The Jordan Rules (24 page)

Take the time Jordan picked up the flu in December. He called in to say he was sick and wouldn't be at practice. Jackson sent trainer Chip Schaefer to Jordan's house to bring him medication.

A week later, John Paxson called in to say he was sick with the flu. He had been vomiting all night. Jackson told him to come to practice and then they'd make an assessment. There was a rule that if you were sick, the trainer had to see you. Paxson was sent right home. The trainer was not asked to go to his house.

It was nothing new on the Bulls, this separate set of rules for Jordan and the other players. Why then, some would ask,
wouldn't
Jordan think he had special rights to go solo instead of joining the ensemble in the game? If it was a mosaic of the air he wanted to create, what signal was there that he shouldn't? If Jordan was given the impression by management that he was special off the court, why should he think things were any different on the court?

The stories, meanwhile, were legion, and the dilemma remained. Jordan was the best. He did so much more for the team. Didn't he deserve special treatment? Don't all superstars in all sports get special treatment?

Jordan was always the last player on the team bus. He didn't like to sit there and wait for others while fans crowded around the bus. The bus always waited. One time he climbed on, but then-Bull Rory Sparrow was stuck in the lobby. As Sparrow got to the front door of the hotel, the bus pulled away. When Jordan suffered a groin pull in the 1988–89 season and had to miss a game, the team set him up at home with a machine for treatment; other players are usually asked to accompany the team if they want to get treatment when they are hurt.

Perhaps the most famous incident involving Jordan's rules occurred during the 1988–89 season. The Bulls were in Charlotte just before Christmas. Coach Doug Collins had said there probably wouldn't be practice the next day, Christmas Eve. But when the Bulls lost to the lowly Hornets, Collins wrote on the blackboard after the game: “Practice at the Multiplex 11
A
.
M
.”

“No way,” Jordan said.

The next morning, the players sat wearily on the team bus waiting for the trip to the airport and a commercial flight home in holiday chaos. No Jordan. Collins was frantic. He sent then-trainer Mark Pfeil to knock on Jordan's door, Jordan wouldn't answer the telephone. Jordan told Pfeil he wasn't going back to Chicago for practice just because Collins was angry, because he would then have to travel all the way back to North Carolina for Christmas as he'd planned. Pfeil could tell Collins that.

Pfeil did and Collins sent him back. He was horrified. Tell Jordan, Collins instructed, that if he'd just come to the airport, Collins would cancel practice.

“I'll be there for five minutes,” Jordan said. “That's all.”

The bus left, and shortly after the players arrived at the gate Jordan showed up and Collins gathered the team. It was Christmas Eve, Collins said with anxious eyes, so as a reward he was calling off practice.

Jordan turned and started walking away. Paxson noticed he was not wearing socks. No socks? Going to Chicago in December? The players knew immediately why practice had been canceled.

Collins never did figure out how to deal with Jordan. During that 1989–90 season, Jordan's friends rode the team bus and the team made reservations for them on the road in the team hotel. Other players were told they couldn't even have friends or family with them on the road, let alone have the team handle the accommodations. Jackson stopped much of that when he became coach after the 1988–89 season. But when the players showed up in Atlanta and were handed rooming lists, they saw that Shiver was back with the team, as was Tim Grover.

Grover is Jordan's personal weight trainer. Again, the separation, the Jordan Rules; the other eleven Bulls work out with strength coaches Al Vermeil and Erik Helland. Helland even goes on long road trips with the team to help keep players on their weight-lifting and workout routines and to find a gym. Jordan and Grover always find a different one.

Jordan started working out on his own during the 1989–90 season. He purchased a weight set for the basement of his home and eventually hooked up with Grover through the team doctor. Jordan had never worked out and always joked that his pre-training-camp routine involved walking on the golf course. He had long been a junkfood addict who probably took in more grease a year than a squeaky joint, although in recent years he'd stopped eating fast foods. Jordan is just a natural, says the Bulls' team doctor, John Hefferon, and that allowed him to ignore most of the prescribed regimens for athletes.

But Jordan was finding himself getting worn down in the latter stages of the playoffs, and he wanted to work more on a post-up move, so he decided he'd need to get stronger to battle for position. He started lifting weights and got his weight over 210 during the 1990–91 season.

Why not with the team strength coach?

The official reason was that Jordan would draw crowds that were too large at the team's practice facility.

The real reason? No one was quite sure, but there was considerable speculation that it had to do with the competitive fires that raged within Jordan.

Teams take on their own personality in the locker room. Some are serious, others are into hotfoots and juvenile antics. The Bulls, taking their cue from Jordan, like to harass one another verbally. Often, the abuse can get ugly and personal. Jordan derided Grant regularly during his contract negotiations about how lousy his contract was and how he would be willing to buy a pencil from him to support his family. When rumors spread that Pippen was in line for a contract that might equal or surpass Jordan's, Grant told Jordan that Pippen would now have to take all the shots and that they'd be glad to help Jordan out with a loan if he needed one. Perhaps for a hair weave?

So the concern was that weight lifting would become a competition and Jordan would lose. Grant, according to Vermeil, already was bench-pressing the weight a football defensive lineman can lift. And even Will Perdue, whom Jordan didn't respect, had been lifting weights for so long that Vermeil felt it would take Jordan a few years to reach the levels Perdue had now attained.

“Wouldn't the team just love it if he got a hernia trying to lift more than me?” said Perdue. “They'd probably blame me.”

So the team's own Jordan rules sent a definite message: Michael Jordan
is
different from the rest of the team. But not so different that, as the team moved on to Miami on Saturday, Jordan would be permitted to bring his entourage on the team charter. Shiver and Grover would have to meet him in Miami.

Practice went badly on Sunday. Jackson blew up at Armstrong several times as the young guard showed little enthusiasm and played out of control. Jackson was now desperately urging Krause daily to make a deal with Dallas. He wanted point guard Derek Harper. He was telling Krause to trade King and Armstrong and Hopson, too, if possible, and Krause had offered Paxson to Milwaukee, hoping to get a first-round draft pick to deal to Dallas in a package for Harper.

But it was a dilemma for Krause. He was calling around, but the value of King, Armstrong, and Hopson had plummeted. “I can't trade anybody if you don't play them,” Krause told Jackson. “You want them traded. Play them.”

Meanwhile, Armstrong was feeling he had become a target of Jackson's through no fault of his own. Sometimes he was right. For example, Jordan likes to try to sneak in on occasion to slam in a missed free throw. It had worked a few times earlier in the season and was a crowd-pleasing move. When Jordan wanted to try it, he'd tell Armstrong to drop back to protect, which was Jordan's job. Armstrong's job was to meet the opposing point guard at halfcourt or sooner, but he'd drop back to protect for Jordan. Then Jackson would scream from the bench, “Up, B.J., up, get up. What the hell are you doing?”

Jordan would tell him not to worry about Jackson. Jackson would tell him to do as he said.

Armstrong was losing confidence quickly. Finally, he had his agent, Arn Tellem, call Jerry Reinsdorf. “B.J. is confused,” Tellem told Reinsdorf. “He doesn't know who to listen to. The superstar of the team tells him one thing and the coach tells him another. What should he do?”

“You tell him to listen to the coach,” Reinsdorf instructed.

Armstrong wasn't so sure.

Jackson was awakened at 7:00
A
.
M
. Monday by a call from Krause. “Did you see the newspaper?” Krause asked. Even if Jackson did read the sports section, he certainly wouldn't have seen the Chicago newspapers in Miami. Krause studied the stories about the Bulls, living in mortal fear of negative reports. This one was horrible. Stacey King was blasting the team. If the Bulls didn't think he could play, fine, then trade him somewhere he could. He wasn't getting a chance when others in his rookie class were, and it was time to stop blaming every loss on the bench. The story went on and on. Krause wanted to talk to King. Jackson said he would do the talking; he knew that Krause would just make things worse.

“Would you really rather be playing for a team like New Jersey or the Clippers?” Jackson asked King.

“Sure,” King replied.

Jackson understood, but he was disappointed. “The only way you make money in the pro game today is to get statistics,” Jackson told a friend later. And he even tried to help his players in that quest. It was why he ignored Pippen's often-selfish play. He knew Pippen was trying to get a new deal, and he could not in all good conscience counsel him otherwise. But he also felt King could prove himself on a winning team like the Bulls. King obviously felt otherwise.

The game against the Heat on January 21 proved to be the easy part. The inexperienced Heat players were hanging in, but committed 5 turnovers in 7 possessions in the third quarter, allowing the Bulls, who rarely made any mistakes, to take a 14-point lead and walk away with the game.

King played twenty-two minutes, the second-most he'd played in a month. And he performed reasonably well, getting 9 points and even 5 assists, which only infuriated backup center Will Perdue, who played two minutes.

Perdue was in his third season and was waiting patiently. He'd rarely played in his first season; Collins and Krause feuded over his use and he became a pawn in their battle for control. Jackson had used Perdue more, but thought he was too weak defensively to play for extended periods of time. And it didn't help that Jordan had once felt inclined to punch him around in a practice.

It was during the 1989–90 season. Perdue was setting a screen, which usually resembled a seven-foot piece of spaghetti, but this time he dug in. Jordan came by, expecting Perdue to give way as usual, when
Bang!
Jordan slammed into Perdue and stopped, almost sliding down to the floor like some life-size cartoon character. Jordan stopped, looked hard at Perdue, and swung.
One! Two!
Right to the side of the head. Perdue's knees wobbled, but he remained upright.

“Why the hell don't you ever set a pick like that in a game?” Jordan screamed.

Everyone stopped, and since this was early in practice no one was watching from outside the glass-enclosed gym in the Multiplex. The incident would lead to Jackson's demand that the team install a curtain so practice could be private. Explanation: The players need to concentrate. Reality: We can't have people seeing this stuff.

Perdue's playing time was continuing to decrease, and he'd talked to Jackson about it at the end of December. He was ready to press his case in the media, but his parents were in town for a few weeks and he didn't want to upset them. He'd wait. But now King had complained and his playing time had gone up. So Perdue went to the newspapers.

He wasn't playing and didn't believe that was right; King had spoken out and got to play more. “That seems to be the way it is around here,” Perdue told Kent McDill of the
Daily Herald.
“And I don't want to be playing in the last minute and a half of blowouts.” Perdue also wondered why Cartwright was playing so much—forty-four minutes in one recent game—since he clearly was wearing down. What was the team thinking of? “I'm treading water here,” Perdue said. “My skills are deteriorating, no doubt about it.”

The bench problems didn't stop there. Hopson was proving difficult to coach. Jackson had sent him into the game almost two weeks earlier against Philadelphia, and Hopson had sauntered over to the scorers' table to check in, moving as if it were a chore, although Hopson often walked like that. Before he got there, Jackson yelled to him, “Show like you care.” The Bulls started offering him around, but no one wanted to touch his $930,000-per-year contract. He was hesitant and lost on the court, Jackson felt, and he blamed the team. “They say I'm supposed to score and I get two shots a game,” Hopson complained to close friend, Armstrong. “Now they say I'm a defensive player. First I was a guard, now I'm a forward. Before I was a scorer, now I'm a defender. Who knows what the hell's going on here?”

And nobody seemed to know what was happening with the rookie Scott Williams, even though the coaches were impressed with his play at times. Bach had even stunned Reinsdorf at the team's Christmas party by telling him that Williams would be a better player than King. Reinsdorf, paying King $8 million over six years, was not at all pleased to hear this, although he was pleased with the way Krause had finagled getting Williams as a free agent. But Williams had stopped showering after games, apparently in a protest over a lack of playing time. He was saying that he was better than King and Perdue and should be playing. He'd often stare long and hard at Jackson or Bach without saying anything, and Jackson began to worry. He started to ask the players if something was wrong with Williams, whether he needed professional counseling. He had no feel for the kid. Bach did. He called his son, a California state trooper. “Get me a gun,” he said. “We've got a kid here who's gonna walk into the coach's office one day and go off and I want to be ready.”