The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
—PAUL VALERY
The team room at the Sheri L. Berto Center is the perfect setting for an epiphany. It’s the inner sanctum of the Chicago Bulls—a sacred space adorned with Native American totems and other symbolic objects I’ve collected over the years. On one wall hangs a wooden arrow with a tobacco pouch tied to it—the Lakota Sioux symbol of prayer—and on another a bear claw necklace, which, I’m told, conveys power and wisdom upon its beholder. The room also contains the middle feather of an owl (for balance and harmony); a painting that tells the story of the great mystical warrior, Crazy Horse; and photos of a white buffalo calf born in Wisconsin. To the Sioux, the white buffalo is the most sacred of animals, a symbol of prosperity and good fortune.
I had the room decorated this way to reinforce in the players’ minds that our journey together each year, from the start of training camp to the last whistle in the playoffs, is a sacred quest. This is our holy sanctuary, the place where the players and the coaches come together and prepare our hearts and minds for battle, hidden from the probing eyes of the media and the harsh realities of the outside world. This is the room where the spirit of the team takes form.
Early in the morning on March 7, 1995, I held an informal meeting in the team room with assistant coaches Tex Winter and Jimmy Rodgers to review some game tapes and discuss what to do with the team. Even though Scottie Pippen was having an MVP-caliber season and Toni Kukoc had begun to flower, the team had developed a disturbing tendency to build up huge double-digit leads in the first half, only to fall apart in the closing minutes of the game. Part of the problem was that we had lost two important big men in the off-season: Horace Grant, an All-Star power forward who had signed on as a free agent with the Orlando Magic, and Scott Williams, who had jumped to the Philadelphia 76ers. As a stopgap measure, we were playing Kukoc at power forward, but though he gave it a gallant try, he wasn’t strong or aggressive enough to fend off bruisers like Charles Barkley and Karl Malone.
During the All-Star break in February, I had met with owner Jerry Reinsdorf in Phoenix to discuss the future of the team. In the year and a half since we had won our last NBA title, we had lost all but three of the regulars on our championship teams, including Bill Cartwright, now with the Seattle Supersonics; John Paxson, the Bulls’ newest radio announcer, and Michael Jordan, who had retired in 1993 and was playing for Reinsdorf’s other organization, the Chicago White Sox. Reinsdorf was convinced that unless the Bulls had a strong infusion of new talent, we would probably languish around the .500 mark for years. He was considering trading some veterans—notably Pippen—for young stars in order to rebuild the franchise. He asked me if I would be willing to stick with the team through what could be a long, sometimes frustrating process of renewal. I told him I would.
Secretly I hoped that we could find another solution. I was dubious that we could ever get fair value for Pippen, easily the best all-around player in the league, and I was relieved when the trading deadline passed in late February and Scottie was still on the team. What the Bulls needed wasn’t something a quick trade could provide; the team needed that unshakable desire to win that Cartwright, Paxson, and, most of all, Jordan had in their bones. How could you trade for that? As I mulled these problems over in the team room with Tex and Jimmy, I tried to put an optimistic spin on the situation. But deep inside, I sensed that the players had already surrendered. They had grown comfortable with the idea of being a .500 team.
Then Michael Jordan walked in the door.
Dressed in a dark warmup suit, he glided into the room and took a seat in the back as if he had never left.
A couple of days earlier he had walked out of the White Sox spring training camp in Sarasota, Florida, and returned to Chicago, to avoid becoming a pawn in the baseball strike. Michael was adamant about not crossing the picket line, so he packed his bags rather than play in the exhibition season, which was starting that week.
“What’s going on?” I asked him. “Are you ready to suit up?”
He smiled and said, “It looks like baseball isn’t going to happen for me.”
“Well,” I replied, “I think we’ve got a uniform around here that might fit you.”
Michael and I had joked before about a possible comeback, but this time I could tell it wasn’t just banter. In September, before the team officially retired his number in a made-for-TV ceremony at our new arena, the United Center, I told him I thought he was jumping the gun. There was no reason why a superbly conditioned athlete like Michael, who was then only thirty-one, couldn’t return to the game and play into his late thirties. He said he was participating in the ceremony as a favor to Jerry Reinsdorf and to raise money for a youth center on the west side of Chicago named in honor of his father, James Jordan, who had been brutally murdered the year before.
“What if the strike doesn’t get settled?” I had asked him that day. “What if your whole year gets blown out of the water?”
“That’s a possibility,” he’d replied. “But I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
“Well, if it does happen, you could come back here and play basketball. All you’d need is twenty-five games or so to get ready for the playoffs. We could use you down the stretch.”
“Twenty-five—that’s too many.”
“Okay, maybe twenty.”
I knew then that he would consider coming back if Major League Baseball couldn’t get its act together by spring training. Which it didn’t—and that’s why he had returned to the Berto Center. When we were alone, Michael asked if he could come to practice the next day and work out with the team to see how it felt to have a basketball in his hands again.
Knowing Michael, a little sweat and intense competition was all he needed to make up his mind.
None of us could have predicted what was going to happen next. The effect on the team, from the very first practice, was electric. The players—most of whom had never played with Michael before—were thrilled about the prospect of his return, and the level of competition at practice rose instantly. Even though he wasn’t in game shape, Michael challenged everybody to step up. Scottie Pippen and B. J. Armstrong, who had felt burdened by the team’s inconsistent performance, suddenly came alive, and Toni Kukoc was almost giddy with excitement. Even Pete Myers, the player who stood to lose his spot in the starting lineup, was excited.
What Michael brought to the team was not only his extraordinary talent, but a deep understanding of the system of basketball we played. He was versatile enough to play all five positions on the floor, and could show by example how the system worked at its most sophisticated level. This was extremely valuable for the newcomers to the team. Before practice, I often found Michael working out, one-on-one, with young players like Corie Blount and Dickey Simpkins. It reminded me of the days when a younger Pippen and Jordan would work on dunking left-handed or making a 180° spin move from the corner.
Over the next two weeks, while Michael was deciding what to do with his life, the team transformed before our eyes, invigorated by Jordan’s presence on the practice floor. We won the next four out of five games, including a dramatic victory over Cleveland, one of the most physically intimidating teams in the league, and a last-minute come-from-behind win over Milwaukee. The Indiana Pacers’ coach Larry Brown predicted that with Jordan in the lineup the Bulls would be the favorites to win the NBA championship. I didn’t think that was a realistic assessment of the situation, but maybe I was wrong. Perhaps Michael could perform a miracle.
The whole world seemed to be swept up in the myth of Michael Jordan, superhero. As he started working out with the team, the word spread, and on his second day of practice, an army of reporters, photographers, and TV crews from all over the globe began to swell outside the Berto Center. One morning I saw a swarm of media descend on Scottie Pippen’s car as he entered the parking lot, hoping that he might open his window and throw them a few crumbs of information. At the front of the line was sportscaster Dick Schaap, and I realized this must be a pretty big story.
I tried to protect Michael as much as I could. I’d let him leave the floor early so that when the reporters came rushing on court after practice, he’d already be gone. Early on I asked him how long it was going to take him to make his decision, and he said about a week and a half. So I told the reporters that they should go home and come back in a week or so when we had something to tell them. What a mistake! After that they attacked the story as if it were the O. J. Simpson trial.
What interested me was the religious overtone to the proceedings. Perhaps it was the fact that the nation had spent the last year caught up in the O.J. case, suffering the disillusionment of watching a one-time beloved sports great being tried for the murder of his ex-wife and her friend. Perhaps it was just a reflection of the spiritual malaise in the culture and the deep yearning for a mythic hero who could set us free. Whatever the reason, during his hiatus from the team, Michael had somehow been transformed in the public mind from a great athlete to a sports deity.
The Associated Press reported that, in a survey of African-American children, Jordan had tied with God as the person they most admired after their parents. A radio station in Chicago asked listeners if Jordan should be named king of the world, and 41 percent of the respondents said yes. And fans were spotted kneeling and praying at the foot of Jordan’s statue in front of the United Center. To poke fun at the media’s adoration of Jordan, Tim Hallam, the Bulls’ wry director of media services, started referring to him and his entourage as Jesus and the Apostles. “Jesus goes to the bathroom,” Hallam would announce in a mock broadcaster’s baritone. “Details at eleven.”
Michael found the whole thing a little embarrassing. I’ve always been impressed by his ability to remain humble and down to earth despite all the attention he receives. But the hysteria surrounding his comeback created a division between Michael and his teammates that ultimately had an adverse effect on the team. The new players, which included everyone except Armstrong, Pippen, and Will Perdue, never got to know Michael intimately, nor he them—and that eventually undermined the team’s performance on court. Basketball is a sport that involves the subtle interweaving of players at full speed to the point where they are thinking and moving as one. To do that successfully, they need to trust each other on a deep level and know instinctively how their teammates will respond in pressure situations. A great player can only do so much on his own—no matter how breathtaking his one-on-one moves. If he is out of sync psychologically with everyone else, the team will never achieve the harmony needed to win a championship.
There’s a passage from Rudyard Kipling’s Second Jungle Book that I often read during the playoffs to remind the team of this basic principle:
Now this is the Law of the Jungle—
as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper,
but the Wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk,
the Law runneth forward and back—
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf
and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
Before Michael arrived, the Bulls were beginning to gel as a team. The main thing we needed, I thought, was to strengthen our resilience in the fourth quarter—and that’s what Jordan was famous for. What I didn’t anticipate was the impact Jordan’s presence would have on the psyche of the team. I was so busy focusing on protecting Michael’s privacy, I lost sight of how isolated he was from his teammates and what that was doing to the other players.
Kukoc was simply awestruck. A talented forward from Croatia whom Jerry Krause considers the best pure passer since Magic Johnson, Toni was devastated in 1993 when Jordan announced his retirement, only a few days after Kukoc had joined the team. Now he was finally getting a chance to play with Jordan, and he was so intimidated he refused to go one-on-one against him in practice. Even when we’d run a special play for Toni that called for him to drive to the basket, he’d pull up and take a short jumper instead.
Once Michael officially joined the team and started playing in games, the situation didn’t improve. Some of the players were so bedazzled by his moves they’d unconsciously step back and wait to see what he was going to do next. And Michael was so absorbed in his struggle to prove to himself that he still had the touch, he often made uncharacteristic misjudgments. To make matters worse, his teammates were reluctant to make demands on him. In one game, Michael missed Steve Kerr, who was wide open in the corner, and drove to the hoop, only to get clobbered by three defenders. Kerr was the best three-point shooter in the league last year. When Michael went to the free throw line, I asked Steve to inform Michael that he was open, and Steve looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. There was no way he was going to tell the great Michael Jordan how to play the game.
That wasn’t surprising. After all, Michael only practiced with the team four times before his first game on March 19, and once he was back in action, his teammates had to compete with the rest of the world for his attention. Everywhere he went, he was surrounded by a squadron of bodyguards and “a personal entourage,” who formed a cocoon around him that was difficult to penetrate. In the past Michael sometimes invited friends along on road trips to keep him company and fend off intrusive fans. But now he had the retinue of a small potentate, and when he entered a room, a sea of onlookers gathered around. After a game in Orlando, Toni Kukoc found himself trailing behind the Jordan caravan as it headed from the stadium to the parking lot. Reporters were buzzing around Michael, not even noticing that Toni was there. Parodying Jordan, Kukoc announced to the air, “I’m not giving any interviews.”
The first game—at Market Square Arena in Indianapolis—was a three-ring circus, which was broadcast worldwide and attracted the largest TV audience of any regular season NBA game in history. Larry Brown captured the mood perfectly, declaring, “The Beatles and Elvis are back.” There were so many cameramen on the floor during warmups, vying for position near Michael, the only thing the other players could do was get out of the way. At one point, observing a TV crew taking footage of Michael’s famed Nikes, Corie Blount said, “Now they’re interviewing his shoes.”
To shake things up, I considered starting Pete Myers at shooting guard instead of Michael, and, in retrospect, I probably should have. Michael’s shooting rhythm was off that day: he went 7 for 28 from the field and scored only 19 points in a 103–96 overtime loss. But it wasn’t long before he found his stroke. The next weekend he hit a 16-foot jumper to beat Atlanta at the buzzer, then three days later scored 55 points—the highest total in a game to that point in the season—to lead the Bulls past the Knicks at Madison Square Garden. There could be no doubt in anyone’s mind that the “real” Michael Jordan was back.
But there were glitches that bothered me. Many of the players seemed listless and confused when Michael was on the floor. This reminded me of the way the team played when I first joined the Bulls as an assistant coach in 1987. That year Michael had an unprecedented season, winning every honor imaginable, including Most Valuable Player, All-NBA first team, Defensive Player of the Year, All-Star Game MVP, and even Slam Dunk champion, but the members of his “supporting cast,” as he called it, were so enthralled by what he could do with a basketball that they never learned to work with him successfully.
After the Knicks game, Michael asked to see me in my office.
“I’ve decided to quit,” he said straightfaced. “What else can I do?”
I made a face.
“No, I’m just kidding,” he said, breaking into a smile. But you’ve got to tell the players they can’t expect me to do what I did in New York every night. In our next game I want them to get up and going—to play as a team.”
I flashed back to 1989 when I took over as head coach and had talked to Michael about how I wanted him to share the spotlight with his teammates so the team could grow and flourish. In those days he was a gifted young athlete with enormous confidence in his own abilities who had to be cajoled into making sacrifices for the team. Now he was an older, wiser player who understood that it wasn’t brilliant individual performances that made great teams, but the energy that’s unleashed when players put their egos aside and work toward a common goal.
Good teams become great ones when the members trust each other enough to surrender the “me” for the “we.” This is the lesson Michael and his teammates learned en route to winning three consecutive NBA championships. As Bill Cartwright puts it: “A great basketball team will have trust. I’ve seen teams in this league where the players won’t pass to a guy because they don’t think he is going to catch the ball. But a great basketball team will throw the ball to everyone. If a guy drops it or bobbles it out of bounds, the next time they’ll throw it to him again. And because of their confidence in him, he will have confidence. That’s how you grow.”
When I was starting out, I, too—like the young, brash Jordan—thought I could conquer the world with the force of my ego, even though my jump shot needed some work. Back then I would have scoffed at anyone who suggested that selflessness and compassion were the secrets to success. Those were qualities that counted in church, not muscling under the boards with Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. But after searching long and hard for meaning everywhere else, I discovered that the game itself operated according to laws far more profound than anything that might be found in a coach’s playbook. Inside the lines of the court, the mystery of life gets played out night after night.
The first glimpse I had of this came, surprisingly, not on a basketball court, but on a pitcher’s mound in Williston, North Dakota.