When Nothing Else Matters

7 The Costs of Pretending

AS THE SEASON PROGRESSED, A CAREFUL COLLINS LOOKED FOR ways to guide Jordan during a game. If unable to communicate with him, the team would suffer, particularly when a tired Jordan lapsed into being a one-man offense. Collins sought a way to offer criticism without being overtly critical. He wanted to correct without correcting. Sometimes an assistant coach would ask him, Why do you do that? Just talk to him. But Collins, so burnt during his early Chicago days when blunt around Jordan, didn’t act like a man confident in expressing his worries directly. If bothered by an aspect of Jordan’s play, he often delivered his concerns cryptically, admonishing not Jordan but the entire team, hoping that Jordan would catch on to his real meaning. Sometimes he specifically excluded Jordan from his complaints, though the intention of his remark was to influence Jordan alone into changing something he had been doing. It was a weird mind game, but it made for pleasant relations between coach and star. Noticing that Jordan wasn’t passing the ball often enough, he waited for a time-out, stared at his other players and said, “Come on, guys, we gotta move the ball. We can’t stand around and watch Michael play.”

It was Collins’s way of saying, Michael is holding the ball too much. Sometimes his messages were too opaque to be grasped by anybody. But Collins thought that Jordan generally understood. He decided that his new dialect, this evolving Collins-speak, worked. He settled upon reserving his advice for matters mostly related to technique. If he saw Jordan’s jump shot losing its arc and turning flat because he wasn’t jumping as high, he carefully formulated a pointer. “Michael, lift a little bit,” he would say. “You’re getting a little flat with it.”

“You’re right,” Jordan responded.

The coach was walking a fine line. Jordan wanted to be in control of everything he did. On the other hand, Collins knew that if he didn’t coach Jordan enough that this could lead to trouble, too. On the day he’d hired him, Jordan privately warned that if Collins was ever seen as bowing to him, the other players would resent the double standard and lose respect for him. That would be the moment, Jordan added, when he would begin having his own doubts about Collins. “He told me he wouldn’t respect me if I didn’t [express a coach’s occasional criticism]—because then I can’t coach the other guys,” Collins recalled.

Jordan carefully avoided any appearance of usurping Collins’s power. Sometimes, Collins called to him, “Hubie was open,” meaning that Jordan had forced a shot while Hubert Davis waited alone for a pass at his favorite spot along the three-point line. Jordan nodded agreeably, as he did when Collins expressed clipped concern about Jordan’s shot selection. The tendinitis in his right wrist had increasingly made long jumpers, and especially three-pointers (he hit fewer than one in every five), doubtful propositions. Every few games, there came a moment when, watching Jordan badly miss a 25-footer, Collins gently indicated to him that it would probably be best if he didn’t cast up another long jumper: “Michael, we don’t need that shot.”

Jordan nodded.

He deferred during practices, too, when Collins sometimes said he needed him on the floor to run through a play. But the limits of the coach’s authority were always clear. One night during a time-out against Minnesota, Collins diagrammed a play that called for the ball to be rotated to Whitney on the outside. “This is where I’m going to put you,” Collins said to Jordan, pointing at his chart. “I’ll put you there so I can load up the other side of the floor and it can go to Chris over here and—”

Jordan interrupted. “Good, but how about having me over there?” Jordan said, pointing to the opposite side of the floor, Whitney’s side, where the ball was going, and where Jordan wanted to be to get the shot himself.

Collins nodded.

He knew when not to push. But he realized he had to find a way to alter Jordan’s game sometimes, in part because Collins could see physical problems with Jordan that extended beyond the bad knee. He couldn’t handle the ball with his old skill, Collins noticed. Some of that had to do with diminishing reflexes, and some with his lack of practice since the knee problems. But mostly, it was a consequence of his bad right index finger, which never had regained full movement after the cigar-cutting accident, in early ’99.

He sliced the finger while down in the Bahamas, the victim of a cheap cutter that had malfunctioned, Jordan told people. A doctor in a local emergency room treated the injury, but the tendon was snapped, with the result that Jordan had a finger he could not move. Once back in Chicago, he went to John Hefferon, who, during surgery, also saw extensive ligament damage in the finger unrelated to the accident, the product of years of dislocations. Even in repairing the tendon, he couldn’t hope to restore all of the finger’s mobility and dexterity, he told Jordan. The finger would never again be able to handle a basketball with quite the same sureness. The rest of his right hand would need to compensate.

It never wholly adjusted, Collins knew. Before the accident, Collins had watched Jordan do anything with a basketball in his right hand—palm it, grip it like a grapefruit, wave it at a foe before blowing by him and dunking. Now Collins saw that Jordan couldn’t reliably palm the ball, making many dunks problematic. Most seriously, he experienced problems for the first time in handling the ball against defensive pressure, especially late in games, when defenders often came at him in double-teaming pincers. The index finger would sometimes betray him, and the ball would come up too high off the dribble, leaving him exposed and vulnerable to a steal. He’d occasionally dribble a ball off his foot, or try to make a stylish move and have the ball squirt away from him. His turnover rate never had been higher—five or more, on many tough nights. “He mishandles that ball sometimes,” Collins said, carefully noting that he thought the bad finger, not Jordan, was to blame. “He can’t grip that ball and swing it.”

But still, on his best nights, Collins marveled, he could be as productive as anybody else in the league. The trick, the coach knew, was in reining in his star when he played like a tired man. For a while, Collins had settled upon a plan to rest Jordan routinely toward the end of first quarters. But the plan was quickly shelved, under Jordan’s pressure. Collins had reversed course again. Like a mariner sensitive to the slightest shift in winds, he was forever tacking. He allowed Jordan now to play 40 minutes on successive days, the part of the regimen that worried John Hefferon the most. “I thought Michael was okay with that tonight,” Collins said blithely following the earlier home loss to Minnesota, the second of consecutive 40-minute evenings. “He felt pretty good.”

Meanwhile, he sought in moments to lay the responsibility for Jordan’s playing time on Jordan. Sometimes he would touch on Jordan’s intransigence and, in the same breath, change course and say he needed Jordan out there to win. Asked whether he was thinking of shaving time off Jordan’s minutes, he answered: “I’d like to. But you know how stubborn he is. Michael wants to win…. He doesn’t want to be saving it for anything. So, ummmm”—long pause here, Collins already tacking—“that’s why, you know, the score dictates a lot [about] his minutes…. We go into these droughts where it’s so tough for us to score.”

As Jordan’s knee pain became more severe and his limp more pronounced in February, Collins was back to saying that he wished he could cut Jordan’s minutes. But who would fill those minutes, even if Jordan agreed to the arrangement? Alexander could score, but the coaches still thought his offense erratic, his defense spotty and his intensity almost nonexistent. The hardworking, reliable Hubert Davis had done everything asked of him without complaint, filling in as a starter, making big baskets, later calmly reassuming his spot on the bench, scarcely playing at all until somebody else would be injured and he found himself playing 30, 40 minutes again. Davis had delivered, but Collins worried that Davis already was exhibiting signs of fatigue. At 31, Davis was thought to be in his NBA twilight, relatively old by league standards for any player not named Michael Jordan, and Collins worried that he could not ask for more minutes from Davis without seeing a sharp decline in his effectiveness.

That left Tyrone Nesby, who, though not an offensive threat, brought a defensive prowess that no other Wizard, aside from a healthy Jordan, could match. Having come off the bench to stifle Vince Carter during that second-quarter stint in Toronto, Nesby had so bothered an array of capable players that he seemed on the brink of carving himself a nice niche as a 6′ 6″ defensive specialist. In three successive victories, during late January and early February, he put the shackles on three talented foes down the stretch—Cleveland’s Jumaine Jones, Atlanta’s All-Star Shareef Abdur-Rahim and Indiana’s Jonathan Bender. “We don’t beat Cleveland or Atlanta without Nez,” Collins said.

Nesby had nimble feet to go along with long arms, which he often spread and waved maniacally around an opponent, like an octopus enveloping quarry. He’d belly-bump foes, too, and push them with his strong upper legs and forearms. T-Nez could be maddening for a rival who had seldom seen him in action. A perturbed Jumaine Jones just put his hands on his hips at one point and stared at him, incredulous that Nesby was getting away with something that Jones had difficulty articulating to an official. T-Nez didn’t seem to notice, taking a break during a change of possessions to stare off at something, mumbling at air.

Nobody on the Wizards possessed more motivation, as Nesby was playing in the last year of his contract. In the Wizards’ next game, a tight contest at home against Atlanta, he harassed the Hawks’ young star Abdur-Rahim into losing his grip on the ball with about a minute to play, the ball spinning free, with the Hawks unable to recover it before the 24-second shot clock expired. A pleased Jordan slapped him on the butt, shouting, “Don’t leave yourself any bullets, Nez.”

Nesby had moved high above Alexander in the rotation, having played about 20 minutes a night over the last two weeks. His versatility now made him the ideal person to enter the game when Jordan needed a breather. Nesby could play not only a shooting guard but also either of the forward positions, his speed enabling him to handle quick, smaller swingmen like Jumaine Jones or bigger, more powerful forwards like Abdur-Rahim. In the next game, at home against Indiana, he received a rare spot start at power forward, filling in for the rugged Popeye Jones, who wasn’t thought fast enough to defend the athletic Indiana front line. Nesby locked up big, swift Indiana forward Jonathan Bender, led the Wizards in rebounding and had a double-double—10 rebounds, 10 points. Afterward, Collins lauded him: “He did a great job on Jonathan Bender.”

Aware that Nesby was in the last year of a deal paying him more than $3 million a season, Collins had begun exhorting him with talk of his potential appeal to other NBA teams and how his future might hinge on the season’s remaining three months. “Nez,” Collins said to him alone in his office, “when you’re in shape, you make us a totally different team. Think about this in terms of money. Bust your tail for the ninety days left this season and then you’re a free agent. This could set you up for the next few years. You say to yourself, I’m gonna go to the wall every day for the next ninety days and establish myself…. Somebody has gotta pay you, because you have talent and you’re only twenty-six years old.”

Nesby tried not to ponder his contract running out or what he had to do to get a new one. “If you think about it too much, it can start to be like the only thing you think about, and that’s just gonna get you upset,” he said. “That’d just be havin’ me thinkin’ negative and nervous when I’m on the bench. I’d be angry I’m not playin’ more, and I’m not that way, not angry, just tryin’ to do my best.”

He talked very fast—and what came rambling out of him was usually unfiltered, which accounted for why most of the media so liked him. He was that rare player who could be counted on to say whatever popped into his head, an affable guy hoping to stay in the league and make money, and if telling his story could help, he would tell it. He thought Collins liked him, he said, thought Coach liked hard players, and this he was trying to be, flying around the lane, snatching rebounds, cutting off bigger players even if it meant being knocked to the floor. Better to get hurt playin’ hard, he said, than to protect your body and not get another contract. And he knew Collins appreciated guys who played hurt. “Doug wants to see you holding nothin’ back if you want that money,” he said. “And I’m tryin’. I think I’m showin’ it.”

In the locker room, he carefully fit his black do-rag over his cornrows, looking over his shoulder as Jordan came walking out of the trainer’s room. He knew he had to win over Jordan, understanding that he had begun the year with serious baggage after having screamed at Leonard Hamilton. He called the incident The Thing, like it was its own octopus. “I know Mike was wonderin’, about The Thing and other stuff…. You know, like: ‘Well, let’s see, you know I hear Tyrone got attitude.’”

Attitude always meant bad attitude. It was like The Thing, something hard to get away from.

He sensed that Wizards officials had yet to make up their minds about him, including Jordan, who urged him to continue rebounding hard: “Go to the rack, man.”

Nez thought the team could help Jordan best if it wasn’t so reliant on him. At anytime in a game, he thought, when the score got close and players felt uncertain, the ball went to Jordan. Nez found himself often catching a pass and instinctively looking to put the ball in Jordan’s hands. “I looked at tapes and saw that we basically only scored when Mike’s got it going,” Nez said. “When he wasn’t on the court, everybody looked like: What are we gonna do? You can’t be playin’ like that…. So I said to myself, ‘I’m gonna start goin’ and takin’ shots. I don’t care if I only shoot three or four shots. I’m gonna try to help out.”

Jordan wanted Nez to drive, dunk, use his power game for easy hoops. “If you have your shot, shoot it,” he told Nez, the same thing he’d said in preseason. Nez thought the pointers were hopeful signs—Mike’s talking to me, Mike’s passing on advice, Mike’s wanting to help.

But you never knew what was going down, Nez thought. He’d proven he could defend virtually anybody at his position in the NBA, but The Thing and all the old talk about his attitude might have had an effect he couldn’t see, he realized. One Wizards official said privately, “He might still be a live firecracker,” meaning it was possible, thought the official, that Nez might still go off. But the single incident with Leonard Hamilton was not an insurmountable barrier to another Wizards contract for Nesby, not by a long ways. If he played well down the stretch, his continued presence in Washington would be a real possibility, and if Washington took a pass on him, another NBA team might bite. However, the limits of Nesby’s outside shot meant he would always be on the bubble, and bubble players, noted the official, enjoyed far less room for screwups either on or off the court.

This was a reality of the business. A superstar with a more offensively productive and crowd-thrilling game enjoyed far greater latitude for volatility and terrible behavior. Latrell Sprewell could choke his old Golden State coach, P. J. Carlesimo, once, attack him a second time, and, after serving a lengthy suspension, come back and make tens of millions, while being promoted as an anti-hero of sorts by a shoe company. But Sprewell, on his good nights, could easily score 30 points and more. The list of misbehaving players who had kept getting signed for many years, from Dennis Rodman to Isiah Rider, could have filled the rosters of a couple of NBA teams. Stars who assaulted women arrived at settlements and went on blissfully playing, the incidents quickly forgotten, at least in basketball circles.

But all those players could change a team’s fortunes. Middling players lived by a different standard. At that moment, in winter of early 2002, Nesby was averaging slightly fewer than five points a game, in about 18 minutes per night. His reputation for defensive excellence had not spread far. He was on the bubble, and could go from his $3 million-plus salary to zero in the NBA if he couldn’t prove himself in the next 90 days. “When I think about the contract, I just tell myself, Show Mike, show Doug, and play hard and do it every night, ’cause not many nights left,” he said. “I’m playin’ my best ball now. Mike hasn’t talked to me about it, but he’s busy, I know. I think I still have a chance.”

His motivation resembled that of any guy anxious to hold on to his job. The NBA earning window for a player like Nesby was about four to five years. There would be an opportunity perhaps in a European league, but the money there would be nothing comparable. This was not a reason for pity, only an indication that professional ballers did not live for terribly long as young princes. Nesby’s hopes for long-term financial security hinged over the next 90 days on his defensive prowess, which might have been his ticket once to 10 million dollars, but still could be overshadowed by a five-minute incident, one year earlier, in which no one had been punched, pushed or threatened. Nesby simply hoped that league executives, when they heard his name, would not automatically think of a frustrated, screaming young man from a single game. He hoped they saw how hard he defended, how long he could run. “Ready to go through the wall,” he promised.

If Collins needed him to play an extra five, six minutes to give Jordan extra rest, said Nez, then he was ready.

Five minutes or so a night was exactly the additional time that John Hefferon wished Jordan would take off. Nesby was the man who, defensively, at least, could serve as the adequate substitute.

But Jordan told Collins that he did not want any more minutes off. Jordan would keep logging 40-minute nights—until he couldn’t. The decision meant everything to the idol’s season and the bubble player’s career. They were the two sides of the NBA reality—one always to be venerated, the other waiting for word whether he would stay or go.

If October, November and December had worn Jordan down, the early part of 2002 was the death march for his right knee. He played 41 minutes a game during one especially brutal stretch in January and early February. People close to Jordan all over the country worried. Phil Jackson privately told people that Jordan was playing too many minutes. Tex Winter, Jackson’s highly regarded assistant, said it publicly: “I think he’s running a real possibility of injury in the second half of the season if he keeps playing those kind of hard minutes. It’s a risk.”

The final game before the All-Star break was at home against the Sacramento Kings, who entered the night with the league’s best record at 37–11 but had just played the night before, tired after a long road trip. “You gotta kill when you can kill,” Jordan told his teammates.

The Wizards delivered their finest team effort of the season. Jordan had 25 points and nine assists. Hamilton led all scorers with 33 points. Popeye Jones had a mouth-dropping double-double—18 points and 15 rebounds—dominating the boards against a Sacramento front line that included Vlade Divac and All-Star Chris Webber. Brendan Haywood blocked a pair of shots and had 11 rebounds. Chris Whitney hit three-pointers. Etan Thomas ran down loose balls in key moments. Jordan and Nesby alternated in chasing Sacramento’s superb three-point bomber, Predrag Stojakovic, stymieing him in the second half.

The Wizards won by seven, but not before a scare that portended trouble for the remainder of the season. In the second quarter, after hitting a jumper, Jordan turned and banged knees with big Etan Thomas. Jordan fell to the floor, grabbing his right knee, not writhing but not getting up right away either. Even as the staff dashed onto the floor, Jordan rose and motioned for them to get back: He was fine.

After the game, he shuffled out to the scrum with no more stiffness than he usually exhibited, not even mentioning the knee. He trumpeted the team’s accomplishments, the Wizards having arrived at the four-day All-Star break with a record of 26–21 and a five-game winning streak. Washington already had seven more victories than a season earlier, and Jordan was leading the team in scoring, with more than 25 points a game.

He said that he looked forward to the All-Star Game, which many observers viewed as the first half of a doubleheader between Jordan and Kobe Bryant—the second game to come, about 48 hours later, in Los Angeles. Jordan downplayed both matchups with Bryant, particularly the All-Star confrontation. He tried joking: “If Kobe tries to make it a one-on-one game, I’m gonna foul him with every foul I got. I’m a competitive person, but I know we have a long second half of the season.”

Collins said he hoped Jordan’s All-Star minutes wouldn’t be too high. Jordan assured Collins that he would keep his playing time short—somewhere around 12 minutes. It was basically the same thing he said to the Eastern Conference coach, Byron Scott. “Twelve to fifteen minutes, that’s what he told me,” Scott said, smiling. “Fifteen minutes. I think once the game starts, he’ll probably change his mind.”

Fifteen would not remain fifteen.

On Saturday, in the Philadelphia 76ers’ home arena, the First Union Center, Jordan sat for a joint press conference alongside Allen Iverson, who sported a red headband with his nickname in large white block letters, THE ANSWER. Jordan wore black Jordan Brand/Nike sweats with a silver earring. What you had here was the perfect confluence of a charismatic young man’s self-adoration and an experienced elder’s marketing pose, and in that way the scene mirrored perfectly two forces that stoke the basketball industry’s success—vanity and the skill to make vanity pass as class, to make money off vanity as a fashion statement. The two players spent most of the time carefully praising each other and trying to restrain journalists. Surprisingly, Jordan looked the edgier of the two. Some reporter in the first row asked him if he might play beyond his two-year Wizards contract if—

Jordan cut him off. “Slow your roll,” he said to the guy, which mockingly meant, Chill. It was a Jordan whom you seldom saw in a press setting. This was the Jordan who had sliced Lacy Banks in Indiana. A few reporters chuckled. He pointed out to the questioner that he would be 41 years old if he played into a third season. “No, no,” he said, shaking his head, as if to say, Not a chance. “You guys gave me a lot of shit when I [turned] thirty-nine.”

He fired a few zingers, declaring that he loved Charles Barkley but that Barkley never would be part of the elite class of players, instead relegated to “that second tier” because he never won an NBA championship. And he issued a challenge of sorts to Iverson, who had yet to win an NBA title. He pointed out that his own scoring titles hadn’t won him inclusion into the ranks of players like Magic Johnson and Larry Bird until the Bulls won their first championship. “That’s the kind of respect I earned,” he declared. “And that’s something he’s gonna have to earn.”

By then the media looked restless, as if Jordan wasn’t getting around to what they most wanted him to talk about. Finally, a reporter raised the subject: “This is for Allen. You played against Michael and Kobe both this year.”

Jordan was already smirking.

The reporter went on: “Can you compare the two guys, and maybe think back on Michael before the retirement and compare the two [Jordan’s and Bryant’s] games?”

Jordan sliced in. “I wouldn’t answer that question if I were you. But go ahead.”

Iverson looked hesitant.

“That’s an unfair question,” Jordan went on. “Truly.”

“You heard what he said,” Iverson said to the reporter.

“Next,” Jordan commanded, and the question was officially rejected.

Nearly every All-Star doing interviews at the arena found himself barraged by questions about what it felt like to contemplate playing alongside or against Jordan. One player seemingly had had too much of all the bowing at the altar. The Milwaukee Bucks’ All-Star guard Ray Allen raised a point that no NBA official, or television announcer working the game, dared to make because it would necessarily raise questions about the strength of Jordan’s appeal. Referring to Jordan’s fourth place finish in the overall All-Star voting, Allen asked, “How could he finish [fourth] in voting? He is on TV more than any other player in the league. When he first started [his comeback], [ESPN’s] Sportscenter showed [his] every play, every shot. Popularity is the biggest key in All-Star votes. So hearing he’s [fourth] in voting is a surprise to me.” He elaborated later: “How does that happen if it’s all a popularity thing and he’s so popular?”

It was a brave, perceptive question. No one connected to the NBA dared to venture an answer.

Magic Johnson had come to Philadelphia, on All-Star eve, to play in a three-on-three game involving celebrities and retired stars. He talked while getting ready in a locker room. He spoke to anyone about anything. A television man rushed up and asked if he’d do an All-Star Game promo. Magic said sure, taking about a hundredth of a second to prepare. He turned 90 degrees, looked into a lens and started talking: “And tomorrow the NBA All-Star Game —whooooooo—Michael Jordan returns. And so many other super super super great players.”

“Thank you, Magic,” said the TV guy.

“Anytime,” Magic said.

“Oh.” The TV guy wheeled back. “How old are you, if I may ask?”

“Goin’ on forty-three,” Magic said.

“Thank you, Magic.”

“Anytime.”

Do you miss any of this, Magic? somebody asked him.

He shrugged. He alluded to how his past had put everything in proper perspective for him: After being stricken by the AIDS virus, he had retired as a player, later to make a comeback that hadn’t worked out.

He didn’t refer to his mistakes but everyone around knew them: He had cheated on his wife, slept with too many women, engaged in unprotected sex, and recklessly cut his career short. Having redeemed himself since, he was a part-owner of the Lakers, but he reserved his greatest passion for his movie theaters and many other businesses in Southeast L.A. He was now the personification of what Jim Riswold, the producer of Jordan’s famous Nike ads, had hoped to see Jordan evolve into, someone who cared deeply about something beyond games and winning. He beamed when a woman said that she had a friend whose teenage son worked in one of his businesses.

“Thank you; that’s a wonderful thing,” he said.

Another TV man asked him for another promo. Magic stared into another lens and said, “And tomorrow, the NBA All-Star Game. With Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and the most super players in the world.”

“That’s great, Magic.”

“Anytime,” Magic said. “Michael around?”

“No, he left quite a while ago, Magic.”

Magic chuckled. “I’m sure Michael knows he’s gotta get rest for what’s comin’ up for him after this weekend.”

He meant the Wizards–Lakers game that coming Tuesday night.

“Everybody in the world is waiting on that game,” Magic said, adding that he thought Bryant, like Jordan, understood he couldn’t blow his wad on the All-Star Game and not have enough in the tank for Tuesday. “Probably more important for Michael to keep his playing time down than Kobe. Kobe’s so young. Michael’s gotta be careful. It’s an All-Star Game, but the L.A. game is the game. He knows that.”

So Jordan won’t be playing for very long tomorrow? somebody asked him.

“I didn’t say that,” Magic answered, grinning. “You just don’t know with Michael. You just don’t know.”

You really don’t miss it, Magic? a woman whispered.

He looked at her with an expression made dreamy by all the pleasure and serenity in it. He returned her whisper with a voice not much above a whisper. “I really really don’t. I love what I’m doin’. I’m grateful to get the message out. Oh.” He seemed to have been reminded of something. “People really should be tested for AIDS. Really important. I try to talk about that wherever I go.”

All men grow older, but only a few grow. Magic Johnson was the well-to-do athlete who had found his next life. Foreign TV people and grizzled American reporters jostled with one another to get close to him, their hands outstretched. He shook them all. He had a connection with people; it was what so separated him at that moment from Jordan, whom he liked, whom he cared about, but who, on the doorstep of 40, had yet to find anything beyond the game. Much time remained in a life at 40. Johnson’s life spoke of the possibilities.

The next afternoon, Jordan arrived at the game, two hours early, to do extra stretching, feeling a little tight. It didn’t help. He looked stiff throughout the evening—not hobbled, just not himself somehow. In the first quarter, he missed a breakaway dunk, a dunk when he was far out ahead of the field and had several seconds to think about it. He mistimed it, not getting up high or soon enough. His hand brought the ball down on the back of the rim, where it caromed off as a good 2,000 flashes recorded the moment.

He tried smiling. He knew it would be the only moment the crowd and media remembered about his day, understood it would be the first thing he’d need to talk about at the postgame press conference. Not long before his missed dunk, he had beaten Minnesota’s Kevin Garnett on a drive and dunked over San Antonio’s 7′ 0″ Tim Duncan. But all that most people would remember from his performance would be the missed dunk, a defining embarrassment on a day when he struggled, missing 9 of 13 shots, scoring only eight points.

None of those numbers, however, would have an impact on the rest of his season. On the other hand, his 23 minutes worried Wizards officials, who regarded his playing stint as needlessly long, on a weekend when he needed as much rest as possible. Just as Byron Scott and others had hinted, Jordan found it too difficult to come off the court once a game was in motion.

His competitive instincts could not have been assuaged by the sight of his touted heir, Kobe Bryant, tearing up the game, scoring at will for the victorious West squad—31 points in 30 minutes—on his way to the game’s Most Valuable Player award. Playing in front of hometown fans who booed him throughout the game—the venomous Philadelphians still smarting over the local schoolboy star’s escape to warm and winning Los Angeles—Bryant was possessed by an on-court fury.

He could have scored 50 if he’d wished. The quality of his play only made the Wizards officials wish all the more that Jordan had gotten off the court sooner, so that he could begin resting for the Lakers. But in this garish game (an All-Star weekend is a modern-day Roman bacchanal), Jordan’s pride did not permit him to leave any sooner than the third quarter. By that time, putting on his sweats, he seemed stiffer than ever, shuffling, displaying the telltale signs of his knee problems.

Afterward, he appeared before the press and handled the discussion of the missed dunk with much grace. No one had to ask him about the moment. He sat down, leaned into a microphone, smiled thinly and blurted, “Okay, who’s gonna be the first to ask?”

The press chuckled.

“I laugh at myself,” he said. “If I can’t laugh at myself, I can’t laugh at anybody.”

Then he delivered the closest thing to a soliloquy on aging. “It was one of those situations where you got a wide-open dunk…. It’s been awhile since I’ve been in that circumstance. The wheels started turning. I started trying to figure out, What will you do?”

He hunched his shoulders. “At the last minute, you think, Well, just dunk it. And you lose concentration. As much as you want to be creative, you listen for all the signs and moves in your body. And you’re just worried about something popping or whatever. As you get old, you just don’t have the same kind of confidence. So you gotta go through a checklist.”

Jordan paused and chuckled. The mood lightened in the room.

“And I went through the checklist, and by the time I was ready to dunk the ball, I wasn’t there.”

He sounded wistful. He mentioned that he had been talking about the missed dunk to NBC when Tracy McGrady made a spectacular dunk. “I remember when I used to be like that,” he said softly.

A reporter asked him about Bryant being booed. Something in him changed in that instant, as if a switch had been flipped and he was suddenly thinking two nights ahead. He wouldn’t be feeling sorry for a rival. “He’s played on hostile territory before,” Jordan said, observing that many players got booed somewhere, sometime.

“I’m always booed in Cleveland.”

Shuffling a little, he was off to Los Angeles, where most of the questions for him were about Bryant, though Jordan seemed more absorbed by the shadow of Phil Jackson. “We know our friendship will outlast any battle we ever have on the basketball court,” he said, on the morning of the game. “No matter what happens, there’s a sense of love between us.”

For all his talk of Zen and openness—or maybe because of it—Phil Jackson did not display much emotion or sentimentality. He seldom expressed the standard NBA coach’s excitement and gratitude about things, the gushing about a player that took on this form: He’s been so important to our team, and I can’t say enough great things about him, we really love the guy. You never heard his voice trembling with feeling. His impassiveness and gray beard gave him the bearing of a $500-an-hour psychoanalyst who could take you or leave you but would probably leave you except for the business between the two of you. He gave off an air of being above sentiment, which meant he could scarcely have been more different from Doug Collins.

Love was not part of Jackson’s public vocabulary. He’d smirk a little when a questioner used the word. Much of the time he had an amused disdain for the media, condescension radiating from him. His aloofness intrigued many reporters, and flummoxed the rest. He would not hesitate saying, after coming back from an off day, that he’d watched no basketball at all, and wouldn’t waste his time watching basketball on an off day. That smirk encouraged the image that he was constantly evolving, and others weren’t.

He had been a wild card of sorts during his playing days with the Knicks in the late ’60s and early ’70s. But, with his days of beads and heavy cannabis consumption in Greenwich Village long since over, he wore nice suits and natty sweatsuits now. He radiated élan. The formal scrum session over, he’d start moving away, amused he was still being pursued. He’d airily mention a book, something he ate, make a quick reference to something about spiritualism, smirk at somebody asking him about a no-name power forward somewhere and snicker “Don’t know” because he couldn’t care less about the no-name forward. “Okay, guys,” he’d say then, done with them, smiling in amusement.

The press reveled in portraying him as a grown-up ’60s flower child, but to spend time at his media sessions was to realize that he was no Peace and Love holdover but seemingly a guy emulating the ultracool of a Beat poet, consciously wry, detached, understated, confident he had It, whatever It was. His public air was hip: He was a little too good at making such things as the Triangle Offense sound like a spiritual epiphany (he had likened the Triangle to tai chi), and in trying to ground all of basketball into enlightened truths, as expressed in his book Sacred Hoops, where he proffered the chance for his players “to create something as a group that transcended the limits of their own singular imaginations.” Okay, then.

Now he did a commercial for a national chain of hotels, in which, in self-parody, he spouted his own coaching version of Zen and New Ageism (“Surrender the me for the we…”), having arrived at that special place in America where one could turn a profit and still project purity.

He was on a 10-year roll, the coach nearly every other team coveted. More than a coach, Jackson had become a name in pop culture, rising to the status of American Winner, the counterculture’s answer to Vince Lombardi, respected enough for his leadership skills that his old friend Bill Bradley had asked him to run his doomed presidential campaign. Jackson declined, having decided by then to take the Lakers job, but this did not stop many Democrats from touting him as a possible political candidate in his native North Dakota.

The media, which loves theatrical archetypes and needs someone at all times to be portrayed as Svengali, never could get enough of stories about the Zen Master recommending tai chi, meditation, visualization and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to his players. But the Zen label misled fans. Jackson’s passion for transcendentalism never had made him gentle. He didn’t shy away from bruising people when he thought they stood in the way of his winning, chewing out players about as often as most other coaches did, having once booted out his starting power forward, Horace Grant, from a Bulls practice when Grant said that his tendinitis had become so painful that he didn’t think he could perform. Jackson told him not to come back until he got his head together and decided to play. For the team’s amusement, in front of Grant, he screened a video of Grant making a bad play, the video then segueing into a clip from The Wizard of Oz, in which the Scarecrow wished plaintively for a brain.

Jackson regularly zinged Bulls players with his film clips. He had had no sacred cows, in film sessions or anywhere else, not even Jordan. Early in his reign, he had signaled to the team that it would no longer be Jordancentric: In selecting a new co-captain, he appointed the lone Bull who had ever challenged Jordan and backed him down. Bill Cartwright, thought Jackson, was a natural leader. That quality, in addition to the benefit of making clear that Jordan did not run the team, meant the upside of a Cartwright co-captaincy far outweighed any possible problems presented by Cartwright’s shaky relationship with the idol. Cartwright had the job. Jordan would just have to get over it, if he had a problem with it.

The Bulls’ style of play changed during Jackson’s tenure. Against Jordan’s preference, Jackson implemented Tex Winter’s more pass-oriented and ball-sharing Triangle Offense, which Jordan had originally derided as “an equal-opportunity offense” that sometimes placed the ball in average players’ hands at key moments in a game. The Triangle became law. Jackson won his team’s respect while leaving himself vulnerable. As in Collins’s case, had Jordan demanded a coaching change, Jackson would have been out in days, hours even. Jackson moved ahead with all his plans anyway. He had to persuade Jordan against single-handedly attempting to dominate the stretches of big games, when Jordan had a tendency to take virtually every shot. During the Bulls’ first championship season, they led the best-of-seven NBA Finals series, three games to one, against the Lakers who, trying to stay alive on their home floor, had kept Game Five close as the fourth quarter ticked down. Jackson was exasperated with Jordan’s failure to pass to wide-open Bulls, particularly guard John Paxson, Chicago’s best three-point shooter. During a time-out, with the Bulls trailing by a point, Jackson had had enough. John Bach, then an assistant under Jackson, felt Jackson was ready to say something. So did Bill Cartwright. The many accounts of the time-out slightly vary, and a decade’s worth of apocrypha might have altered some memories, but everyone agrees upon the gist of what Jackson did next. With his team seated on the bench and his star toweling off, Jackson asked Jordan: “Michael, who’s open?”

Jordan stared at the floor, did not answer.

Jackson demanded of Jordan, “Michael, who’s open? Who’s open?”

Jordan said softly, “Pax.”

Jackson spoke evenly: “Then pass him the fucking ball.”

Jordan complied. Suddenly the arena rained Paxson jumpers.

The Bulls won their first title. Jordan embraced Jackson, who had been resolute enough not to sacrifice any part of his vision to appease a player.

Jackson had demonstrated conviction since being hired by Jerry Krause in 1987, to serve as an assistant to Doug Collins. Jordan was only 24 years old, and a raw 6′ 7″ Scottie Pippen had just arrived as a rookie out of the University of Central Arkansas, where he had improbably progressed from the team’s student equipment manager during his freshman year to the fifth overall selection in the NBA draft. Jackson tutored Pippen, not only honing his shots and defensive technique but encouraging him in the aftermath of games to consider what he had just seen on the court, helping him better visualize what would be coming later. Pippen quickly admired Jackson, as did Jordan, to whom Jackson spoke about the ethos of team play. Jordan thought Jackson had guts to make a point that the star might not have wished to hear.

Simultaneously, Collins began fraying nerves. “He yelled a lot,” Brad Sellers remembered. “It wasn’t that he was vicious, just that he wanted to win so bad, and wanted everything done in a certain way. He’d be yelling at everybody, not Michael, but everybody else.”

The perception of two standards on the Collins-led team—one for Jordan and another for everyone else—did not help the head coach’s position. Shying away from Collins, some players sought out Jackson, who filled an emotional vacuum. Stars like Pippen and Horace Grant made no secret of their loyalty to Jackson. Jordan did not then reveal a preference for one coach over the other, but neither did he send a clear message of support for Collins, whose relationships during his third Bulls season had disintegrated with Krause and later Jackson, who was already being viewed by Krause as Collins’s possible successor and so had become cast as the usurper of power, in the view of Collins’s few remaining allies. At the very least, Collins would need to bring the Bulls to the 1989 NBA Finals to keep his job.

He didn’t. After Jerry Reinsdorf fired him with the explanation that the team needed someone who could take it the next step to a championship, Collins diplomatically stayed quiet, preparing the ground for a coaching comeback. In only his second season as head coach, Jackson led the Bulls to the first of their six championships. He had given Reinsdorf what Collins couldn’t, using largely the same players, and the identical core of superstars. But Jackson didn’t know any more about the game than Collins, thought associates close to both men. Jackson simply had the greater skill in managing people. He did not blink, and sometimes Collins did, which meant that one man was a coaching legend, and the other trying to hold on to a place in the profession.

But Jordan didn’t know everything about Jackson. He had met at last a man with a penchant for discretion that rivaled his own. In 1998, as the Bulls stormed toward their sixth title and Jackson’s last Bulls contract ran out, the talk around Chicago was, increasingly, that Jerry Krause had torn apart the Jackson-Jordan-Pippen trio, a line of thinking that Jordan adopted, not knowing the full story. Jackson’s second marriage was in trouble, and the coach welcomed a sabbatical that would at least give him the chance of trying to repair his relationship with his wife. “I didn’t know everything that was going on,” Jordan would say of the Jackson departure.

By 2000, Jackson and his wife had split up, with Jackson coaching in Los Angeles and becoming involved in a relationship with Jeanie Buss, a Lakers executive and the daughter of the team’s owner. Meanwhile, Jordan was in his Wizards executive office, contemplating the loss of what he loved most. Early during his comeback considerations, he chatted jocularly with Jackson about what it might be like if Jordan ever played for the Lakers, each man grinning, laughing, seemingly trying to avoid a seriousness that, as one witness observed, would lead the other to conclude he was being courted. The longer each could keep the conversation light and fanciful, the greater the possibility for discreetly measuring the other’s possible interest. It was a no-risk, no-embarrassment dance. “Michael knew he could come here; things were kind of said; he knew,” said the sagacious assistant coach Tex Winter.

Blunt around Jordan, free of the crippling obeisance that characterized most people’s treatment of the star, Tex Winter was the rare Jordan coach, past or present, who did not see it necessary to be a caretaker of myths, who spoke matter-of-factly about the star. L.A. would not have worked as well as Washington for Jordan, Winter thought. “In Los Angeles, we have established players, and we’d already won. He would have had a different role here; we probably would have asked him to play fewer minutes. Things for all of us were different; things would have been different for Michael, too, if—” and Winter’s voice trailed off momentarily. “The talk never got serious, only casual. Michael knew what the reality was.”

The Lakers were already an extraordinary team built around two young stars, Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal, whose talents surpassed an aging Jordan’s now, and whose own egos and needs left no room for anyone who might supplant their star status. If Jordan were to have seriously considered playing for the Lakers, he would have had to content himself with the idea of playing a complementary role to a new generation’s stars, and that, thought a sympathetic Winter, ran against everything in Jordan’s nature.

You do not ask Zeus to be Mercury’s attendant. “He needed a younger team he could help build and lead,” Winter said, “and this wasn’t a team that needed to be led. This team has leaders and stars. There were better places for him. The Wizards seemed like the right place…. Michael knew it; everybody knew it. He knew he could have come here if he wanted, but no one needed to say anything and no one did. I don’t even know if he really thought of any place besides Washington. The Wizards were the better place for him.”

After the playing comeback had begun in Washington, Jackson called Jordan every few weeks just to check in, to ask Jordan how he was doing. Jackson, as much as anyone inside the Wizards organization, knew how Jordan was feeling and faring—which explained in part his concern about Jordan’s playing minutes.

Jackson did not have any fondness for Collins, who in turn had regarded Jackson as partially responsible for undermining his standing in Chicago. But few people cared about the Collins–Jackson relationship. At the Lakers’ practice the day before the game, virtually all the questions for Jackson had to do with Jordan.

What will it be like to see Jordan in another uniform?

Jackson smiled, a tiny smirk. “Well, I have to disinvolve myself from that, emotionally. It’s just got to be a game where we play a team that’s playing very well. It’s not going to be about Michael versus Kobe or whatever.”

Will it be hard for you to disengage yourself from all that?

“No. I’m pretty good at that.”

Is Jordan a better player than he was in the ’90s? a TV guy asked him.

Jackson looked beyond incredulous. “No, he’s not a better player…” he said soberly. “Physically, I think it’s hard for him. I see a period of a game where he gets really tired. And things don’t go as well…when he gets tired.”

He heard another question, but he was not through unspooling his philosophy on how to care properly for Jordan or any other aging veteran, in what sounded like a rebuke of Collins’s style. He thought an average of about 35 minutes a game for Jordan probably suited his body best as he approached 39. “You get to forty minutes,” he observed, “and the decline is really rapid.”

A friend of Jackson’s in the NBA coaching fraternity had an idea how Jackson would have addressed the idea of Jordan’s minutes. “He sure wouldn’t have gone to him and said, ‘Michael, I care so much about you and I really think we need to lower your minutes and is that all right?’” the coach declared. “He probably would have said something like, ‘Feeling good? Well, that’s great.’ Then he would have played Michael forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight minutes. Michael would have gotten the message. It would’ve been the end of the forty-minute nights. And Michael would’ve respected it…. Michael always respected Phil’s toughness. Michael liked toughness. Just so it had a purpose—and it won.”

Jackson had said all he wished to say about Jordan’s minutes. Somebody asked him about the best way to guard Jordan. He squinted. “Make him shoot jump shots in positions he doesn’t like,” he answered softly. “And that’s not always easy. He can usually get the ball where he likes to shoot it. Okay, guys.”

Somebody called out to him a last question, as he walked away, something about “Kobe and Michael.” Jackson glanced at the guy the way a doctor would a mental patient. “It’s not at all Kobe versus Michael,” he said, shaking his head, shaking it, shaking. Even the Zen Master couldn’t hide the pressure.

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Jordan had much the same kind of relationship with Kobe Bryant that he had with many young stars, giving advice when asked. For a long while, Bryant had ravenously absorbed every suggestion. But given each man’s nature, it was inevitable, as Bryant matured and needed Jordan’s pointers less, that something said by one would sometimes push the competitive buttons of the other. Bryant had listened coolly once, during Jordan’s executive days, when the mentor lectured him on defensive techniques. It was a day when Jordan bantered lightly about the fantasy of playing again. Chuckling, Bryant responded, “Stay upstairs, old man. You’ll have more fun upstairs.”

Jordan’s circle had leaked Bryant’s words, reflecting Jordan’s mild irritation at the prodigy’s impudence. Jordan, who looks for reasons to feel slighted, would use the comment as one more means for stoking his own fires. Many athletic relationships are like that, an oscillation between friendship and fury, off-court support and on-court sabotage. Great athletes typically view this as a normal state of affairs, and hold no lasting grudges. Jordan and Bryant were no different. But the weird yin-yang of their relationship meant that the older athlete, once on the court, would be trying to cannibalize the young man he guided. Likewise, Bryant, who at 23 already had won two championships and had a kingly sense of his powers, would be trying to slay the monarch, if given the chance. Both Bryant and Jordan understood this. So did their coaches, which explained why neither side wanted to see the personal confrontation happen.

Each coaching staff had other misgivings. The Wizards camp worried that an older Jordan would be left exhausted and useless on the offensive end if he guarded Bryant. The Lakers coaches, by contrast, had no doubts that Bryant could physically handle Jordan. But they worried that Bryant would be so psyched for the personal duel that the game itself would become secondary to him. “Kobe takes his defense against a great rival so personally,” Tex Winter said. “It becomes too much of a personal challenge, and we don’t like him to play that way. We’re trying to get Kobe away from the idea that it’s a one-on-one contest…. If he matched up with Michael, we [would be] a little afraid he would consider it a one-on-one game, instead of a five-on-five game…. And that won’t ever be allowed to happen. Phil doesn’t want that, won’t allow it. It won’t happen.”

Someone close to Jackson insisted that the coach never would have put Bryant on Jordan for an additional reason: He wouldn’t want Jordan believing that he had attempted to embarrass him. Winter doubted that Collins would expose Jordan to a Bryant matchup either: “I’m not sure Doug would want to put Michael in that position…”

The Lakers coaches informed Bryant that he would spend most, if not all, of the game guarding Richard Hamilton, whom they hoped Bryant’s defense would shut down completely, leaving Jordan to assume the burden of making up for points lost. Bryant said he understood. But Jordan, holding all power that mattered over Collins, could decide for himself whether to guard Bryant or not. He had guarded Vince Carter for long stretches and Tracy McGrady. It was his call. Jordan didn’t want the matchup, deciding instead to guard Lakers forward Rick Fox. The decision spoke more powerfully than any words about his respect for Bryant.

Although the press reported there would be no matchup, the sense of a personal confrontation only grew with the reports that O’Neal’s sore arthritic toe would keep him out of the game. The main event would be Jordan versus Bryant, a fight that looked quite even, at least on paper. Jordan entered the game averaging 25 points to Bryant’s 26; six rebounds to Bryant’s five. Each man averaged five assists a game. They scarcely could have been more equal on paper—except that one man was 15 years older and the other had two good knees and a deer’s speed.

The game was nothing special, Bryant insisted. “If I was going to get stoked about it, I’d tell you guys,” he said to the media. “But I’m really not, man. I don’t mean to kill your buzz.”

Before his team took the floor, Phil Jackson told his coaching staff that he wanted to win the game in the worst way, and that he hoped Michael would put on a good show. He meant all this. He wanted to beat Collins, and he wanted to defeat the player he loved just to show he still had his coaching chops. But he did not want any pieces of Jordan’s legend scattered on the arena floor.

The Wizards, riding their five-game winning streak, believed they could win, especially as they would be facing an undermanned Lakers squad. With O’Neal out, Bryant would need to carry virtually all the Lakers’ offense and hold down Richard Hamilton, too. The Wizards dominated early, with Hamilton scoring 12 points in the first quarter, mostly on pull-up jumpers in and around the lane, where his quickness seemed to bother Bryant, who irritably shoulder-bumped Hamilton after one score, making him stumble. They had been rivals during their high school days in Pennsylvania, where Bryant always had won their confrontations, his Lower Merion High School team knocking out Hamilton’s Coatesville Area High squad from the state high school tournament in 1995 and 1996. But the most memorable moment in their schoolboy duels had come in a 1995 regular season game, when Bryant hit a three-pointer from just over the midcourt line at the buzzer, to beat Coatesville by a point, an outcome that Bryant never had let Hamilton forget. Now at 23, they seemed in the grips of a fierce territorial struggle. Although each was 6′ 7″, Bryant enjoyed the physical advantage, considerably stronger and more durable as the game wore on. He shoulder-bumped the thinner man again, and one could see the reason for Tex Winter’s concerns about Bryant: Once Bryant became preoccupied with a matchup, it threatened his ability to see the rest of a game.

Meanwhile, Jordan had a quietly efficient first half against Rick Fox and Lakers reserve Devean George, scoring 11 and combining with Hamilton’s bursts to give the Wizards a 13-point lead. At the start of the second half, the Wizards seemed on the verge of putting the game away. The Lakers turned thuggish. L.A.’s Mark Madsen whacked Hamilton with an open hand, bloodying his mouth, on a Hamilton drive to the hoop. Soon, nowhere close to the ball, Bryant had struck Chris Whitney with an elbow to the head. More elbows flew, whistles blew, two flagrant fouls on the Lakers were assessed, and a parade of Wizards stepped to the free-throw line to stretch the lead. Hamilton next hit a jumper and Washington led by 20, the Wizards about to push the Lakers into a ravine.

And then Kobe Bryant lifted off.

It was something to behold. He took the game over in every way that a player can seize a contest. He scored inside and outside. He passed, rebounded, played choking defense, screamed at teammates, glared at his opponents, nodded to himself during time-outs as if to say his team would find a way. What he did immediately was drive to the hoop hard, flying past Hamilton. With his worried foes forced to double-and triple-team him, he then passed the ball outside to open shooters, and the Lakers quickly cut the lead to 12. At the moment when the Wizards began paying more attention to his teammates, he started firing, scoring 12 points in the third quarter, which ended with the Lakers leading by three—a 23-point turnaround in 10 minutes.

Single-handedly, Bryant cut the heart out of the Wizards’ offense. Whenever Hamilton drove to the basket or around screens, Bryant bumped him, knocking him around with his forearms, shoulders and legs, limiting him to five points in the game’s final three quarters, denying him even the chance to pass inside to the Wizards’ big men and Jordan. For good measure, and because he had an acute case of on-court nastiness, Bryant gave Hamilton an elbow to the head, much like the one he gave Whitney, having by then bent Hamilton to his will.

Through it all, the eye hardly noticed Jordan, who scored 21 points and played decently, though not spectacularly. He tired as the game moved along, his 41 minutes leaving him noticeably slowed in the second half. Nowhere to be seen on this night was the Jordan who shut down Latrell Sprewell in their last game at Madison Square Garden and who held Vince Carter pointless in the second half at Toronto. Nowhere was the man who scored in the 40s. Those images faded in Los Angeles, replaced by the picture of a tentative Jordan finally trying to guard the league’s young prince. For 46 of the game’s 48 minutes, the older player and the younger version of himself had carefully avoided each other. But then came a screen, a defensive switch and, suddenly, Jordan found himself facing a stationary Bryant alone on the court’s left wing.

The crowd roared, having waited all night for this. The moment had the feel of a short, dazzling prizefight, with the young man the aggressor. Never had the old predator looked so much like prey. Bryant stared him down, took a short hard dribble to his left that had Jordan moving unsteadily backward, then lifted like a phantom and connected on a 22-foot jumper.

The moment answered any last questions about their relative abilities. The younger man had the weapons now.

Lakers 103, Wizards 94.

Bryant strolled away with his career’s third triple-double—leading all scorers with 23 points, to go along with 11 rebounds and a personal best of 15 assists.

Jordan struggled to explain what happened. “I felt everyone was expecting me to take over the game,” he said. “I couldn’t get the ball…”

He noted Hamilton’s problems—“I think [the Lakers] took Rip out [of the game]”—and complimented Bryant: “Defensively, he stepped it up on Rip, and Rip certainly didn’t get anything going [in the second half]. This is definitely a lesson for us…. We folded under their pressure.”

He talked, a bit wistfully, about Jackson’s role in the evening: “You know his team is going to play solid defense. It was kind of difficult…. You can imagine what other teams felt like going against us [in Chicago].”

In the hallway, Collins noted that he’d like to get Jordan’s minutes down to 36 or 37, but that he couldn’t tonight because “we were leaking oil.”

Tex Winter thought that Jordan appeared tired in the game. “He looked worn down,” he observed. “I think Phil [Jackson] is right when he says it’s hard for Michael when he’s going past thirty-five minutes. How long did he go? Forty-one? That’s a lot. Risky.”

The Wizards’ second-half collapse deeply worried the coaches. A few feared that Hamilton’s lack of strength, even frailty, had been exposed by Bryant, and that opponents thereafter would routinely try to bully him. Jordan rode Hamilton the next day at practice in Sacramento, telling him he better muscle up and hit the weights. The next night, in a lopsided loss at Sacramento, with the Kings banging Hamilton every time he drove or came around a screen, he hit only 3 of 14 shots in the first three quarters. By then, even Hamilton realized he had to build up his body, telling the coaches that he would begin regularly lifting weights with Jordan and a few other team members early in the morning.

But the coaches’ greatest concern revolved around Jordan. Privately discussing his performance against the Lakers, the Wizards coaches had become newly concerned about Jordan’s mobility and health. Running gingerly, he hit only a third of his shots for a quiet 16 points in Sacramento, then floundered for most of an evening in Phoenix, again having hit only a third of his shots, when the Wizards called time-out with 5.6 seconds left, trailing by a point.

The Wizards would not have been in the game at all but for Tyrone Nesby, who scored 18 points and had ten rebounds, having a spectacular night, likely the best all-around game of his career, blocking two shots, coming up with a key loose ball and tipping in an errant Jordan shot in the final 20 seconds that kept the Wizards close. Hamilton had rebounded from his recent poundings to score 29. The disappointment until that moment had been Jordan, who looked shackled, visibly laboring. Just the same, everyone in the arena knew where the ball was going. A talented young Suns defender named Shawn Marion had hawked him the entire game, daring him to drive, living in his jersey, it seemed. Now Collins designed a play to isolate Jordan against Marion on the right wing. Inexplicably, as soon as the ball touched Jordan’s hands, Marion began backing up, tentative for the first time all night. Jordan took a hard step toward the basket, stopped, pump-faked Marion into the air and hit a game-winning 16-foot jumper. He wheeled, pumped his fist and yelled toward the Suns: “That’s what they pay me for. That’s what they pay me for.”

It was the 28th time in his career that he had hit a winning shot in the final 10 seconds of a game. The brief celebration in the locker room was raucous. The team hurried to the airport and boarded their plane. While in the air, Jordan remarked that he felt a bit of stiffness in his right leg. By the time he awakened in Washington the next morning, his right knee was swelling badly.

His knee steadily worsened. He sat out another practice, this one on his 39th birthday, February 17. He stepped up his icing and electrical stimulation treatments. The bruise that his knee suffered when he collided with Etan Thomas in the last game before the All-Star break had hastened the buildup of the tendinitis-triggered fluid in the knee, aggravating an existing and chronic problem. His biggest mistake came in pushing the knee after the collision, a knee already worn down by too many minutes. Alternately favoring it to compensate for his pain and driving hard on it, he left the knee vulnerable to more serious injury. By the time he arrived at MCI on President’s Day, February 18, surgery on the knee was only nine days away.

Seeing his pain, Grover raised the possibility of skipping a game, as did Collins and trainer Steve Stricker. Jordan said no. But, in a rare admission that betrayed his pain, he told Nesby and several other teammates before a game against Houston that his knee was hurting, that they had a chance to step up and show what they had.

He started and missed his first three shots over 6′ 4″ Houston guard Cuttino Mobley. He didn’t hit a shot until about eight minutes remained in the first half—a gimpy-looking 15-foot fallaway—moving like a sea captain with a wooden peg for a right leg. He couldn’t get back often on defense, unable to cut off a fast-breaking Steve Francis in the third quarter, Jordan fouling him, wincing, Francis looking back at him with concern. Jordan nodded at him: I’m okay.

He could still pass, so he found a way to assist on 11 baskets. Hamilton had 21 points, but none when it counted most. Jordan could score only 11 points, and the Wizards lost by 13, with Collins allowing Jordan to log 36 minutes and play until the final 1:34, after which Jordan dragged his right leg off the court and immediately went into the trainers’ room to lie on a table.

Having run out of reassuring words, Collins told the media he would advise Jordan to take a game off and rest the knee. Jordan minimized the problem—“It’s a little bit of tendinitis”—while saying he would not travel with the team for its next game, two nights later, in Detroit. He would stay in Washington, getting the knee treated and ready for a home game, the next night, against New Jersey.

Nesby would start in Jordan’s place against the Pistons. During the next day at practice, just before the team flew to Detroit, Hamilton spoke excitedly about the chance to prove that the team could win without the star. “It’s definitely going to be motivating…” he said. “Nez can get himself going; he doesn’t need anybody else to get him going.”

The team flew to Detroit and lost by seven, in a game close down the stretch. With his big chance, Nesby played strong defense but could only manage four points. Hubert Davis came off the bench to score 19, and Hamilton had 22. “I think if a couple shots went down, we could have won,” Hamilton said the next night, back at MCI. “We had some things to prove, and I think we proved we can fight like a team and be competitive. We’re not no supporting cast for anybody. We got a lot of talented young guys. We had a chance to win if a couple of those shots fell.”

But they hadn’t, and now they were mired in another bad run, which made it all the more essential, Jordan thought, that he play that night against New Jersey. A worried Collins asked him how he felt.

“I’m fine, Douggie,” Jordan said, politely but curtly.

He was half of himself. The Nets outscored the Wizards in fast-break points, 27–0. Jason Kidd had 30 points, and Jordan struggled to score 16, while committing four turnovers. He spent some of the game icing the knee, then returned, going from stiff to stiffer. Even with his woes and Hamilton unable to find his touch, the game stayed competitive into the final four minutes, with the Wizards hanging around, down by nine. With his teammates having isolated most of the left side of the floor for him, Jordan had the ball, trying to post up a resistant Kidd, who knocked the ball away. Jordan retrieved it and doggedly, laboriously set up in the post again. Then he spun toward the lane and, with Kidd right alongside him, pump-faked. It was the move that usually so tormented the Nets. But Kidd did not bite, remaining on the floor, waiting. When Jordan went up on his bad knee, Kidd soared above him. To shoot would have meant having the jumper swatted away. With no other choice, Jordan passed blindly in the direction of a teammate no longer there. The ball was intercepted and turned into a dunk at the other end. Game over.

“I don’t think it’s going to be a lingering problem,” he said afterward of his knee.

It was not what he told friends privately. Hurts like hell sometimes, really hurts, he told them. But he lost patience if they argued against him playing. He’d snap: When hadn’t he played through anything? He’d fall back on his mantra. “No one knows me like me,” he insisted. As he came closer to a physical breakdown, he was in disciplined denial.

Now, with questions and alarm spreading among coaches and reporters, he delivered a game so scintillating as to make observers wonder why they ever had doubted him. At MCI, on Saturday, February 23, he scored a point a minute in a two-point loss to Miami, after which his believers—on the team and in the media—exchanged chuckles and congratulated one another on their faith and wisdom: See? How can anything be wrong with somebody who can play so well? Nobody who scores 37 can be hurting too badly.

But those 37 points had meant another hard 37 minutes on the floor. He hurt so badly that he limped down the aisle of the team plane that night, flying to Miami for a game there the next night, in another back-to-back. Trainers treated his knee in the plane’s rear lounge—ice to reduce the swelling, electrical stimulation to prompt blood flow—but neither offered relief. He could hardly walk on the right leg. Grover and the team trainers knew he couldn’t run.

The plane flew along the Eastern seaboard. Those around him talked softly. Jordan fell uncharacteristically silent. No profane teasing of anybody. No soliloquies about the best basketball programs next to his alma mater, North Carolina. There was no talk. Instead of venturing up front for a card game, he stayed in the lounge with Grover, Koehler and bodyguard Wooten, people who knew his moods and the limits of his patience for chatter. Somebody came back to say hi, took a look at his vacant expression and decided against it. The plane hummed, players slept. Jordan stretched out his bad leg and closed his eyes.

There is no meaningful difference, medically speaking, between towering pride and hubris. Having ignored his high-priced experts’ advice for months, he finally had pushed too hard. Part of his right knee’s cartilage had torn, an injury resulting in part from three decades of his on-court fury, but dramatically hastened by his determination since the season’s start to push exceedingly hard on inflamed knees riddled with tendinitis and vulnerable to breakdown if subjected to undue stresses. In pushing and in alternately favoring one leg over the other, he had dramatically raised the odds of catastrophe.

The next night, hardly able to move, he listened as Collins urged him not to suit up. He found himself slumped behind a crude makeshift partition in the visitors’ locker room of the American Airlines Arena, having his right knee drained again, listening as the stranger doing it—the Miami Heat team physician Harlan Selesnick—advised him against playing, too.

He played, getting beaten by obscure players who had worn his shoes as children. All the while the knee swelled. He yelled at officials more than he had all season, berating referee Ron Garretson over non-calls—traveling violations missed, a thrown elbow undetected: “You didn’t see that?” Dragging the right leg like it had a steel ball on it, he took himself out of a close game for good with six minutes left. No one around him could deny any longer that something was terribly wrong. No one yet knew how wrong, or that 90 minutes of arthroscopic surgery awaited him, three days later. But something in the leg had given out, and he could go no more.

The Wizards lost. Hardly anybody noticed. Afterward, the locker room had the feel of a morgue. Jordan managed to smile, briefly. His eyes glimmered with the force of an epiphany. Something strange happened in the same moment, something that hadn’t happened all season. He glanced my way, as if expecting a question. I simply asked what he said to himself now. “I’m getting old,” he answered. “It’s a sign that, obviously, things are coming to a closure…”

People faintly gasped, thinking they could read his meaning. A few reporters talked of his end. But when had they ever really known him? Three days later, the surgery complete on his knee’s torn lateral meniscus, word leaked that Jordan hoped to rehab his knee within a month. Closure never had met Michael Jordan. He still needed a game.