “You know, Rodman’s no dummy,” he said. “Actually, he’s beaten the system. You have to give somebody credit who can do that. And I’m not so sure that maybe the system shouldn’t take a lickin’ every once in a while. It’s a reflection a little bit on our society, though. Which is a shame, but that’s part of the system, too.”
The coach had talked often with Rodman about taking better care of his money but didn’t think his message had gotten through, especially when it came to his gambling. “Anybody that likes him and has some compassion for him is gonna be concerned about him,” Winter explained, pointing out that the reason his teammates put up with Rodman was because they liked him. “He’s a very likable guy. Very generous. Generous to a fault, really. Wants attention. He’s a contradiction, really. He’s a very shy guy in a lot of ways. Very withdrawn. And yet he calls attention to himself on every turn. That’s a contradicting personality. I think Phil’s got a better read on him than the rest of us. Phil was somewhat a maverick himself. He wrote that book, Maverick, which he’s still embarrassed about. I didn’t read it. He asked me not to, so I didn’t. He said, ‘You don’t want to read that.’ Phil is more sympathetic toward Rodman than I am by a long shot.”
As the plot would turn in Rodman’s strange world, Game 4 of the Finals came down to his ability at the free throw line. He responded by hitting four free throws in the closing seconds to go with his 14 rebounds to seal an 86–82 Chicago win and a virtually insurmountable 3–1 lead in the series.
“The much-maligned Dennis Rodman had a wonderful game for us,” admitted Jackson, who had blasted the forward’s behavior just a day earlier, a ploy that Jackson knew would result in Rodman’s resurgence. “As usual, he takes himself out of a hole and plays well enough to redeem himself,” the coach said with a wry smile.
On a night when the Jazz responded to their Game 3 blowout with a show of fire, the Bulls managed to stay ahead by hitting 17 of 24 free throws in the fourth period. Rodman, a 55-percent shooter during the season, rolled in two for a 78–75 lead with 1:38 left. Then, with under a minute left and Chicago ahead by two, he added two more.
Game 5 clearly became a case of celebrating too early, too much of the Bulls laughing at their good fortune. The result was an 83–81 Utah win. Even Jordan admitted to getting caught up in the fallacy. “I really didn’t have a tee time,” he told reporters, “because I anticipated drinking so much champagne that I wouldn’t be able to get up.” As poorly as the Bulls played (Jordan was 9 for 26 from the floor and Pippen 2 for 16), they still had a shot to win it at the end.
Kukoc’s 30 points on 11 of 13 shooting had kept them close, despite Malone’s 39 points.
The Bulls got the ball back with 1.1 seconds to go, and during the ensuing timeout, Jordan sat on the bench enjoying the situation. If ever there was a moment to inhabit, as Jackson had encouraged him to do, this was it. A few moments later, Jordan missed a falling-out-of-bounds shot, but that didn’t prevent his treasuring the moment. “I’m pretty sure people were hoping I would make that shot. Except people from Utah,” he said. “For 1.1 seconds, everyone was holding their breath, which was kind of cute.
“No one knew what was going to happen,” he said. “Me, you, no one who was watching the game. And that was the cute part about it. And I love those moments. Great players thrive on that in some respects because they have an opportunity to decide happiness and sadness. That’s what you live for. That’s the fun part about it.”
Throughout the series, the Bulls’ ability to perform reflected Jackson’s work and the stress-reduction sessions with George Mumford. Repeatedly, Jordan would speak of being “in the moment,” the primary focus of Mumford’s mindfulness.
If the Bulls ever needed focus, it was now. They were headed back to Utah for Game 6. For Jackson and his staff, it wasn’t an entirely new experience. They had lost Game 5 of the 1993 Finals to Phoenix and had to travel back to the Southwest to defeat the Suns. “Unfortunately, we have to go back to Utah, and it’s a duplicate situation of 1993,” Jordan said. “So when you get on the plane headed to Utah, you have to be very positive, you have to be ready to play. It’s one loss, and you can’t let it eat at you to the point where it becomes two losses.”
The Jazz charged out early in Game 6 and Pippen came up with horrendous back spasms. The pain sent him to the locker room, where a massage therapist literally pounded on his back trying to drive the spasms out. One team employee reported Krause standing back in a corner of the room, almost transfixed, watching Pippen absorb the blows, eager to get back in the game to help Jordan. The GM didn’t intrude upon the scene, but afterward, after Pippen had returned to the game and winced his way through the proceedings, giving Jordan just enough support to get to the end, some observers said that Krause seemed dramatically and genuinely changed in his opinion of Pippen.
“I just tried to gut it out,” Pippen said. “I felt my presence on the floor would mean more than just sitting in the locker room. I knew I was going to come back in the second half, but I just didn’t know how much I was going to be able to give.”
He returned to the game to run the offense as Jordan scored a magnificent 45 points, including the final jumper in the key after which Jordan stood poised, his arm draped in a follow-through, savoring the moment, inhabiting the moment, frozen in that moment. Photos of the shot would show in the soft focus a number of Utah fans suspended there in agony with him, their hands covering eyes and ears, the ball hanging there in air, ready to swish for an 87–86 Chicago win.
“Things start to move very slowly and you start to see the court very well,” said Jordan, explaining the last play. “You start reading what the defense is trying to do. And I saw that. I saw the moment.”
The Jazz would get a final Stockton shot, but Ron Harper hustled to help him miss. When the ball had bounded away and the buzzer sounded, Jordan produced yet another of those moments to inhabit, this time he and Jackson together in a prolonged embrace.
The emotion would carry them away from there, first on a peaceful plane ride home, shared with Krause and Reinsdorf and free of acrimony, where an exhausted Jordan found a quiet place to curl up in deep sleep.
He would awaken, of course, from the dream to find that Jackson had ridden off on his motorcycle after turning down Reinsdorf’s late offer to stay with the team. Another year trading insults and hard lines with Krause just wasn’t worth it, no matter how exhilarating the finishes.
As for the rest of them, the players, their futures would be frozen in another summer of charged NBA labor deliberations. Who knew where it would end up?
All they really had, as Jackson had told them, was the moment. The sweet, sad, wonderful moment. And that was more than enough.
After the Gold Rush
The Bulls’ players and coaches closed out their experience with a private, emotion-filled team dinner in the days after the championship game. They all expressed their love and regard for one another, and the tears flowed. After that, Jackson’s immediate plan of escape was a trip abroad with June, the beginning of a year-long attempt to recover their relationship. “They tried,” explained a Jackson friend, “but they just couldn’t work it out.”
There were reports that Jackson planned to have surgery to repair the troubled hip that contributed to his stiff, awkward gait. But in an interview with Rick Telander of the Sun-Times before he left on his trip to Turkey, Jackson said the hip was an excuse the team’s management had added to the public agenda. “It hurts, but I would do a year of yoga before I would even consider surgery,” he said. “I think management put the hip surgery out there, and the media seemed to pick it up.”
Then Jackson told Telander that he might have stayed on. “I did feel it was time to take some time off,” he said. “What would have changed things is if management had said, ‘Stay on until Michael is finished, until he retires.’ But they never suggested that.”
Jackson said that during the spring of 1996, he and Todd Musburger had suggested a five-year coaching proposal, but Reinsdorf turned them down.
Next, Jackson had suggested a two-year agreement at about $3 million per season. Again, Reinsdorf declined.
What Reinsdorf seemed to be gambling on was that he and Krause could rebuild the team fast enough to keep the fans interested. Reinsdorf admitted that he and Krause almost broke up the team by trading Pippen in 1997. “We considered giving up a shot at the sixth title to begin rebuilding, and we would have given it up if we could have made the right deal,” Reinsdorf said. “The reason we considered breaking the team up is that we wanted to minimize the period of time between winning the last championship and getting back into contention with the next team.”
In other words, to minimize the time between the Jordan era and the next act on the United Center stage.
“We now have very little to trade, very little to work with in rebuilding,” Reinsdorf said that July.
Then the team chairman added: “Michael couldn’t care less about what happens [to the team] after he leaves.” At the very least, the comment indicated something less than warmth between Reinsdorf and Jordan.
Reinsdorf’s defense was that if Jackson and Jordan wanted to take control away from Krause, they never came out and said it. “There’s never been a power struggle,” the team chairman said. “Phil never asked for Krause to be removed. It never happened. Phil never told me he thought we were a house divided. He said it was difficult to work with Jerry Krause but not impossible. Phil never ever said that. He did express the fact that it was very strained.”
Certainly Jackson and Jordan weren’t going to put themselves in the position of saying outright that they wanted Krause gone, and Reinsdorf probably understood that and allowed it to work for him.
Reinsdorf said that he met with Jackson during the playoffs and told the coach that he’d been reading how management was pushing him out. This came after Jackson had informed Reinsdorf that he didn’t plan to coach after 1998. “I asked him, ‘Has anything changed? Do you want to coach another season?’ He said, ‘No.’”
After the season, Reinsdorf said he returned to Chicago and reviewed the newspaper clippings of the final weeks of the playoffs and discovered comments by Todd Musburger, Jackson’s agent, suggesting that “we have never publicly or privately told Phil we wanted him back. Wednesday night after the title we had our office celebration. I sat down with Phil and told him, ‘If you’ve changed your mind, we want you back.’”
The offer was unconditional, and it stood regardless of whether Jordan returned, Reinsdorf said. “Phil said, ‘That’s very generous.’ I told him, ‘Generosity has nothing to do with it. You’ve earned it.’ He took a deep breath and said, ‘No, I have to step back.’”
“Why people have been given the wrong impression about it I don’t know, and I really don’t care,” Reinsdorf said.
In March, Jackson had likened the situation with the Bulls to his last days as a player with the New York Knicks.
“I was in New York,” Jackson said. “We had eleven great years of a run. I was there for ten of those great years. The eleventh year things started to turn. Fortunately I got off before the landslide hit in the late ’70s. But when it turned, the town turned against the Knicks, and it took them almost ten years to get it back. The people were against them because they’re overcharging, they’re abusing their position for power to make people cringe. They were being brusque and intrusive in the press. They said things like, ‘The bottom line is the figure that really counts now, not wins and losses.’”
Of the situation with the Bulls, Jackson said, “It draws a pattern that’s scary, because the people in Chicago are going to have a long memory, and they’re going to remember this stuff later on down the line.”
As Jackson long suspected, the Bulls hired Tim Floyd that July as the team’s director of basketball operations—but the team did not name him head coach immediately. Krause emphasized in the press conference announcing Floyd’s appointment that the head coaching job was Jackson’s for the taking.
In September, when he and June were making their way from Montana to a new wintertime abode near Woodstock, they stopped for a few days in Chicago. Tex Winter, still hoping to patch up the fabric of the team, took Tim Floyd over to Jackson’s house for a meeting. It wasn’t the first time Jackson had talked with Floyd. There had also been a phone conversation, during which Jackson discovered what the rest of Chicago would soon find out—that Floyd was a nice man.
In their September meeting, Floyd made overtures about Jackson returning for another season. Jackson appreciated the visit, but wasn’t about to give up the peace of mind he had found since leaving the team in June. Krause would later acknowledge the visit but said he had no knowledge of Floyd making any overtures to Jackson.
“To my knowledge, nothing like that was ever discussed,” Krause said. “They discussed coaches and players around the league and stuff like that.”
But as far as Floyd bringing up the issue of Jackson coaching, “First of all, that isn’t Tim’s place,” Krause said. “That would be [Reinsdorf’s] or mine.”
Jordan, meanwhile, remained firm in his declaration that he would retire if Jackson was not his coach. Upon his hiring, Floyd had emphasized that he would move aside to work in an administrative capacity if Jackson decided to return as coach.
Floyd apparently had taken no offense at Jackson derisively calling him “Pink” and “Pinkie” when he sensed Bulls management was positioning Floyd to replace him.
“It doesn’t bother him,” Krause said. “Tim’s been there. He understands. Tim’s a good person and a good coach.”
In a phone interview several days later, Jackson said that Jordan was probably going to retire, which was good, because Reinsdorf really didn’t want him to play anyway. Through a spokesman, Reinsdorf protested that that wasn’t the case. Reinsdorf said he badly wanted Jordan to play another season.
Reinsdorf said that in July he had assured Jordan that if he wanted to play, “the money [meaning his one-year contract in excess of $36 million] will be there.”
That, in itself, may have been implied insult enough to drive Jordan from the game.
After all, the only clear way for Reinsdorf to be assured of Jordan’s returning would have been for the team chairman to remove Krause to give Jackson and Jordan what they saw as “room to breathe.”
In March, Jordan was asked if he knew about the unhappy end to the playing career of Los Angeles Lakers great Jerry West, who got into a nasty fight in 1974 with Jack Kent Cooke, then the Lakers’ owner. West had wanted to play another season or two and easily could have, but he retired abruptly during training camp in 1974. “No one ever had to pay me to play basketball,” West said in an interview twenty years later, the bitterness obvious in his voice. “But Mr. Cooke’s manipulation made me not want to play for him. My relationship with Mr. Cooke was acrimonious because the negotiations were a game to him. I knew that. It was very frustrating.”
Jordan had often made a similar comment, that he would play the game even if there was no pay.
“I never knew that,” Jordan said when he heard how West’s career ended, how the Lakers’ great remained bitter decades later. “Will I have the same feelings?” Jordan asked. “Is that what you’re asking me? I can’t say that. It hasn’t ended yet. Hopefully, it doesn’t come to that.”
Clearly, it had come to that by September.
Jackson said of Reinsdorf, almost admiringly, that the team chairman valued his loyalty to Krause over everything else, even if it meant that Jordan’s untimely retirement could cost the franchise.
The financial picture for the Bulls, however, was strong. By and large, they had already maximized their revenue for the 1999 season. They’d renewed the leases on their high-priced skyboxes and had season-tickets waiting lists that ran thousands deep. Even with a 1998 payroll that approached $70 million, Reinsdorf conceded that the team still made a profit.
About the only real way for the team to improve its financial standing would be to cut costs. Jordan’s contract was obviously the single largest budget item.
That move became a matter of record in January, after the lockout between the NBA owners and players finally ended. With the season set to open in early February, Jordan announced his retirement to an assembly of worldwide media gathered at the United Center on January 13. Still, he declined to make his decision any more certain than 99.99 percent.
It was important to never say never, said Jordan.
He had made the choice to retire just weeks before turning thirty-six and months after severely lacerating his finger with a cigar cutter. Even at his advanced playing age and with the long-term effect of the injury, many observers had little question that he remained the best player in the game. “It’s sad for everyone to see the greatest basketball player in the world come to that conclusion,” Indiana Pacers coach Larry Bird said of Jordan’s choice. “There comes a time in every player’s career that they have to make that decision, and he feels it’s his time.”
“Mentally, I’m exhausted. I don’t feel I have a challenge. Physically, I feel great,” Jordan said in explaining the move. “This is a perfect time for me to walk away from the game.”
The game itself was not in such good shape, having spent the previous six months locked in a labor standoff. Without question, the NBA could have used his presence as it tried to regain fan loyalty. “I think the league is going to carry on, although we’ve had our troubles over the last six months,” he said, referring to the league’s struggles over a new collective bargaining agreement that caused it to miss nearly half of the 1998–99 season. “I think that is a reality check for all of us. It is a business, yet it is still fun. It is still a game. And the game will continue on.”
But it would have to do so without him.
One reporter asked if Jordan might consider using his many talents to save the world. Jordan avowed that he was no savior. Indeed he had failed to save the championship team that he had desperately sought to keep together over the course of the 1997–98 season as Jackson and Krause feuded.
Yet Jordan made scant mention of the dispute at his retirement press conference, other than to point out that Bulls management would now have to live up to the standard he had set by winning six titles.
“We set high standards around here,” he said with a hint of a smile.
Jordan had used his fire to drive the entire franchise, for years considered a joke in the league, to the heights of dominance. His presence had an influence that reached from the lowliest employee to the organization’s board room.
“As fine a coach as Phil is, so much of it is just this unbelievable trickle-down from Michael Jordan,” said Chip Schaefer, the Bulls’ trainer for eight years. “As much as has been said and written about him athletically, it still hasn’t been enough. People are sick of realizing it, but it’s like, ‘No, no. Do you really realize what this guy is? Do you really realize what this guy is? I don’t think you do.’”