8

Collapse—and the End of the New Jacks

WHAT I REMEMBER BEST ABOUT THE NEXT FEW DAYS IS THAT no one in the locker room sounded busted up about what had happened. None of the young players offered the familiar bromide about the difficulty of filling the star’s shoes. “It’s a new time,” one Wizards official said. “They’re a new breed. You know what the attitude is? Everybody gets his.”

It was the old school’s take on what seemed to be the new school’s instinct for opportunism. The New Jacks muttered that they wished Jordan a swift recovery but that they had confidence in their abilities to win without him and looked forward to proving it.

This seemed a perfectly ingenuous response to me, in a sports world where feigning shock and humility is the order of things. All season, the New Jacks had heard their team characterized as garbage aside from its star—a one-man show in which they would be humiliated if ever without him, an assumption that their coach had done little to discourage. Now at last they had an extended chance to demonstrate otherwise. Jordan’s absence meant more playing time for many of them, and more on-court freedom for everyone—more chances to fast-break, run, shoot, play their kind of game, a young man’s game, without having to wait on their elder star to jog downcourt, take the ball and expect everyone else to run the offense through him.

Like the coaches, they heard the official announcement about Jordan back in Washington, not knowing what the arthroscopic surgery might reveal about his knee or when Jordan might play again. That his playing future lay in doubt shook none of them. As usual, Richard Hamilton’s words reflected the group’s attitude, his candor flavored with just enough diplomacy to be passable. While praising his fallen teammate as a “warrior” and casually allowing as to how it would be “great” if Jordan came back for the following season, Hamilton made clear that the young represented the future no matter what happened to Jordan. “I mean, we expected him to play this year…” Hamilton said. “But, you know, we’re a young team. So we know M.J. is not going to be playing here for the next five years…. We know that, in order for us to grow, this is the team to grow right now.”

I’m going to be back, Jordan told a few of them in the locker room, on the eve of the surgery.

None of them said anything to that.

I’m going to be back, he repeated.

Okay, said Hamilton. We know you will. Wanna get you back.

Hamilton wished him luck. Lue did, too.

Everybody was subdued, thought one witness. Not subdued as in uncomfortable, just that there didn’t seem much to say.

Everybody wished him luck a last time.

I’m coming back, no matter how we’re doing. No matter if we make the playoffs or not.

The next day, Wednesday, February 27, doctors put Jordan under a general anesthetic, and the Wizards’ physician, Stephen Haas, repaired Jordan’s torn cartilage. It was a simple procedure, but doctors forecasted it would take Jordan three to six weeks to return to the court. John Hefferon thought three weeks sounded overly optimistic—“very challenging,” he tactfully put it—for a 39-year-old, believing Jordan required at least four weeks before playing again and that, even afterward, his rehab would need to be ongoing and his playing minutes carefully monitored, as never before. “If you push too fast [during rehabilitation] and inflame the joint, you need to back off or you’ll have problems…” Hefferon said. “The pushing is where you run into the challenge of Michael’s desires. Michael will probably want the minimum of [rehab] time…. Michael wants to get back to make it to the playoffs. He’ll want to push—as always.”

But Jordan could do nothing for now, the start of his rehab at least a few days away. Tyrone Nesby would start in his place, and Courtney Alexander would see a marked increase in playing time, suddenly out of the gulag and receiving a last look, with the Wizards needing someone to make up for at least some of Jordan’s lost points. “It’s good to see Courtney get a chance, because he can run, he can shoot and he can score,” Tyronn Lue said. “He has talent…. Rip knows that. I know that. All of us do. It’s tough to prove yourself in this game without getting time to play and playing the way you’re used to and comfortable with. That’s sometimes hard for a lot of guys. Confidence is really important for all of us.”

 

Ty Lue had a unique position among the New Jacks. His intensity—his dives on the floor and his hunger for getting into an opponent’s body—had made him a pet of Jordan’s. Still, Lue had frustrations with Jordan and Collins’s methodically slow-paced style of play, which made it difficult for him as a point guard, he thought, to exhibit his speed and improvisational strengths. At only six feet, with no prospect of ever being able simply to shoot over bigger guards, and never having carved himself a reputation as a pure, spot-up, feet-planted, long-distance shooter, he was at his best moving in the open court. This he had done as a high school star in Kansas City and later at the University of Nebraska, where his reputation as a scorer, a passer and a tenacious defender had made him a first-round draft choice in 1998.

For his first three years in the NBA, he played sparingly for the Lakers. Jackson wanted a point guard to find an open spot in his Triangle offense and stroke open jumpers. The Triangle never meshed with Lue’s style. For Lue, L.A. amounted to career interruptus.

His entire Los Angeles stint may have been disastrous but for the publicity he received during the last NBA Finals, when he hounded and nearly fought Allen Iverson. He looked at once like a ballplayer and a dervish of a tough middleweight.

Doug Collins loved such a player.

Jordan had yet to commit himself to a comeback, which meant that much was in flux, including Collins’s coaching strategies. At 24, Lue did not want to give up any more years to an offense that did not suit him. He signed in no small part with the Wizards because those closest to him thought they understood from Collins that the team’s offense, regardless of Jordan’s presence, would be basically up-tempo. Had Lue believed anything else, he likely would have tested more of the NBA marketplace, in search of a compatible suitor.

Feeling comfortable after his discussions with Collins, Lue signed with Washington. He had begun training camp ahead of Chris Whitney on the depth chart, only soon to discover that Collins and Jordan’s offense called for little running, and far more of the methodical, set-up offense that so limited him in Los Angeles. With Jordan on the floor, the Wizards offense looked in many moments like a variation, or amalgam, of several offenses—the old North Carolina motion offense, the Chicago Triangle and, lastly, when whim struck, a simple scheme in which Jordan attempted to isolate a side of the floor for himself, to work one-on-one against, hopefully, a hapless defender. Collins did not favor references to the Wizards’ use of any elements of the Triangle (for one thing, the word conjured images of Jackson and Winter), preferring to talk of his own offense’s quick cuts, screens and passing. But his offense always relied on Jordan, and Jordan, for the first time in his career, was running the Jordan Offense, a melding of strategies and personal improvisation. It was as if Jordan had taken pieces of all the battle plans he liked best over the years, reserving for himself the option of discarding all of them at a moment’s notice if he thought he could score in isolation.

Lue found himself usually being asked, after he passed to Jordan inside, to find a spot on the outside and be ready to shoot a long jumper, should Jordan pass the ball out. For a point guard in those moments, the only meaningful difference between the Chicago/L.A. Triangle and the Washington offense was that the Wizards’ offense called for Jordan to be an ad hoc point. Everything—sometimes a point forward of sorts operating low in the post—and for a traditional point guard like Lue to slide along the outside and wait. It represented, in Lue’s case, no difference. The arrangement still forced Lue in those moments to slow down, wait for a star and stay put on the perimeter. Not long after the team’s arrival in Wilmington, Whitney moved ahead of him, demonstrating more aptitude and patience for the Wizards’ offense, and a better three-point shot.

For all Jordan’s affection toward Lue, the star thought that Lue often looked tentative and out of position on the floor. There had been a particularly bad scene early in the season, when Lue, trying his best to follow Jordan’s wishes to slide along on the outside and await a pass, had moved to a corner, where he stood open, waiting. A Wizards shot from the other side missed, producing a long rebound out toward the top of the key, where Lue normally would have been. The rebound led to a fast-break basket for the opposition. Friends of Lue could see a livid Jordan in his face. Why weren’t you at the top of the key?

Lue felt himself thinking too much on the court, not relying on his best weapons, his instincts and superior quickness. Sometimes Collins shouted so many instructions at him as he dribbled up the court that the Wizards would be slow to execute their offense. Finally, a Wizards official, concerned for Lue and convinced that Collins’s micromanagement of the games had become counterproductive, urged Lue to stop giving so much of his attention to Collins. “You don’t have to look at him,” the official said to Lue. “You don’t have to slow down, you don’t have to turn your head his way. You can listen if you want, but don’t look. You don’t have to listen to everything Michael is yelling out there either. You’re trying to please too many people.”

Lue listened but said nothing.

“You just have to play, Ty. If you think you gotta make Doug, Michael and everybody else happy every minute, you’ll be too wound up to play. That’s what’s happening.”

Lue nodded. But through the midpoint of the season, he had yet to look comfortable in the offense.

Sometimes a player like Hamilton hinted at his comrades’ frustrations with the offense, talking wistfully of a game or two from the previous season when the young guys had won big while running all night, segueing into a remark about how it would be great to run. A popular presence among his peers, Hamilton could make the dream come alive; he had an evangelist’s fervor when it came to the subject of running. Lue and the other New Jacks loved the talk, as one loves any pleasurable fantasy.

 

The New Jacks always had had to rub up against the resistance of Jordan and Collins. Before Jordan’s injury, Collins and Jordan privately and publicly discouraged talk of the team adopting an up-tempo style. “Enjoy this slow motion game we’re playing, okay?” Collins told reporters.

Jordan agreed. “We can’t run with this team,” he’d regularly say of opponents.

But, with Jordan having gone down, the shackles were taken off the young players. Fans suddenly saw the young players fast-breaking routinely, with Hamilton often out in front of the pack. “I’m sure it’s more fun to watch,” he said one night in the locker room.

He pointed out that with Jordan out on the floor, sometimes “you kind of defer to him and get him the ball, and the defense can stack up against us. Now [without him], we’re getting easy baskets…. We’re pushing the ball and running, but we’re not turning the ball over…”

Hamilton had strained his groin again—a slight pull, he thought—and, though it hurt, he was determined to tape it tighter and play through it, determined to lead, aware and proud that opponents were focusing on him now. On the night of Jordan’s surgery, he scored 31 points in a loss at home to powerful Portland. Two nights later in Chicago, Hamilton strapped his groin and carried them again, scoring 30, only to see the Wizards lose by nine. It was the Wizards’ seventh straight defeat, their ninth loss in 10 games since coming back from the All-Star break, and their second since Jordan had gone down. Popeye Jones, reading the question on the minds of the media, said, “We don’t want you guys writing and saying that these guys in here are nothing without Mike.”

Jones and Hamilton knew that skepticism would be the new theme. Their record had dropped to 27–30, with the team no longer looking like a certainty to make the playoffs. Worse, Hamilton was stricken with a stomach virus that would cause him to miss the next game, in Washington, two afternoons later. The Wizards had no choice but to turn for offense to the largely forgotten Courtney Alexander, fresh out of exile and still showing rust.

No second-year player on the Wizards—or for that matter, in the entire league—had fallen farther or faster than Alexander over the last three months. Collins had sliced his playing time, and Alexander had missed 13 games with a sprained ankle. He had met with Collins several times, asking how he might earn more playing time.

Work, said Collins. Earn it with your play.

But it was hard, Alexander pointed out, to earn anything without the opportunity to play. And without playing time, his conditioning, subpar even before his injury, became worse. Now he was being thrust onto the court, ready or not. His burden would be complicated by having to start against Orlando, which meant that Alexander would be asked to guard Tracy McGrady, who had a quicker first step to the basket than any man of his size in the NBA and a reputation for quickly devouring undersized defenders like Alexander. Their matchup sounded about as fair as putting a bunny in front of a cheetah.

On Sunday, Alexander got off to a poor start, hitting only one of his first six shots, which ordinarily, as Christian Laettner pointed out, would have earned him a spot on the bench, perhaps for the remainder of the game. But, with Jordan out and Hamilton sick, Collins had nowhere else to turn.

By the second half, McGrady looked like All-World, scoring 15 points in the third quarter, draining jumpers, spinning and throwing down a tomahawk dunk. But Alexander was suddenly playing brilliantly, too, and one could see at last everything about him that had made the scouts so excited. He hit long jumpers off the dribble against McGrady—hit them moving in either direction, hit them while jumping straight up, hit them while falling away and falling down. He backed McGrady down toward the post, then shot a fallaway over him. He had a tremendous vertical leap, so that even at only 6′ 5″—giving away four inches in height and perhaps another inch or two in reach to the long-armed McGrady—he sometimes soared over him in shooting his jumper.

On the offensive end, he looked like a future All-Star. It was the other end of his game that haunted his future. For all his physical gifts, he had not proven that he could play defense worth a whit. McGrady was doing anything he wanted. In the fourth quarter, each young player scored at will against the other. Alexander hit hanging jumpers with McGrady all over him, including a 14-footer to tie the game with 47 seconds left in regulation.

Alexander grabbed his trunks and bent, taking deep breaths. Now it seemed his run had to end, for he hadn’t seen this kind of playing time for a year. In overtime, a distracted McGrady lost sight of him for an instant, and Alexander hit an open jumper from the top of the key to give the Wizards the lead. It was a day for all underdogs. Saving his best for the end, Nesby scored on a short bank shot, hit a huge outside jumper and made a steal. The Wizards won by five. Alexander led all scorers with 32 points and, just as amazingly, had played 50 minutes.

He kept the media waiting, as long as Jordan would have. It was his special day, and he would let people know it, after many months of being overlooked by the media and coaches alike. Sometimes a reporter mumbled to him and he simply hmmmmed. He did not smile, he did not frown, he just wore his impassive look, part of the reason why a Wizards official long before had dubbed him “The Sphinx.” Dressing slowly, placing a diamond stud in each ear, he paused before putting on his shirt, allowing everybody to wait some more and glimpse his tattoo, which consisted of Chinese characters on his left shoulder and triceps.

“Mandarin?” somebody asked him.

“Power and truth,” he murmured, though it wasn’t clear whether this meant the tattoo or some vindication he felt.

“Power and truth?”

“You all need to wait for me to get ready,” he said softly, bringing a finger to his lips as if asking for respectful silence, then and only then resuming to put on his shirt.

Hence, the Sphinx.

Finally ready, he said that he had seized the day’s opportunity. “I’m an up-and-coming player in this league,” he declared.

Sometimes his teammates sniped about what they regarded as Alexander’s pomposity and affectations. His perceived aloofness had made it difficult for some to feel sorry when Collins demoted him. But among the New Jacks, they were with him to a man on this day, happy to see another young player step up and show that the team could win without Jordan. Even a few of the veterans expressed pleasure, with Christian Laettner saying that a pure shooter like Alexander needed time at the start of a game to shoot and get into a rhythm. “If he’s getting yanked all the time, it’s tough for him to find that rhythm,” Laettner added. “He has to play…. I’ve tried to help when it’s been tough for him. I just say to him, ‘This is bull. Hang in there.’”

Everyone wondered how long this good feeling for Alexander would last. Collins had only about 15 seconds to enjoy the victory before somebody asked him if Alexander was out of his doghouse.

Collins’s face reddened. “Excuse me—whose doghouse? We don’t have a doghouse…. I take offense to that. I don’t put guys in doghouses.”

But, all around Collins, players thought that Alexander finally had received a long overdue chance. Two nights later at MCI, the Wizards blew out the Bulls. Hamilton, who looked drawn but found a way to play, reentered the starting lineup, taking Alexander’s spot and scoring 15. Coming off the bench, Alexander hit 9 of 11 shots and led the Wizards with 26 points. While not close to Alexander off the court, Hamilton viewed Alexander as a young player with whom his own future might be inextricably linked. “Courtney’s always played hard,” Hamilton said. “Now people are seein’ what the real Courtney Alexander is all about. We have a lot of character in this locker room.”

An excited reporter sliced in: What did Michael say to you guys when he came in the locker room after the game?

Hamilton shrugged, managing to look simultaneously poised, polite and a touch bored. It was a fabulous feat. “I didn’t hear what he said.”

Casually and without edge, several other players allowed as to how they hadn’t heard what Jordan said. He came to the arena but didn’t sit on the team bench, as rehabbing players at MCI were generally expected to do. Sometimes he watched a game on the locker room’s big-screen TV, alone with his entourage. He issued quick congratulations to the team at the game’s end and spoke briefly with Collins, departing hurriedly, leaving behind a locker room far more festive in his absence. All music was louder, the laughter more raucous, like the sounds of a classroom where the regular teacher had stepped out indefinitely and no substitute could be found.

The distance between Jordan and the young players grew during his time on the injured list. Alexander spoke about the star with a stiff formality, often referring not to “Michael” or “Mike” or “M.J.” but to “Michael Jordan.” Amid the lingering Tonto–Lone Ranger references to Jordan and Hamilton, Alexander was creating his own duo, linking himself not with the idol but with Hamilton. His words reflected Hamilton’s message: the future depended on the young. “A lot of people said this would be myself and Rip’s team, you know, in some years…” Alexander said, noting that “Rip’s a scorer; I’m a scorer.” He nodded at someone who said the fans seemed to like the running and high-flying. “Sure,” he said, “because it’s exciting and it’s the future. We all hoped for that style, Rip and myself, and you see now what happens when we get a chance to execute it.”

The New Jacks had won two in a row without the idol, climbing to 29–30, very much in playoff contention with 23 games to play, aglow with self-fulfillment. Then potent Detroit came into MCI—led by scoring machine Jerry Stackhouse and shot blocker extraordinaire Ben Wallace—and Hamilton and Alexander combined for a respectable 44 points. But, on the other end of the court, Stackhouse abused each of them, the duo’s defensive liabilities exposed under a light becoming hotter with Jordan gone.

“You want it, you got it,” a Wizards official said of the attention that the duo chased. Hamilton still looked overmatched against a muscular player like Stackhouse who could bull him inside. And now, as often as not, a confrontation with any capable scorer revealed the blemishes of Alexander’s game, negating its beauty and all those points. His stretches of lethargy and lapses in judgment cost his team as frequently as his athleticism lifted them. With the game tied in the final seconds, Detroit worked the ball to Jon Barry, who had been left alone in the left corner by a momentarily confused Alexander and hit the game-winning three-pointer at the buzzer.

It was the start of a five-game losing streak.

They went to Orlando, where McGrady, getting payback, scorched Alexander and scored 50, as the Magic won by three points. Road and home losses to Boston dropped the team five games under the .500 mark. Some of the coaches wondered whether the young players were so enamored of running that it had become like a drug. Chaos infected them at a game’s critical stages—turnovers on the rise, players’ shooting percentages plummeting in the second half. Hamilton was being forced to face what Jordan saw: Neither of them could regularly win at this stage of their careers without the other. Kwame Brown and Brendan Haywood still had not materialized, and defense remained a problem. Aside from Nesby and Lue, the New Jacks didn’t have anyone who could reliably defend scorers. There was always a defensive hole in a forward or guard matchup, which begged for a healthy Jordan to fill it.

A defeat to the lowly Clippers, in Los Angeles, completed their five-game skid, leaving the Wizards with 14 losses in its 17 games since the All-Star break, the worst record among all the NBA’s serious playoff contenders over that stretch. The team was on its second Western swing in four weeks, a six-game trip, and Collins hoped that Jordan might join them at some point on the road, not to play but simply to provide a morale boost. Two weeks had passed since his surgery. Once in a while, a reporter asked Collins, Where is he? And Collins would admit that he hadn’t heard from Jordan that day, that he didn’t know when he might next speak to him, that he didn’t even know Jordan’s whereabouts much of the time. Jordan did not routinely check in with Collins or anyone else. He was above that.

 

While he wished Jordan were around more, Collins didn’t want him rushing on to a court. His own mistakes in dealing with injuries as a player convinced him that a premature return ran the risk of setting back the knee’s rehab and damaging Jordan’s chances of playing the following season. If the team completely fell out of the playoff picture in the week or two ahead, Collins resolved to advise Jordan to sit out the remainder of the season.

Then the Wizards fortunes turned. Following the loss to the Clippers, the team surprisingly won two of their next three road games. In Seattle, Lue had his best night of the season, scoring 26 points, setting his feet and hitting the long three-pointers supposedly out of his range. After losing the next night in Portland, the team flew to Oakland and beat Golden State. Improbably, they found themselves in the same position as at the beginning of their Western swing—five games under .500 and still in the race. In the 12 games missed by Jordan since his surgery, the team had gone 4–8, not good, but not disastrous either. The New Jacks had not set the league afire, but they had hung on, and the team still had life with 15 games to play.

Yet the huge news in Oakland came before the game, during Collins’s scrum session. Even measured against his frequently jittery demeanor, Collins looked and sounded uncomfortable. Something was up. Did he have any news about Jordan? someone asked. That tuning fork of a head shook ever so slightly. His voice rose, not angrily, not at all unpleasantly, just uneasily enough for one to hear the tension in it. The voice had a flutter. “I talked to Michael today,” he said, and that information alone had people leaning forward. “He says he’s feeling better and, uhh, he was, uh, actually he’d gone to Chicago. He and Juanita had gone to Chicago, so he sounded good, you know. We talked for about five minutes. He said, uh, he was working out a couple times a day, trying, you know, to pick up the workouts. And [he said] his knee felt pretty good, so that’s basically all I know.”

The key word in that last sentence was “basically.” When a coach says, “That’s basically all I know,” you can be confident that he hasn’t told you all he knows, basically or otherwise.

Basically is one of those words that gives all coaches, like politicians, the license to fudge and sometimes lie altogether. The media knows this, which is why no coach in the modern age should use the word “basically.” It is like saying, Look at me, I am dissembling now.

I said that I just hoped to ask him, basically, a little question.

By then the rest of the media had pounced. Someone asked if he knew whether Jordan would be joining the team before the road trip’s end.

“No, no,” Collins said.

You don’t know or you don’t think he’s going to do it?

Collins looked above the heads, licked his lips, talked very fast. He was not made for this. “I don’t know, I don’t know. I mean, he could show up anytime, you know. It just depends on how he’s feeling. He might say, Jump on a plane, let’s go. But as of right now, I don’t know…. He says his knee feels a hundred percent better than it did before the surgery, so those are all positive things.”

Collins declared that, when it came to the issue of Jordan playing, he would do whatever Michael wished. “I think what I would do is sit down with him and say, ‘Okay, how do you want to play? Do you want to play the second quarters and the fourth quarters? Do you want to go back to playing at the start?’ I think that’s his call. And whatever he wants to do, I’ll try to blend the team around that.”

Still, Collins emphasized, “He wouldn’t play without practicing, he wouldn’t do that. I would expect him, before he played, to try to get in two or three practices with us…. I would be shocked if he tried to play without practicing…. I still think he needs to test his knee a little bit, to see how it’s going to hold up.”

“Two or three practices?” an amazed Wizards official said later of Collins’s hope. “Two or three? I’d say to Doug, ‘Prepare to be shocked.’ Michael will land somewhere, shoot some balls and say, I’m in. Doug would have to say, You’re not in.”

He was in.

 

That evening in Chicago, the boss secretly boarded a plane. When the Wizards arrived in Denver that night from Oakland, several of them noticed Tim Grover and George Koehler at the team hotel. Simultaneously, everyone on the team knew who was resting somewhere in a suite.

“He’ll just practice,” Collins assured team personnel the next morning.

Jordan came to practice, shot some balls and jogged around.

“He wants to play,” Collins told people.

The game came the following evening, Wednesday, March 20. It was exactly three weeks to the day since his surgery, or at the quick end of what Wizards physician Stephen Haas had told him was medically sensible for a rehab. To John Hefferon, three weeks remained “very challenging,” which was to say, a roll of the dice.

You’re not ready. Think of the risk, Michael: Some around the Wizards’ locker room dreamt of saying it to him. Others in the organization went a step further, telling colleagues they’d confront him if they thought it might stop him. On the other hand, they knew their warnings might have just the opposite effect, stoking his fury, pushing him to do the very thing they most worried about. So, in the end, after all that hand-wringing, they leaned toward saying nothing. They knew they were enablers, and that gave them pause, but the alternative might be to infuriate Jordan, and who wanted to deal with that shit storm? They were portraits of self-conflict. One man heard himself saying, unreally, to the star, “Fantastic to have you back. We need you out there.”

Jordan agreed. His knee might heal more soundly if he had more time off, but his spirit would atrophy. His mood had darkened in his time away, rehabilitation having been a reminder of his athletic mortality. On the cusp of middle-age, he was not so different from other men, after all. “I gotta be out there; I go nuts sitting; I don’t have a lot of time,” he said, in response to a friend who asked, Why do you go on the court with these pains? What’s the point?

The point was…The point was he had to have it, and he would have it. He played, taking on the new role of a reserve asked to come off the bench midway through the first quarter. Running gingerly, he went 2–9 in 16 minutes against Denver, scoring seven points. Hamilton scored 30 and Alexander added 16. Nesby mauled the hapless Nuggets and pulled down eight rebounds. Washington won by 32, and Collins rediscovered the party line. After the game, he expressed shock—absolute shock—that anyone might suggest Jordan had put himself at risk: “Michael isn’t going to come back too early and set himself back just because he wants to finish out the season.”

They flew to Utah to face the Jazz the following evening. Just 22 days after surgery, Jordan would be playing in games on successive nights. Before the game, he sat in the visitors’ locker room in black bicycle shorts and shower sandals, receiving stim treatment on his right knee and unconsciously fidgeting with the ice bag affixed to his left knee. A kid brought him coffee. He sipped it, staring through everybody, surveying a game tape of Utah. It was quiet. Tim Grover sat close by in a pin-striped suit, next to Koehler and Larry Wooten. Everything was the way he liked it; everything was as it always had been. He studied Utah on the screen. Jordan checked the tiny pads on his right knee. Nothing had changed.

An hour later, he rode a stationary bicycle in the tunnel of the Delta Center for the game’s opening six minutes, keeping the knee loose. At a time-out, he coolly got off the bike and checked into the game with 5:11 left in the first quarter. Walking over to his favorite foil on the planet Earth, Bryon Russell, he smiled, chuckled and gave him a little elbow to the stomach, tossing in a shoulder bump for good measure. I’m back. Hi. Russell just nodded.

Jordan had not played on this floor for four years, not since he had hit The Shot over Russell to win the ’98 championship. Now it was as if Jordan immediately wanted to remind Russell of that moment. In just seconds, he had the ball at the top of the key, staring down Russell, going one-on-one, dribbling between his legs, lunging forward, pulling back, then rising. Not fooled, Russell had a hand in his face, almost blocking the shot. The 20-footer didn’t even touch the rim, hitting the right side of the backboard.

Russell grinned.

Jordan soon came looking for payback. By then the task of guarding him had fallen to a tall, thin Russian import named Andrei Kirilenko, a 6′ 9″ rookie who had size and youth on his side but not enough guile. Moving a tad stiffly but quickly, Jordan hit a fallaway over him. But the most pleasurable Jordan moment came with about 1:50 remaining in the first half. He pump-faked, got the gullible young Kirilenko in the air, flew by him on bad knee and all, passed to Kwame Brown and then received a return pass from Brown while darting toward the hoop. With Kirilenko two steps behind him, he leaped and dunked.

His torn meniscus had been worked on just 23 days earlier.

He hit four of eight shots in 12 first-half minutes. But he had nothing left in the second half, missing all four shots he took and beginning to drag the bad leg. The team looked similarly exhausted, showing the effects of a nine-day road trip. Hamilton was having an awful night, going 2–11, and Nesby was 3–12. Utah drew away.

After four years of waiting, Bryon Russell found a tiny measure of revenge, hitting a three-pointer over Jordan with 2:55 left to give Utah an 11-point lead, then pressuring him so tightly that Jordan dribbled the ball off his foot. It rolled away too quickly for him to recover it. He watched it, wearing a look of pure puzzlement. Russell retrieved it and fed ahead to Karl Malone, whose score put the game out of reach. In the next minute, Jordan was sitting on the baseline. He had played only 22 minutes, but already he seemed to be favoring the knee.

By then, the dangers were obvious. Afterward, Collins steadfastly insisted he looked physically sound, if rusty. Jordan told the press the knee felt good. The team, he pointed out, had gone 3–3 on the road trip, still in the Eastern Conference race at 32–37.

He mentioned that it was great to return to Utah, gloating a little, prodded by the media to gloat a little more, saying with a chuckle that he didn’t talk with Russell about The Shot because “I don’t think he wants to remember things like that.”

The media laughed.

Over the years, the evening’s Jordanmania simply added to Karl Malone’s irritation. Although Utah had won, Malone had had a history of losing with a grudge, and Michael Jordan had a history of rubbing in Utah’s playoff losses. It was a combination made for ill will. Malone was asked what it had been like to play against Jordan that night: “When I retire, I’ll say what I really want to say,” Malone curtly answered.

Good-bye to bitter Utah. With everybody around him insisting he looked and felt great, Jordan walked slowly toward the team bus.

“How’s the knee?” someone asked him.

“None of your concern,” Jordan answered, which was the precise moment when, for some people, it again became a concern.

 

For a week, Tim Grover had gently urged Jordan to consider all the options and think through the consequences. Better to err on the side of too much recovery time, said Grover, who suggested to Jordan that nothing less than his career might be at stake. A knee that blew up or tore a second time might be a knee without the capacity to heal completely again, Grover thought, assuming it had healed this time—which no one, in truth, could be sure about. The knee still needed strengthening. Jordan was tired of hearing about it. “Just get me ready,” Jordan said to Grover and the Wizards’ trainers.

Grover had yielded to the inevitable, though a couple of the doubters still believed they could rein Jordan in. Now and then, someone around the team convinced himself that he had found just the right line for changing Jordan’s mind. “I think I might say to him that you don’t want to see the Hope diamond forever marred just for a couple of lousy games in March,” said a member of the Wizards’ staff. “And that, goddamn, who gives a shit about games in March when your stage has always been the playoffs?”

But a playoff spot still looked possible, a point that Jordan, an inveterate debater, seized upon for advantage, arguing that the team’s position necessitated that he play. The man contemplating the Hope diamond metaphor began worrying about a possible backlash if he opened his mouth: Jordan had a long memory, he knew. A man who uttered a perceived slight could go from acquaintance to pariah overnight. Everyone remembered that, during Jordan’s rehab of his broken foot, Jerry Krause forever had earned his contempt by urging that Jordan stay away from the court for the season. No one around the Wizards wanted to be the next Krause. Even while missing more practices, Jordan resolved to play. The team trailed in the playoff race by 3 ½ games and, with only 13 games left, the Wizards were running out of days to make up ground. Charlotte and Indiana were ahead of them, and Toronto looked positioned to make a run.

But Toronto had problems, with Vince Carter having gone out with a knee injury. Jordan left for a day to attend a family funeral in the Chicago area, rejoining the team for a Sunday game in Toronto. “All you motherfuckers needed me back,” he happily teased some teammates, after getting off the team bus and walking into the visitors’ locker room in the Air Canada Centre.

This was a winnable game, Jordan told people. They had to have it.

Sitting on the bench at the game’s start, he watched Hamilton dunk and the Wizards sprint out to an 8–0 lead. But the young Wizards quickly squandered the advantage. Jordan entered a tie game with about four and a half minutes left in the first quarter, bulling 6′ 7″ Mo Peterson down low, trying to get position for his fallaway. His shot was off. He missed 9 of his first 13 field-goal attempts, agitated by the play around him, yelling at Kwame Brown to get in the right place, barking at Hamilton in the third quarter about his defense against Toronto’s fast breaks: “You gotta get back, you gotta get back…”

He was bitching at the refs, particularly Phil Robinson, complaining about being fouled and not getting any calls. In another era, when Jordan reigned above all others, NBA refs made him the beneficiary of almost every borderline call. But, in his twilight, the old favoritism had given way to a near evenhandedness late in a game. He was on his own now. The rest of the league might treat him like a sacred cow, but refs generally made him earn his keep. If he was bumped slightly on a shot, or stripped of the ball on a murky play by a pair of brutes, so be it.

Looking tired at the start of the fourth quarter, he said to Collins, in a voice loud enough to carry to the media table, “Do you want me out top?”

This meant he wanted to be out top, out at the top of the key, from where he could set up the offense and wouldn’t have to expend as much energy.

Collins nodded.

Jordan drove and missed a four-footer in the lane.

Collins buried his head in his hands.

It was that kind of game, maddening and thrilling. The Wizards had blown their early lead, and gone on a run, and now Toronto had lost all of its 13-point lead. The Wizards seized the advantage. Collins went for the kill. In the last three minutes, he abandoned all restraint and ran virtually all the offense through Jordan, who hit two jumpers, and the Wizards led by three points with under a minute to play. Toronto scored, Jordan missed another jumper, and, with a half minute left, the Wizards one-point lead hinged on stopping Toronto a last time. When Jordan rebounded an errant shot, victory seemed ensured. But, in the same instant, Toronto’s rugged Jerome Williams and Antonio Davis swatted at the ball and his arms. In the next second, the ball dropped from Jordan’s hands to the floor.

No moment said more about the changing status of Michael Jordan. The refs blew no whistle. The ball was free. Antonio Davis snatched it and, in one motion, jumped, stretched his arms and scored on a layup with 15 seconds left, giving Toronto the lead. An irate Jordan, stricken in the same instant by a back spasm, writhed in pain and screamed at Phil Robinson that he had been fouled, berating the official as Robinson turned his back. A shout from the Wizards bench finally brought him back to the game at hand. The Wizards needed to set up a play. Jordan trudged to the bench, clutching his lower back.

The trainer and a couple of players asked him if he was all right. He waved them off. Of course he was all right; of course he was staying in the game. Fuck that. I’m fine. He was already thinking of how they would win. He did not need to say, I want the ball. Hamilton had 21 points, and Jordan had both a fragile knee and a shot that had been erratic all afternoon, but there was no question where the ball was going. Collins told everyone else to clear out a portion of the floor, to give him room.

He was guarded in those last seconds by the 6′ 9″ Williams, one of the league’s toughest defensive players, who forced him farther away from the basket than Jordan wanted to be—not around the free-throw line, from where he typically shot in the final seconds, but at least two feet beyond it. Jordan faked a shot and waited for Williams to leap. Williams stayed on the ground, waiting.

When Jordan jumped, Williams leaped with him, waiting for the older, shorter man at the apogee, his right arm elongated. Jordan had no choice but to put extra arc on the ball to get it over Williams’s hand. Its flight remains on the mind’s eye: the exquisite rotation, its finely measured distance to the hoop, the improbable realized, again. The ball went in. Simultaneously, Jordan’s teammates on the bench leaped deliriously.

In the next instant, the ball spun out.

The Wizards disconsolately shuffled off the court. Their slide continued. Jordan rushed to scream at Phil Robinson, finally coaxed away by team members, head down, right leg dragging, ominously so.

He had made 6 of 17 shots, and scored 14 points in 23 minutes. Afterward, he said the referees had swallowed their whistles in not calling a foul on the controversial ball strip. He pursed his lips hard. “I hope this game doesn’t come back to haunt us when you’re talking about the playoffs,” he murmured. “Still, we got twelve games left.”

At 32–38, they would need a stunning surge to make the playoffs. Jordan found Collins and told him not to lose faith, that they were going to find a way to win the next 10 straight.

 

In the days ahead, he reclaimed the locker room turf from Hamilton and the rest of the New Jacks. He let them know it was his team, not in a confrontation, or by waving his putative title as once and future chief basketball executive. He simply did what he had always done everywhere, imposing the force of his personality over teammates, sending barbs their way, needling their play, making certain all understood that their games had deficiencies. He turned up the heat now. He made cracks about Hamilton giving away too much defensively and being pushed around, and remarked that Alexander still didn’t look very interested in grabbing a rebound or shooting anything other than a jump shot.

Even with all his scoring, Alexander had become seen by the coaches and Jordan as the antithesis of the tough player, a bad sign for his future in Washington. His powerful 6′ 5″ body belied the softness of his play, some thought. He seldom drove hard to the basket or threw his body between the path of a ball handler and the basket. Hamilton’s big numbers and camaraderie made him a leader of the New Jacks, but the coaches and Jordan still questioned Hamilton’s commitment to getting stronger. His defense had improved a bit, but his lack of strength still plagued him, with a couple of the coaches still talking about a moment in Portland when Hamilton had grabbed a loose ball near the scorer’s table, only to have Scottie Pippen yank the ball so hard from his hands that Hamilton went flying.

The New Jacks seemed especially on guard now that Jordan had returned. Lue felt Jordan getting tougher and more demanding. Kwame Brown looked more miserable than ever, his anger seeping out, particularly over what several of the young players regarded as the team’s double standard in all things related to Jordan. It was an exasperated Brown who first broached the matter when asked about how he’d managed to miss a dunk in a game. “Hey,” he said softly. “Even M.J. misses dunks. But no one says anything about that.” His words hung there, awkwardly. He covered quickly. “But Michael’s earned that.”

Still, Brown’s deference toward Jordan was fading. If prodded, he acknowledged his harsh treatment at the hands of several veterans, including Jordan, early in the season. He hung exclusively with the New Jacks now, spending much of his free time playing Xbox and watching his videos, a man-child doing a man-child’s things. Trying to explain what had gone wrong with his prized draft pick, Jordan talked about how high school kids came to the league with psyches not yet developed. He went so far as to suggest that, for the sake of his development, Brown might have been better off playing college ball. By then, Brown’s confidence was shredded. At 20, he was already, psychologically, a rehab project.

Collins sounded regretful, wishing he could start all over again with Brown. “I’ve probably done a very poor job,” he said one night. “I saw a young guy with this tremendous skill level and potential, and maybe I wanted too much from him, too soon…. I think he’s overwhelmed. I want to restore him; I want him to start feeling good about himself again…. But he’s gotta learn how to play. I talked to him the other day and said, ‘Kwame, I apologize to you if, in any way, I’ve made this tougher for you, or I expected too much too soon.’ I’ve never coached a player out of high school. I didn’t do a very good job.”

But Collins wasn’t sure what he would do next. In the end, he thought, the kid would rise or fall alone. “Kwame needs to find another gear,” he added. “That can’t come from me.”

The coach and Jordan didn’t sound buoyed by much about their team, and some young Wizards had difficulty taking their minds off the question of how Jordan viewed them. Players sought to be careful in what they said about him. Sometimes surrogates talked for them. “Right now it’s especially weird to play with a guy who you think of as your boss,” said an agent for one player. “Because guys are already thinking about next season. They gotta keep one eye out for [Jordan]. They wonder, Can you shoot much? Or does shooting get you in trouble if he wants the ball a lot? That’s a hard thing to play through, because it means guys are thinking too much out there. Can you run, or do you have to slow it down and wait for him? Can you have any fun around him? They don’t know. These guys have to learn to play with Michael, and everybody understands that—it’s his team. But he’s gotta play with them, too. No offense to Michael—I know Michael’s busting his ass on the court—but he doesn’t talk to ’em enough for them to have any idea what they’re allowed to do.”

The agent could read the future. The shadow boss had his own plan for the future, and not all of the New Jacks would have a place in it.

Over the next week, anytime you saw Jordan off the court at MCI, he seemed to have something on his knees—wires, electrical stim pads, ice bags. Two days after the Toronto game, he received 45 minutes of stim treatment on the right knee, readying himself to play Denver.

That night, a journeyman named Voshon Lenard—whom he’d routinely thumped when Lenard played for Miami and the Bulls gave Miami an annual series of whippings—blocked his fallaway jumper late in the first quarter. Not merely blocked it, but got his hand on top of the ball and so stuffed him that the force of Lenard’s hand pushing down on the ball from above sent Jordan tumbling. Jordan on his knees. Camera shutters clicked. It was no small embarrassment, and Lenard’s trash-talking only angered him more. But he had nothing with which to answer on this night. Hamilton and Whitney had 22 apiece, and Nesby shut down everyone he was asked to guard, as the Wizards won by 16. Jordan had only nine points in 20 minutes, and afterward the scrum mostly wanted to know about the Lenard block. Jordan tried smiling. He said he felt good.

But club officials were skeptical. Then the most public face among all the team’s officials made a mistake. On a TV show, Doug Collins let it slip that he would be surprised if Jordan played the following season.

Collins’s remark triggered a behind-the-scenes furor in the Wizards’ front office, which had season tickets to sell, plus preseason games to arenas in small cities whose offers would be considerably less if word spread that Michael Jordan might not be playing the next season. The Wizards brass instructed the coach never to say anything like that again.

Cast in the role of basketball’s Homer Simpson, Collins had to go out before cameras and say that his comments had been misunderstood. Baying reporters pressed him to explain his comment. All he needed to say was that he’d been guilty of a poor choice of words, that the truth was Jordan wanted to return for another season but that nothing was certain. Instead, Collins opted for defiance and denial. “I don’t know what the big news is…” he said. “I don’t think anything was said that nobody already didn’t know…. What did I say? Did anybody hear it?”

A reporter answered, “You said you’d be surprised if he played next year.”

Doh. This is not what Collins wanted to hear. His claim seemed to be that he had not said what he said. He had a new take on what he said. “I said that Michael will make that decision.”

Someone chuckled derisively.

A few people wanted to know if Jordan had taken him to the wood-shed. “Did Michael talk to you about what you said?”

Collins flared. He inhaled. His head did its little shake. Stress did nasty things to him. “Guys, that’s done. Done. Okay? We’re done…. I know Michael wants to play next year…. To start running with this at this particular time, I think, is a disservice to our team.”

“Does your gut tell you that he will play?”

Collins looked as though his head might lift off. “Now, you just, come on now—”

“Any more questions?” the Wizards p.r. man asked, bringing it to a merciful end.

Collins walked away, muttering forlornly, “I don’t need this.”

Then Jordan sauntered before the cameras, cool, commanding, the anti-Collins. Grinning, he assured everyone that no decision had been made about his future, defending Collins the way a boss comes to the aid of a mistake-prone underling. “I’m not mad at him,” Jordan said. “That’s his observation.”

Actually, Collins had been more right than wrong: Jordan was a long ways from committing to another season, uncertain of how his knees might hold up. Privately, Jordan reserved his irritation for the Wizards’ top executives. The thought that Susan O’Malley and other Pollin subordinates might be conveying the impression to arena operators in preseason cities, or to Washington ticket buyers, that his return was a virtual certainty angered Jordan. If he did not come back for another season, he did not want people making money off his name. The executives’ dismay with Collins’s statement merely confirmed Jordan’s sense that people were profiting from the idea that Michael Jordan would continue to be in a Wizards uniform. His indignation heightened, he saw the incident as just one more example of O’Malley’s crass exploitation of the Jordan name.

 

Turning a basketball profit for the first time in many years, Abe Pollin gave public thanks to Jordan while carefully avoiding any reference to occasional tensions with his star, who had spent a part of the winter talking like an executive again, noting his interest in considering possible trades.

For a long while, since the beginning of Jordan’s comeback and the relinquishing of his executive title, the Wizards had pretended that Wes Unseld, the team’s general manager, was in charge of basketball operations. But those close to Jordan, and Jordan himself, increasingly dropped the pretense that anyone other than Jordan was in control. Collins regularly told the press that Jordan would be running the franchise once he left the court. In February, Jordan had alluded to his own decisive role in all of the Wizards’ basketball decisions, using the royal we in discussing his designs. “I think there are some holes we need to continue to improve on, so we will entertain deals,” he said, privately exploring what could be done to obtain Charles Oakley from Chicago.

Nearing the league’s trade deadline, he had changed his mind, declaring that he thought it wise that the team not make any trades that might disturb the chemistry of the team. With Jerry Krause declining to let Oakley go, Jordan preferred that the organization stand pat and not push any trade buttons.

Abe Pollin quietly endured all of Jordan’s comments about trade possibilities. Never in the face of Collins’s assertions or Jordan’s presumption did Pollin correct the impression that Jordan’s future as club president was anything less than certain. I saw the owner briefly during this period, our paths crossing for a few seconds at MCI. Pollin walked briskly. I asked for his opinion on “Michael’s leadership of things.” Not stopping or looking over, appearing a tad tense and annoyed at having his peace interrupted, he mumbled, “Sensational, sensational. Michael’s leadership is sensational.”

Not as long as Jordan wore a uniform and the money flowed did Pollin hint at any problem. Later, when things publicly came apart between the two of them, his lush praise of Jordan seemed like rank hypocrisy to many Jordan allies. But I always viewed Pollin’s behavior as instinct, basic business, a function of his proximity to all that money. When I think of Pollin from this period, I have this image of a smiling crocodile, waiting.

 

Jordan’s two sons, Jeffrey and Marcus, flew to Washington, to spend the weekend with him. He had three days after the Denver game to rest his knee, and the presence of his sons relaxed him. On the morning of a Friday night game against Milwaukee at MCI, he watched Jeffrey and Marcus play a pickup game with the sons of assistant general manager Rod Higgins in the Wizards’ practice gym, and Wizards personnel who watched said a delighted Jordan laughed and clapped his hands, happy in a way they’d seldom seen. Collins, who had left the arena, came back to find Jordan still watching his sons—a good sign, the coach decided. He told his wife that Jordan looked energized.

The struggling man had one great burst left in him for the season. With a black circulation-support sleeve around his knee, and his pain and stiffness having slackened, he ran better that night than at any time since before the surgery. Trying to save wear on the bad knee, Collins had acceded to Jordan’s wish to play him more as a point guard on the perimeter, from where he could afford to move less, alternating between passing and bursting around screens set by Jahidi White and Popeye Jones. At the end of the Wizards’ nine-point victory, he had 34 points in 26 minutes, shining in front of his children, who, like his skeptics, sometimes told him he was old.

“It’s always good to see your kids,” he said afterward. “Even though they call you old…. I just felt good all day. I came into the game pretty loose.”

With only 10 games left, he told people that he wanted to be up to 40 minutes a night for the season’s final week. Grover, Collins and anybody who had his ear continued to stress caution. It was a word that, especially in triumphant moods, Jordan found particularly distasteful.

But his knee was fickle now. It might be okay on a Friday, only to leave him miserable on a Sunday. Two days after confounding Milwaukee, he had nothing against Dallas in an Easter afternoon affair, being held scoreless during the first half by 6′ 5″ Adrian Griffin, whom he tried posting up down low but who had a hand in his face on his half-dozen errant jumpers. He didn’t have a field goal through three quarters, finishing with a mere 10 points, and only Hamilton’s 23 kept the game close against Dallas’s triumvirate of stars—Dirk Nowitzki, Steve Nash and Michael Finley. Nesby hindered Finley, and Lue managed to keep Nash under reasonable control. A typical performance from a healthy Jordan would have meant a certain win, but Jordan, as Collins said later, had a knee at only 50 percent by then.

Even so, he played the entire fourth quarter. The Wizards’ loss made everything more painful. Once off the floor and in the tunnel, he began dragging the right leg again, his knee swelling. But he would not admit it, choosing to focus instead on mistakes in the game, seeming to blame Collins for not using him more as a point guard out on the perimeter, where, Jordan thought, he might have saved some of his energy. He spoke of Collins as if he were an unproven coach who needed to prove his mettle. It was not a flattering side of Jordan, and this was a rare instance when he showed the side in public. “He’s gonna have to earn his coaching ring to minimize my minutes and keep me in the focus of what’s happening,” he said. “In the Milwaukee game, [I thought] I could utilize myself a little better playing point guard. [That didn’t happen] as much today. And he may have used me up a little bit.”

The coach had his own spin on what was happening, praising Jordan for playing through pain. In hopes of inspiring a banged-up squad that had difficulty scoring points, Collins began citing Jordan as the model of the indomitable warrior. “Is he healthy?” Collins asked rhetorically. “The answer is no. Is he gonna compete? The answer is yes. And I think he’s a tremendous example for the rest of our guys…. When you look across the locker room and see M.J. playing, you’re sort of thinking, It’s the time of year that I’ve gotta strap it on and play, too.”

Strap it on was a favorite Collins phrase. The players had begun to use it, too. Everybody had to strap it on.

Only one player would not be able to strap it on much longer. Jordan had gone to talk to trainer Steve Stricker. He had a small problem, he said to somebody. The small problem involved not being able to flex his right knee totally. “I think it’s going to be stiff after playing so many minutes,” Jordan said matter-of-factly.

 

Delusion for many people can be an eternal state, can be so deep and complete that they are blissfully numb to it. But for hurting athletes in denial of their physical problems, delusion has limits and endings. The end now was approaching for Jordan. The following morning, April Fool’s Day, his knee swelled anew. Surgery mended the cartilage, but no 39-year-old knee in the midst of rehab was made for this pounding. Over the next 36 hours, it filled with fluid and so stiffened that, shortly before the Wizards took the MCI floor to play the Lakers, Collins told Jordan he did not want him to play.

Jordan said he wanted to try. In a mark of his desperation, he went out on the floor looking to the world like a man wearing panty hose on his right leg—dark, tight, blue panty hose that a man as aggressively virile as Jordan never would have stood for wearing except for the hope that it might provide his knee with protection and relief. He looked liked the tallest man ever to play Peter Pan. Those who had told him about the synthetic legging—a “therapeutic circulation stocking,” a trainer dubbed it—touted its ability to alleviate swelling by keeping the knee warm and enhancing blood flow in the area, the same theory by which electrical stimulation sometimes helped. Not everyone was so sure. Steve Stricker voiced uncertainty about whether it could help, but if Jordan wanted to try the legging, Stricker added, it couldn’t hurt.

At the start of the game, Jordan rode the stationary bike in the tunnel, then took the court with about three minutes left in the first quarter, by which time the Lakers were already up by 10 points, the slaughter underway. Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal did whatever they wished. The Wizards committed a turnover, and the Lakers were fast-breaking, with Bryant racing to the hoop. Jordan was in a position to try contesting him but didn’t, Bryant dunking, Jordan slowly turning and starting back up the court.

He was beaten on defense by a journeyman named Brian Shaw. Bryant left him flat-footed on a drive, a moment that a pained Jackson later mentioned to friends. Jordan took a seat on the bench with three minutes left in the second quarter.

Collins told him at halftime that he shouldn’t return to the game unless the Wizards staged a dramatic comeback. Jordan was surprisingly docile.

“When Michael doesn’t fight you, you know he’s hurt,” Collins said later.

He had a career-low of two points.

He said little to his teammates. With the Wizards on the way to losing by 20, he spent most of the second half on the end of the bench, two seats away from his closest teammate, mumbling over his shoulder to George Koehler, and otherwise alone with his thoughts.

Jackson said afterward that he looked like a shadow of himself.

Bryant added, “He might not have been moving like Michael wanted to move, but he wanted it as much. Nobody wants it more than Michael.”

It was exactly that wanting—his salvation so often—that had been his undoing. He had, as John Hefferon observed, a 39-year-old’s knees but a 25-year-old’s dreams. In the locker room, he declared that he had “no pain” and felt “good.” In the next moment, however, he seemed to be bracing the world for a possibly unsatisfactory ending to the season, his sorrow palpable when he spoke about the frustration of having to play hobbled against Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal—his tone a kind of faint plea: Please don’t compare this version of himself against the younger stars. “It’s tough…when you’re going against the best and you don’t have the same”—he paused for an instant, searching for a synonym, not wanting to use the word “knee,” “body” or “youth,” finally settling upon a word—“equipment, to go against them.” His voice trailed off.

In that last week before his season’s end, if only for a moment, he pulled up the shade on a mystery. He talked candidly about his tendinitis and related knee problems for the first time, grimly offering a theory about the origin of his troubles. His explanation eerily echoed the words and warnings of Tim Grover, six months earlier. The problem began, he said, with his broken ribs, and the favoring of his hurting left knee. “I came back without that period of building myself up, and from there it started: the flaring of the knee, the tendinitis. And parts of the body start to break down. And you start compensating, and other things happen.”

Now that those other things had happened, he could not be whole, or even close to what he had been. Even when healthy, he felt age altering him, and wondered how to say this without sounding self-pitying. The comparisons with Kobe Bryant cheated him, he thought, but he knew that people always would compare him to young princes.

The softness of his voice made clear how unfair he regarded this. Not only wasn’t he the same, but his Bulls comrades were all gone. “I don’t look over and see Pippen or Rodman,” he said. “This is a different time.”

Because it was so different, no one in the scrum followed up with a question about Pippen, Rodman or the old Bulls. Reporters wanted to know about his knee before he flew to Milwaukee, where the team would play the next night. “Are you feeling okay?” somebody asked.

“Fine,” he said, his secret safe for another 12 hours.

 

When Jordan awakened the next morning, Wednesday, April 3, with his knee ballooning in a Milwaukee hotel room, his season ended. He phoned Collins and, in the athlete’s vernacular—talking about his body as if it were a thing apart from the rest of him—he told the coach that he was “gonna shut it down, let the thing heal.” He voiced his desire to play the following season, to take six or eight weeks off to rid the knee of its inflammation, then slowly rehab.

He didn’t tell Collins much more. He didn’t let him know when he would be flying out of Milwaukee, or where he would be headed. He didn’t gather his teammates to break the news personally. He simply packed.

Collins met him in the hotel lobby. Jordan said good-bye and walked out.

He had teammates but very few intimates. In the end, he told virtually no one what had happened, most of the Wizards not learning the news until they prepared to board a 5 p.m. bus headed for their game at Milwaukee’s Bradley Arena.

Only then did Lue, Nesby and the rest of the team hear from others that Jordan’s season was finished. By then he had left for the airport with aides, a flight to Washington ready, his future a mist. “I think Michael realizes he pushed the envelope by coming back too quickly,” declared a somber Collins.

Late that afternoon, Lue, shrugging forlornly, said he had known nothing. “I didn’t know it was that bad,” he murmured, asking for more information, as much in the dark as fans inside the Milwaukee arena, wondering aloud whether Jordan was already out of the city. Seldom was the divide between Jordan and others more evident.

Players kept asking, Where is he exactly? No one had answers. Trying to make sense of what had happened, few reporters even watched the game, in which Alexander scored 22 and the New Jacks fell short again. At halftime, Collins told somebody that the team looked discombobulated. Everybody is wondering where he is and what’s happened, Collins explained.

At the airport, Jordan got on a private plane with Tim Grover, two bodyguards and the rest of his small crew. No one spoke to him for most of the flight. He stared out a window. Soon, he reached that place where all aging athletes eventually land, a solitary place where uncertainty makes everything quiet. That is a small death, and some athletes make an easier peace with it than others. “I think Michael needs to be alone for a while,” Collins said.

 

With Jordan’s season finished, the Wizards’ playoff hopes succumbed, and something changed in Collins. His hazel eyes stopped flashing irritably at questions about Jordan’s health. He began searching for ways to explain why the comeback had imploded.

By the regular season’s final week, he confessed that his younger players’ struggles early in the year “probably seduced me” into playing Jordan too many minutes, admitting with regret that Jordan had controlled their relationship.

“Michael has such a dominant personality,” he said softly, “that he tells you he’s feeling good, and you want to believe it even when he’s not. There are games when I played him forty-one minutes when I probably should have played him thirty-five. But I kept saying to myself, ‘There’s no back-to-back. He doesn’t have to practice tomorrow.’ That [approach] took its toll, no question.”

And then came the most surprising disclosure, one that seemingly nullified everything Collins had been saying for six months. “That knee wasn’t right all season long,” he said. “He probably hurt it in the summer.”

He thought about the future, wondering what Jordan’s attitude about his playing time might be if he came back for another season. His minutes would have to be cut, Collins said. “And the thing about it is, if it means he gets mad at me, then I’m gonna have to do it anyway, because”—Collins paused for a split second, looked up in the air and said it—“he won’t do it on his own.”

He never had, he never could. His appetites prevented that. Collins knew it, too.

 

Three days later, Collins said he still didn’t know where Jordan was, that he hadn’t heard from him since Jordan walked out of that Milwaukee hotel lobby.

Four more days passed. Jordan flew into Washington for an event with highly regarded high school basketball players participating in an all-star game that Jordan and Nike sponsored at MCI—the Jordan Capital Classic. Each star received a pair of Jordan’s latest shoes, which came in a small, gray metallic Bond-like suitcase (it looked charmingly suitable for carrying toxic substances and a tasteful semiautomatic with silencer) and would soon be going on sale to the public for about $200.

Jordan congratulated a big kid named Amare Stoudemire, soon to be the first-round pick of the Phoenix Suns, wishing him luck and adding that he hoped he liked the shoes. Stoudemire’s pair had come in red and white. If Stoudemire and other young stars enjoyed the shoes and one day signed with Nike, Jordan’s clout with the shoe company would be enhanced whenever his retirement came. The trip was built around his promotional activities. While in town, he planned to talk with Collins and and watch some games.

He saw Collins that afternoon at MCI. A full week had passed since Jordan had left him in that hotel lobby. Jordan gave him about a half hour, and later that afternoon, Collins said he thought that Jordan would be watching the Wizards’ game that evening against Philadelphia, assuring reporters that Jordan “gets fired up about [Wizards] games…. He sits back and agonizes, trust me.”

Collins remained as loyal and feisty as ever, protecting Jordan against all questions that he regarded as unflattering, especially those raising the question of a double standard. Asked why a rehabbing but ambulatory Jordan did not sit on the team bench with other sidelined Wizards at MCI, per the team’s custom, Collins insisted that this could never happen, that, given the attention he attracted, Jordan couldn’t be expected to sit anywhere close to the public—“Michael can’t go to Starbucks.”

Collins likened the thought of Jordan sitting on the team bench to a scene, many years earlier, when Jordan, he said, exited a vehicle near the Chicago area, only to encounter about a hundred spectators who immediately descended upon the car, “stripping it down.”

Was he saying Jordan would be mobbed and stripped on the team bench?

“You just can’t do that,” Collins insisted.

That evening, after spending the first half with the Nike-shoe-wearing high school stars, Jordan took a seat on the Wizards bench for the remainder of the game. Jordan hadn’t forewarned Collins, who was left again to explain how he could know so little about what Jordan ever was planning to do. Jordan accorded him all the respect of an underling.

 

Jordan took a seat on the end of the bench, two seats down from Laettner, dapper as ever in a black suit and gold tie, wearing a credential around his neck, chewing gum, laughing, yelling at referee Leroy Richardson, thoroughly enjoying himself.

Fans did not strip him. The atmosphere was, if anything, laid-back. A seat remained open between Laettner and Jordan, and when Alexander came out of the game, he paused, not taking the seat, allowing Jahidi White to fill it. Jordan joked a little with White, covering his mouth with his gold tie to stifle a laugh, looking up at the action and exhorting Etan Thomas, who was pulling down 15 rebounds, scoring 14 points and having a superb game on a night when the Wizards easily beat the Sixers.

At a time-out, Jordan gently slapped Kwame Brown on the chest with his credential, as if to say, Wake up. At another time-out, he delivered an impromptu lecture on pump-faking to Hamilton, who, on his way to a game-high 21 points, listened expressionlessly.

He would not travel with them, but at least he cheered from that last seat on the bench during the final three games at home. On the second Sunday in April, attired in a gold-checkered sports jacket, mustard pants and mustard shirt (he was, in all things, from head to toes, a mustard lover, the precise shade being French’s mustard), he smiled, genially hassled refs and watched the Wizards lose to Indiana. At the end of the game, he shook a hand or two and started walking off, headed toward the tunnel leading to the hallway and locker room. Susan O’Malley stood in the tunnel, alongside a wall. As he got close to the tunnel, Jordan lowered his head and looked at the cement floor, bounding past the short woman, never acknowledging her. Nor she him.

 

In the last days of the season, to be on the road anywhere with the Jordan-less Wizards was to be reminded of what it must have been like, almost every night, with Abe Pollin’s unglamorous teams of the ’80s and ’90s. In Charlotte, there were 8,000 empty seats one evening—one of only three non-sellouts among the Wizards’ 41 road dates, all occurring with Jordan out—and anyone could have bought an upper-tier seat off a desperate scalper for five dollars. As a writer whose sole responsibility it was to write about one man, I found myself reduced for a few days to contemplating the phantasm in his absence—like writing about Howard Hughes while tracking his company’s trucks.

The Wizards lost a close game to a good Charlotte team that night, and Hamilton scored 22, all of which had a familiar ring. But, on a nice note, with the season winding toward the end and the New Jacks leading the way at home, they won two of their next three, beating Memphis and Philadelphia. Alexander had a big steal late against Memphis, and Hamilton played well enough through his bad groin to score a game-high of 21 against the Sixers, after which they flew up to Philadelphia for a game on the last Friday of the Wizards’ season.

They would be officially eliminated from the playoffs that evening. The players seemed accepting of the reality coming, with Nesby and others already making their workout plans for the off-season and looking forward to their summers, like kids getting out of school. “I’m going to blow out my hair on the last day,” he said to Lue of his cornrows. “Gonna blow my stuff out.” Nez seemed happy; they all seemed happy in the locker room in Philadelphia, Rip talking to a reporter and displaying the tattoo on his chest—FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME, which had a heart alongside it. Some guys were good-naturedly teasing Lue over the team photo, which he had missed, leaving the Wizards to superimpose his body and head on the picture.

“They brushed you in,” said somebody, who pulled out a copy of the photo.

“It’s messed up,” Lue said. It was. His body and head looked askew and scorched in the photo. Nesby was softly chuckling.

Lue moaned, “I look like a burn victim.”

Everybody laughed hard, Lue especially. They enjoyed hanging with one another, and seldom had the locker room ever seemed livelier than during that last week. But it would be over in just a few days, and then the worry would begin for some about their futures, especially those without contracts for the following season.

Just a couple of days earlier, Collins had told Nesby that “hopefully” he would be playing on the team the following season, that Nez had had “as big a turnaround as anyone on the team,” a remark the coach repeated to the media. Nez’s hopes soared. “I’m tryin’ to finish up the year strong,” he said. “And I’ll be keepin’ my body strong over the summer, workin’ out. All I’ll be doing in Vegas is workin’ out and restin’ at my home—workin’ out and restin’.”

Jordan had spoken to him briefly, just two nights before. “He said, ‘Keep your energy up,’” Nez recalled. “That’s the only time I’ve talked to him since he left Milwaukee…. He didn’t talk about the contract. I’m waitin’ till we finish up to start thinkin’ real hard about it.”

He had done everything right since Leonard Hamilton kicked him off that bench, a season earlier. He had worked hard for seven months and, as Collins said privately to coaches, played his ass off. Now Collins said publicly that he hoped to get Nez back. His words offered no clue about Jordan’s thoughts. But Collins’s support could only help.

“Gonna play every minute hard now, no matter if the games count for us or not,” Nez said. “What are you gonna do now, man?” He meant me.

I wasn’t sure I understood. “What do you mean?”

“You gonna do summer basketball games somewhere, man?”

“I don’t think so, Nez.”

And then I said something I’d sworn I’d never say to a player, because as a journalist concerned about preserving my objectivity, I’d tried to keep a subtle distance between myself and my subjects. But I told Nez I hoped he made it back. I meant it. You come to care about certain players, as you would about kids down your block. They are not übermen but merely young guys with huge dreams, upon whom the window usually shuts quickly. At 26, the odds were 50–50 at best for Nez, after which, no matter what happened, he probably had two-thirds of a life still to lead.

“See you next season, man,” he said, grinning.

The Wizards were mathematically laid to rest in the next couple of hours. Most questions afterward turned to the players’ futures. Somebody asked Hamilton about Jordan. “He said he’s thinkin’ he’s gonna come back,” Hamilton said hunching his shoulders in a neutral gesture meant to mean, Maybe.

He saw a friend across the locker room and waved. He was back home, a half-hour or so from his hometown of Coatesville. Many of his friends had come to the game, people whose faces alone reminded Hamilton of his success as a schoolboy player, of all the talk in those days about his vast potential. “I like being around home,” he said. He put on his platinum medallion chain with the block CV for Coatesville and waved to another friend, thinking of the New Jacks and their futures. “We know that Michael’s not gonna play for the next five, six years. We know that we’re the future of the team. So if Michael comes back, that’s great. But we don’t depend on him like everybody thinks we depend on him. In order for us to turn around this organization, it’s gonna be us.”

Just his tone now—direct and firm—said everything about the way he regarded himself in the Jordan orbit. He was finished being the star’s sidekick. Their relationship had become badly strained. Hamilton had stood up to Jordan, back in Washington, not in any shouting match but during some bantering in the locker room, the same turf that Jordan had taken back a few weeks earlier. Jordan had needled him once too often about defensive lapses, and, smiling, Hamilton had finally replied that his defense was getting better and that, besides, he was running just fine, that all the young guys were running now that they were allowed to run. Oh, yeah? Jordan said, sarcastically. Hamilton wasn’t backing down from him any longer. We’re scoring and we’re running now, Hamilton said. Each man seemed careful not to cross a line, a witness thought. But tension charged the space between them, and the digs and searing of egos went on for a considerable while.

What had being with Jordan meant to him? someone cheerfully asked now. Hamilton thought it over. “Michael taught, and that’s always good,” Hamilton said. People waited for elaboration. He left it at that.

In the aftermath of the season, Collins and other coaches told the Wizards brass that the team could not improve with its roster, triggering uncomfortable questions: How could they set out rebuilding a team around a man just three months shy of 40 at the beginning of the next NBA season, a player likely to be around for only another year? What would happen when his departure necessarily meant the team must retool? How much longer were the New Jacks willing to be the chorus for the Michael Show?

No one had answers to the questions, though some things were certain. Courtney Alexander was gone. He had never proven himself to be tough or versatile enough for Collins and Jordan. In a kiss of death delivered in the season’s final week, a sympathetic-sounding Collins praised Alexander’s recent games, before adding that Alexander’s play revealed he found it “tough” to match up against bigger guys playing the small-forward position.

Collins wanted someone capable of defending small forwards, a banger like Nesby but a player who could provide points, too. Jordan, he thought, had been forced to guard far too many small forwards during the season, rugged young players like Ron Artest who outweighed him, pounded him, wore him down. He wanted Jordan playing guard exclusively for the rest of his days. And he wanted him playing fewer minutes, perhaps not even starting any longer, just coming off the bench as a superb sixth man to lead the second team and be on the floor for stretch drives in the fourth quarter. But the plan depended on finding that new player. To acquire a real small forward—the Three spot, in basketball parlance—was an imperative. That person, the coaches concluded, certainly wasn’t Alexander, too small at 6′ 5″ and not a strong enough defender against formidable guards his own size. Within weeks, Alexander was jettisoned. He became the reclamation project of New Orleans, which, in exchange, gave the Wizards a late first-round draft pick.

While Alexander had disappointed, others had risen in Collins’s estimation. The young power forward Etan Thomas had shown great potential late in the season as a rebounder and shot blocker. Tyronn Lue had steadily improved as a backup point guard, especially in his outside shooting. He had hit 42 percent from behind the three-point line, a higher percentage than even the renowned three-point shooter Chris Whitney, whose starting job at point guard seemed in jeopardy, with the coaches wanting an upgrade at the position. Popeye Jones had proven himself one of the best rebounders in the league, landing in the top 10 of a most arcane but meaningful statistic—rebounds per minute. Collins loved Jones, wanting to re-sign him, if possible.

But above all else, he told his assistant coaches, they needed to add someone to play the Three. He had ideas on a possible Three, he said. If they landed a versatile performer who could play at the Three and at the shooting-guard position, perhaps someone like Detroit’s Jerry Stackhouse, and complemented him with a highly talented point guard, they would be a solid playoff contender, he predicted. During his Detroit days, while in his capacity as the Pistons’ coach and general manager in 1998, Collins actually had traded for Stackhouse, high on him as someone who could do everything—drive hard to the basket, shoot jumpers and play bruising defense when motivated. Stackhouse could change the dynamic of a team, thought Collins. He might be the difference.

The coach projected optimism, trying to sell everyone on the idea that the team had just concluded a good season. Plus-18, he kept saying, meaning that the Wizards had won 18 more games over their 19–63 mark of a season earlier. Even our record, 37–45, is misleading, he insisted, arguing it only told half the story. “Look at our injuries,” he told people. Jordan missed 22 games, Hamilton 19, Laettner 25 (most of those with his broken leg), Alexander 26 (Collins forgot to mention that he had benched Alexander in half of those)—and, at different times, Lue, Hubert Davis, Haywood and White had been out for significant stretches. Without the injuries, particularly Jordan’s, “we would have been a playoff team,” Collins declared, pointing out that their second-half tailspin came only when Jordan’s physical problems seized him, after which the team went 11–24.

But, in fact, the team had barely kept its head above water even with Jordan on the floor, winning only half of the 60 games he played, and going 27–26 in games he started before his surgery. The team always had needed a healthy Hamilton and his 20 points per game. With Hamilton and Jordan both playing well, the Wizards had thrived in stretches, especially as Hamilton modestly improved his defense. If, as Collins observed, they signed a star who could play the small-forward position a good portion of a game, they might see dramatic improvement.

That judgment had immediate implications for the roster.

Tyrone Nesby would not be offered a new contract. The more the Wizards executives looked at their current player-payroll numbers, and pondered the likely financial demands of a highly regarded free agent or two, the more their interest dimmed in Nesby. Collins had said many glowing things about Nesby, but coaches said glowing things about many players. Coaches’ sentiments could not be trusted. Coaches could not be trusted for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that coaches were seldom their clubs’ money men. Attitudes quickly changed when coaches saw the bean counters’ ledgers and had to make choices.

That quickly, Nesby went from an annual league salary of $3.2 million to zero.

No other NBA team would sign him to a regular season contract.

Tyrone Nesby’s window had closed at age 26.

 

That left only one major disposal job. Michael Jordan no longer believed he needed Richard Hamilton, who, in standing up to him, had become expendable. No one in the organization argued otherwise. All along, most of the coaches had been ambivalent about Hamilton. Some thought he might never build his body. “You still have to chain him to the weight room,” one official groaned.

There were issues of morale, too, tensions exacerbated by Hamilton’s impression that Jordan’s stature still meant that others had to fight sometimes just to show their skills and get recognition. Two club officials had not forgotten when a frustrated Hamilton, coming back from his groin injury, had gone to Collins and complained about not feeling like an integral part of the offense.

Collins answered: “Rip, you have a coach who’s gonna run every play for you and Michael…”

But every play for you and Michael never freed Hamilton from worry. The officials were convinced that Hamilton could no longer abide playing in Jordan’s shadow, that the bad feelings between the two men could only get worse. Hamilton became trade bait. Jordan suggested acquiring the same player that Collins had in mind. In early September, in a six-player deal with Detroit, the Wizards dealt Hamilton away for Jerry Stackhouse.

Jordan had no comment about the deal, declining to talk about anything that summer, not having made up his mind about whether to play again. “What are his options?” said one Wizards official. “What else is he going to do? Go back to that office?”

It was the right set of questions.