THE MEDIA AND THE WIZARDS’ OPPONENTS KNEW NOTHING about it yet, but Doug Collins understood that, soon enough, everyone would learn that Jordan’s bad knee had been drained of fluid. The draining made clear that his tendinitis was far worse than Collins and Wizards officials had led the media to believe, or perhaps believed themselves. There would be more questions about why Collins had allowed Jordan to play for such long stretches.
“We gotta get his minutes down,” Collins said to another Wizards official.
The official agreed.
“We just have to do it,” Collins declared, resolute now.
If they didn’t get the minutes down, they would be inviting disaster. On the other hand, the tendinitis alone was not disastrous. It simply meant what the word suggested, an inflammation of a tendon, and Jordan’s inflammation in this case was his knee’s way of indicating that it had been overworked or underprepared for the exertion being demanded of it. It was equal parts a consequence (Jordan had failed to give himself adequate time to prepare his body after suffering his broken ribs in summertime) and a warning (he better heed the message before genuine catastrophe struck, in the way of chronic tendinitis or an even worse problem).
Jordan had made a decision to keep secret his trip to Chicago, where his personal doctor John Hefferon presided over the draining and treatment of the knee. Someone close to him asked how they could possibly prevent news of a trip from breaking, and Jordan said, Don’t worry about it. The world always tried to keep tabs on him, but he ran it around screens and p.r. decoys and always lost it. Other than a few Wizards officials, no one outside his circle knew about his plans for the trip to Chicago—not even most of his teammates. Successfully guarding the secret would protect him against opponents who might otherwise try to prey on him, as well as the media mob who would howl: What’s wrong with the knee, Mike? But now his advisers, watching him badly limp, realized the obvious could not be hidden much longer.
Aside from rest, no surefire cure exists for tendinitis, making it among the most stubborn of man’s maladies. The knee’s primitive defense mechanism against the problem is unsparing, designed to take away most of the injured man’s mobility. When the tendon becomes inflamed and a nearby joint is irritated, the knee produces a clear substance called synovial fluid, which, as it accumulates, swells the stiffening knee, severely hampering movement. The accompanying pain represents the body’s attempt to halt all exertion, so that the knee will be permitted the rest it needs and the tendon’s inflammation will have a chance to subside. It is an old, crude and perfect little system of torture, like the rack. And through millennia of medical progress, little about tendinitis’s misery has changed. When it hits, and synovial fluid flows, even a 94-foot run down a basketball court becomes a teeth-gritting exercise. Afflicted stars will hurt just as Cro-Magnon men did. The stricken are best advised to sit, and most do. They embrace common sense, in the interest of protecting careers. With his left knee throbbing, even 21-year-old Bobby Simmons, unusually young to be hit so hard, deferred to the advice of trainers and coaches, and rested until his tendinitis passed like a bad storm. But somebody would need to sell Jordan on the idea of rest, a concept that he generally resisted.
Jordan wanted his movement immediately restored so he could play, and for this to happen, he needed his knee drained of the synovial fluid, which required the insertion of a needle into his knee. “It’s kind of a barbaric process to remove it,” said Wizards trainer Steve Stricker. He did not mean unethical or dangerous (drainings occurred now and then in basketball), simply that the approach was old and crude relative to modern tools and techniques in 21st-century sports medicine, and that, for all its discomfort, the procedure didn’t heal the knee, a point on which Hefferon and Wizards team doctor Stephen Haas completely agreed. There was only the illusion of a remedy. After the draining of his knee, Jordan could move again. But the tendon remained inflamed—a draining could do nothing for inflammation. If he did not rest, the pain would be coming back, along with more inflammation, more swelling, a nastier case of restricted movement and a heightened chance for other injury.
Hefferon had supervised the draining of enough knees to understand a driven athlete’s compulsion to get back onto a court. But always he advised rest—first, a little time off, followed by a new, less demanding schedule of activity. He knew that, for older athletes especially, the supporting muscles around the knee weakened over time, and that, in Jordan’s case, the muscles had atrophied even more during his three-year layoff. His age, layoff and past wars all conspired; his 13 years in the NBA meant his body already had absorbed a career’s worth of stresses that left his knee far more vulnerable than a young one. Hefferon didn’t object to the draining of the knee, but he saw little hope for a cure that season unless Jordan committed himself to a program of occasional rest.
Jordan sat out a Monday practice, but he traveled to Cleveland, to play on Tuesday night, determined not to miss a start during the 82-game season. Collins told the skeptical media, “I have to get Michael’s minutes down to thirty-four, thirty-five minutes a game,” which would represent a sharp reduction for a player who, through these first 12 games, had played less than 37 minutes in only one game. What Collins didn’t tell the press was that his new talk of reducing Jordan’s playing time had come only after he learned of the knee’s draining.
Jordan jogged out to the floor, played a tentative 31 minutes and went 9–24. The Wizards lost by 19. Jordan’s play had been abysmal for three games now. He had made less than a third of 74 shots over that span, still shooting too often for a man who couldn’t get lift on his jumper. Something in Jordan snapped afterward. He publicly lashed out at his teammates for the first time during his comeback. “I just think we stink…” he said. “I don’t see anybody covering my back. But everybody, I’m sure, expects me to cover theirs. That’s something I’m not going to live too much with.” He hinted that he was not right, physically. “It’s not fun to go out there and not see the effort, especially if I’m not one hundred percent.”
At 3–10 and with newspaper headlines screaming JORDAN: WE STINK, the team seemed on the verge of coming apart. They traveled to Philadelphia for a game the next night, in what seemed the worst of all possible scenarios for Jordan, a game immediately following another game, a burden aggravated by the presence of a foe good enough to have played in the NBA Finals just the year before, and led by the small but gifted Allen Iverson. If the Wizards’ chances didn’t seem dismal enough, Collins chose this moment to disclose that Jordan had had his knee drained, earlier in the week.
Jesus, said somebody in the press horde.
Is he okay to play? somebody asked Collins.
“Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, he got it drained and checked out,” Collins said casually.
Jordan, wearing a black support sleeve around his right knee, was noticeably restrained during warm-ups, careful not to leave his feet when shooting jumpers. It was one of those games that observers deem a blowout before a ball ever goes up. Then the Wizards surprised everyone in the arena. Jordan had 30 points, including the Wizards’ last 14 in the first half, substituting quickness for lost jumping ability, rising without warning off his dribble to hit uncontested jumpers.
In the second half, badly tiring on the fragile knee, he missed 9 of his 13 shots, but by then, other Wizards had taken over. Playing tenaciously, Hamilton pulled down a career-high nine rebounds and scored 28 points—13 of which came during a third-quarter run climaxed when he got a step ahead of the pack and dunked to give the Wizards the lead. He held Philly’s Aaron McKie to just two baskets, a performance so sterling that even Collins was moved to put an arm around him and say that now Hamilton was giving him what he wanted.
Brendan Haywood’s left thumb had healed, and he outrebounded everyone matched up against him. Tyronn Lue—who, as a Laker a season earlier, had almost gotten into a fight with Iverson during the NBA playoffs—came off the injured list to nearly brawl with him again, so angering Iverson that, even en route to scoring 40, the star came apart in the second half when it most mattered. “Motherfucker, I’ll fight you after the motherfuckin’ game in the tunnel; kick your punk ass; c’mon, bitch,” yelled Iverson, and Lue, fierce but cool, came right back: “I’ll fight you right now.”
After that exchange, Iverson was helpless to find self-control, his mission now to punish Lue, the game an afterthought, the Sixers’ lead melting. He threw up a series of off-balance jumpers that led to Wizards fast-break baskets. His rage played into the hands of Jordan, who, double-teaming the frazzled star, forced him into disastrous turnovers. Iverson lost the ball nine times, and the Wizards won by seven.
But Jordan had played a hard 38 minutes. In just 24 hours, Collins had abandoned his expressed goal of allowing his star no more than 33 or 34 minutes. Afterward, Jordan remained in cover-up mode. The knee was no problem, he said: “I felt good. I rested it, iced my legs a little today and I felt good.”
Two nights later, in Miami, he scored 22 in a victory, and then the following evening at MCI, just six days after the draining of his knee, he played his fourth game in five nights, in an NBA version of a death march. It had been exactly a week since Paul Pierce had taken him apart down the stretch. Now came an even swifter and bigger young lion, Orlando’s 22-year-old Tracy McGrady, who, having come into the league straight from high school, was already an NBA star who would match up against Jordan from the game’s start. “T-Mac,” as the league had dubbed him, was generally thought to have the most talent of any young shooting guard in the league, with the possible exception (though this was by no means certain) of Kobe Bryant, some McGrady devotees insisting that, in an individual matchup, Bryant paled against the bigger, taller T-Mac.
No other opponent could have been worse for Jordan at this stage. McGrady stood 6′ 8″, but even his listed height didn’t reflect his true size. In the NBA, scouts and observers talk with reverence about a player who is “long” or, in a nifty bit of adverbial praise, “plays long.” Long is homage; long refers to the player’s unusually long arms that, coupled with his leaping ability, enable him to reach up in the air just as high as players considerably taller. Long is a gift, just as great Ups are a gift. With his lengthy arms elongated in flight, Tracy McGrady was the personification of Long. He swooped and dunked with either hand over seven-foot centers, and posted up any rival at his position. He was 6′ 8″ but he played at 6′ 10″, at least. So easily did he abuse guards on the inside that it made them hesitant to guard him too closely on the outside, out of fear that he would embarrass them with a short bank shot or a dunk or a no-look pass to a teammate left unguarded because nearly every defender had been forced to pick up the slashing T-Mac. The result was that he could always step outside, catch a pass, simply rise and cast up sweetly arcing three-point shots over intimidated defenders. He had too many physical advantages over Jordan now and languidly hit a jumper over him early in the game just to prove the point.
“Allnight long,” a voice called out from the Orlando bench.
Only on defense did McGrady seem to have any shortcomings. The offense from a healthy Jordan might have presented problems for McGrady, but that right knee was slowly locking up now. He was on fire. It meant something different now. Different from those days when he hung 55 on the Knicks or 63 on the Celtics and someone like broadcaster Marv Albert nasally shouted, “Jordan on fire.” Now it was no longer so metaphorical. His inflamed right knee felt afire, as if somebody stabbed it with a scorching poker. He spent most of the first half pump-faking McGrady, doing it slyly enough that the young star leaped, committed two silly fouls and found himself languishing on the bench for much of the half.
In the second half, McGrady dominated, on both ends of the floor. Jordan already was giving up two inches to him in height, another inch or so in arm length and at least a couple of more inches in leaping ability. The younger man saw him grimacing and knew he could beat Jordan on the dribble: “I just tried to put the ball on the floor and make him move his feet. Then I’d shoot a lot of jumpers.” Jordan seemed to stumble a couple of times on the knee. Collins left him in, with the Wizards still within 10 points. By then, Patrick Ewing, now an Orlando role player, noticed Jordan wincing badly. “I knew it was the knee…” he said later. “It’s hard to play on something like that.”
During the fourth quarter, Jordan pump-faked from about the same spot on the floor where, a week earlier, he had tried fooling Pierce. McGrady stayed down on his feet, waited for Jordan to lift, and then went up. He didn’t need to jump particularly high, just lift that arm. His big hand swatted the shot away. MCI sounded like a tomb. Jordan lurched, buckled. His pain and limp became impossible to hide, and Collins stared hard at him. Something passed between the two men. Collins lifted him, though a good 15 minutes too late. Jordan quietly took a seat on the bench, and limped off at the end, the Wizards losers by nine, Jordan having gone 6–19 in 33 minutes.
The knee’s problem was so obvious now that not even Jordan could deny it. In the locker room, he admitted that it had begun swelling again, and added that he would be returning to John Hefferon the next day. The knee would receive another draining and undergo an MRI examination. He counted on a swift remedy: “I don’t think it’s gonna be something that’s gonna linger. I have to make sure that there’s no ligament damage, get it treated, get it drained and see what the doctors say.”
Then somebody broached what he didn’t want to hear: Would it be best for him to sit out some games?
He paused, allowing as to how he might sit. “I’d rather continue to play, but if it’s not going to get any better [without] me sitting out, then I guess I gotta do that…. If Dr. Hefferon and Dr. Haas come to an agreement, I may [sit out],” he said.
But Hefferon was not so sure that Jordan would commit to a lengthy rest. “When have you ever seen Michael just say he’s willing to stop playing?” he observed. “There are just some things in life that don’t easily happen. He understands risks, he understands what is happening to him, and he understands he wants to play. Which of those does he appreciate more? He wanted to play; he had to play.”
Back in 1985, during his second season, Jordan trusted Hefferon with his career when he broke the navicular tarsal bone of his left foot and found himself under the care of the prominent Chicago orthopedist. The rehabilitation, scheduled to last six to eight weeks, ran considerably longer, until it became maddening for Jordan, who at one point during his rehab, to the disgruntlement of Jerry Krause and others on the Bulls staff, played pickup games in North Carolina, angrily arguing that the foot had healed enough for him to rejoin the team. He needed to play, he told Hefferon; he needed a game.
Forced to play dual roles of doctor and diplomat, trying to coax patience from the young star, Hefferon finally decided that the team risked alienating Jordan forever if it made him wait any longer. Estimating the chance of reinjury to the foot at 10 percent, Hefferon recommended that Jordan be allowed to play. “I think he appreciated I listened,” Hefferon said. “I could talk honestly to him and he could talk honestly to me…. That’s not as common as you’d think.”
Hefferon came from an athletic background, a former Triple-A pitcher in the Oakland Athletics organization who understood the code of discretion in locker rooms and knew that certain secrets remained inviolate. But he was not blind to things. He had come to believe that Jordan needed games more than any athlete he’d ever worked with, believed even during his retirements that Jordan would come to regret his departures, that he had retired before he was truly ready, that there would be a void there. Hefferon had been right, on all counts. Now he knew that Jordan’s appetites might make any doctor’s advice to him pointless; that, in the end, Jordan would do what his appetites drove him to do.
On Monday, December 3, a little more than 36 hours after the Orlando game, Hefferon gave Jordan an MRI exam and presided over the second draining of the knee. He saw no structural damage but significant tendinitis. He urged that Jordan immediately cut his minutes; that he pick and choose what back-to-back games to play and bypass; and that he sit out the next several games until the swelling in his knee diminished and the pain of his tendinitis eased.
Jordan was noncommittal.
No surprise there, thought Hefferon.
Hefferon saw no quick fix to Jordan’s problem. He believed that age and many hard years on unforgiving basketball courts inexorably grinded the knees of thirtysomething players, and here his patient was two months from 39. He didn’t see severe tendinitis in 20-year-olds, only in older players whose knees, over the years, had passed some threshold of “wear and tear,” as he put it. “There was a lot of wear and tear on Michael’s knees, and human beings’ knees aren’t made for wear and tear forever.” Add in his high school glory days, he said, and Jordan had experienced more than 20 years of wear and tear. So the knees had been at risk from the beginning. But then Jordan had likely added to the risks, Hefferon thought: So many minutes of playing time so early in the season had likely spurred more irritation and inflammation, he thought. He reminded Jordan of this point, gently urging him to back off.
Jordan listened intently.
Like Tim Grover, Hefferon believed that the knees would have probably fared just fine but for Jordan’s long layoff and then his rush to get back. The doctor and the trainer understood better than the sycophants: Jordan was not a god but a man—a stunning athlete with a remarkable body but a man just the same—and a man whose muscles were in decline at about the same rate as other athletes his age, only Jordan had more talent and, likely, far more fast-twitch muscles to begin with, Hefferon thought. Jordan had fallen out of condition during his time away , and the leg muscles providing core strength and stability around his knees had lost much of their protective force, atrophying from inactivity and age. Had Jordan never retired, he still would have faced a degree of decline, Hefferon pointed out: “By 38, a person already has lost some strength in the legs. The muscles aren’t as good at 38 as they are at 25. Your thigh muscles aren’t as strong. You have fewer fast-twitch muscle fibers and a lower percentage of fast-twitch fibers…. The time is ticking down on your athletic career.”
But Jordan’s long layoff hastened the atrophy, Hefferon said. Jordan had worked out less in those three years away than the typical American fitness club member—lifted weights seldom, ran less, developed a gut. The pain he experienced now was common in anybody of his age who rushed back to physical activity after being dormant for so long. Even when a thirtysomething athlete walked away from a game for only a year, it meant that leg strength, speed and durability would be significantly reduced when he began a comeback, raising the risks for pain and injury. That lack of strength left him vulnerable to other problems, like a painful hyperextension of the knee, which had happened when he tried to reach back over his head and snag a long rebound during the last preseason game against Boston.
But Hefferon and Grover remained convinced that, given enough time to get ready, Jordan still had an opportunity for a sustained, relatively successful comeback. He had the gift that mattered most, a spectacularly athletic body that never had been abused. His vices were, physically speaking, minor: late nights, cigars, a few drinks now and then. Outside of fitness buffs in a monastery, the body was about as well preserved as any 38-year-old’s could be after doing essentially nothing over three years other than occasionally walking a golf course. The main challenge for Jordan would be in remaining patient, in not rushing either the tendinitis rehab or the training program. Pushing the pedal so hard after suffering the broken ribs had been a serious mistake, the doctor and trainer ruefully concluded. If Jordan held down his playing minutes now and adopted a prudent conditioning program, then he could still thrive on the court. On the other hand, if Jordan did not reduce his playing time, his chances for failure rose significantly, believed Hefferon. The doctor advised him to find periodic games where he could play brief stretches or not at all.
For the most part, Jordan listened impassively. Hefferon knew what this meant, too. “He understands he’s older and that, philosophically, he has to deal with it. But he hates being told he shouldn’t do something…. It kills him when he cannot play…. But my goal is to get him better…. I was honest with him. I don’t know how many other people say it to Michael, but I have to tell him what I think.”
Jordan liked to know bottom lines, and Hefferon repeated his: He preferred that Jordan sit out several games. Hefferon understood that, for competitive reasons, it was a tough decision for an athlete (or a coach, assuming Collins had any say in the decision) to make. If the Wizards, at 5–11, went on another losing streak, it might bury the team for the season. On the other hand, Hefferon viewed an NBA campaign as a long one (the Wizards had completed fewer than one-fifth of their games), remembering how Jordan had come back from his foot injury during his second season to lead the Bulls into the playoffs. That first rehab had been a lengthy ordeal. Addressing this tendinitis problem would require only a small fraction of that time. He lobbied Jordan courteously but vigorously.
His patient committed to nothing, and flew to Texas.
Jordan had decided not to sit out several games but just one, in San Antonio, the next night. He decided he would try saving his knees by barely practicing, or not practicing at all—then play against Houston, two nights later. Hefferon could offer no assurances about his future, particularly if Jordan rejected his most important advice. “If he plays fewer minutes, there’ll probably be fewer problems with the knees,” Hefferon said. “But the problem with all this has been that, in the heat of battle, he wants to play. In the fourth quarter, he doesn’t want to talk of minutes…. Realistically, if he says he’s feeling good and wants to play thirty-five to forty minutes, how are you going to tell him he can’t?…You would need to persuade him, and who’s going to do that? Who’s in a position to do that?”
Doug Collins?
Hefferon didn’t directly answer. He always had gotten along with Collins. “I don’t know that there’s anybody around there who can say to Michael, ‘You can’t play, you shouldn’t play.’”
By then, Doug Collins faced new questions about both the minutes he had played Jordan and about his denials in Wilmington of the tendinitis problem, which, in turn, raised issues about his candor and powers. Increasingly, he seemed to be not a normal coach but a nominal coach, and the real issue was no longer a knee but who led a team. The question was who had control of any team with Michael Jordan on it—over matters of personnel, lineups, playing time, game strategy and team morale—and whether Collins could ever be fully trusted to put the interests of his team above those of one player. The question had been there since the start of training camp in Wilmington, when Collins casually and sometimes smugly denied that Jordan had any serious physical difficulties. Had he been in the dark about Jordan’s knee problems? (This was, in retrospect, difficult to imagine.) Had he concealed the truth about a player’s health? If so, why? What did the matter say about his authority, or lack of authority, to do what was best for his team? Had he been instructed to be quiet or shade the truth since training camp?
I needed to ask him about what he had known, which raised the possibility that he might become very angry. I’d heard the stories of his battles with journalists in Chicago and Detroit; how, at some point, things became ugly enough between Collins and particular writers that relationships ruptured. During Collins’s days at the helm of the Bulls, it had gotten so bad at one point between the young coach and Chicago Tribune reporter Sam Smith that not only did they stop talking to each other for a while but Smith stopped writing about Collins during the period, so that Tribune readers were treated to daily Bulls stories surreally devoid of any reference to the Bulls coach.
Collins was easily triggered. Understandably, the media around the Wizards treated him gently, the way you would treat any volatile man, with the result that some questions had not been asked as aggressively as they might have been around another coach less prone to eruptions. It was a consideration that seldom arose in political reporting, where the moment that anything becomes an issue, the media zestfully confront the candidate or official, who blows up at his peril. By contrast, coaches, like athletes, have license to be loutish. They vent with impunity. On live television, the head football coach at the University of Michigan, Lloyd Carr, testily responded to an ABC sideline reporter’s politely phrased question about a bit of Carr’s play-calling this way: “Why would you ask a dumb question like that?” A variety of coaches in all sports periodically blow up or lash out at reporters, who in turn generally accept the blowups as the cost of doing business, trying to learn for the sake of their professional survival when it might be best to approach on discomfiting matters, and when to back off. There is a great deal of backing off.
Collins always had difficulty with questions that were not in keeping with his message for the day. Now, with the most famous knee in sports drained for the second time in eight days, Collins was back to talking about yet another plan to cut Jordan’s minutes, from an average of 38 down to about 32. In retrospect, he said to the scrum, he wished he hadn’t played Jordan so many minutes. He nodded and smiled, as if to say, There it is; the matter is closed. But the matter wasn’t closed.
To have a sense of what it is like between journalists and a coach when the subject of discussion is an athlete to whom the coach owes his job, it is instructive to know what happened between Doug Collins and me during a 24-hour period in early December, when the Wizards were on the road in Texas. It was the rare time when things did not feel sanitized around the team, perhaps because, away from Washington, the usual p.r. safeguards weren’t in place. In Houston, three days after the latest draining of the knee, I asked Collins when he had first learned about the tendinitis, reminding him of Jordan’s and his trainer’s version of when the ailment worsened: “Tim Grover and Michael now both say they felt the tendinitis coming on in training camp, that it was something of a problem then. When did you first become aware of it?”
Collins took his time answering, stammering a little, not a sign of defensiveness, just his way when speaking especially carefully. “Uhhmmm, oh, before the New York game [the opening night of the regular season],” he said. “I thought right when we played in the [Mohegan Sun] casino [in Uncasville, Connecticut, the last preseason game]. I thought he tweaked his knee…”
I asked whether Jordan exhibited any signs of knee problems before the preseason game in Connecticut.
Collins didn’t say no or yes. He looked over my head and answered slowly: “Well, you know what? I would basically go on just how he was playing and what he would say. Michael’s never gonna tell you.”
And Collins never asked Jordan how his knees felt during training camp in Wilmington—or so, again, he was asking the media to believe.
He moved on to a question about Kwame Brown, and I never really finished asking about the subject that day—nothing unusual, as reporting on sports figures goes. You work in a question here and there. You bide your time, city to city. Matt Williams, a Wizards p.r. official, came over to say hello, and I casually let him know I would be asking Collins a couple more questions about Jordan’s knees, hoping that he might convey my intention to Collins, so that no one would feel blindsided. Williams said okay, tersely. This reaction was not auspicious. There seemed to be a tension welling. It is always palpable if, as a journalist, you are on the wrong end of things with a professional sports team. If a superstar like Jordan and his coach have become disenchanted with you, you can quickly be made to feel like a troublemaker. It was happening now, signs being sent among some of the Wizards employees that I was pushing too hard, some signals less faint than others, a few trivially amusing. I walked into the locker room and heard an equipment man, in a voice not meant to be overheard, call in warning toward the coaches’ quarters, “Leahy’s here.” That night, a Wizards assistant trainer, a stout blond woman, walked around the press row passing out sticks of Big Red gum (Jordan seemed to like the product). It was something she occasionally did, and now she gave sticks to the reporters on each side of me, and then all around me, but not to me.
“Hi—may I get a stick of gum, too?” I called out.
She looked at me, and moved on.
“Just a stick?” I said. “That’s dynamite gum, that Big Red gum.”
She kept walking.
A tiny thing, but the Big Red gum was a little red flag.
For a reporter, this is when, perversely perhaps, you think you are making headway. But at some point, you need to finish, and the time to finish was the next day, at a practice in Dallas, at the American Airlines Arena. Waiting for Collins, I began worrying about the possibility of a scene were he to become angry at my questions. I asked Matt Williams whether Collins might prefer it if I spoke to him away from the rest of the media—off to the side, after he had finished with the scrum.
Williams said he’d prefer that, too, and walked over to Collins to ask him about it.
Williams came back and shook his head. “He said no.”
I told Williams I thought I would be asking the questions anyway.
Williams just nodded.
Now here came Collins, running a hand through his gray crew cut, shuffling over on his bad hips. The scrum enveloped him. He stood on a practice court, at the other end of which Jordan was shooting with Brendan Haywood. Jordan occasionally looked over, spinning a ball on his fingers, throwing up a hook shot, glancing back at us, tossing up another hook. Collins was saying he loved Michael, and that his knee looked good. I prepared to ask my questions toward the end, after reporters who had stories to write that day had had a chance to get all they needed. But then the session ended abruptly. As Collins walked off, I strolled over to him.
This may or may not have been a good move.
But we were alone at least. The television microphones were not around him. Maybe he would feel less besieged. He stared at me. I told him I just had a few questions, only needed a couple of minutes. He kept staring. I asked him about training camp: “Did Grover and Michael not tell you about the tendinitis?”
Collins folded his arms across his chest. “We never discussed it.”
Did you think his problem was just part of the normal aches and pains associated with any training camp?
“Yes, yes. I don’t know where you’re going…”
You thought it was just normal aches and pains?
“I didn’t think anything.”
Were you concerned that if you talked about it that the media would be on a big tendinitis watch?
He sighed. He turned slightly and bent his head, as if contemplating what to say next. He quickly turned back, having settled on something; he was going to say it. “Michael is in a situation where, you know, if he gets tendinitis, then everybody says, See, you’re too old, you shouldn’t have come back. I mean, he gets it no matter what he does. He gets it from every direction.”
He shook his head, as if angry for having said this much, angry for being prodded. His head had that familiar little tremble that it got when he was deeply emotional, a shake like a tuning fork’s.
I could see Matt Williams walking over. Time to finish. “Just a last question,” I said. “On—”
Collins cut me off. “You’re trying to run me into a circle…You guys. You guys are having this guy under such a microscope. I mean, day to day, all you’re doing is watching this guy’s every move, and imagine if we turned it around?”
It was a good point. How much weirder and more scrutinized could a life be?
Williams had arrived. I tried wrapping up. “The question—”
Collins exploded. “I’m done with you for today. God dang it, I’m done. I mean…” He paused, looked up and shouted, not so much at me, not so much to Williams, but to the air. “This guy, this guy’s a stalker.”
At the other end of the court, Jordan and some other players wheeled and looked at us.
Collins stormed off.
By contrast, the man in the storm’s eye seemed unruffled, even looked a little amused. As Collins was fuming along the practice court, Jordan spun his ball, whispering something to Haywood, then glancing at me. He looked in a fine mood. “Doug,” he called out, softly, the way a man would call out the name of a comrade just to acknowledge a job well done. Collins was one of his buffers to the world, a defender who freed Jordan to concentrate on his pleasures, one of which was about to take place, Jordan preparing for the briefest of one-on-one confrontations with the 7-foot Haywood. He stood on the left side of the floor, at a diagonal to the basket. Teammates cleared the court.
“Let’s go,” Jordan said to Haywood, faking a jump shot, then bursting along the left baseline toward the basket, where Haywood met him in the air and swatted away his reverse layup. The kid bounded around the court, he whooped, he raised the ball like a trophy.
“That’s a foul,” Jordan cried.
“Block, block,” a happy Haywood yelled. “That’s it, that’s it.”
“Foul,” Jordan said, but he did not argue strenuously, or for long. A smile worked at a corner of his mouth. He sidled over to Haywood, whispered in his ear and patted his back.
All the while, his head bowed, Collins stood off to the side, shouldering his burdens. Matt Williams told Collins that he couldn’t be screaming at reporters. I privately wondered if I would be reporting on this moment if the coach involved had been more successful. After all, Collins wasn’t the only coach who became upset with the press. A variety of sports pooh-bahs (football’s Bill Parcells, a two-time Super Bowl winner, sprung to mind) sometimes turned ugly and abusive around writers, and (Bobby Knight’s flameouts aside) almost always the incidents went unreported, especially if the coaches won. If they brought home championships, it was said that they were “generals,” whose volatility stemmed from their high standards, their fire meriting our accolades. Winners received exemptions. Only second-tier coaches like Collins who flew into tirades ran the risk of being written off as jerks, but even they generally received passes for their behavior. I had tired of the charade in any case.
They were not esteemed “generals.” They didn’t lead armies, save countries or implement the Marshall Plan. They presided over games. They called for plays, they cut rosters, they screamed at young kids like Kwame Brown, and they tried to keep Michael Jordan and other superstars happy. Collins was simply another guy accustomed to screaming.
Nonetheless, glancing at him, I felt some sympathy. I never had the sense that he took pleasure in erupting at anybody. Usually his outbursts were instinctive and defensive, Collins intent on protecting Jordan, on demonstrating his gratitude and loyalty to his benefactor. It was a constant burden. I looked across this Dallas practice court and saw the toll it took on him. Some men fray more easily than others. “This shit,” he was saying.
Power relationships between superstar athletes and uncelebrated coaches do not need to be one-sided from the beginning. Someone must give in to create a relationship’s imbalance, someone must cave. Under pressure, Doug Collins had yielded to Michael Jordan more than a decade earlier, during the coach’s turbulent stint at the helm of the Bulls. Deference swiftly became habit. It was difficult to point to a single event in Chicago that triggered Collins’s subservience, but several people in the Bulls organization remembered a closed-door intrasquad scrimmage during the 1987–1988 season when Jordan began complaining that Collins, the scorekeeper, had deprived his team of points. No, the score’s right, said Collins. Like hell it is, Jordan yelled back, the argument escalating.
The issue seemed minor to the point of silliness to everyone else on the floor, but Jordan fumed, stomping out of practice. Collins called to him: You just can’t leave a practice, Michael—come back here.
Jordan kept walking, a stunning act of petulance and defiance, an enfant terrible moment rivaling anything that a young Wizards player would later do to Collins. That evening, the Bulls, scheduled to fly to Indianapolis for a game the next day, sat shocked on a plane, aware that Jordan had not shown up. The players stared at Collins, who, though outwardly calm, had his head down, in the posture of a condemned man who knew the fate awaiting him if a reprieve did not come. If the plane left without Jordan, there would be a furor, stories of dissension, and Collins, not Jordan, would soon be gone. A former Bull, Brad Sellers, remembered the rapt fascination aboard—the plane sitting at the O’Hare gate at 5:09, scheduled to leave at 5:10, Collins saying nothing, most of the players staring at the plane’s open door.
In the next few seconds, Jordan appeared and coolly walked past Collins without acknowledging him. “Maybe Michael was a little late, but it was a power play, too,” Sellers said. “It made Jordan’s point about who was in charge…. Nothing was the same after that. The guys knew who had control.”
In that moment, the relationship between coach and star changed forever, the pecking order established—Jordan the star, Collins to serve at Jordan’s pleasure.
Careful not to offend thereafter, Collins frequently turned to others to confront Jordan about sensitive matters, one day dispatching an assistant coach, Phil Jackson, to press Jordan about Jackson’s conviction that a star became great only when he sublimated his desire for individual accolades in the interests of bettering his teammates and winning championships. Emissaries on Collins’s behalf were always useful. Even when trying to be helpful, Collins sometimes said the wrong thing, plagued by a tin ear for what caused offense, cursed by poor political antennae. Prior to the start of the coach’s first season with the Bulls, he had wanted to help guide Jordan through whatever rehabilitation might remain for his still questionable, if seemingly healed, left foot. The broken foot had been a sensitive issue. Jerry Krause, in trying to bar Jordan from playing at the end of the previous season so as to extend his rehab, had told his star that his return to the court was a matter for the club, not Jordan, to decide; that Jordan was the Bulls’ “property.” An insulted Jordan played anyway, and never really forgave Krause. Good political sense dictated avoiding the issue if one wanted to remain in Jordan’s good graces. But Collins raised it, trying to project empathy. He told Jordan about his own foot injury at the height of his career and how he believed he had rushed its recovery to his detriment, offering the recollection as a cautionary tale about the risks of subjecting a foot to stresses too soon.
It was the last story his listener wanted to hear. Jordan replied frostily: “That’s your foot; this is mine.”
After Jordan’s tirade at the intrasquad scrimmage, Collins was even more careful around the star, with assistants like Jackson assuming an increasing role in working with Jordan. Collins earned Jordan’s tolerance and friendship, though eventually the coach’s mood swings wore on Jordan, too. In the end, with his volatility having alienated several players and key Bulls officials, Collins was out the door, and Jackson on his way to becoming a coaching legend. Never had Jordan accorded Collins the regard he soon paid to Jackson, whom Jordan more than once said he loved, adding that he could never play for another coach.
Never is a short-lived thing in sports, however. So here was Collins again, gratefully referring to Jordan as “my boss.” From the viewpoint of players and at least one Wizards official, he sounded subservient, emboldening Jordan while undercutting his own authority in the locker room. Never did he have the confident bearing of most coaches, not their easy banter, nor chin-raised magisterial ease, instead always seemingly a trifle leery around people, looking around furtively, especially amid strangers: He was a congenitally suspicious man.
He had had a life of basketball disappointments that left their marks. He might have been an Olympic hero but for a rank injustice: In the gold medal game against the Soviet Union in 1972, with the United States trailing by a point in the final seconds, he had stolen the ball, been fouled, and hit two free throws for the apparent victory, only to watch Olympic referees give the Soviets three inbound attempts to make a basket, after the last of which the great robbery was complete and the Americans the losers. Collins wept afterward and, for years afterward, sometimes teared up in private when discussing the loss. But the heartbreak seemed to stiffen his resolve, if anything.
No one could question his steeliness as a player, nor the source of his commitment to preparation and standards. When he was a small boy, growing up in Benton, Illinois, his father had been the local county sheriff, and the Collins family lived for several years in a two-story county house adjoining the jail. The bedroom of young Doug Collins was on the upper floor, with only about 30 feet and a wall separating his room from the second-story jail cells that his father presided over. The son embraced tough standards early in life. He acquired a lawman’s sense of rigid propriety, of right being a path from which a winner could not stray. Right meant practicing hard, meant staying after practice to work harder, meant year-round conditioning, meant agonizing so much after a loss that it was unbearable. Right meant agonizing as much as your coach, and Collins as a player had agonized more than anybody.
Playing when hurt, he likely sacrificed years off his career. A Sports Illustrated cover boy while a college All-American at Illinois State, and the first player selected overall in the NBA’s 1973 draft, he had been a 6′ 6″ All-Star guard for the Philadelphia 76ers, though his playing days were characterized by frustrations—a near-miss in the 1977 NBA Finals, and a series of debilitating injuries. He left with no championships, despite playing with Julius Erving and George McGinnis. He had suffered a series of knee injuries, and now was scheduled to receive his hip replacement in the next off-season, moving in the shuffle of a man 20 years older. He had given everything and expected nothing less from his players in Chicago and Detroit. Six years as a head coach had brought him young stars but no loyal disciples or NBA titles—Phil Jackson had shown the Bulls how to win.
Now Jackson did television commercials and was America’s favorite Zen master, and Collins was barely hanging on in the basketball profession, trying to please a player whom he called his boss. Jordan’s status as his professional savior meant that Collins—even after Jordan the player ostensibly gave up all managerial authority in accordance with NBA rules—would take his cues from him.
That meant, among other things, that the shadow boss told Collins about what he hoped to see in the way of game strategy. Collins’s submissiveness left a Collins friend in the organization fearing that it might undermine the coach’s authority with his other players. Why don’t you treat him like any other player? he asked Collins, whose silence suggested to his friend that he didn’t want to hear such advice again; it would do him no good.
He routinely deferred to the star in front of his squad. One afternoon, during a scrimmage at a closed-door practice, Collins casually said, “I’ll let the players keep the score.”
Jordan could not resist having his one-upsmanship: “I haven’t found a damn coach yet who could do it.”
Collins knew his limits around Jordan. He worked hard at remaining his friend, buying cigars as a present for him, sticking up for him around the press. When it came to the issue of playing time, Jordan seldom sought out Collins directly. Usually, Tim Grover approached the coach, bearing a message from Jordan. “Doug, he’s feeling good,” Grover often said, which was code for, Don’t cut his minutes down, don’t interrupt his flow. During games, when Collins readied himself to take Jordan out at prearranged points, he looked at Jordan. If Jordan stared hard and long back, it meant, Don’t lift me, I’m feeling good. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to come out.
A shadow coach, Jordan guided the most important decisions. His control over personnel was absolute. If he wanted Kwame benched, Kwame was out. If he was dissatisfied with Courtney Alexander’s play, then Alexander sat. If a point guard didn’t get him the ball often enough, or in the right places, the point guard faced demotion. Once the coach talked semi-jokingly about being “lasered” by Jordan if he made a move that offended the star. Such obsequiousness was unseemly, thought the worrying Wizards official. “Doug jeopardizes the respect of the younger guys for him when they think that Michael can run him that easily,” the official observed. “Maybe Doug thinks there’s no other way.”
One frequently heard the argument that Phil Jackson would have handled Jordan differently, a criticism that was not so much speculative as beside the point. It did not take a Jackson to wield influence over Jordan or any other headstrong athlete. Historically, professional sports have been replete with unglamorous coaches and managers guiding athletic gods. Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Jim Brown, Joe Namath, Reggie Jackson, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, a mix of testy, flighty and demanding personalities, all played, successfully and respectfully, for the little-known and charismatically challenged. Even now, the New York Yankees’ manager, Joe Torre, skillfully presides over a team made up of barons whose salaries in some cases dwarf his own. Jordan and Collins’s pairing bore no resemblance to the superstar-coach relationship of, say, Babe Ruth and Miller Huggins, the Yankee manager through all of the 1920s, who had no qualms about letting Ruth know who was in charge.
A leader needed to assert himself. Coaching, like so much else in life, turned on calculated risk, and risk was what Collins was reluctant to take when it came to Jordan. What would Jordan have done had Collins taken firmer hold of the reins and declared that the star would play fewer minutes, or that he would no longer be exerting so much influence over personnel decisions? Certainly, Jordan could have had Pollin fire the coach, but the move would have looked petty and spiteful, severely damaging the god’s image. That reality alone always gave Collins more leverage than he understood. Perhaps it didn’t matter. He wanted Jordan’s affection. He would do whatever Jordan demanded.
With his knee drained and John Hefferon’s key advice disregarded, Jordan sat out just one game, against San Antonio, where more than 35,000 fans—the biggest NBA crowd of the regular season—showed up hoping to see him play. It was the first game he had missed because of injury since the ’92–’93 season, a streak during which, fans remembered, he had played through bulging ankles and a broken facial bone and an infected foot, as if impervious to mortals’ agonies. Down to the last few minutes, Jordan diehards in the Alamodome believed he would suit up. Disappointed, they nonetheless applauded warmly when he walked out of the tunnel in a cream-colored suit. The ovation built as he reached his seat on the end of the Wizards bench, Jordan waving slightly, smiling. Then he plopped down on the bench and, laughing, ribbed Popeye Jones: “Don’t get your ass beat.” He seemed relaxed enough, and then the game began and he couldn’t sit still. He fitfully flexed his right knee. He pulled on his gold earring, grimaced and covered his face at bad passes.
The young Wizards, particularly Richard Hamilton, weren’t exactly despairing over Jordan’s absence or the possibility he might need to sit out more games. “The guys take pride and want to show we can play without Michael,” Hamilton said, even suggesting that Jordan could benefit by observing them for a night. “Hopefully, he can watch and maybe get an understanding of our games. The guys out here are the guys who played on last year’s team with me…. We can’t put all our eggs in one basket, planning on Michael playing…. We have to approach this as the team we’re going to play with…”
Courtney Alexander replaced Jordan in the lineup and played well on the offensive end, hitting 8–17 shots, scoring 16 points to complement Hamilton’s 24. But this would be a tough night for the young Wizards to try proving themselves without Jordan. San Antonio’s stars included the league’s best young big man, Tim Duncan, and the classy veteran David Robinson. Jordan looked pained as San Antonio built its lead and exploited defensive mismatches, particularly one that called for Kwame Brown to somehow handle Robinson. Jordan groaned and jerked his head back a few times, as if to recoil from the horror.
The San Antonio fans appeared reasonably content: their team was winning, and they had a chance to see Jordan, who emerged to a new wave of screams before the second half, thousands of necks craning as he gingerly walked past, people leaping and pointing, ecstatic in much the same way that crowds once reacted to a sighting of DiMaggio on Old Timers’ Day. Only this was bigger; he had a legend possessed by no athletes other than Ali and Ruth. He was equal parts man and Wonder now, and people paid big money and endured horrific traffic jams just to say they had occupied his air. His lure meant that financial forces changed wherever he went on the road. But a crowd could not change any team’s on-court fortunes. The Wizards got pummeled, losing by 15, a margin unreflective of how lopsided the game felt. The team’s record sunk to 5–12.
Thousands of fans hung around afterward, hopeful of getting one more glimpse of him. They waited an hour, two hours, long after the Wizards team bus had left. Jordan was sitting in an airport by then, deep in his tube. Privately, he already had put an end to any serious thought that he would rest the knee for another game. He was upset: He needed for the sake of everybody to get back to playing, why couldn’t people see that? Didn’t everyone goddamn understand they couldn’t afford to drop every fucking game in Texas? Hadn’t everybody just seen what happened out there? He repeated a refrain. We’re losing, we’re getting our asses beat, this is unacceptable, losing like this is fucking unacceptable.
Only it wasn’t unacceptable, not really; very few things were unacceptable in the NBA so long as the big money rolled in. In Washington, more money poured into the Wizards’ coffers than ever in the team’s history—despite a team that already had experienced an eight-game losing streak.
All the normal gauges of sports—team standings, wins and losses, playoff possibilities—had a curious irrelevance by then. A Jordan game now was not basketball so much as a transcendental event, and the Wizards less a losing NBA team than a novelty act, a touring troupe led by a charismatic figure aiming for nothing less than his professional resurrection. It was basketball’s equivalent of a fantasy Beatles reunion at Wembley Stadium; it was Sinatra at the Garden. It did not particularly matter how much or how little the show moved you so long as you saw it. You’d seen him, you’d done the Jordan thing, you had the souvenir jersey. Thus motivated, they poured through the turnstiles everywhere—worshippers of a man, addicts for big events, lovers of a game, moths to a flame.
The Wizards were on the way to leading the NBA in total home and road attendance for the first time in franchise history, selling out each of the team’s 41 games at MCI, increasing the club’s home attendance by a league-high 32 percent and banking what some industry experts estimated to be an extra $450,000 per home game in ticket revenue—which translated to a gaudy boost of more than $18 million by season’s end, which did not include the bonanza in extra souvenir and concessions sales.
But even the team’s new profits in the 2001–2002 season paled against what Jordan the gold mine meant to the NBA as a whole. In the last year of their contracts with the league, NBC and Turner saw their ratings climb, most importantly among 18-to 34-year-olds. Foreign TV ratings soared. Thirty-eight of the Wizards’ 41 road games would be sellouts, with the only vacant seats coming on nights later in the season when an injured Jordan could not play. Coupled with a coming-out of new stars and a surge in NBA merchandising, Jordan set off a tsunami of new gate and ancillary income for the league.
Best of all, for several team owners, the new money sparked a casualty. The NBA’s so-called luxury tax—the levy imposed on high-spending teams whose player salaries exceed a ceiling reflective of a defined ratio of league revenue—already had likely disappeared for the season, in large part because the jump in revenue from Jordan’s presence allowed for larger aggregate player salaries, thereby pushing the year’s salary cap beyond even the most profligate teams’ expenditures. Three NBA big spenders originally projected to be hit by the tax—Dallas, New York and Portland—consequently would pay nothing, saving their owners an estimated $60 million.
In the end, Jordan’s financial boost to the league would be ineffably high. “If the league wrote Jordan a check for $100 million, the league would still be getting the better end of the bargain,” said Alvin Gentry, the Los Angeles Clippers’ head coach, aware that Jordan was receiving only a $1 million player salary and donating it to September 11th victims (a contribution that simultaneously sparked praise and criticism as some observers felt it was a transparent effort by Jordan to compensate for his lack of community involvement—an issue that meant nothing to the league, which simply loved its bonanza).
Such gratitude toward Jordan sparked a powerful deference throughout the NBA, a reluctance to press Midas to do anything he didn’t wish, even when his edicts meant the Wizards broke league rules. Wanting to minimize scrutiny of his practice habits, particularly as his right knee worsened, Jordan and the Wizards casually flouted NBA rules governing the relationship between the media and players, including those guaranteeing reporters the opportunity to observe the last half hour of team practices. The vast majority of practices were closed altogether by Collins and Jordan, the coach typically exchanging a glance with his star when a Wizards p.r. official asked whether the media could be admitted that day. Jordan would usually be riding a stationary bike by then.
“No,” Collins said, dispatching someone to tell the media to stay put.
The media complained to Wizards p.r. men like Matt Williams, but Williams’s ultimate boss had no complaints about Jordan or Collins, or at least none he would mention publicly. Abe Pollin’s tone conveyed only absolute delight with everything. He had a two-faced quality during Jordan’s best days in Washington, his public face radiating unqualified admiration for the star. To listen to Pollin was to believe that, on and off the court, Jordan had comported himself brilliantly and nobly. “Michael is showing everybody why he is such an inspirational person and a classy guy doing a great thing,” Pollin said in passing one night.
Jordan was making Pollin a lot of money. “Michael’s impact already has been dramatic,” Pollin went on happily, telling people in days to come that, thanks to Jordan and the newly constituted Wizards, it looked like years of financial malaise had ended, that the franchise would actually be realizing a profit for the first time in many years. The Wizards season ticket sales had climbed to more than 14,000 seats, the luxury boxes were being filled, revenue both from ad sales in Wizards souvenir programs and from corporate signage around MCI had spiked. Jordan was as reliable as the United States Mint, and as long as he was, nothing would be permitted to impede the money machine.
But, beneath the public surface, the tensions between the two men’s camps persisted. Susan O’Malley still wanted Jordan’s occasional help in marketing and public relations activities. Her requests did not call for much of his time, but now Jordan tried minimizing all commitments other than those on the court. It did not help matters that it was O’Malley, so aggressive from the Jordan camp’s view, who was asking for his time. Even her least-demanding requests were often met by Jordan’s resistance, escalating the uneasiness between the two. One winter day, after a special practice staged on the MCI court for Wizards season ticket holders, she had approached him as he was leaving the court and asked if he might be able to take just a few minutes to chat briefly with a group of ticket holders. They stood alone together at the foot of the tunnel leading to the Wizards dressing room, alongside the overhang of seats behind a basket, Jordan towering over her, O’Malley lifting her head nearly straight up to make eye contact. Jordan said how, unfortunately, he couldn’t do anything at that moment, citing something in his schedule. “I’m sorry,” he could be heard saying.
O’Malley didn’t yield. She kept softly but tenaciously pushing: It would just take a few minutes, Michael. They’d love to see you.
Jordan’s body language was adolescent-like. He slouched, glanced down, rolled his shoulders, swayed, looked trapped. He had a commitment, he said.
O’Malley became firmer: Michael, it would just take a few minutes.
Now Jordan was shaking his head: Sorry, sorry, no, can’t do it, sorry.
They parted after a while, with neither really saying, “’Bye,” or “Thanks anyway,” or “See you soon”—their conversation just ending, the frustration of each palpable.
Once he soured on someone, that relationship, for all practical purposes, was dead. O’Malley had become his new Jerry Krause. It guaranteed that the strains between the two, and in turn the tensions between Jordan and Pollin, would worsen. Meanwhile, flush with financial health, Pollin could not have appeared happier. “Everything Michael’s doing is great for the Wizards—I’m so lucky, we’re all so lucky,” he said, anticipating another night inside his arena teeming with the well-heeled and free-spending.
Jordan wasn’t thinking dollars at that moment. What the fuck was wrong with all these people doubting he could take care of his body? he asked. Nobody knows me like me. He had been miserable in San Antonio, but now, just two days later in Houston, he was on the court, his rehab having lasted all of one game.
Collins had told the media that the possibility loomed that Jordan wouldn’t be playing in games on successive nights, and that he might occasionally be told to sit out games during particularly crushing stretches: “On some nights, we may have to say, ‘Sit it out.’”
He hadn’t cleared that comment with Jordan. Jordan had no such plans, so Collins wouldn’t be publicly saying anything like that ever again.
It was Classic Collins, people joked. He veered off script, saying something that simply popped into his head. Jordan always forgave him, believing Collins had his best interests at heart, never bothered in the way he might have been had a Jerry Krause uttered the same words. Collins had passed the loyalty test, the proof of which was that, after a gaffe, he swiftly got hold of the Jordan camp’s talking points again. Displaying his malleability in Texas, he voiced sympathy with Jordan’s instinct to play until his body had nothing left: “You want to know there’s not another pitch left in that arm or even one more time up and down the floor. You want to know it’s all gone…”
Jordan hadn’t practiced, hadn’t even touched a ball for four days by the time they hit Houston, his conditioning a mess, his finesse gone, his gait stiff. Panting through a lung-scorching 33 minutes, he looked ungainly for three quarters, even during a baseline dunk when his leap was so precariously low that he had to rattle the ball off the back rim. His outside shot had lost all radar-guidance, clanging short and off to the side.
He was pitiable, and then he was not. A single play resurrected him in the fourth quarter. He beat two defenders and hit an improbable, high-arcing reverse layup (the basketball equivalent of a trick billiards shot, deftly executed with added English and assisted by no small portion of luck). Next he canned a couple of tightly defended jumpers. And the game swung. It was in such moments, at 38 years and 10 months—whittled by age, winded from inactivity, his skills maybe 25 to 50 percent of what they had been at his peak—that even a doubter could see that here was the most remarkable athlete ever to play on an American sports team. You could point to the erosion of his skills, obviously. But even great mountains erode. Erosion is the inevitability. The prize, if any is out there, is in the way men resist it. Jordan’s decline only made what he did on a night like this so confoundingly supernatural. He was the aged athlete who could just as well have been playing in an old-timers’ game, but instead was in Houston, scoring on a bum leg against a double-teaming defense, and humbling men 10 and 15 years younger. In all, he scored 10 of his 18 points in the final quarter and collected several assists on no-look passes, and though he hit only 9 of 23 shots during the game, his savvy made the difference down the stretch. Hamilton, who had led the team for three quarters, played superbly again, finishing with a game-high 26 points. Haywood had a big block in the final minutes. Lue hit two huge jumpers, and the grunting, bruising, indomitable Popeye Jones finished with 10 points and 10 rebounds on his own pair of pained knees.
The Wizards won, 85–82, which made their record only slightly less woeful at 6–12. What no one knew is that they had begun a long winning streak. The team flew to Dallas, where Jordan again couldn’t find his shot for most of the game—a portent of disaster, it seemed, particularly against a team as offensively potent as Dallas. But the biggest Dallas gun, forward Dirk Nowitzki, sat out with an injury, and so even with Jordan making only 3 of 15 shots through three quarters, and Dallas once leading by as many as 20 points, the Wizards found themselves in the game late.
Jordan then picked up a couple of steals without seemingly moving. On defense, he seldom darted any longer. But, in his best moments, he read the court like Garry Kasparov scanned a chessboard, anticipating foes’ moves and filling lanes to make interceptions. Some of it derived from his sense of fate, the conviction that good things were meant to happen to him on a court, a gift unaffected by his struggles in a game. He knew that basketball was an aggregation of disappointments. What distinguished Jordan from mortals by then was less his talent than his refusal to back off on a bad night: He didn’t cower like beaten prey and disappear in the midst of a 3–15, not even with a throbbing knee. The doctor who knew him best thought it explained why Jordan had been uniformly great during his career’s most formidable challenges. “Michael always thinks that the next shot he’s putting up is the one going in; he’s always saying to teammates, ‘Keep putting it up, keep putting it up,’” Hefferon observed. “His belief is absolute, no matter how he’s feeling physically.”
And so it was that Jordan scored 15 points in the fourth quarter, and the shortest of win-streaks was alive at two. At the game’s end, he draped a long arm around the neck of Lue, an amazingly intimate gesture for a man unknown for such displays. He walked happily, if a tad awkwardly, toward a trainer’s room, where ice waited for his knee. He flexed it. Someone asked him how he was feeling. “Fine,” he said. His listeners waited for elaboration. “Fine,” he repeated. It was as much as he would give them.
They flew to Memphis, where they won again. Hamilton had a season-high 30 points, flaying Memphis’s heralded rookie, Shane Battier, hitting 15 of 24 shots, just another indication of how befuddling his mid-range jump shot had become to league defenses since he returned to the starting lineup. Jordan contented himself for the time being with feeding Hamilton the ball in stretches, picking up nine assists to go along with 16 points. For the first time all year, the Wizards looked less like the Jordan Show than a real team. Other players seemed to be jelling. Lue and Chris Whitney hit long jumpers. Laettner played tougher defense. Haywood was spectacular, with 15 rebounds to go with 17 points, on a night when, along with Laettner, he helped to frustrate the league’s eventual rookie of the year, Spain’s Pau Gasol, who managed to pull down 13 rebounds but was limited to six points. The only disappointing note was Kwame Brown, who still looked confused, unable to score a point or pull down more than a single rebound. Courtney Alexander would not be a disappointment because Alexander did not play, placed on the injured list with an ankle sprain.
The team’s starting lineup and reserve rotation finally looked set. Players understood their roles. Laettner had become more assertive. Hamilton did not need to fear an imminent benching. Morale was good, and the Wizards won at home against Miami and New York, the winning streak now at five, Jordan and Hamilton combining for 48 points against Miami, and 53 against the Knicks. After the New York game, Hamilton tried spreading the praise, saying he had learned much from Jordan (“It’s wonderful listening to Michael…”) and, especially, assistant coach John Bach, with whom he had spent hours watching tapes and working on his defense.
As for Collins, Hamilton said that he and the coach were “still trying to feel each other out,” adding that, with every day, he had a better sense what Collins wanted. In between pleasantries, Hamilton slipped in his observations on what changes had benefited the team. The team’s tendency to run most of the offense through Jordan seemed to be shifting, he said, pleased that he had begun seeing the ball as much as he wanted it: “At first, we used to throw the ball to Michael. Play over. Now we’re running through our offense, starting to look at second and third options…. Everybody’s benefiting now.”
He seemed, wherever the Wizards went, to be the target of reporters who wanted him to say how much, as one reporter put it, “Michael’s influence is sinking into your team.” Hamilton deftly changed the premise, keeping his answer short: “I think the big thing is that we’re learning to play off each other.” He would say the next day: “Michael is getting a better feel for me. He’s starting to understand what I can do.” As he starred in more games, he became emboldened. He was not going to be Jordan’s sidekick forever: “The game is now more up-tempo, more younger players…. I think [Jordan] is willing now to allow us to go ahead and play our game. And we all feed off each other. It’s not just us feeding off him.”
Beneath the surface, there was a lingering tension. Jordan complimented Hamilton while portraying himself as the teacher finally getting through to an up-and-down student: “I feel good that he’s accepted, you know, the education that I’ve tried to pass on to him, to where he’s starting to see it within our structured offense.” And then Jordan couldn’t help himself: “And that [means] not isolating [going against defenders one-on-one] and alienating the rest of his teammates.” He let the scrum think about that for a half beat. Jordan ended on a vaguely positive note: “I think he’s understanding all-around play, and hopefully he can learn from that education.”
Amid the win and tenuous harmony, one major thing had gone wrong on the night of the New York game. Laettner broke his left fibula and would be out for about a month, which meant, said Collins, that Brown would be starting the Wizards’ next game in Toronto. Once there, Jordan effectively overrode Collins’s decision, recommending to Collins that Popeye Jones start in Laettner’s place, as Jones, thought Jordan, would be more effective against Toronto’s toughest inside player, Antonio Davis.
The game marked Washington’s first with Toronto since Vince Carter had so badly scorched the Wizards during preseason. Jordan decided to guard Carter one-on-one, and in the first half, Carter had 23 points, most of them coming on three-pointers. Carter simply pulled up and, with Jordan backing up, cast up rainbow jumpers. Jordan looked helpless for a while. (“He’s a tough cover,” Jordan said later. “It took me a whole quarter to learn his tendencies.”)
With Carter already at 19 points, Jordan gave way for a while in the second quarter to Tyrone Nesby, who never made better use of his toughness than in the next six minutes. He had his best defensive stint of the year, bumping Carter, knocking him out of his rhythm, forcing the star to put extra arc on his shot. “My whole thing,” Nesby said later, “was just tryin’ to get [Carter] frustrated…. He didn’t want to post me up because [opponents] kind of get hit with [my] arm a lot.”
By the time Jordan got back on the floor, Carter seemed to have lost something, a new frustration gripping him. When he blocked a Jordan shot, only to be called for a foul, he snickered at referee Rodney Mott: “Yeah, bail him out. Way to bail him out.”
Jordan shot a look Carter’s way. In the second half, everything turned, and Carter wilted. Jordan shut him out completely—Carter scoreless for the remainder of the game, seemingly so discouraged that he only put up four shots, none of which was remotely close, Jordan smothering him, chastising him a couple of times when Carter complained to officials. He took delight in bumping the younger man late in the fourth quarter, Carter not bumping back, broken by then, Jordan now psychologically dominating the matchup that he had dreamt aloud about back in his office a year earlier. Later, Jordan would declare, with the understatement of a satisfied victor, that it had required some study of Carter to “take his rhythm away.”
The Wizards came from 19 points down to win by five. Hamilton, who had been selected by the NBA as the league’s Player of the Week, carried the team offensively again with 27 points, and Jordan added 21, even with another poor shooting performance. Having won their sixth straight, the Wizards were now only a game under .500, as hot as any team in the NBA’s Eastern Conference. Amazingly, less than two weeks after having his knee drained, Jordan had played 36 minutes, already back to logging heavy playing time despite John Hefferon’s warnings and Doug Collins’s oft-repeated assurances that the minutes would be coming down. The Wizards were thriving, and everywhere around the NBA, and the MCI Center in particular, the registers were clanging with new money, and the expectations of more millions in Wizards’ playoff ticket revenue. But it was a fool’s gold. Jordan was about to play the best ball of his comeback while grinding down those knees against all reason.
The day after the Toronto game, on Monday, December 17, Abe Pollin threw a holiday dinner for the Wizards’ players and coaches—part of a multicourse, weeklong lovefest, an owner’s bacchanal. As the Wizards beat Atlanta at home to reach .500 and stretch the winning streak to seven, Pollin expressed gratitude for all his players and coaches, and his “luck” at landing two people as wonderful as Doug Collins and Michael Jordan. He reminded people that, before the season ever began, he had predicted the Wizards would make the playoffs. I know people laughed at that, he said. But look at the players. Aren’t they playing great? I still hold to my prediction they’re going to make the playoffs. And people aren’t laughing anymore when I talk about the playoffs, are they?
He had high praise for Collins. “Doug is a smart coach and is doing a fantastic job,” Pollin said. “He likes hard work, and I do, too. And he’s showing the players the importance of it. Tough defense, teamwork and hard work, and they’ve all picked it up.”
He had a team now, he happily emphasized. “Sure, Michael brings them in, but people coming to MCI are excited about seeing the younger players, too, because they’re getting better all the time and winning. We’re competitive, and I give a lot of the credit for that to Doug and Michael…. This is the place to be now. People want to seethe Wizards. I’m so excited about the playoffs. I think we’re going to get there…. I just say, Let’s keep it going, let’s keep it going. And, as I say to everybody, I know Michael’s going to lead the way.”
Do the two of you talk a lot?
“We keep in touch,” Pollin said.
Inside MCI Center, any apparel or souvenir with the Jordan name flew off shelves. His jerseys, ranging from $35 to $169, sold briskly. In a game against Atlanta that week, as often happened at MCI, the crowd chanted his name —Joooorr-dan, Joooor-dan—less an exhortation than a feel-good mantra, more reverential than rabid. Sometimes fans booed when he laid a ball up for a gentle basket rather than dunked, a soft boo, not a display of anger, only comradely disappointment: Most of the booing came from good-natured, middle-aged fans who keenly understood from their own lives the new limits.
Still, the reality chipped away at his majesty. He could score 35, and some fans would leave the arena feeling strangely deprived, thinking they had missed something but having difficulty putting their fingers on exactly what. Their ennui had nothing to do with his productivity, only aesthetics: A night’s worth of flawless fallaway jump shots never would have the impact on them of one tomahawk dunk. His art lay not in point totals but in his magic, only most of his magic was gone. Younger players best understood the inevitability of this, sympathizing with him, viewing the fans’ disappointment as an injustice. “Jordan doesn’t have the Ups to dunk all the time anymore,” Tracy McGrady said. “So? I don’t know why people get surprised…He’s older now. He does different stuff now. He has to.”
Nonetheless, the change in his game had a profound effect on the way audiences viewed him. His magnetism did not extend as far during his second comeback, his appeal among youth in particular not as strong as during the peak of his magic in the ’90s. The new tableau of the comfortable American family at a Jordan game looked different. It was not uncommon to see a parent wearing, as a kind of sweatshirt, a fresh Jordan jersey purchased just minutes earlier, with two more jerseys slung across his arm for his children to don later perhaps if the mood struck them, which was questionable, as the kids had come to the game in their own favorite jerseys—an Iverson here, a Carter there, a Bryant, an O’Neal. The scenes reflected a shifting marketplace, the signs of which were everywhere. The first round of fan balloting for the All-Star Game had just come out, revealing that Jordan trailed no fewer than five players—Carter, Iverson, Bryant, O’Neal and Minnesota’s young star Kevin Garnett. He had lost his hold on children and young adults, and, in turn, his grip on advertisers had slackened, said analysts. His core audience skewed older now, but, even in that group, people’s fascination with him had waned. The new reality dented his appeal as a commercial spokesman. After an MCI commercial with him tested poorly, the corporation said it had no immediate plans for another Jordan television ad. Neither did Gatorade announce any role for him in an upcoming ad campaign. Nike indicated it would be using younger athletes to shill for Jordan’s new approximately $200 shoe, ready to come out on the market in 2002. He was the best player in the history of basketball, but he was now old-school in a game whose fans, particularly the urban young, gravitated to the young and fresh. In a cruel truth, he was losing worshippers at the same pace he was losing Ups.
In most cases now, the curious came to see him for the same reason that people went to see Niagara Falls or stared up at a lunar eclipse—because they wanted to glimpse the attraction. They packed MCI, and, after games, they jammed nearby Washington restaurants and clubs. The businesses’ owners were delighted, no one more so than Abe Pollin.
Jordan went out on the town sometimes with his crew—Tim Grover, George Koehler and other trusted friends. He had opened up an eponymous restaurant in Washington, but he generally preferred going to other restaurants and nightclubs, mostly Washington hangouts for the deep-pocketed and discreet. He liked Zola and Café Milano and sometimes a club called Dreams. He’d knock back a few drinks, settle in, maybe smoke a cigar, talk to some women, talk longer to others, accept a handshake from a club employee or two and chat for a bit with guys about basketball—not at all unusual doings, as evenings in the NBA go. Just the same, the regular media didn’t see any of it. Reporters heard about Jordan frequenting particular clubs, but never did they have a chance to get close enough to observe him in such places, the security around Jordan essential for warding off not only voyeurs but also the potentially unstable.
The result was that no reporter or stranger could dare think of approaching Jordan and his friends at a club unless that person happened to know someone seated at the Jordan table. The male companion of a woman who had ended up at the Jordan table seemed to qualify, especially a perturbed companion. This meant, in turn, that the boyfriend or date saw and heard things that regular journalists covering Jordan couldn’t. In time, an intriguing story would run in a Washington, D.C., alternative newspaper, Washington City Paper, written by an offended young man who told the tale of feeling somewhat jilted when his female friend had not only gone off to the Jordan table, he claimed, but had received a whispered invitation from someone at the Jordan table to join Michael and his friends later in the evening after she had separated herself from her date. Michael’s limo would quietly pick her up, promised the Jordan friend. In time, without telling her friend about it first, she accepted the invitation, joining Jordan and a few of his friends on an extended outing somewhere in Washington. The young man was offended and more than a little angry at Jordan. He thought Jordan had acted arrogantly, particularly during their encounter, claiming that Jordan had been aloof to the point where he wouldn’t acknowledge his presence, while simultaneously making a move on his date.
No reader could be sure of what happened, of course, and even if the worst was true, did it really amount to anything more than a story of bad manners and a trifling flirtation between a married man and an agreeable young woman whose upset suitor had lashed back? Probably not. After all, how many times in my life had I witnessed married male acquaintances try to woo women? Still, the story reminded me of all I couldn’t see, day to day, in Jordan’s life.
By December of 2001, I was about to hear another tale, another set of allegations about Jordan’s off-court existence. In Cleveland, male exotic dancer Bobby Mercer was preparing to make contact with me over the subject of Jordan’s alleged affair, years earlier, with a Mercer family member. He had come no closer, in letters and phone calls, to getting what he wanted from Jordan’s attorney, Frederick Sperling—an agreement that Jordan would pay for psychiatric sessions for the woman, whom, he insisted, was still obsessed with Jordan, though their supposed affair had ended long ago. Still threatening legal action, Sperling had warned Mercer to back off. Mercer refused, sending a letter to Jordan’s wife, Juanita, which began:
Dear Juanita Jordan,
Here’s some information I think you should know about, that is going to cause embarrassment to our families…
Now Mercer planned to share his story with the media, formulating plans to hold a press conference to “expose” Jordan on the same day, January 31, 2002, that the Wizards would play in Cleveland. He already had plans to publish a flyer and send it to journalists at major newspapers. If Frederick Sperling wouldn’t deal with him, the Rumpshaker was ready to take the next step.
A few hundred miles away, in Indiana, Karla Knafel still wanted the $5 million that she claimed Jordan had promised to pay her, in exchange for her silence about their old affair. The quarter of a million he already had given her would not keep her quiet much longer. Her attorneys were no closer to resolving their demands with Fred Sperling, both sides digging in their heels. If the negotiations did not result in a settlement over the next few months, Knafel was prepared to file a lawsuit. The story of the affair then would break publicly and Jordan would face a new p.r. headache.
Sperling’s job included trying to minimize Jordan’s p.r. nightmares, thereby freeing his client to think about nothing other than basketball and his other pleasures. Jordan spent late December happily fine-tuning his errant jump shot, receiving more stim treatments and hanging out with his crew, deep and safe in his tube.
Jordan still hadn’t asked any of the young players to party with him. It wasn’t going to happen. The kids understood his reluctance, said Jordan, who noted that going out with him would probably cramp their style anyway, given the security and seclusion he looked for. Beyond that, he wasn’t anxious to have newcomers in his private circle, didn’t have need for any more close friends in that regard, he added. Grover, Koehler and a few others from his crew: They made him comfortable. His comfort zone was small, he reminded people.
The young players did not look busted up about it. They had their own lives, and any life in the NBA, even as a grunt reserve, had its perks and pleasures. The Washington clubs and bars became frenzied whenever a couple of the players dropped in for drinks—they were young princes, imbued with a celebrity enhanced by their good performances and impervious to their bad ones. Hamilton, Lue, Alexander and Nesby made the rounds. “Fans like to talk to players—you don’t have to be Mike for them to be wantin’ to talk to you,” Nesby said. “Some people just treat athletes special. Winnin’ got nothing to do with it. If they are like that for players, imagine what they be doin’ around Mike.”
What are they like around him?
“That’s what I was goin’ to ask you,” Nesby said, squinting, smiling, adjusting a black do-rag over his cornrows.
He thought about it. “Guys talk. You know, ‘What’s happenin’ with Mike? What’s happenin’?’ But Mike don’t talk much, not about that stuff. That’s cool, I guess. You with him on the court. You here to play basketball. I just know the Mike with the basketball part. The other stuff is Mike’s other stuff, you know, and nobody ’round here be knowin’ that.”
T-Nez was cool with knowing or not knowing.
He finished adjusting his do-rag and headed out with Lue and Alexander.
One morning, on the road, I walked into the gift shop of a hotel and bumped into a young Wizards player.
“Hey, dawg,” he said. He was admiring some candy on a rack. “What’s going on with M.J.?”
I said he seemed to be trying to get over his tendinitis.
The player fingered a candy bar. “People get real careful talkin’ about M.J., huh?”
I guess, I said. Makes sense.
“People don’t want to make mistakes. I don’t like talking about the man’s business.”
Sure.
“M.J.’s a little hard to get to know,” the player said. “But I respect the man. Just a little hard, you know—to get to know.”
Does that bother you?
“No. I don’t know if I’d want to.”
Want?
“Goin’ somewhere with him. The boss seein’ you doin’ anything, just bein’ playful—dawg, you don’t want that.”
He shrugged, his mind momentarily erasing Jordan so that he could concentrate on this candy rack. He picked out a few bars and asked the cashier to bill them to his room.
“Sorry—you need a minimum purchase of fifteen to bill to the room,” the cashier said.
The player sighed. Then something slowly ignited in his head. He glanced back and forth between the candy rack and the cashier, back and forth, the candy and the cashier, candy and cashier, candy, cashier, candy, cashier. It was like watching a Beavis and Butthead cartoon, when the two are trying to figure out where and how to get a TV.
A lightbulb went off in the player’s mind. He walked to the rack and picked up a veritable mound of candy. It came to about $20, allowing him to bill everything. The cashier put it all in a bag for him. He happily bounded out, calling toward a teammate.
They were very young.
And their boss was not.
Hamilton went down early that Friday night in Orlando. One moment he was streaking past a beaten defender; in the next instant, making a cut, he was in agony. He partially tore his right groin, the injury reducing him to a hobble, with the early prognosis calling for him to be out for four weeks. If losing a 20-points-a-game scorer wasn’t bad enough, Jordan had an awful night, scoring a season-low 12 points, on 3–16 from the field. The combination of Jordan’s and Hamilton’s setbacks would have typically guaranteed a blowout loss, except that Tracy McGrady was out with a strained back and the chronically ailing Grant Hill had undergone season-ending ankle surgery.
Hubert Davis came off the bench to save the Wizards with 19 points, hitting several long jumpers early in the fourth quarter, the winning streak now at eight. Collins was not exultant but worried: “We lost Christian to a broken leg. Now Rip’s out…. We have to play through it…. But how much of this can a team take?”
From the players’ view, winning with Hamilton out and Jordan’s shot in tatters proved anything was possible. Much of the team slept on the red-eye flight to New York, where the next night, Jordan scored 26 points and led the Wizards back from 10 points down in the final quarter, hitting the game-winning jumper over Latrell Sprewell and a late-arriving Allan Houston with 3.2 seconds left. Sprewell had only six points, none of which came off Jordan in their matchup, Jordan rendering the Knicks star as impotent as he had Vince Carter, six days earlier, during the second half at Toronto. “Look at the numbers, look at the numbers,” Jordan shouted to the coaching staff, meaning Sprewell’s numbers: 3–16 on the night, and 0–13 off Jordan, by most people’s count. But the more important number on this night was nine, the length of the winning streak, which tied a Washington franchise record and catapulted a team once seven games below the .500 mark to two games above it. Jordan sounded supremely self-satisfied. Referring to Hamilton and Laettner, he said, “We have two key guys out and I stepped up tonight. Our defense kept us in the game. And I was able to make a big basket.”
He had played 41 minutes in Orlando the night before, and labored as hard in Madison Square Garden. He insisted he felt great, but already the workload exceeded John Hefferon’s recommendation. Hamilton’s injury put more pressure on Collins, who did not want to sacrifice wins by sitting Jordan for too long but who understood the Wizards would crash if the bad knee broke down. The coach had options: He had Nesby and Davis to buy Jordan a few extra minutes of rest in each game, and also Alexander, who was coming off the injured list that week. But Collins seemed to have difficulty weaning himself off relying on Jordan to play heavy minutes. And, all the while, his star pushed to stay on the floor. Characteristically, Collins sounded conflicted, lurching between worry and his instinct to accommodate Jordan’s desires: “I’ve gotta get Michael’s minutes down, because when I didn’t early in the season, his leg swelled up, it was the point of diminishing returns. We’ve talked about it…. He thinks he can play thirty-seven or thirty-eight minutes comfortably…. This is gonna be a judgment thing, where he and I have to look at each other. There’s a real trust there.”
So he had a plan in place, he said, shrugging, accepting the congratulations of old friends on the team’s turnaround. He rode the league’s longest win-streak. Things could not be much better.
Yet the game is fickle. The streak ended in Charlotte, where Jordan’s shot betrayed him in the fourth quarter. The next night, December 27, the team found itself in Indiana, where Jordan played in his second set of back-to-back games in less than a week. He had difficulty getting lift on his jump shot, wincing after a few misses, making only 2 of 10 shots, calling it a night after only 25 minutes of play, when Indiana turned the game into a rout and Reggie Miller began clapping his hands together and woofing. There seemed to be a foul mood in the air—players on both teams tired, tempers short. When Collins started complaining about a ref’s call, Miller snapped at him, “Goddamn, Doug, you worry about everything. Just coach your team.”
The weird vibe seemed to hover all night. Players began chewing out teammates for everyone at courtside to hear. Jermaine O’Neal beat Jahidi White on a move to the hoop, and Jordan yelled at White, “You gonna let that happen? Let him show you up like that? Let him kick your ass? What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you?”
White said nothing.
Collins jumped on Kwame Brown. “Tell me, what are you supposed to be doin’ out there? What are we doin’? What are we doin’? What are we doin’?”
The kid hung his head.
“What are we doin’?”
But the weirdest moment came during a time-out with 2:45 left in the game. Popeye Jones, who worked hard with the young players, moved toward Etan Thomas, perhaps the most dedicated of the Wizards’ young big men. They were two of the best-liked guys on the team, two of the most determined competitors. It had been a frustrating night for Jones, but even with the game’s outcome decided, he wanted to exhort Thomas to play hard in the last couple of minutes. He mumbled something to Thomas, adding, “Do it.”
The remark caught a nerve. The usually amiable Thomas flared. “Fuck you, Popeye,” he said, walking back onto the court.
Jones’s mouth fell open. Taking a seat on the bench, he said nothing, just glared at the younger player, who, in turn, stared back and slowly nodded, accepting a challenge. Once inside the locker room at the game’s end, they began fighting, each landing punches. Tables toppled, players stepped between the combatants, pulling them apart, Thomas landing a last shot, Popeye still straining to get at him. Once order had been restored, Jordan told everyone, No one, no one should be talking about the incident. Ever. No one.
It had been an awful night all around. The Wizards lost by 27, and Jordan managed only six points, a career low, the first time in 867 games that he had failed to score at least 10 points, a streak that dated back to 1986. He just wanted to finish with the media and get on the plane. He strode into the press lounge, and it was then that he saw Lacy Banks, who had driven from Chicago with his special brand of mirth and a question about the problems of the Bulls. Jordan smirked. Banks grinned. It was impossible not to like Lacy Banks. He was the Will Rogers of basketball reporters, lighthearted, engaging, gabby, and usually posing a question that elicited something remarkably human from Jordan. Mischief oozed from him.
Banks was there to ask Jordan about the demise of Tim Floyd, the Bulls’ coach and Jerry Krause hire who followed Phil Jackson and who had resigned just three days earlier, on Christmas Eve. “Floyd was brought in to try to rebuild the dynasty that you built…” Banks began, and Jordan already had begun chuckling, trying to hide a smile behind his hand, ribbing him: “Lacy, you came all the way from Chicago for that one, didn’t ya?”
Now everyone was laughing.
The cameras kept rolling. Jordan took a breath, and shook his head. He settled on an answer: “Well, I don’t like to elaborate on other teams’ miseries or lack of success”—a nifty shot at the Bulls and Krause; he was always happy to take one. “I like Tim. I thought he was a qualified coach. But some situations are not made for some coaches. Unfortunately, I don’t think the Chicago situation was there for Tim. And, unfortunately, it took him four years to realize it…. I think he’s going to get rid of that whole stigma of coming in after Phil Jackson and after the championship team…. I think he’s better off. I hope you don’t take that in a way that’s very derogatory…. It’s in support of Tim Floyd.”
Then he took a last swipe at Krause and the rest of the Chicago management team who had declined to make him an executive. “I’m happy where I am.”
The Wizards p.r. man said, “Thanks, folks. We gotta go.”
The TV guys flicked off cameras.
Jordan started walking away, then turned to Lacy Banks. Smiling, he muttered, “You asshole.”
The media roared.
Jordan looked like he felt a little better.
Media reports made much of his six-point game. By the time the team arrived back in Washington, he was angry again. Already, he had begun working himself into a simmering furor for a game two nights later at MCI, doing what Michael Jordan did better than anyone else in sports—convincing himself that he was being dismissed and disrespected. “Scoring six points, my career low, I’m pretty sure you guys were saying how old I was,” he would say, 48 hours later. He shot a look at his inquisitors, searching for confirmation of his suspicions—a nodding head here, a telling chuckle there. Nobody around him so much as flinched, nobody said a thing. He wasn’t through. “I knew with that game, you guys would say that I’d lost whatever I’d gained, that maybe [the comeback] wasn’t a great idea.”
That many of those voices were his own invention hardly mattered. Playing in a frenzy, he delivered a masterpiece against Charlotte that night, scoring 24 points by the end of the first quarter alone. Muscling defenders low in the post, he furiously motioned to teammates for the ball: Give it to me, give it to me. Everything worked. Finding himself guarded by bigger but slower foes, he faked and scored on fadeaway jumpers and tricky little up-and-under moves, where he would pump with his arms, get the opponent in the air, then take a long drop step and go under him for a short bank shot. He rediscovered his quick first step to the basket, bursting around defenders and finding space for easy pull-up jumpers and driving layups. He looked offended by miscues, berating referee Derrick Stafford after having one of his jumpers partially blocked by 6′ 10″ Hornet P. J. Brown: “Derrick, what game are you fuckin’ watchin’ out there? How’s that not a foul on him? What game are you fuckin’ watchin’?”
Stafford looked at him but said nothing, just one more ref reminded of the uses of Jordan’s power. P. J. Brown stared slack-jawed at Stafford, as if incredulous that the ref quietly permitted such a lashing. On the other hand, Brown knew better than to say anything to Jordan (“He seemed to have extra motivation tonight,” a diplomatic Brown would say later). Jordan abused Brown a while longer until, in mercy, the Hornets tried 6′ 9″ Lee Nailon on him. Nailon fared no better, and soon David Wesley, Jamaal Magloire and Stacey Augmon futilely took turns. By then Jordan was in ether, going over the rim and pulling down a rebound from Augmon, yelling, mouth open, tongue out, sweat running in rivulets down glistening cheeks, a thousand flash cameras in the arena clicking, Jordan reborn, yelling at somebody, his face a little wild, the crowd berserk.
A few times, Doug Collins looked over at him. Jordan gave him a firm shake of his head: No, no. Before the game, Jordan had told Collins that he didn’t want to be coming out in the first quarter if he had his rhythm. “Let’s ride me,” Jordan said, and Collins complied.
Jordan had 34 points at half, a franchise record. Late in the third quarter, Collins briefly took him out, only to have Jordan swiftly countermand him. “Do you want to go into the fourth quarter with a big lead?” Jordan asked. “Or do you want them to come back on us?”
Collins put him back in the game. The decision was good for Jordan’s point total, but risky for a gimpy knee. Late in the fourth quarter, with a last binge and a short fadeaway jumper, he scored his 51st point, the oldest player in league history ever to score as many as 50. MCI became a din —Joooor-dan, Joooor-dan. On his off nights, he had been a reminder of mortality. But on this evening, he was the flickering ember that would not go out—and so, transfixed, the crowd screamed.
After 38 minutes, slightly raising a hand, he called it a night. Following the game, he said of his doubters, “I’m pretty sure they’re going to say less now, and tryin’ to understand that I can still play this game, at 38.”
When on a roll, he lost himself in basketball, and two nights later, on New Year’s Eve, determined to prove that his gem against Charlotte was no fluke, he set out to decimate New Jersey, whose rising 6′ 9″ young star, Kenyon Martin, was asked to defend him. Early in the game, Jordan was astounded when Martin casually told him that he was playing with a back injury that hampered his movement. Why, why, why had Martin been so naïve to tell him that? he asked later. Didn’t Martin know he was a predator who attacked any weakened quarry?
He scored 45 points in 41 minutes, including 22 straight Wizards points early in the game, just one point shy of his own NBA record for consecutive points on a team. He might have had 50 again, but, seemingly tiring and with the Wizards leading comfortably, he took only two shots in the fourth quarter. Shortly after he missed his last—a three-point attempt—with about three minutes left, Collins looked at him, signaling he hoped to take him out, and Jordan consented with a nod.
He looked beatific after the game, in a way he never would again that season. Other players rushed out to New Year’s parties. He lingered in the training room, finally emerging at 11:30 p.m. to face the media, his silver hoop earring glistening. He talked longer than usual and, even after saying goodnight, he hung around, basking in the good feeling, wanting to talk a little longer. Somebody in his retinue said, “Gettin’ late. We better be goin’, M.J.”
Jordan raised an index finger like a sword: Wait.
He turned and told a few reporters that another 50-point game had been within his reach that night. There had been only five back-to-back 50s in NBA history and, though his name was already on that list, oh, man, he muttered exuberantly, how he would have loved to do it again, especially at age 38. “And I would’ve had it,” he insisted, “if I didn’t miss that last one”—an allusion to that errant three-point attempt, after which he permitted Collins to take him out. “If that one goes,” he said, “I’m there [at 48 points] and then…” He grinned, and flipped his wrist, in a gesture that meant 50 would have been only a hoop away, a done deal.
The team was nearing the end of its greatest run during his comeback. Having begun with that win in Houston, the Wizards were on their way to winning 13 of 15 games, and no player in the league had enjoyed a more scintillating December than Michael Jordan—an older and grounded Jordan, certainly—but once again a Jordan who was being touted in some quarters as a candidate for another Most Valuable Player award, as improbable as that sounded. He emphasized that his legs felt great, answering a question no one had posed, talking about the bad knee though he’d spoken about it to the media horde two minutes earlier. “I’m getting treatment [for it],” he said. “If I can keep this tendinitis away, knock on wood”—he audibly conked his shaven skull with a half-formed fist, in what was becoming a favorite Jordan gesture—“then obviously, you’ll see how I can move.”
It was 11:40 p.m. Another voice began pleading: Let’s go, Mike. He kept talking. No party could compare to being back in the firmament, with even the skeptical media singing hosannas.
Let’s go, Mike. Please.
He finally relented. He happily started off on his night, yelling at something in the air, something only he could feel: “Yeah, yeah.” Outside, by the entrance and exit of the players’ garage, a pack of fans stood three deep, hoping for a glimpse of him in a fleeting SUV. “Yeah, yeah.” The euphoria would last for all of one more week.