THE NEW YEAR BROUGHT TWO SLICES OF HELL—ONE THAT HE didn’t see coming, and one he saw coming only too late. His right knee apparently sent no warning signals he could recognize. But a divorce petition seldom sneaks up on a man; a spouse’s estrangement is a palpable thing. Juanita Jordan and her attorney signed and dated her petition for divorce the day after Christmas. A week later, she still had not filed it, its existence a secret to the world. As she privately resolved to file the petition later that week against a husband merely identified as a “businessman” named “M. Jeff Jordan,” the soon-to-be respondent spent the first days of 2002 outwardly serene, finding his idyll, as usual, at an arena, getting ready for a home game against the Chicago Bulls, two days away.
After doing his strength exercises with Tim Grover that morning, he sat out another midday practice, deciding to rest his fragile knee for the approaching game, doing nothing more than ride the stationary bike and briefly shoot while his teammates drilled.
The media didn’t see any of this. In accordance with Jordan and Collins’s desire, virtually all Wizards practices were closed, despite NBA rules that governed the relationship between the media and players, guaranteeing writers the ability to observe the last 30 minutes of all practices. The closed practices were a reminder that few league rules applied to Jordan. Angry reporters in Washington called the NBA offices, to ask for enforcement of the media access rule, the violation of which by the Wizards was punishable by league fines. The response of the NBA’s chief public relations official, Brian McIntyre, was always the same: We’ll look into it, and ask them to follow the rule.
Nothing changed. No fine was ever administered. No edict from the NBA ever came. Abe Pollin never intervened. In the end, the league’s rule meant nothing. Answerable only to Collins and Jordan, the Wizards’ public relations staff played the role of gatekeepers, keeping writers at a distance. Washington reporters became resigned to being shut out of practices. But visiting writers, unaccustomed to seeing league rules ignored, were irked by Jordan’s sway and the Wizards’ secrecy. Chicago Tribune columnist and Jordan biographer Sam Smith had this Looking Glass exchange one day with Wizards p.r. representative Maureen Nasser.
Smith: You’re agreeing that there’s a rule that says we’re supposed to be allowed in, to see the last part of practice.
Nasser: Yes.
Smith: And that we’re still out here.
Nasser: Yes.
Smith: And that it’s time to let us in.
Nasser: Yes.
Smith: And you’re saying that we’re not going to be let in.
Nasser: Yes.
“She’s just going to keep saying yes,” groaned a USA Today reporter.
“I think I see him; I see twenty-three,” shouted a reporter who believed he glimpsed Jordan through a slit in the gym door.
“Move away from there,” commanded Nasser.
“We never get to go in,” the USA Today man mumbled abjectly.
“I think I see twenty-three,” the other reporter said.
“Move away from there,” Nasser barked.
The reporter obeyed. Such splendid seclusion for 23 required the constant vigilance of a large band of club and Jordan-hired assistants. Even with the tight controls, however, information seeped out. Jordan’s knee still plagued him, according to insiders watching him walk gingerly at closed-door practices. The information landed in stories. Jordan’s personal publicist, Estee Portnoy, made a phone call in an effort to learn the identities of those who had spoken about the boss without his authorization. She recited a favorite Jordan aphorism: Those who know don’t speak, and those who speak don’t know.
It was, among other things, a cryptic order to those in his circle: Don’t talk.
Portnoy told writers that Jordan would look with dismay on any reporter whose Jordan stories might rely on information from people who “Michael thinks don’t truly know his life.” It left journalists hanging on the horns of a dilemma. As the Jordan camp’s reasoning went, those friends who dared to talk about him were necessarily ignorant and not part of his inner circle, making any anecdote gleaned from them unworthy. On the other hand, if reporters wanted to do a legitimate story, they needed first to talk to those people who really knew Michael, except that journalists wouldn’t be able to do that, Portnoy added, because the close friends couldn’t and wouldn’t talk in most cases, in accordance with Michael’s wishes. And if they ever did talk, then by definition they were no longer in the inner circle and what they had to say was nonsense.
It was catch-23.
A large number of reporters continued to play the game, as if hoping that cooperating with Jordan would lead to an exclusive interview. It never happened. The simplest course was the most productive: Write whatever you had, ask Jordan whatever you wished, and be braced for the possibility of trouble.
That is what Sam Smith had done throughout Jordan’s Bulls days. Now, never having gotten into the Wizards’ practice, patiently having waited around until its end, he found himself standing in front of his old antagonist Doug Collins, about whom he had ceased writing, many years earlier. All that had changed. Amazingly, over the years, they had become friends, with a view taking root that Smith, among his many accomplishments, had broken Collins just as surely as a broncobuster tames a temperamental mustang. Now the coach was as compliant as the gentlest colt. The coach talked and talked and talked for him. In the case of Collins, Sam Smith was the NBA’s Horse Whisperer. Maybe he could be persuaded to go out on the road with us.
Smith had a question: Doug, what do you think Michael expected versus what this season has been?
Collins happily nodded. “I think Michael knew, in his heart, that those rib injuries were going to get him off to a slow start…. As Michael has gotten better, it’s given the guys a little bit of a swagger…”
Collins kept talking. From behind the locker-room door, Jordan now and then poked his head out, then swiftly brought it back in—in, out, in, out, like a prairie dog in a burrow. He stayed inside a few more minutes. Collins happily kept talking and talking to Sam Smith. He said that Jordan’s young teammates needed to earn his respect by proving themselves on the floor, just as had been the case during Collins’s days in Chicago, where players had responded by showing their mettle—John Paxson, B. J. Armstrong, Steve Kerr, Craig Hodges…
“You didn’t say Brad Sellers,” Sam Smith interjected, grinning—Sellers the former Bull who had so disappointed Jordan that the star had helped arrange to have him traded away, but not before Sellers had observed the Collins-Jordan blowup at practice and said that everybody knew that the real power on the team certainly didn’t reside with the coach. Collins shot Smith a glance that looked like a faint plea, as if to say, Please don’t go there. Not seeming to notice, Smith had moved on, anyway. It was all pleasant, a nice exchange between two old combatants; but no matter how pleasant, their friendship hadn’t won Smith an invitation to let Smith into practice because Jordan would never give Sam Smith special permission to attend a practice. And if Jordan didn’t, Collins wouldn’t, couldn’t.
Now Jordan finally exited the locker room and walked over. He glanced down, expressionlessly, at Smith. In the old days, when Collins and Smith wouldn’t speak to each other, Jordan talked to the reporter all the time. Like Lacy Banks, Smith had known Jordan in those early years when Jordan frequently invited the Chicago press corps up to his hotel rooms to hang out, play cards, get a few quotes. Jordan liked Smith enough at the time that he invited him to play golf. But after Smith declined an invitation from Jordan to bet during their round, Jordan, who liked wagering, never asked him to play golf again. Smith felt no keen disappointment. He never had sought to become another “Jordan Guy.” Over the years, he reported what he saw, and in time wrote his book, “The Jordan Rules,” which is when Jordan shut him out for good, limiting his discussions with Smith to press conferences.
“Michael doesn’t like it when people make money off him,” Estee Portnoy said of books about Jordan. But the Smith book, which chronicled Jordan’s occasional abuse of Bulls teammates, especially irritated the Jordan camp. In some respects, the book was quite tame. In limiting its scope to Jordan’s basketball existence, it acknowledged the kind of boundaries that athletes like to have drawn, steering clear of Jordan’s private life and any questions about whether his behavior comported with his marketing image. But the book angered Jordan just the same. Nowadays, Smith asked his questions of Jordan without making much eye contact, and Jordan coolly stared over Smith’s head in an exemplar of composure, courteously answering his questions but not offering Smith much in the way of insights.
It took the rare day for him to open up when Smith was part of a scrum, and it said much about the state of Michael Jordan’s mind, 48 hours away from his first game ever against his old team, that this would be such an afternoon. Later, it would seem extraordinary that he had talked on this afternoon at all. He was fighting a heavy cold, and his wife had drawn closer to the day when she would make her move. At the instant Juanita Jordan’s filing took place, there would be p.r. issues to address. There would be painful private matters involving his children and the prosaic question of where he would live full-time during the off-season in Chicago, with his wife and kids ensconced in the Highland Park manse. He had many personal reasons for excusing himself from the press scrum on this day, but he seemed anxious to talk. The Bulls would be in Washington soon, which meant that one of the men responsible for depriving him of an executive position in the Bulls organization and breaking up the triumvirate of Jordan, Jackson and Pippen would be arriving. Any press conference over the next two days offered him another chance to zing Jerry Krause.
His contempt for Krause had not stopped him in recent years from trying to use his old punching bag. A year earlier, when desperate to unload players in an effort to get the team under the salary cap and give himself room to acquire better performers, he actually had called Krause, extending the possibility that perhaps they could do some business together, that perhaps Krause could benefit from acquiring one of his veterans. Krause wasn’t about to be lured into doing Jordan a favor by lowering the Wizards’ bloated player payroll and taking a high-priced mediocrity off his hands. Krause offered nothing, embraced no deals, and Jordan’s grudge remained fresh.
He never would stop taking veiled shots at Krause, whom he viewed as an egotist who had exaggerated his role in the old Bulls’ successes. There seemed no shortage of Krause-related topics available now, especially given the state of upheaval in the Bulls’ organization. With Tim Floyd fired as Bulls coach, Krause had elevated a former Jordan teammate, Bill Cartwright, from an assistant coaching position to the top job. If the Bulls kept plummeting, not only Cartwright would be booted but Krause likely would be endangered. Someone just had to ask Jordan about Krause, and he would do the rest. But no one raised the topic immediately after practice that day. The scrum barraged him instead with questions about the Bulls’ young guard Ron Artest, the rock-hard kid who had inadvertently broken Jordan’s ribs. In a monotone, he said he liked Artest and didn’t blame him.
No Krause questions.
Now the scrum session was breaking up. “See you guys later,” he said softly, turning his back and walking down a hallway toward an elevator, when he heard Sam Smith far behind him calling out a question. Jordan generally ignored questions once he walked away from the scrum. But this one, asking for his opinion on Cartwright’s hiring, presented the opportunity he wanted. A good 50 feet away, he slowed, wheeled and shouted over his shoulder that, as recent club moves went, hiring Cartwright “was the best thing the Bulls did.” He kept turning, stopping, facing the scrum now. He paused only for an instant, then thrust the shiv: “Now they need to fire Jerry and hire John Paxson.”
What did he say?
Silence on both ends of the hallway.
As if uncertain whether he exactly meant it, or because they knew he meant it and wanted to convey ease so as not to scare him off a provocative quote that had fallen like manna from the sky, the reporters up the hallway casually laughed. But Jordan did not, his expression flat, eyes wide, body in a forward lean, as was his way when most serious.
Another question flew down the hallway, carrying a suggestion as to when Krause might be fired: “Maybe this summer?”
“I hope so,” Jordan answered.
He had said it, and he meant it. He had pulled up the shade and, for an instant, he had let the world see much of himself, maybe too much, let them see just how much he could loathe somebody, how he did not have to go deep to tap his grudges. He turned and walked into the elevator.
On game day, the Bulls’ new head coach, Bill Cartwright, spent much of his morning and late afternoon with reporters who seemed to be interested only in talking about Jordan. He’d had a complicated relationship with Jordan, dating back to the early ’90s, when the 6′ 11″ Cartwright had come to the Bulls from New York in a trade that sent Jordan’s close friend and on-court bodyguard Charles Oakley to the Knicks. Jordan fumed in the aftermath, and Cartwright suffered under his digs for the next couple of years until confronting Jordan one day. Cartwright told him to stop it or he would hurt him. The exact remark varied depending on who, in the old Bulls’ circle, was telling the story. Some people thought Cartwright had threatened to break Jordan’s legs. Others insisted he simply warned that he would fight him, or kick the shit out of him. All that seemed certain was that the moment had been ugly, and that, thereafter, Jordan had ceased to ridicule Cartwright, later grudgingly accepting Cartwright as the new man proved his worth on the floor.
Cartwright never had sided with Jordan in his battles with Krause, suggesting in time that he thought Jordan ungrateful and spoiled. “I don’t get it,” he would say to reporters. “‘Guy was making thirty [million] and we won the championship and he is [critical of Krause].”
On this day, the two middle-aged men sounded like a pair of careful, stodgy senators when talking about each other. Cartwright offered a few diplomatic words, telling everybody that Jordan remained a great athlete: “I’d kind of like to have him now, playing for us.”
There. He’d played nice.
He had the day’s only humorous digs, an indication that he hadn’t entirely forgotten the old harassment. Asked whether the Bulls’ unwillingness to offer Jordan a managerial job amounted to a black eye for the organization, Cartwright exclaimed, mock-offended, “‘Is it a black eye?’ My God, what a question.” The faintest hint of a smile curled at the corner of his mouth. Now he had some fun, elaborating on Chicago’s decision not to offer Jordan either a share of ownership or an executive position, aiming to sound matter-of-fact. “That’s not the [managerial] direction [the Bulls] went; we chose another direction.” He affected a momentary look of puzzlement. “And Michael retired for the what time was it?” He smiled impishly. He said the next words slowly: “The second time, right? And here he is again.”
What did he think of Jordan in his blue-and-white Wizards’ uniform?
“He doesn’t look good in those colors. He looks really bad. His natural colors are Bulls colors.”
Did he think he might be talking to Jordan?
Cartwright allowed as to how he wasn’t sure, not sounding anxious about the possibility. “When Michael’s out of here [the arena], he’s hitting a golf ball. Most of us have to work.”
The press laughed.
He hadn’t seen anything about Jordan’s play that surprised him, he said. “If he gets going, he’s trouble,” he added. “Gotta make him a jump shooter. We’re going to start Ron on him.”
“Ron Artest, Rib Breaker,” someone said.
Cartwright rolled his eyes, smiled. “I’ve learned that it’s useful to bother Michael…. Hopefully, Ron can get up and bother him…. Bothering him is what you gotta do.”
He believed in the power and respect that came to somebody who bothered Jordan. But just the same, Cartwright observed, the guy was still Michael Jordan. He might have gotten Jordan the teammate to stop hassling him, but Michael Jordan the player still worried him.
Jordan had spent much of the last 36 hours in bed, getting up only to play a basketball game. On the morning of Friday, January 4, while Juanita Jordan set out to file her divorce petition that day, Tim Grover busied himself monitoring Jordan’s sinus cold at MCI, one of the few people to know what was likely to happen soon in Illinois, loyally safeguarding the secret, preoccupied at that moment with his boss’s condition, as Jordan prepared to face the Bulls in a few hours. He worried about Jordan’s endurance in the game’s second half, if his sinuses got any worse. Jordan sat in a steam room for about a half hour, trying to sweat out the cold. It didn’t help much.
Still congested and sneezing, he nevertheless told a trainer that he had a good feeling about the evening ahead. He looked not like a man sick or distraught but happy, as radiant as a man with a bad sinus cold could be. He didn’t think another 50-plus point game tonight would be awfully surprising. Hell, he said, he could have had 60 the week before against Charlotte if he hadn’t come out of the game with four minutes left. He’d have liked 60, but he’d done 60, done it more than once, he pointed out. So he could live with leaving at 51 points. But it just showed you, he thought, that another 50 was always a possibility, just like having several big games in a row was possible. He’d had three huge games in a row back in 1987: 53, 50 and 61 points, in successive games. He could recite the numbers: 53, 50, 61. Check it out, he said. You get to 45 points in a game, he said, and 50 was right there waiting for you. Get to 50 and there was always 60. Ask the Celtics.
He was having fun now. Yeah, let the Bulls taste some. He didn’t see it as personal. He didn’t even know any of the young guys over there, with the exception of Artest and Tyson Chandler, and even in those cases, not very well. The only Bull with whom he seemed to have any real connection, his old running buddy Charles Oakley, didn’t play much. He thought Oak would much prefer to be with him than in Chicago. Oak would understand why he wanted to put up a big number.
Whatever happened in the game, it was going to be a big night, he said. He’d hit a milestone tonight —30,000 points— and join the company of Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Karl Malone. Just needed 15 points. Nice to do it with Chicago watching.
He took a little more steam, showered, dressed and went off to nap. By the time he awakened and entered the locker room to dress for the game, his wife’s petition, signed and recorded, was in the files of the Lake County Circuit Court. The press still did not know about her action, and the court was about to close for the weekend. But the documents were there; she had done it. He knew it had happened. The media would know soon, too, maybe today, probably Monday at the latest. In the locker room, he held a basketball, shooting it straight up, flicking his wrist, working on his form, studying the ball’s spin. A tired-looking Tim Grover walked out onto the arena floor.
“How do you think Michael’s feeling?” he asked rhetorically when prodded by a couple of reporters.
The reporters guessed this was a reference to the sinus cold. A Wizards assistant trainer rushed over and whispered something to Grover. He immediately started back toward the locker room. Jordan needed him again. “Nothing can stop Michael from playing in this game,” he said, striding. Grover allowed himself a wan laugh. “What do you think could have stopped him?”
Nothing.
Nearby, in a courtside seat, sat Jerry Krause. He looked comically endearing, like a character out of Tolkien. His head was oversized. His body was short as a gnome’s. His dark hair had matted itself to his skull and, as in a kind of parody, he had a couple of crumbs from some recently ingested processed food product on a sleeve. He had, of course, a gut. Just one look at him reminded people of why his problems with Jordan and other Bulls had so escalated. He was too easy to pick on for glamorous, graceful, handsome ballplayers. They were everything he was not, and, in turn, he was everything they had no interest in being. He had spent a career working longer and harder than anybody else around him, and all that labor had gone a long way, though not long enough, toward compensating for his stylistic shortcomings, including a tendency toward the fatuous remark; too often he had all the finesse of a caveman wielding a club.
Seemingly everybody had his favorite Jerry Krause story, which always meant the most unflattering Krause story. In wrapping up a 1997 deal with Phil Jackson, with whom his relationship had disintegrated, Krause told the coach’s agent, Todd Musberger: This will be the last deal we ever do with him. People blamed Krause for Jackson’s eventual departure, though Jackson had wanted out, too: The coach had a marriage breaking up, and this had factored into his need for a hiatus from basketball and the big city. Nonetheless, Krause received virtually all the blame, to be regarded by a wide circle of fans and reporters as the insecure egomaniacal jerk who had driven Jackson and Jordan away.
Jordan’s enmity for him had raged since the early days, when Krause suggested that the Bulls’ organization played a greater part in the team’s success than any player. The executive’s presence on long road trips hadn’t helped matters, with several Bulls players making no effort to hide their contempt. On the team bus, they mocked him like they would a particularly irritable runt of a schoolmate—needling him for suggesting he had built the team, that he had made them. They regarded him as a pompous ass. Jordan joined in the abuse, as nothing Krause could ever do would earn back his respect. Krause responded by seemingly trying to ingratiate himself, as a Chicago official who rode the bus remembered. “That only made it worse for Jerry,” the official said. “Michael can smell desperation. He doesn’t respect desperation in an executive or a coach. After he smelled it in Jerry, that was it, he was unrelenting. Jerry didn’t get it: Michael didn’t forgive.”
Once Jordan turned on people, his hostility was everlasting. Krause would be the butt of his scorn until his last breath. His fans freely vented at his archenemy, too. Incomprehensible shouts flew Krause’s way from seats high off the MCI floor. Krause looked up at the stands, now and then, eyes darting. A few signs taunting him had begun unfurling.
“I have no animosity for Michael,” he mumbled.
“You suck, Jerry,” someone cried from the concourse.
His eyes blinked, but he didn’t acknowledge the shout. He didn’t have any animosity for Michael, he repeated. But, no, he wouldn’t go so far as to say this game with Michael was special. Oh, come on, Jerry, somebody said to him.
“It’s just one of eighty-two games,” he responded, adding that he didn’t see how he’d be able to exchange so much as a word with Jordan even after the game, given that the Bulls had to get on a bus and leave for the airport right away.
A kid shouted from somewhere high, “Bite me, Krause.”
He didn’t twitch. It was easy to see how he endured the abuse of ballplayers. He talked for a minute or two longer and quietly sat down. The teams were taking the floor. A half minute or so after the Wizards came out for warm-ups, Krause stood and turned his back to the players, choosing this moment to crane his neck and study an enthralling row of luxury boxes.
Jordan lashed the Bulls quickly, scoring 25 points in the first half and picking up his 30,000th point with about five minutes left in the second quarter on the second of two free throws, following a foul by Ron Artest. After being whistled for another foul on the next possession, the 6′ 7″ Artest, who before the game had spoken about his goals in the third person—“For Artest, he’s gonna hopefully have respect”—punched the advertisement board beneath the scorer’s table, screaming that he had done nothing more than what Jordan did to him on every trip down the court. He slugged the ad board again, pulling back his fist a third time. Jordan glanced over, slack-jawed. Collins, alarmed that the young player might break his hand, rushed over, urging him to stop. Artest shoved him away, cursing, punching the placard again.
With his young foe coming unglued, Jordan took advantage, torching him in the second quarter, leading fans to dream of another 50-point night. But his cold had him gasping for breath. He scored only four points in the second half, tiring badly, shuffling a little on his bad knee, missing eight of his last nine shots as the Wizards’ 26-point lead sunk to just six in the final minute.
With less than 30 seconds to play, Artest blocked his jumper, and Jordan screamed, unable to believe the refs hadn’t called a foul. With the Bulls on a fast break and Ron Mercer ahead of the pack, free for a breakaway layup, Jordan angrily raced down the court and the improbable happened. “I can jump when I have to, especially when I get pissed,” he would say later. He took a running leap from behind Mercer, looking a little ungainly, like a man who had just jumped off a pier, his motion hurtling him forward. But he was climbing. He met Mercer at a point a foot above the rim. There, he didn’t just block Mercer’s shot but altogether snatched it from the air with two hands, pinning it against the backboard.
The crowd exploded, in that way people howl when they see something they do not believe. As a single moment goes, it was more thrilling than anything else during the entire comeback, save nothing, not a last-second shot, not even the 51-point game—this was a snarling Jordan in the cosmos, his shoes coming down and straddling the prostrate foe. “Did you fucking see that?” a reporter shouted, pounding his laptop. The air was suddenly pocked by the profanities of happy cynics—Fuckin’ A, Get the fuck out of town, Motherfucker bitch-slapped him—amid a roar that went on a long while: Joooor-dan, Joooor-dan. He held the ball aloft. His snatch sealed the Bulls’ fate. The victors were momentarily in ascendance; the losers mired in basketball hell. “Sorry, gotta get to the bus, gotta get to the bus,” Jerry Krause said, hurrying down a hallway.
The week represented the zenith of his comeback, a time during which talk so built of the Wizards’ surge and Jordan’s MVP chances, that I had begun tentatively writing a story about the possibilities of both, when my phone rang on Monday, January 7, three days after the Chicago game.
An editor said, “Juanita Jordan has filed for divorce. Just heard.”
Within an hour, the stories came in a rush out of Chicago. They were staid, like Juanita Jordan’s petition, steeped in the vernacular of well-heeled breakups: “irreconcilable differences,” “25,000-square-foot mansion,” a request for “half of the marital property,” a reference to the respondent’s “net worth of $400 million.” Reporters abided by the conventions of celebrity journalism. There were the standard references to the eccentricities of the marital start. (The Little Wedding Chapel, in Las Vegas, at 3:30 in the morning, in December of 1989. Juanita had on a five-carat diamond; Jordan bore three-carats. The bride and groom wore jeans. Haste seemed in the air, a reasonable reader could infer.) Most of the stories ran old Jordan quotes suggesting an inconsistency between his words and his conduct during the 12-year marriage. After his first retirement in 1993, in explaining his desire to get away from basketball and spend more time at home, he said, “It’s time to be a little bit unselfish.” Within a few months, he had embarked on a baseball career. Less than a year after his second retirement announcement, he left for Washington.
I put the stories down.
The Jordan petition was rather unexceptional stuff—no threesomes, no domestic abuse, no attempted contract hits, nobody absconding with the joint assets.
TV could not get enough of it.
The next night, with Richard Hamilton still out with his bad groin, the Wizards defeated the Los Angeles Clippers, their fourth consecutive victory. Jordan played solidly for a man beset by personal strain—18 points, 8 assists, a team-high 10 rebounds.
After the game, in the Wizards’ locker room, I took my usual place near a gold star on the royal-blue carpet. The gold star had become Jordan’s unofficial mark during postgame press conferences, like an insignia you’d see David Letterman stand on during his opening monologue.
Because he had come out and faced the media on every game night for many years, it would have drawn more attention for him not to appear. So, as the game ended, everyone knew he would be out. While he received ice and stim treatment on his right knee in the closed training room, a petite, bespectacled woman maneuvered into the front of the scrum, almost on top of the gold star. Her name was Lynn Sweet and, as a Washington-based reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times who typically covered hard news, she found herself in the unusual position of having been dispatched to a basketball game, assigned the task of asking Jordan a couple of questions about the divorce filing.
You knew why she was there, before Lynn Sweet ever said it. One look at her quiet efficiency and lack of fascination with her environs made clear she had not come to study basketball, and you realized she would ask her questions of Jordan and likely never be seen in this locker room again. A group of reporters had spread out just enough to let Sweet have a good angle at her subject. She said thank you, she knew that others knew, she just wanted to do this and get it over with. She was an experienced professional who understood that some stories were more awkward than others, and knew that this moment had the potential to be terribly awkward. She would hold her recorder, ask her questions and be done with it. Hers was a reporter’s life.
The wait was long. Sweet did not move from her spot. Then Jordan appeared, smiling as he approached the cameras, so familiarly resplendent in a tan jacket with matching gold tie and hoop earring that, for a long moment, as he began talking about basketball, it seemed that nothing had changed, nothing would ever change.
The illusion lasted all of about two minutes. Lynn Sweet leaned forward, extending her recorder. “What hopes do you have for a reconciliation with your wife?”
He looked her in the eye and answered swiftly: “That’s none of your business.” The line hung there for an electric instant, unsatisfactorily so for him. He decided to elaborate: “Quite frankly, I really don’t want to talk about my personal life…. We have kids, obviously, and we want to make sure that’s the focus. Everything else, when the time comes, you guys will hear it.”
A half-dozen voices shouted basketball questions, but Sweet cut them off. “Michael, do you think your divorce is inevitable?”
“Excuse me?” His head bent toward her as if on a long crane, his lips pursed.
“Do you think your divorce is inevitable?”
He stayed composed, but it was an effort. “None of your business,” he said.
“Thank you, folks,” said the p.r. man, Matt Williams, trying to end it.
But Jordan did not move. He had more media savvy than anyone else in the room, knew better than to end a press conference on an unflattering note. He wanted one more question, and he got it, a valentine, an invitation to talk about his team’s future: “Michael, how much better can this team get when Hamilton and Laettner come back?”
He nodded slightly in the direction of the reporter, as if to say, Good question. “I think we can be a lot better, obviously. You got a veteran player [Laettner] and you got another scorer [Hamilton], so it takes pressure off me. I just like our progress and our overall attitude. If we continue to take that attitude of improvement, we can move ourselves right up this ladder.”
“Thanks a lot, folks,” said Matt Williams.
“All right,” Jordan added, walking off.
In a corner of the locker room, a fuming Tim Grover—his loyalty runneth over—wanted Lynn Sweet banished.
Nearby, a fairly large group of reporters and TV people seethed over Sweet’s questions. “What a stunt, what a bitch,” one muttered, believing the Wizards would be justified in tossing Sweet. “Shit, her questions had nothing to do with sports. Isn’t he entitled to a private life?”
An American boomer had to go back to an event before his birth—the dissolution of Joe DiMaggio’s second marriage—to find a time where America so cared about an athlete’s marital problems. Even in DiMaggio’s case, the comparison had limits: The country’s interest in Joltin’ Joe’s woes had less to do with him than in his coupling with America’s fantasy, Marilyn Monroe.
It was sensible to ask what could justify the intense speculation in Jordan’s marriage. If divorce beset half the marriages in America, laid ruin to the domestic unions of prelates and politicians, athletes and accountants, the respectable and unseemly—nearly all of whom we allowed to suffer through their relationships’ demises without intrusion—then why subject Michael Jordan’s to special scrutiny? The Jordan camp never seemed to grasp the answer. The explanation lay not in Jordan’s personal conduct so much as in nearly two decades’ worth of his business representations: His people had held him up as a man to be emulated, making Jordan more than a half-billion in endorsement dollars in the process. If he carried a special burden, it was a burden of his own making. He had raised the bar on his behavior during 17 years of unremitting self-promotion, in campaigns approved by the Jordan camp and coordinated by Nike and other corporate sponsors that elevated him from great athlete to hero and, finally, to moral symbol.
Typically, celebrities do not offer themselves up to the world as the personification of an ideal. Mick Jagger does not appear on TV while somebody else in a voice-over says, “Be Like Mick.” The cautious celebrity does not do a film scene in which, amid his friendships with cartoon characters in Space Jam, he plays himself immersed in the day-to-day stuff of real family life—using another woman to play his real wife, other children to play his real children—offering America the heartening Jordan family tableau, complete with the portrait of marital fidelity and attendant moral message. Most athletes and entertainers never engage in anything remotely so risky. Risky, because when you present yourself as virtuous in years of ad campaigns and TV commercials, you will be fairly held in time to that standard. Fairly held because you have sold your basketball shoes to people plunking down in excess of $100 not merely for a chance at better Ups but for a way to rub up against your aura, to feel a tiny sense of you in that admittedly silly way people feel when they wish to emulate anybody, to be inspired by your class and elegance, your morality and grace, as they’ve heard it told. And if some of that was artifice, then so, too, was everything you sold with your likeness on it.
No other American athlete had ever been so intimately involved in his own deification. Jordan, remembered Nike ad producer Jim Riswold, wanted to know detail after detail of proposed ad shoots, a bright young man with suggestions and occasional reservations. He balked on some things because Michael Jordan just didn’t do that. He had a virtually flawless sense of what would be flattering and what wouldn’t, of what would grow the Air Jordan shoe campaign and his image.
Most athletes, even the mega-millionaire stars, didn’t aim so high. They balled, they collected big checks, they won games. They were just ballers, and their agents, advisers and shoe companies did not pretend otherwise. Neither American journalists nor fans were ever disillusioned by the behavior of, say, Shaquille O’Neal—the partying giant who, on the eve of being suspended for three games after an on-court melee a few years ago—happily talked of having three children out of wedlock, blithely adding he was “not pure” (he since has married his girlfriend, the mother of all but one of his four children today). The public’s reaction at the time to O’Neal’s statement, like that of disclosures about Mick Jagger’s stray progeny, was that of yawning, smirking, chuckling disinterest. O’Neal, who had a well-earned reputation for being generous around children and never succumbing to drugs or any other great vices, was never marketed as anything other than what he was—a fun-loving, adolescent-like, occasionally foul-mouthed, unpredictable behemoth. Candor has its rewards.
Jordan became the league’s, his shoe company’s and sports TV’s reliable guardian of the Ethic. TV children sang about him. The ditty “If I Could Be Like Mike” fused idolatry with consumerism, just part of a campaign to elevate Jordan into the ether of commercial deities. Now, with the divorce petition and the stories about his alleged affairs, more publications were paying attention to issues of his personal life, posing questions about whether his behavior amounted to hypocrisy. A measure of disillusionment was inevitable.
The Jordan p.r. machine cranked on. In the same week that his wife filed her divorce papers, there came word that suddenly he had plans for a magazine—like Rosie O’Donnell’s, Martha Stewart’s and Oprah Winfrey’s. The publication, said a statement, would offer lifestyle pieces and advice. Nike released a statement promising that JORDAN would reflect “the inspiration of Michael Jordan.”
What that “inspiration” might be was difficult to discern. What idea had he ever expressed beyond winning games? But even this was not the question that mattered most, at least not to anyone on the Jordan team who saw an annual cut of his endorsement money. The biggest worry was that the singing of the TV children might give way to a new question: Had most of this been a ruse? It was why news of a woman’s legal filing in the quiet town of Waukegan, Illinois, triggered such seismic waves in the culture.
By that Friday, January 11, reporters chasing the divorce petition story had descended on the Bradley Center in Milwaukee, where the Wizards were playing the Bucks. Nobody asked him a direct question about Juanita Jordan’s filing, not after Lynn Sweet. That night the Wizards got blown out, losing by 19 in a game far more one-sided than the score.
It was the start of a four-game losing streak. The next night at MCI, playing 40 tough minutes in the second of back-to-back games, Jordan scored 35, but visibly tired late, hitting only three of his last nine shots, as the Wizards lost by eight to Minnesota and Kevin Garnett. Three evenings later, the team fell at home to San Antonio and then was annihilated the following night in a 44-point loss at New Jersey, where the team’s record dropped to 18–18, and Jordan spent the entire second half on the bench. The team’s problems without Hamilton never had been so evident, and now came news that his torn groin was healing more slowly than expected, that his expected return had been pushed back from mid-January to perhaps as late as early February.
The team flew to Chicago for the first game since the comeback’s start at the United Center, where a statue of Jordan stands at the front entrance, a shrine to which tourists flock every day of the year. By game day, hundreds of the ticketless had joined ticket holders in making the pilgrimage there. Quite a few bowed their heads, like people do in Arlington National Cemetery next to JFK’s Eternal Flame. An elderly woman wiped tears from her eyes. A couple of younger women fell into each other’s arms in sodden collapse. A nicely dressed child knelt on a McDonald’s bag.
Inside the arena, a couple of hundred reporters stood outside the visitors’ locker room. Jordan walked down a hallway, people squealing, tripping over microphone cords, throwing elbows, cursing each other, anything to get a position close. He bounded toward the locker room, abruptly stopping to say hello to a disabled woman in a wheelchair who said she had been coming to see him play for 13 years. He bent, hugged her, moved on. The Chicago reporters crowded into the little locker room, staring and pointing at his Wizards road jersey already hanging in his designated locker, right next to a plastic bottle of baby oil and his silver headphones and a single pair of white Air Jordans with black trim.
I saw Lacy Banks. “This is nuts,” he said happily.
We walked out into the hallway, where we bumped into Jordan’s longtime agent, David Falk, whom Banks called the “Bird of Prey.” Agents typically find these monikers very flattering. The more menacing the moniker, the greater his status, the more demand for his services.
The Bird of Prey stood there grinning.
Perfectly bald (wrong, somebody corrected me—once balding, now shaven), Falk looked like a skinny version of the Man from Glad (old school) or a skinnier version still of Austin Powers’s archenemy, Dr. Evil, with a marginally better tan. He gave Bobby Simmons a power shake (“You ready for today?”). He put the shake on the two Jordan buddies who worked as executives in the Wizards’ front office, Rod Higgins and Fred Whitfield. (“What a day really.”) Falk had an unusual way of putting emphasis on words where emphasis didn’t necessarily belong, but it made him sound enthusiastic and pugnacious. It seemed to work.
He had represented Jordan since his first contract negotiation, in 1984. His clients included Patrick Ewing and Alonzo Mourning. He would tell you this if you did not already know it. He also handled key Wizards over the years, like the jettisoned mega-millionaire disappointments Juwan Howard and Rod Strickland, dealing in the process with Abe Pollin, for whom he did not try hiding his contempt. “The only reason Michael came to Washington was Ted Leonsis,” Falk said.
Falk noted that he had gotten along well with Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf, and so regretted, he said, that the tear in his relationship with Pollin had not been repaired, that Abe seemed so resistant to the idea of dealing reasonably with people who could help him. Jordan didn’t permit Falk to speak about certain subjects related to Jordan, or to certain people about any subject, but Falk evidently had free rein to talk about Pollin whenever he wished.
Still, events suggested that Falk had fallen a ways out of the Jordan loop. Jordan’s business seemed to be increasingly handled by an old Falk lieutenant, Curtis Polk. The reality left Falk with less to do in Jordan’s empire, which seemed to be slowly downsizing anyway, with less new business coming in. The sports pages, which once boasted prominent articles about Michael Jordan’s “super-agent,” seldom wrote about him, and like most of the Jordan support staff whose stature derived largely from Jordan’s, he would need to find something new in the coming years to keep himself from looking like a has-been.
Now here came a problem for him. He stood there in front of Lacy Banks when Mike Wise, then of The New York Times, strolled over and said hi to everybody, very casually, greeting Banks and me and, only then, turning to Falk and politely saying hello. This said less about Falk than it did Mike Wise, who was among the most skilled basketball reporters in the country and someone admired as much for his personal style as his professional talents. He did not genuflect before his subjects. Wise smiled at Falk and asked, “Is there a bit of nostalgia for you today, to have the media jackals surrounding you like this?”
Falk got a funny look on his face, the look fighters get when they take a jab on the nose and understand they might be facing surprises. “I love Chicago…” Falk answered. He rhapsodized about Chi Town and the old Bulls.
Wise tried moving him toward a discussion of Jordan’s business relationship with the Wizards, particularly the circumstances under which Jordan had opted out of his managerial and ownership contracts with Pollin and Leonsis. Falk began frowning. Wise wanted to know if an agreement was already in place to have Jordan benefit financially in any future ownership contract, given that his comeback had raised the club’s revenues. “Michael likes to say he scratched his itch,” Wise said, “but he’s also increasing the value of the franchise. Now [after his retirement as a player] he can buy back in and make money and—”
A smirking Falk cut him off: “If he does that, he’s gotta buy back in at the higher price. See, that’s why guys like you are writers, and other people do the financial stuff, because—”
Wise interrupted: “I heard he’s got an under-the-table deal with Leonsis that I heard about…. You were cut out of the deal.”
The Bird of Prey seemed to lose a wing then. He blinked, looked up and down, stared hard at Wise. The truth was already clear: Falk was no longer anybody’s consigliere, just another agent with a new role whittled by the years and Jordan’s shifting ambition. It was probably the natural order of things, but this made it no more pleasant for him. He raised his chin, in a show of dignity. “I can handle that,” he said. “I took a very specific role, a non-role in that, because [Jordan] was in management. I wasn’t allowed to negotiate his contract; it’s against the rules. It wasn’t a complicated deal.”
Wise continued prodding, in hopes of obtaining details of any future financial and ownership guarantees for Jordan. In truth, there were none. What struck me in that moment was the uncertainty of Jordan’s future, the utter absence of assurances for him, the risks being taken by the Jordan team, the assumptions made, the confidence that an ownership deal would still be waiting for their man at the end of his playing days. Falk admitted there was nothing ironclad in place, nothing even suggested, and added that Jordan didn’t fret over it. “He’s not worrying what will happen a year from now,” Falk said. “I don’t think he’s worrying about what’s going to happen a week from now.”
Falk could scarcely have been more candid. From the beginning of his comeback discussions, Jordan had placed a far greater priority on playing than in taking steps to make certain his future was protected. His casualness invited danger. A savvy handling of the matter would have dictated that he extract guarantees up front from Pollin and Leonsis about his future, an action that would have required finesse, as the NBA’s conflict-of-interest rules prohibited Jordan and the Wizards from having a future ownership deal and executive contract already in place for him.
But this did not preclude obvious public relations steps that would have locked Pollin into a position essentially guaranteeing Jordan’s future with the club. Jordan’s people had neither secured Pollin’s private oral pledges nor, far more importantly, made certain the owner publicly suggested that he hoped to see Jordan back in the front office at the end of his playing days. Even a vaguely worded public statement would later have given Jordan both leverage and a moral claim. The Jordan team had secured nothing, the consequence of two decades of feeling assured, of believing Jordan always had the most leverage in a negotiation; that no one ever said no to their man. In the end, Jordan had given up his entire Wizards stake in exchange for nothing—nothing other than a chance to play ball. The headlong rush said everything about his priorities. “It was for his love of the game,” Falk said softly, falling back on Jordanese to describe this need that overwhelmed all others.
Falk looked over his shoulder, power-shook another hand and turned back, folding his arms across his chest again, reclaiming his command pose. Another gaggle of basketball executives in suits swooped. “You’re doing it today,” he mumbled over his shoulder.
He muttered hi to somebody else. Keeping the face out there. Keeping the Bird of Prey flying. Nothing about Jordan’s future was certain, he knew. Soon-to-
be-retired athletic gods did not dictate terms once they stopped filling seats. He insisted that Jordan wanted to stay in Washington and work with Leonsis, though when I asked whether Jordan might buy into the Bulls if an ownership opportunity ever presented itself, he held up his hands, being careful. He understood his client’s impulsiveness. “I don’t rule anything out,” he said.
The afternoon’s solemnity was a bit overwrought, and one could have committed heresy by noting the presence of a few boos. But the ovation for Jordan was heartfelt, lasting more than two and a half minutes—and it might have gone into the following week had the Bulls not cut the lights. Conspiracy theorists blamed Jerry Reinsdorf and Jerry Krause, a bit of speculation plagued by just one problem. Neither of the two Jerrys had even shown up, exhibiting the kind of dreadful manners that we in the media love to note. It was a strange and dazzling day.
“It was the worst game I’ve ever seen,” assistant coach John Bach would say later.
The afternoon start probably had something to do with the awfulness of the play. Bodies hadn’t fully awakened. But the tension of Jordan’s return explained more. Just before the tip, he looked down at the court, his arms extended and hands half-clenched, in a strangely meditative pose. It didn’t help. After Ron Artest badly clanked the game’s first shot over him, Jordan came down, lost his handle on the ball, regained it and missed an open jumper. Both teams spent much of the game handling the ball as if it had been rolled in butter. Jordan committed nine turnovers and made only 7 of 21 shots, with Artest holding him to 16 points. In payback, Jordan cuffed Artest, who missed 12 of 15 shots, looking half out of his mind sometimes. Once, in his daffy hyperactive way, he kicked Jordan, accidentally, or maybe not. Having the two defend each other meant a kind of mutually assured destruction.
Jordan looked exhausted by the end, having played too long again, 41 minutes. The crowd had commenced a mass exodus from the dreariness a couple of minutes earlier. The final seconds were played before perhaps half of the 23,500 there at the start. The Wizards won by eight, thanks to Chris Whitney’s 20 points and Popeye Jones’s 14 rebounds that accompanied his besting of Charles Oakley, whom he held scoreless. Reliable Hubert Davis started in place of Hamilton and played 38 minutes, while holding down Ron Mercer.
The Wizards looked like a tired team, but they had won their 19th game, equaling the team’s victory total from the previous season, which had been the worst in franchise history. Collins made a big deal about it. Jordan sounded grateful just to be off the court. “When the crowd started that whole thing [the ovation], it was hard for me to play…” he said. He likened the city of Chicago to a brother. “In all the other games, I don’t think I played against my brother. I owe a lot of gratitude to this city for what they gave me….. It was a tough [day], tough, tough. I played like it, too. The motivation wasn’t as high as I normally play with.”
The mood was all too glum. Lacy Banks stepped forward with an observation that pushed the right buttons, telling Jordan that his eyes seemed to be tearing up during his introduction.
Jordan groaned, “You didn’t see tears. They cut the lights out before you could see anything, Lacy.” He shook his head. The press laughed. And then Jordan acknowledged he had almost cried. “I was getting close,” he said. His eyes glazed over. He glanced at Banks, and laughed ruefully.
The Wizards’ bus left a half-hour later. Players wanted to see his statue. Jordan groaned to the driver, “Keep going, keep going, keep going.”
Pressured by everybody else, the driver ignored him. The bus slowed near the statue. Players moved to one side so they could get a good view. Lue and a few others began applauding. Jordan looked out the other side, stared at asphalt and said nothing. It had been a long afternoon, and finally they were gone.
Among those who had stared at the Jordan statue and politely clapped was Richard Hamilton, reduced to being a spectator at the games for the time being, still trying to recover from his injured groin. Collins thought the groin probably needed at least two more weeks of rehab, to be augmented by gradual conditioning. It didn’t make sense to play Hamilton at 70 percent, he said. Hamilton’s whole game was speed, and if Rip didn’t have it, he couldn’t fight his way free. Foes would knock him around like the waif he was, and batter him mercilessly. Rip had to stay on the injured list for now.
The next morning, still in Chicago, the team practiced at Tim Grover’s facility, Hoops the Gym. Near the practice’s end, Hamilton worked alone, doing light footwork, shuffling his feet laterally, trying to maintain some semblance of conditioning while being careful to protect the groin. He shot some jumpers, looking as though he was careful not to push off too hard on his legs. The shots went in anyway, jumper after flawless jumper. You could roll him out of a hospital bed and he would still make jumpers.
Across the court, a happy-looking Jordan casually called out to him: Did he want to have a shooting game?
Sure, Hamilton answered.
Their relationship remained murky. It was not volatile; it simply had yet to connect, and seemed by then that it never would. Around the media, Jordan still occasionally referred to Hamilton as the Lone Ranger and likened himself to the loyal companion, Tonto. Hamilton, who hadn’t been alive during the Lone Ranger era, never really knew what to make of the analogy. “The thing is, Michael said something to reporters about Tonto and it gets attention ’cause it’s Michael, and we all respect that, but I didn’t really know about Tonto, and the young players just want to show our talent and that matters more to me than this other stuff,” Hamilton said. “We’re not Jordanaires.”
For Hamilton, it always came back to that: He was no Jordanaire. He appreciated being around a great player, but he wanted more respect from observers. He thought he could play with anybody, and aimed to get past this injury as soon as possible to resume his climb. Even injured, he knew he could make shots. “Hey,” he yelled, and threw up a shot from 45 feet away. All net. He looked at Jordan and their contest was on, as a whole team waited for them outside.
No player but Jordan had the power to keep the team bus waiting. A few of the Wizards on the bus guessed that he had found himself a game, and they knew what any game meant. Cash was always on the line in a Jordan challenge—which on this day consisted of a shooting contest from mid-court, a distance of 47 feet from the basket. In the unfamiliar surroundings of Grover’s gym, the Wizards p.r. representative had been unable to keep tabs on reporters, and I’d found myself able to walk unseen up to a viewing area behind glass, a floor above the practice court. It was a window onto a game and a relationship. Hamilton went up several hundred dollars early, happily yelling, while the attendants, a couple of ball boys and a Wizards staff member, kept glancing at watches. The competition dragged on. Ten, fifteen minutes. Someone finally said: “Probably time to get going, Michael.”
No, he said coolly.
The game would not end until Jordan said so. The lean Hamilton, having to use his shoulders to muscle up shots, continued making improbable swishes and adding on to his winnings. Jordan’s shots careened off the sides of the rim. He struggled with the half-court distance while expressing ever more confidence that the contest would soon turn, making this sound like fate: “Feelin’ good—oooh, almost, there it is, startin’ to feel it, oooh, feelin’ it.” It was a nifty head game; he knew how to plant doubt. Three more Jordan shots went wide, and the swishing Hamilton tacked on a couple hundred dollars more. The bus had waited 20 minutes by then. Jordan began improvising, seemingly compensating for his wrist’s tendinitis, adjusting his form, finally settling on a one-legged set shot that look borrowed from the ’50s and Bob Cousy, his left foot on the floor, his right knee lifted and bent. He gave the ball one bounce, did a little hop, got a hip into the shot and flicked it, effortlessly. Finally, he started finding his range—“oooooh, oooooh, oooooh”—hitting 8 of his last 13 mid-court shots to win more than $1,000 off the day’s prey. At last, Jordan indicated that the game was over. He grinned and whooped—“coo, coo, coo”—a signal that he had fleeced another pigeon. He pointed in a gesture of amused supremacy at Hamilton, who, turning his back, walked to the back of the gym to retrieve his sweats, while a delighted Jordan fitted an earring into his left lobe, put on a black cap and kept teasing. “You knew you weren’t taking my money, Rip,” he cried, and when Hamilton didn’t turn, he repeated it. Hamilton never stopped walking, never uttered a word. Jordan stared at Hamilton’s back, calling out, “Rip, we’ll do it again.”
The moment revealed all his sides—his need for dominance, the compulsion to find another rush, his avuncular instinct to soothe the bruised foe. He had an alpha personality in a profession teeming with alphas, which necessarily meant that, from his early Bulls days, there always had been ebbs and flows to his relationships with teammates, particularly with other alphas. But his taunting and besting of other Bulls had been accompanied by his expert schooling of them in practice, where he sometimes preyed on the weakest during scrimmages in hopes of humiliating and browbeating them into raising their games.
He played a critical role in improving the games of several Bulls, most notably Scottie Pippen, who had arrived in the NBA with a reputation as a sieve on defense. Relentlessly abused in scrimmages by a merciless Jordan, Pippen lifted his play to become a premier defender. “You either sink or swim with Michael in practice, and Scottie made it,” said Tex Winter, the architect of Chicago’s famed Triangle Offense and a longtime Bulls assistant coach who had moved on with Phil Jackson to the Lakers. “You either work hard or Michael has no use for you.”
The Wizards had hoped that Jordan’s ruthless practice style might transform Hamilton and Alexander, two players still in need of improving their defense. But Jordan’s bad knee made any hard practicing or hands-on tutelage impossible. In January, the knee began to show signs again of fatigue and strain. By then, he seldom played any basketball outside of games, participating in about one-quarter of the Wizards’ practices, according to team observers. He would do a few drills—a series of sprints, some shooting on undefensed fast breaks, a brief run-through of plays—before muttering to Collins, “I’ll go to the bike.” Or Collins, wanting to save the troubled right knee for a coming game, would sometimes call to him, “I think you’ve had enough, Michael. Go to the bike.”
Consequently, the Wizards seldom scrimmaged full-court, with one team observer saying he had never been part of an NBA organization that practiced so little under game-like conditions. Ultimately, Jordan gave the young players far fewer of the tough tutorials that he had brought to a Chicago practice. What he had left to give them was his dominant side: alpha man’s periodic aloofness, his ribbing, his shooting games. Aside from his occasional chats with Ty Lue, he offered no key players any reason for affection. Alexander was lost. Hamilton’s improvement on defense came from working and watching tapes with John Bach. The team’s number two star resumed making the point, casually and politely, that Jordan would not be around in another couple of years. “We showed that we got the pride to win without Michael,” Hamilton said. “We know we got a lot of talent, and we’re going to be the leaders someday soon.”
With every month, Hamilton voiced his conviction more directly. It reflected an ebbing veneration of the idol, a new daring among a few players making clear where the future rested.
It had become clear that the team could not win steadily without Hamilton. But if the team also lost Jordan, the effect on the Wizards’ playoff chances would be fatal. Any plan for the team was meaningless without abiding by the only priority that mattered: Protect Jordan. Safeguard the knee. Make certain he received adequate rest during a game. Preferably, no nights longer than 38 minutes.
He had played 40 minutes or more in four of the last six games, or five to eight minutes longer per game than had been recommended by John Hefferon. His performance had plummeted. He had missed nearly two-thirds of his shots, and been guilty of a rash of turnovers. The team flew to Minneapolis, where he again played too long. He was brilliant for a half, hitting 10 of 19 shots, only to sink in the second half, missing 13 of 15 shots, and making only 1 of 11 in the fourth quarter, as the Wizards lost again, their fifth loss in their last six games. He had pulled down 14 rebounds, a testament to his tenacity, but no one could dispute his decline during the final minutes, when nearly all his shots hit the front rim and he labored defensively. Afterward, he was asked: Are the minutes taking too much out of you?
“I didn’t feel that bad, actually,” he said, dismissing the suggestion that the team needed to reassess his playing time.
A few hours later, he got off a red-eye flight back in Washington, arose early and worked on his shooting, alone. He could not go through a real practice on most days, but he felt the need to try honing his erratic shot after sleeping just a couple of hours. He received more ice and stim treatment. That night at MCI, against Philadelphia, the pattern of the Minnesota game was repeated: Another sensational Jordan beginning, followed by an abysmal, exhausted finish. He had 28 points in the first half, but hit only one of eight shots in the second half. In this, the second of games on back-to-back nights, he had played 42 minutes and scored only two second-half points, and the Wizards lost by seven. He now had made only 47 of 130 shots in his last seven games, shooting a miserable 36.2 percent and missing more field-goal attempts in that stretch than any other player in the league.
Meanwhile, I had spent the last few hours on my own flight, with nothing better to do than crunch more Jordan numbers.
He had gone 4-for-30 in the fourth quarters of his last three games, shooting a microscopic 13 percent.
“What are you doing?” a Wizards p.r. man asked me.
I had just come off the plane and arrived at MCI, hair askew. Unshaven and wired, I probably looked a little wild. I was sitting in the pressroom scribbling numbers, calculating shooting percentages, gorging minutiae, spitting out factoids, drooling banalities, buzzed after the road trip, deep inside my tube. “He’s four-for-thirty in fourth quarters over the last week, Dolph,” I said. “Four-for-thirty. What do you think of that?”
“He’s sure putting people in the seats, huh?” the man said.
His name was Dolph Sand. He had big, dark hair and a thick mustache and he looked like he could be related to the Marx Brothers. He was a very nice man whom everybody liked, and his job included bringing Jordan the names of the refs, when they were announced the evening of a game. Sand had worked in his Wizards job for many years, and he had been around through the good days and bad ones. He had seen the arena half-filled, and a third-filled, and sometimes as quiet as Lenin’s Tomb. Everything was different now, Dolph Sand observed.
“He’s packing them in,” he noted, brightly and rightly.
Not that I didn’t already know this, but hearing it kind of shook me awake. It brought me out of my tube and reminded me what this whole thing was about, bottom line. You get back into MCI and somebody like Dolph Sand innocently reminds you what it’s always going to be about—and what it’s about is stuffing these seats and selling goodies.
And Jordan had done it. He had filled everything, including the luxury boxes. He had attracted more advertisers who wanted their companies’ names to hang somewhere, anywhere. To come back from a road trip and walk into MCI was to see advertising billboards on about every inch of space that couldn’t be used to squeeze in another paying customer—signs for some companies that had been here before Jordan and some that hadn’t, the old loyalists having to cede their prime positions if they couldn’t pony up for the higher rate. There were signs hawking beer and cellular phones, and sodas and fast-food joints, and an internet venture and a supermarket, and whatever and whoever else had the money to pay. There was a toy blimp—about 15 feet long—that flew around inside the arena before the game, bearing the name of a health-care company. It hovered maybe 10 to 20 feet above the baskets. Kids loved the toy blimp, and their parents stared at the health-care company’s name, and if they were sitting close enough to courtside, you could now and then see one of the kids toss a souvenir miniature Wizards basketball up at the blimp as if hopeful of blowing it out of the air, and if a ball got lost, go get another for $10 or so at a souvenir stand and another $70 jersey while you were at it. Cha-ching.
Jordan accounted for that sound. Knowing this as well, Abe Pollin had expressed appreciation in the way owners do, honoring Jordan at a halftime ceremony earlier in the month, presenting him with a trophy of a silver basketball to commemorate Jordan’s arrival in the 30,000-point pantheon. To see the two of them stiffly standing together, surrounded by their coteries, was to understand that they shared so many traits, good and bad.
Both men worked hard, exuded public grace, and almost never made excuses. They were about as color-blind as men can be, with each having surrounded himself long before with capable people of different races. Jordan rewarded anyone who could help him, and as many of his closest friends and advisers (seemingly far more) were white as not. Pollin had distinguished himself early in his basketball life by ensuring that African-Americans rose to top positions in all sectors of his organization. Wes Unseld found himself in his sixth year as the club’s general manager, and the hiring of Jordan as club president had ushered in Fred Whitfield and Rod Huggins. African-Americans held key managerial positions in everything from Wizards advertising and ticket sales to the public relations department. It was an egalitarian place, like so much of the NBA, a seeming model for race relations and social progress, and Pollin had played no small role in that.
Yet Pollin and Jordan also had a great need for loyalty and deference, and here neither man had yet to satisfy the other’s wishes. The owner’s handing of the silver basketball to the star constituted both an acknowledgment of the obvious (Jordan had changed the team’s fortunes on every level) and a gesture of respect toward a man with whom his relationship had experienced serious tensions. But the gossipers around both men had made certain that the gulf between them widened. And the media offended Pollin by suggesting that Jordan had single-handedly advanced the franchise, whose fortunes, it was suggested, would be even brighter if Pollin did not stand in the way of Jordan’s grand plans.
By then, the press in Washington and a few other cities had advanced a broader argument: Jordan, it was said, had begun transforming the city of Washington—particularly the community around MCI. Michael Jordan had done what Abe Pollin hadn’t, what a city’s worth of business people couldn’t. Michael Jordan’s arrival had sparked a renaissance. Michael Jordan meant new shops, new buildings, new jobs, new hope. Michael Jordan had lit a flame, and Abe Pollin and other Washington entrepreneurs were lucky to hold his torch.
The Jordan phenomenon was moving, it was transcendent, and it was nonsense.
The adoration of Jordan always inflated his role in a city’s development. Simultaneously, it tended to obscure the community achievements of a businessman like Pollin, who had built MCI, five years earlier, in a tired, stagnant area of Washington, and absorbed all the attendant financial risks, a man whose life in the construction business made risk a daily part of his existence. The community surrounding MCI had been on a slow, steady rebound ever since, for which Pollin seldom, if ever, received kudos, any improvement generally credited to Jordan’s playing comeback, which by then was only into its third month.
That slight, or hard luck, depending on your perspective, simply underscored what little magic the Pollin name had in either the city of Washington or pro basketball, despite his high profile in both venues. He was the Rodney Dangerfield of basketball owners. His commissioned biography remained unpublished. His reputation as a skinflint among basketball owners appeared unalterable. For all his money and clout, his quest for enduring respect in the sports community looked as tough now as it had been in his beginnings.
Since his boyhood, Abe Pollin loved sports. With a quarter in his pocket, the schoolboy regularly rushed to nearby Griffith Stadium in the early ’30s to watch the Washington Senators. It was an age when major league baseball lorded over other American team sports, and a pre-television era in which to have a ticket to a ball game meant having a seat in an exclusive theater. The Senators were generally also-rans to the New York Yankees, and, watching Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig swat the ball around Griffith, the boy was able to marvel over the New York idols in the flesh while mourning his beloved Senators’ losses. A role reversal came in 1933, when the Senators soared to win the American League pennant. Young Pollin rejoiced. Never to be a great athlete, he had found a permanent place as a spectator, and dreamer. Silvery quarters and baseball tickets were aplenty for him. His family enjoyed a comfortable life, thanks to his immigrant father, Morris, who built a thriving plumbing and heating business from scratch and passed on, as part of Abe Pollin’s and his brother Harold’s Jewish upbringing, the importance of community involvement, charity, passion and achievement.
His father segued into the construction business, for which Abe Pollin worked in the ’40s, before establishing his own company a decade later, building office complexes, houses and apartments, on his way to becoming a wealthy man. By 1962, he had enough money to explore the possibility of fulfilling a long-held wish to buy a professional sports team, attempting to acquire the NBA’s Cincinnati Royals. A deal with the Royals never materialized, but the new part of his life had begun. His pursuit of the club that would one day be known as the Wizards began in 1963, the year Michael Jordan was born and the ailing franchise played its last days in Chicago. There, it was known as the Chicago Zephyrs, and its star was a superb young center named Walt Bellamy, who had failed to take the Zephyrs far. The team struggled for recognition in a sports-crazed town that belonged to Chicago’s two baseball teams, along with the city’s football Bears and the hockey Black Hawks. By the time Pollin and two partners bought the team for an NBA-record $1.1 million in 1964, it had moved to Baltimore and was renamed the Bullets. Four years later, Pollin bought out his partners.
The landscape of professional sports was changing nearby. Baseball’s Senators lost their grip on Washington loyalties, the empty seats growing as the early ’70s began, the team’s attendance next to last in the American League. After the 1971 season, the Senators said goodbye to Washington, soon to become the Texas Rangers. A vacuum existed; the time seemed ripe for new Washington teams. In 1972, Pollin acquired the National Hockey League’s expansion franchise in Washington. A year later, with his basketball team dropping Baltimore from its name to become the Washington Bullets, Pollin’s two teams assumed residence in his new arena, built in the Washington suburb of Landover, Maryland. The ’70s became the Bullets’ golden days. The team regularly made the playoffs and reached the NBA Finals three times in the decade, winning the championship in 1978.
Then came 20 years of mostly misery. Losing became habit, a trend unbroken by the arrival of promising young draft picks and high-priced veterans acquired in the twilight of their playing days. By 1997, Pollin had changed the team’s name. “Bullets” no longer had the right ring. The name worked in the ’60s, when TV was inundated with all-American six-shooters and homey Westerns, when always a good TV sheriff had the good bullets. But the country had changed, and the nature of American cities, too. Bullets had come to have a lethal sound. Bad name for a city that had too many areas with too many real bullets and too much bloodletting. As names go, the “Washington Bullets” had come to make about as much sense as the Washington Nukes (and, across the world, in what was the final straw for the name, Pollin’s close friend, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, had been assassinated with a handgun).
It had become a loser’s name besides. One heard the words “Washington Bullets” and immediately braced for news of the latest rout. Not merely a rout, but a down-in-the-dust ass-stomping, punctuated by comic ineptitude. Maybe you could get rid of the stench with a name change. Voilà: The too edgy, too-identified-
with-losing, vaguely gang-banging name of Bullets gave way to the happy, prudent, vaguely Disney-sounding name that seemed born of a children’s birthday party theme—the Wizards.
Along the way, Pollin gained a reputation for philanthropy and social activism that spanned a half-century. He had integrated Washington area construction crews in the ’50s, and initiated a program in the ’90s for feeding the Washington homeless called “Abe’s Table.” He helped to launch the area’s “I Have a Dream” program, designed to pay the college tuition of impoverished Washington-area children. He personally aided a large group of fifth graders at a Maryland elementary school, later fulfilling his vow to pay for the college costs of the 20 students who graduated from high school. He was that archetype known as a kindly patron.
1997 was Pollin’s makeover year, facelifts for everything. He had built another new arena, this time not in a suburb but on the edge of Washington’s Chinatown, in a downtown area desperate for revitalization. No one could reasonably argue that he didn’t tap into his wealth, or put himself at financial risk. He paid for everything, with the costs of construction over two years exceeding the projected $175 million budget by at least $45 million. For financing, he had borrowed from several lenders, offering as collateral his two teams and most of his land and properties, including his arena in Landover. Susan O’Malley’s father, Peter, a Maryland attorney and longtime Pollin friend, handled the legal end of much of the project. In December 1997, Pollin moved his team out of Landover and into his new arena, the MCI Center, for which the telecommunications giant paid him $44 million for naming rights.
From the moment the arena opened for business, the area around the seedy east side neighborhood bordering Chinatown slowly, steadily changed. Pollin deserved the lion’s share of credit. A couple of nice restaurants popped up here, and a couple of attractive night spots there, in tandem with all the new foot traffic coming to see the Wizards, the Capitals, his WNBA Washington Mystics, Georgetown basketball and rock shows. The mass of bodies, in turn, generated new cultural and business activity. A theater group began contemplating expansion plans in the area, later to settle on building a new stage across from the arena. The area around MCI became a hub of activity on game nights, requiring parking lots, small shops, still more restaurants. The influx of attractions, employees and revenue served as the stimulus for the construction of apartment complexes and the refurbishing of old buildings and surrounding streets. That is, by any measuring stick, an economic and social revitalization, which Pollin’s money and risk had set in motion.
Once Jordan came to town, pundits around Washington tended to overlook or undervalue Pollin’s contributions. It was Jordan, said the Jordanphiles, who stoked economic activity in the area. But in measuring people’s relative contributions to the rebound of a dormant area, reason dictates that you begin with the man who gambled something, the one who put up considerable money from a fortune that paled against those of other NBA owners. Jordan was generally disinclined to risk his own money, outside of casinos.
Jordan looked to others to assume business gambles. Jordan did not provide the big money for deals, believing his presence alone constituted an investment, that it ought to be enough for a free stake in something.
What he did on his end was show up somewhere. The move generally made money for someone else. When he donned a Wizards uniform, it meant that about 5,500 more people a night came to MCI than the year before. By the start of the season, the Wizards had sold nearly 14,000 season ticket packages, an increase of about 4,000 from the year before. The surrounding shops, bars and restaurants benefited, with some eateries reporting sharp increases in business on game nights.
Still, many observers had hoped for and predicted a broader economic impact. The speculation was that Jordan’s presence, and the increased excitement and business at MCI, would lure more technology companies and young venture capital firms to invest in the area, where they could offer employees the chance to be close to a city’s vibrancy—to Jordan’s games, trendy new restaurants, exciting clubs. A few businesses set up offices nearby, but there was no dramatic spike in investment after Jordan’s arrival.
The economic stimulus could be likened on a smaller scale to what the Chicago arena area had seen during the early years of Jordan’s ascendancy around Chicago Stadium, and later nearby the United Center, a trickle-down effect that benefited neighborhood restaurants and sports shops. But Jordan was never FDR, and what he brought was not the WPA. In Washington, mythologizers were so starstruck as to equate a man’s mere presence with hands-on accomplishment. In truth, Jordan never invested in the Washington community around the arena. He was not an assertive force on behalf of a community. He was simply the wonder who landed there.
The contrast was somebody like Magic Johnson, who formed a real estate development company in Los Angeles and, in the wake of learning he was HIV-positive, began heavily investing in some of the toughest, poorest communities of that city, high-risk investments that created businesses and jobs. His chain of movie theaters meant more jobs for locals and more reason for outsiders to come to Southeast L.A., look around, eat, shop and pump more money into the area, forging a connection to places and people they would never have considered before. Johnson was a builder and investor who left his mark on places. Jordan’s connection to a place was remote. In his old Chicago days, he had been involved with the Make-A-Wish Foundation. But such activity even with children had diminished markedly. While still club president, he did one community appearance at a Washington school, arriving for a photo op, efficiently posing, expressing thanks and departing quickly.
There were limits, too, to what Jordan would do to boost the Wizards, a fact clouded by the media’s emphasis on Pollin’s shortcomings, and fed in no small part by the Jordan camp’s sniping. Word still floated around about how the Jordan people wished that Pollin had had the sense to accept Leonsis’s supposed offer, a year earlier, to pick up the cost of the league’s luxury-tax penalties on deals that Pollin had allegedly vetoed. Why couldn’t Pollin, asked Jordan allies, allow an important minority partner like Leonsis to help? Moreover, why couldn’t Pollin pay on his own?
The Jordan people carefully avoided discussion about why then-part-owner Jordan—if so enamored of the idea that his partners, Pollin and Leonsis, pay for luxury-tax penalties and added salary—did not see fit to offer money from his own fortune. That was always the essential contradiction to Jordan: He wanted ownership, but none of ownership’s traditional financial responsibilities. He wanted the rest of Wizards ownership to invest more millions, but did not want to invest any money himself. He wanted other possible ownership groups in other cities to pony up huge sums if they wanted him, while sparing him any risk. He saw no contradiction in any of this. He did not bring money to a table; he was not a money guy. He brought Jordan. He injected mystique.
That so much was made of his economic and social impact on Washington evinced the media’s willingness to graft a fairy tale on the city. But besides his free stake in the Wizards and Lincoln Holdings, his business investments in Washington were really confined to one. In the early part of 2002, his restaurant, Jordan’s, opened in the Reagan Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, close to the White House. His sixth eatery in the country, it seated about 200 people, and business seemed brisk there for a while, despite restaurant reviews that characterized the fare as diner-quality disappointing. I ate there several times, once with a couple of colleagues, each of us struck on that afternoon by the same thing: There seemed nothing around to indicate that Jordan had anything to do with the place—no grand photo or artistic representation of the idol, no signature on a menu, no hint of his influence upon the ambience or décor, which had an unfinished, even vacant feel. It was as if he was there but not there, a feeling that characterized the sensation of Jordan in Washington.
While in Washington, he stayed in his tube from the moment he left his home in the Ritz-Carlton to when he returned. More than a few superstars lived that way, like a careful extraterrestrial: touch down, quietly reap the local benefits and return to the pod. The insularity of his life manifested itself in ways big and small. One night in the scrum, a visiting Chicago reporter asked Jordan about the perceived renaissance of the Washington area around the MCI Center, for which he was then receiving credit. Jordan was confused, believing the point of the question was about games and winning. The reporter rephrased the question so that Jordan might have a better chance of understanding that it had nothing to do with games, that its point was to elicit Jordan’s thoughts, if any, on the neighborhood around the arena, and what he thought his role was in helping it. The clarification didn’t help. Jordan’s answer, swift and rote, underscored how little of his new city had dented his consciousness. “I think a whole new attitude is something that’s needed with this [the Wizards’] organization, and winning does that,” he said proudly. “And I think the fans are starting to see that.”
To say that he gave much thought to revitalizing anything in Washington, other than his lethargic team, was to be party to a fiction. He cared about winning, and if a city’s residents liked to win, then he was happy they were happy.
Once, when he was baby-faced, this was all right, part of a carefreeness granted to twentysomething athletes. But as he’d gotten older, the attitude had begun to seem so…young. What had once looked charming now struck many observers as evidence of arrested development, a sign that a nearly 39-year-old man had spent too much time in a world of games. The divorce petition and stories of his affairs only added to the doubts. He remained an idol to many fans, except now he had become a symbol of self-indulgence to a legion of others. America had come to be divided over Michael Jordan.
That reality went unadmitted by media forces. Television needed him for all that he could do for its ratings and future advertising revenues. In the three years prior to the 2001–2002 season, the Wizards had not appeared on national television. In just the first two and a half months of the new season, long before its midway point, the Wizards already had appeared in 13 nationally televised games. But Nielsen ratings could not mask the doubts about Jordan. He still trailed several players in the overall fan balloting for the All-Star Game. The greatest and most promoted player in the history of the game could not win a popularity contest against a group of twentysomethings? The numbers were not an anomaly. The following season, the fans would not vote him onto the starting All-Star team at all. How could that be, if he was, as his advisers and worshippers insisted, the most loved and admired athlete in the world?
Always, his popularity had been like that of the politician who has support thousands of miles wide, but only an inch deep. If he ever committed a misstep and his skills began visibly declining, the ardor couldn’t hold, because most fans never had felt any real connection to him. He was an astounding athlete, but down deep, only an athlete. He was not, say, Muhammad Ali, someone whose intense appeal endured well beyond the ravaging of his physical skills, whose daring in asserting his religious beliefs, railing at racism, resisting the draft during the Vietnam War, withstanding the government’s prosecutorial force and weathering the loss of his livelihood for more than three years, still inspired fans of diverse backgrounds. Ali’s emergence as a moral and cultural symbol explained why his legend had endured his own old extramarital affairs, as well as the hubris of his career’s twilight, when he fought on too long, at a horrific cost to his health. Fans remembered his sacrifices. Love was not too strong a word for what people felt for him. He enjoyed an infinite reservoir of affection and adoration that flowed from his commitment to something larger than championships and himself.
Jordan didn’t. It hadn’t mattered once. As long as he remained the comet, fans could still marvel. But now, looking at him grounded, hearing of his personal troubles, hoping to discover something new and more to him, they couldn’t see it. Their embrace slackened. The occasional big game couldn’t change this. His comeback, just as some of his friends feared, had begun diminishing him.
Away from a basketball arena, the dangers to his image always felt greater. I flew to Cleveland and saw Robert Mercer, a.k.a. the Rumpshaker, who had mailed his letter to Juanita Jordan, a month earlier, and had no idea whether it had any impact or if she had even read it. “But I don’t wish bad things for anybody,” he said, having heard about the divorce petition. He sat in a Hard Rock Cafe and told me he had decided against holding his scheduled January press conference, the one where he had planned to talk about Michael Jordan’s alleged affair. He’d mailed out a lot of flyers for the press conference, he said, and hoped that a big press crowd wouldn’t show up disappointed.
“Just isn’t gonna be one,” he said. “I changed my mind.”
The phone calls and threats of legal action from Jordan attorney Frederick Sperling hadn’t stopped him from going forward, he said. No, he simply had decided that this wasn’t the right time to talk to reporters, that there might never be a good time.
The Rumpshaker looked relieved. He wore a gold chain and gold earring, and bore a striking resemblance to no one so much as Michael Jordan.
“Yeah, people say that a lot,” he said casually. He sipped a bottled water, declining french fries, swearing off calories, wanting to keep his body taut. He mentioned a gig he had coming up, talking about the exotic dances he performed, a pleasant man in good spirits. He just wanted to get back to his life, he said, sighing, finished for the time being with all his talking about Jordan. “It’s tiring,” he said. “You just want to go on to something else. I don’t know how people who find themselves in something like this can handle it for months and months, you know. Like how does Michael handle it? I don’t know how he handles it.”
So the Rumpshaker was out of the picture.
A few hundred miles away, in Indiana, the hairdresser Karla Knafel had heard nothing from Jordan’s attorneys that satisfied her. With Bobby Mercer suddenly quiet, Frederick Sperling could even train more of his attention on the Knafel matter, if necessary. There remained time to stop the mess from breaking publicly.
Things were looking better for Jordan at all points on the personal front. He and his wife had spent time together, soon releasing a joint statement that they were reuniting. It had taken only a month for the divorce petition to disappear.
So brilliantly did Jordan play in stretches for the next two weeks as to leave observers wondering whether his morning leg-weight sessions with Tim Grover had solved his knees’ problems altogether. He would be abusing a defender so easily. Then, in the time it takes for a man to turn with a dribble, he would jerk his head up, grimacing, bending, walking gingerly, not injured but clearly pained, playing through it, carrying on, jogging carefully for the next few minutes. Nonmedical coaches and some press-row observers would say, “He just tweaked something.”
Tweaked is sports parlance, a nice catchall word used when nobody has the slightest idea what is going on with an athlete’s body. Tweaked is to be employed when the grimacing athlete isn’t writhing. Anything tweaked is thought to be no serious cause for concern, nothing more than a momentary pain. And there seemed reason to embrace the tweaked diagnosis when, within a half, Jordan would be running freely again, torching another opponent and playing the same grueling 40, 41 minutes.
“Just tweaked something,” somebody would declare reassuringly.
The belief was as wishful as Jordan’s workload excessive. He had 40 points in 40 minutes in a home win against lowly Cleveland, and two nights later at MCI, he scored 41 points in 40 minutes, as he hit 17 of 30 shots and the Wizards beat Phoenix by 10. With the Wizards’ big men increasingly understanding where he wanted them to screen his defenders, he shot more unguarded jumpers than ever. Popeye Jones especially knew how to free a shooter. Jordan liked Jones’s skill at picking off defenders—Jones’s blind screens sometimes left smaller opponents feeling for their jaws. As a Wizard, Jordan never before had enjoyed such wide-open shots. “I like the way the guys are starting to set screens,” he said, after the Phoenix game.
“The last four games, you’ve averaged 35,” a reporter pointed out, making this sound fairly remarkable.
“Oh, yeah? That surprise you?” Jordan answered, a little testy. He didn’t much appreciate compliments about 30-point averages, assuming reporters would know this had been commonplace once.
It was always surprising to see what pushed his buttons.
He had a couple of days off, then had 32 points in 42 minutes in a home loss to Detroit. The game came down to the final 18 seconds, with the Wizards trailing by one, when the Pistons’ Michael Curry smothered Jordan during an inbounds play. The moment exposed a new Jordan limitation: He simply wasn’t quick enough any longer to free himself from a defender as fast as Curry without the aid of screens. The Wizards never could get him the ball. Without Hamilton on the floor, the ball went to Hubert Davis, who missed a long jumper.
Once again, the absence of a second threat had killed the Wizards. Hamilton had now missed 17 games, but Collins announced that he would be coming back with his 20-point average to play that week in Cleveland. Jordan made clear to the media that, given his long layoff, Hamilton shouldn’t be thinking of immediately reclaiming his old role in the team’s offense. Hamilton’s Lone Ranger would have to sit back and defer because “Tonto is gonna have to take the reins,” Jordan said of himself. “And when the Lone Ranger is ready, then I can step back and I will welcome his offensive input.”
Hamilton was asked about it. He smiled wearily. More Lone Ranger questions? “I’m feelin’ good, movin’ pretty good,” he said. “I’m a team player, and I want to get back in a hurry.”
But he would need at least a few days to get his wind back. He couldn’t do much for long in Cleveland, back in Jordan’s shadow. Jordan scored 26 points but played 40 minutes again, wearing down in the second half as Cleveland came back from a 15-point deficit. A rebound basket gave Cleveland a one-point lead with less than two seconds to play. The Wizards called time-out and Collins began drawing up a play.
“Everybody in the place knew where the ball was going,” Jordan would say later.
What set him apart in all kinds of games was his fearlessness in the face of possibilities, good and bad. He had no worries about uncertainty, about randomness, about in-and-out shots, about dice rolls, about blackjack hands, about scoring or not scoring. The simplicity of what was about to happen in those moments put him at ease.
It was so different from the rest of life, he thought, where so many things could happen. When you took a shot, he’d tell people, only one of two things could happen: You were either going to make it or you were going to miss it. He’d missed loads of last-second shots in his career, he freely told people. And made loads—more than he missed—including one right here in Cleveland against Craig Ehlo to win a playoff series and vault the young Bulls toward greatness. But you never knew, he said. You couldn’t do anything more, he’d say, than give the basket a good look, exercise solid mechanics, rely on instinct, let the ball go and not be afraid of what happened next. Give yourself over to the realization that the ball would be going in—or staying out. That this is how it was meant to be, whether in or not in. That randomness at some point took over. That sometimes you won and sometimes not. He’d been able to grasp this truth even as a young man, and Phil Jackson had helped him to see it even better. Visualize the good. Execute. Accept the randomness. It left you blameless, whatever happened.
What you wanted to do, he believed, was always give yourself the best chance of making a jumper, and for this to happen, you needed to work constantly on the mechanics of your shot. And this he had done. He’d hurried off that red-eye from Minnesota and gotten into the gym to shoot for hours, the same thing he’d done countless times in Washington while other guys slept. No longer the game’s greatest player, he still possessed its greatest work ethic on a court. He believed fiercely in a professional’s accountability. Even if he took the court injured, his presence, as he saw it, meant that he had declared himself ready, and so there could be no excuses; he had to produce. With his hardest work already done, he simply fell back on instinct, without the need for assurance from any coach.
Collins knew what he wanted. He had learned from the Detroit game the other night, when he couldn’t get the ball to Jordan in the final seconds because he had failed to use enough screens and cuts. He decided to utilize screens that would enable Jordan to find a free space. He wanted Cleveland thinking about possibilities other than Jordan. Now he brought back the tired Hamilton into the game, simply to serve as a decoy, another good shooter whom Cleveland would feel it could ignore only at its peril. Collins would have the fine outside-shooting Whitney on the floor, too, as well as Alexander, whose reputation as a shooter would at least force Cleveland to have a defender watching him.
Collins drew up the play. Popeye Jones would inbound the ball. Alexander would race to the outside, above Jordan, while Whitney would cut under him, toward the lane, and cut yet again. The cuts, and the prospect of either a wide-open Whitney or Alexander, would concern the defense just enough that Jordan’s defender might be distracted for an instant, if not move altogether to cover a wide-open Whitney.
Jordan would be free.
It was to be Collins’s finest moment in a huddle during the entire season, evidence of what one assistant coach had said earlier: that if the NBA allowed a time-out every possession and the team could huddle up like a football squad, the Wizards would have a chance of winning every game; that no one in the league was better at freeing up someone for a shot than Collins.
Now the players stepped back onto the floor. Cleveland’s coach, John Lucas, an old friend of Jordan’s, walked over to him and began joking, trying to distract him. Jordan smiled and told Lucas the talk had to stop.
“It’s money time,” Jordan said. “No time for jokin’.”
Lucas kept chatting, getting closer. Jordan gently pushed him away and walked toward a spot near the baseline. A young, strong Cleveland swingman, Bryant Stith, took a position in front of him. The Cavaliers’ tough point guard Andre Miller hovered close. The referee handed the ball to Jones, who waited. An open Whitney darted under Jordan, who made a cut around the baseline, then raced back up the lane, headed toward a spot just to the left of the free-throw line, close to where he had buried Craig Ehlo. Seeing Whitney bolt free, Stith hesitated, then took a step toward the point guard. Momentarily unguarded, Jordan reached his spot, maneuvering around Miller. Jones had already let go of the basketball, a well-timed, precise missile. Jordan caught it, turned his shoulders toward the basket and simply lifted for a 15-foot jumper.
The shot went in at the buzzer.
Wizards, 93–92.
“Who did you think was gonna shoot the ball?” he asked Lucas afterward.
He had that look he only got after he’d hit a big shot—brown eyes wide and gleaming, his head bobbing. “Everybody in the gym knew I was gonna take the shot,” he kept saying proudly.
However, the 40 minutes had left him feeling a little stiff, and the Wizards had a game the next night at home against Atlanta. He would be playing yet another back-to-back. He received stim treatment for the right knee and played heavy minutes again, scoring 28 points, the Wizards winning by seven. “I know everybody was tired,” he said, “everybody” meaning himself.
Two days later, in a Sunday afternoon game at MCI, he played 41 minutes and scored 23, looking badly fatigued as the game moved on, getting outplayed in stretches by Jalen Rose, with whom he traded elbows to the head, the two having to be separated by officials in the second half. The Wizards won by 20 points anyway, a margin of victory possible only because Hamilton, in just his third game back, had rediscovered his legs, scoring 21 points.
Afterward, reporters asked Jordan what Hamilton’s boost meant to the team. Jordan coolly talked instead about the lessons Hamilton had to learn in coming back. “It’s good to have him back…” he said. “I told Rip that the game had taught him a lesson. He thought he could come in and pick up where he left off. Doesn’t happen that way. You got to get into the game and try to get your rhythm and your timing and get your legs back.”
The Wizards would need major production from Hamilton now, as Jordan was slowly but inexorably running himself into the ground. Two nights later at home, after stim treatment before the game’s start, he played 40 minutes again, this time in a victory over Toronto, which received 29 points from Vince Carter. Hamilton played well, scoring 16 to go along with Jordan’s 23 points. The Wizards had won their fourth straight. But Jordan stayed in the training room for about 45 minutes afterward, icing his knees for longer than usual, slowly shuffling out when the door finally opened.
It was only the first week of February. The team still had one game left before reaching the All-Star break, and 35 games to play after that, which meant more than 40 percent of the season remained. The Wizards stood four games above .500, suddenly a favorite to secure one of the top playoff berths in the Eastern Conference. But no one among the coaches knew that Jordan’s season was nearly over, as a practical matter. He only had a few good games left in him for the year, and only 20 days before he would go on the injured list. In the eight weeks since John Hefferon had cautioned him, no one had reined him in, particularly Collins, who had let everyone know, again, that he would rely on Jordan to let him know if his right knee ever felt sore or tired.
He wanted to please Jordan, wanted to be his friend, admiring the star for never having run to him during the worst of the losing streaks and asking, Why am I doing this? No weakness there, no self-pity, said Collins. The only worry he ever detected in Jordan came in non-basketball moments—say, on plane flights, when sometimes he became quiet. He didn’t know what Jordan was thinking then. Jordan didn’t share much of that. But sometimes you could feel a sliver of the pressure in his silences, thought Collins, who didn’t know that any other star alive could have handled that burden. Any other superstar was excused a bad night, Collins pointed out—any other player could ease into a game and have a scoreless first quarter. But if Jordan did that, Collins added, people immediately suspected that he had turned old overnight. He just wanted to help him, he told Jordan on the team plane. He loved him as a player, and appreciated him as a friend. “I just want to help you, Michael,” he’d repeat.
“I’m fine, Douggie,” Jordan said.
Collins said okay, and left it at that. He knew not to go too far.