The pauses between the notes—ah, that is where the art resides!
—ARTUR SCHNABEL
When I started working for the Bulls, nobody was more excited than my son, Ben. He worshipped Michael Jordan. He had a huge Jordan poster in his room, read anything he could find about him and talked about him endlessly at the dinner table. Ben’s dream was to meet his hero in the flesh.
I mentioned this to Michael my first day on the job, and he made himself available to meet Ben, who was nine at the time. They met at a practice and when the excitement wore off, Ben became confused. “What do I have left?” he said. “I’ve already achieved my life’s goal.”
Ben wasn’t the only person who felt that way about Michael. Jordan was a global phenomenon, and even his teammates were caught up in the mystique. He hated being told that he wasn’t as good as Magic Johnson or Larry Bird because he hadn’t won a championship yet. His drive to succeed put enormous pressure on the organization; the players felt guilty most of the time because they weren’t living up to Michael’s expectations.
This created an interesting challenge for me when I became head coach. Like everyone else, I marveled at what Jordan could do with a basketball. He was Michelangelo in baggy shorts. But I knew his celebrity status isolated him from his teammates and made it harder for him to become the inspiring team leader the Bulls needed to succeed. Red Holzman once told me that the true measure of a star was his ability to make the people around him look good. Jordan still needed to learn that lesson.
At first Michael and I took a wait-and-see attitude toward each other. I didn’t want to become too familiar with him, as other coaches had been, because I knew it would make it harder for me to win his respect. It wasn’t until we won our first championship, and he could see that the changes I had implemented actually worked, that our relationship opened up and we developed a strong partnership. Michael told me that my approach to the game reminded him of his mentor, University of North Carolina coach Dean Smith, which may have something to do with why we work so well together.
From the start I told Michael that I was going to treat him like everyone else in practice; if he made a mistake, he was going to hear about it. He took it well. Being treated like one of the guys helped Michael feel more connected to the group, and vice versa. If he wanted to, he could easily set himself apart, but he isn’t built that way. The practice floor is one of the few places where he can be himself, and not Michael Jordan, Superstar. “I live a whole different lifestyle than the rest of the team, and that creates separation,” he says. “My job is to tie myself back to them. And to do that I have to hang with them and maintain that closeness—get to know what they like to do, tell them about what I like to do. I don’t want them to feel, ‘Well, he’s too great. I can’t be anywhere near him. I can’t touch him.’”
Unfortunately, there wasn’t time for Michael do that in 1995. The craziness surrounding his return gave him and his teammates little chance to interact informally with each other. Most of the players only got to see him on the basketball court. The rest of the time he was sequestered at home or in his hotel room. This feeling of isolation was exacerbated by the fact that the makeup of the team had completely changed since his departure. Scottie Pippen, B. J. Armstrong, and Will Perdue were the only players who had worked with Michael before. He had nothing more than a passing acquaintance with the rest of the team. As a result, he seemed to them like a distant figure, mysterious and larger than life.
The first time we practiced meditation, Michael thought I was joking. Midway through the session, he cocked one eye open and took a glance around the room to see if any of his teammates were actually doing it. To his surprise, many of them were.
Michael has always maintained that he didn’t need any of “that Zen stuff” because he already had a positive outlook on life. Who am I to argue? In the process of becoming a great athlete, Michael had attained a quality of mind few Zen students ever achieve. His ability to stay relaxed and intensely focused in the midst of chaos is unsurpassed. He loves being in the center of a storm. While everyone else is spinning madly out of control, he moves effortlessly across the floor, enveloped by a great stillness.
Jordan doesn’t practice visualization regularly, but he often calls up images of past successes in his mind during high-pressure situations. More often than not, he’ll replay the last-second shot he took to win the 1982 NCAA championship as a freshman at North Carolina. Rather than cloud his mind with negative thoughts, he says to himself, “Okay, I’ve been here before,” then tries to relax enough to let something positive emerge. Jordan doesn’t believe in trying to visualize the shot in specific detail. “I know what I want the outcome to be,” he says, “but I don’t try to see myself doing it beforehand. In 1982, I knew I wanted to make that shot. I didn’t know where I was going to shoot it or what kind of shot I was going to take. I just believed I could do it, and I did.”
Jordan’s thought process in the last seconds of Game 6 in the 1993 NBA finals is typical. We were behind by 6 points, and the crowd in Phoenix was going berserk. If we lost, it meant we would have to play the seventh game in the Suns’ arena—not a happy prospect. When I called a timeout to set up a play, the other players were tense and unfocused, but Michael was remarkably composed. “I could hear all the noise,” he recalls, “but I was thinking, ‘No matter what happens, this is only Game Six. We’ve still got Game Seven.’ I didn’t get caught up in the surrounding rigmarole. I focused on, ‘Okay, we’ve still got a chance to win this game. All we’ve got to do is get some kind of roll going, and I’m the one to do that.’ My focus was right there at that particular moment. But even then I was thinking that Game Seven was a possibility. So I had a cushion.” Jordan emerged from the huddle and ignited the surge with a driving layup and a critical rebound that helped us to win the game—and the championship.
In my mind, Michael is the epitome of the peaceful warrior. Day in and day out, he has endured more punishment than any other player in the league, but he rarely shows any sign of anger. Once he was upended by Detroit’s front line on his way to the basket and brutally slammed to the floor. It was a malicious hit that could have caused serious damage, and I expected Michael to be fuming. But he wasn’t. During the timeout that followed, I asked him if he was feeling frustrated. “No,” he replied with a shrug, “I know they’re going to do that when I’m in there.”
Michael’s competitive drive is legendary. His typical modus operandi is to study the opposition carefully and figure out its weakest point, then go after it like a one-man demolition crew until the team crumbles. In his early years, Michael had so much energy he would try to win games singlehandedly, but often burned out by the fourth quarter. When I took over the team, I encouraged him to conserve his energy so he would be fresh when we really needed him. But getting Michael to hold back was nearly impossible. In 1991–92, he had to be carried off the court after injuring his back. He could barely walk the next day, but he refused to watch from the sidelines. He played three games in a row that way. He was in so much pain that the trainer had to help him walk from the dressing room to the court. But as soon as he hit the floor, he was transformed into another person: Air Jordan.
Michael rarely gets depressed. During the 1989 playoffs, he blew a foul shot that would have clinched the Cleveland series. Devastated by his uncharacteristic lapse, he spent the rest of the evening, according to a friend, staring blankly at his TV set. Everybody was still morose the next day when we boarded the bus for the airport, and the trip to Cleveland for the final game. At the last minute Jordan bounded on board, glowing with confidence. “Have no fear,” he announced as he walked down the aisle. “We’re going to win this game.” The mood lifted instantly. It wasn’t so much what he said but how he carried himself that made the difference. The next day he fulfilled his promise by sinking a come-from-behind shot at the buzzer to put us ahead, 101–100. Since then, that jumper has been known in Chicago simply as The Shot.
It took a long time for Michael to realize he couldn’t do it all by himself. Slowly, however, as the team began to master the nuances of the system, he learned that he could trust his teammates to come through in the clutch. The turning point was a game against the Utah Jazz in 1989. Utah’s John Stockton was switching off to double-team Jordan, leaving John Paxson wide open. So Michael started feeding Paxson and John scored 27 points. Michael realized that night that he wasn’t the only money player on the team. It was the beginning of his transformation from a gifted solo artist into a selfless team player.
As our relationship grew, I began consulting with Michael more regularly to get an inside perspective on what was happening with the team. He, in turn, started to assume a broader leadership role.
Michael isn’t a cheerleader. He prefers to lead with action rather than words. As he puts it, “I’d rather see it done than hear it done.” But every now and then he gives the team an inspiring pep talk. As we prepared for the 1993 finals, some of the players were worried about our chances against the Suns, who had the homecourt advantage and had beaten us in Chicago during the regular season. On the flight to Phoenix for the first two games, Jordan roamed around the team jet puffing on a cigar and saying, “We’ve got to go there and show them what it’s like to play championship basketball.” The message must have gotten through. We swept the first two games.
As a rule, Michael doesn’t get involved with personnel problems, primarily because he thinks it might jeopardize his role as a leader on the floor. He doesn’t want to appear too closely aligned with the coaching staff. Sometimes he needs to exploit the tension between the coaches and the players to maintain control on court.
One player he did take an active interest in was Scott Williams. When Scott was a rookie, he felt unappreciated because he wasn’t getting paid much and I frequently criticized his performance. Once toward the end of the season, I took him out of a game after a few minutes because he didn’t seem focused, and he started grumbling on the bench. I asked him what his problem was, and he said he needed five more rebounds to reach the bonus in his contract. (As a rule, I’m not interested in knowing that kind of information because I don’t want it to influence my coaching decisions.) “Don’t worry, I’ll get you in in the second half,” I replied. “Just don’t let your mood affect the team right now.” Scott went in later and made his bonus.
Jordan took Scott under his wing and showed him how to be a pro. Sometimes he would use me as a foil in his attempts to bolster Scott’s ego. He’d tell Scott: “Once you’re on the basketball court, don’t think about Phil. Think about your team. Think about your responsibility. Phil can’t play. You’ve got to play, and we’ve got to help you play.” Michael wasn’t always diplomatic. When Scott tried to overreach, Michael would get in his face and curse. “You’re not out here to shoot,” he’d start screaming. “Get back to the basics. Play defense, rebound the ball, and, when you get your opportunity to score, then you can shoot. But don’t come out here and try to live up to what your friends back home feel you should be doing. Because it’s not going to help us win this game.” Thanks in large part to Michael’s tutelage, Scott settled down and matured as an athlete and a team player.
An important aspect of Jordan’s leadership is his handling of the media. He has never really liked working with the press, but he’s skilled at dealing with reporters and takes his responsibility seriously. He started to get disenchanted with the media during the 1993 playoffs when reports surfaced that he had bet huge sums of money on golf. The stories forced the NBA to launch an investigation, which it later dropped.
Jordan was stunned at the lengths the media went to probe into his personal life. Those feelings came up again that year when his father was murdered in South Carolina. “The only insecurity I have is with the media,” he says. “Because a misinterpretation by the media is never corrected. They’ll misinterpret a quote and say, ‘I’m sorry.’ But what about the people who read it? That’s the power of the media today. It builds you up to the point where you’re afraid to make a mistake. You’re afraid to do the easiest things that could be misconstrued as negative—like going to a casino, which is very normal, very harmless, or losing money in one-on-one betting.”
In the early days, Michael had a hard time saying no to reporters. The world at large expected him to be Joe All-American, and he was reluctant to disabuse anyone of that notion, even though he knew it was a fiction. The Jordan Rules, which came out in 1991, presented an equally distorted portrait of Michael as a sarcastic, mean-spirited egoist who spent most of his time poking fun at his teammates and Jerry Krause. Michael was furious when it appeared, but in a strange way, it had a liberating effect on him. He realized that he didn’t have to be Mr. Perfect all the time, and that freed him to find out who he really was.
Now Michael has a more detached view of the press. “The media helps you become famous,” he says, “but after you reach a certain level, they break you down bit by bit. It’s a contradiction. If you want me to be a role model, why are you looking for negative things in my life to attack? My real job comes as soon as I step off the court and have to deal with the expectations and contradictions that come with being in the spotlight.”
Michael always said that when basketball stopped being fun, he was going to walk away. During the 1992–93 season, I could see the toll the long season was taking on him. He’d always been able to bounce back quickly, but every now and then I detected an unusual bout of despondency. He’d been dropping hints all season that he might retire early, and that summer when I heard the news on the radio that his father had been murdered, my first thought was that he wouldn’t be coming back for the next season.
When we finally met to talk about his decision to leave the sport in late September, Michael had thought it through from every angle. I tried to appeal to his spiritual side. I told him that God had given him a talent that made people happy, and I didn’t think it was right for him to walk away. He talked about impermanence. “For some reason,” he said, “God is telling me to move on, and I must move on. People have to learn that nothing lasts forever.”
Then he posed an unsolvable riddle. “Can you think of any way I can just play in the playoffs?” he asked. I suggested making him a parttime player during the regular season as we had done with Cartwright the year before. He shook his head. “I’m not going to come back and play thirteen games and get criticized by the press for being a prima donna. That would be too much of a headache.” I told him I couldn’t think of anything else. “That answers my question,” he said. “Until we can come up with a solution for that one, I must retire.” (Little did I know how prophetic that conversation would be.)
Everyone expected me to be shattered by the news, but I felt surprisingly calm. My wife thought I was in a state of denial. “How do you feel, Phil?” she asked. “Are you mad at M.J.? Are you sad?” Though I wasn’t happy about the news, I wasn’t in a state of shock, either. Ever since his father’s death, I had a strong intuition that he would be leaving the team.
What made the transition easier for me was the meeting we had with Michael in the Berto Center just before he made his official announcement to the press. I was impressed by the players’ depth of feeling for Michael. We went around the room, and each one of the players made a heartfelt statement. Scottie Pippen thanked him for showing him the way, and John Paxson acknowledged how grateful he was to have played by his side. B. J. Armstrong, Jordan’s closest friend on the team, said he was worried for him because now he would have “the two scariest things in life: a lot of money and a lot of free time.” The person who surprised Michael the most was Toni Kukoc, who was so upset by Jordan’s departure, he broke into tears.
Afterwards, the players followed Michael down to the press conference and stood by the podium while he announced his retirement. “That was true respect,” Jordan recalls, deeply moved. “They didn’t have to be there. They didn’t have to show tears. You can’t make those things up. I think it sealed the relationship between us.”
About a month later, just before the season was about to start, I got a call from Michael asking if he could come down to the training center and work out with the team. He said he just wanted to check it out one more time.
It was an interesting moment. I thought he’d spend the time doing what he often did: wowing us with his one-on-one moves. But instead, he played it straight, performing all the drills by the book. Then he walked off the court and was gone.
Later I learned that he was meeting with Jerry Reinsdorf that day to sign his letter of intent to retire. Before he did that, he needed to know if he could really leave the game behind. The answer that day was yes.