The Jordan Rules (4 page)

One of the more controversial pages of the book included a joking comment attributed to Jordan by two sources about someday owning a golf club and omitting Jews. I never noticed the slightest bit of racism, anti-Semitism or any bias toward any group or individual by Jordan. He had been playing golf at a local club with primarily Jewish membership and said he wanted to join. They said he could play anytime he wanted, but membership was closed. His joke was in response to that. I was writing about how even great stars and celebrities had doors closed to them, sometimes because of race, and Jordan's comment was a throwaway line; in no way did anyone involved take it seriously. But when the book was released, that was one of those “out of context” lines that stung.

As the season progressed, the story was telling itself. There was the tough start, and Phil's statement after the December loss in Detroit that the team might have to be broken up. The Gulf War started during a road trip to Atlanta, as I recall, and everyone was a little uptight even though we didn't think there was going to be an attack on us. There was the All-Star break win in Detroit that everyone felt was a turning point. At the time I didn't agree. But then there was the amazing post All-Star break run to the playoffs when it seemed they'd never lose.

It was becoming surreal. The season had only been all about beating Detroit. I remember talking with managing partner Jerry Reinsdorf in the fall and we agreed it was Portland's year with their fast start and previous loss in the Finals. Everyone just wanted to shut down the Pistons. People remember that final game in Detroit when the Pistons walked off the floor in the waning seconds of their famous loss to the Bulls, but not everyone recalls that Jordan had provoked it the day before with comments about how, despite winning two titles, the Pistons weren't true or deserving champions because of their style of play. In those pre-Internet days, the Pistons' players saw the comments just before the game and were fuming. Jordan had distracted them, exactly as he'd planned, even though it was almost unprecedented to talk that way about a team that was close to winning three titles. That was Michael.

And then the Bulls stunningly blew through the Lakers in the Finals and that post-game locker room was the best I've felt for any sports team I've been around, primarily because I knew them so well, and because I knew how much they wanted it and how much disappointment they'd all gone through. And perhaps more than anyone outside that locker room, I knew how difficult it could be.

And then a few months later there were accusations that one person was trying to destroy what could be a sports dynasty for Chicago, the only one of its kind, and the reason for its disintegration would be Sam Smith.

***

When you cover a team that goes all the way, it's both exhilarating and exhausting. The newspaper becomes a beast and all those stories you slaved over that were cut and trimmed, well, now they can't get enough. Keep feeding the beast, reporters like to say.

I finished up the post-season basketball stuff for the newspaper, and then went back to putting the final chapters of the book together. Phil Jackson was terrific in walking me through some things I never could have known. He understood the difference between a book and newspaper: that the newspaper was “history in a hurry” and the book was for posterity. He told me about that last famous timeout when he asked Michael who was open. It was the perfect ending I was thinking about. How did Michael finally get it and get there? I thought I'd end the book that way, but the editor asked for a bit of the parade and rally. I was only too happy to be done with the editing process as well.

I preferred the daily newspaper for the immediacy and opportunity to move onto the next story quickly. It was difficult reading and rereading and editing, and by the summer I couldn't bear to look at the book again. I sent in probably 100 pages more than they wanted and said they could edit it. I'd read that book enough times. That was in July, and after a few months off I was ready for the next season. I didn't think much about the book. Really. I'd thought it would come out, get a few mentions and be forgotten. I guess I really was too close to it.

***

First came the White House. Later we'd all learn that Jordan skipped the team trip to the White House so he could go on a gambling weekend with some shady characters. Ultimately his gambling issues would become the stuff of potential scandal but no, the league didn't banish him in 1993, according to the NBA urban legend that is rivaled only by the myth of NBA lottery fixes, spontaneous combustion, Sasquatch and someone actually committing a charge against Vlade Divac.

Initially, the Bulls players scattered quickly after the championship, and the organization didn't have time to schedule the White House trip. The timing wasn't right once training camp started, so the team asked the players to come in a few days early to go to see the president. Jordan declined, saying he had a family obligation and not even the president was more important than your family. Heck, Michael could have driven over the president after winning a title for Chicago and everyone would have condemned the president for not moving. Of course, the issues that resonated in
The Jordan Rules
—the internal feuds on the team and Jordan sometimes stretching his advantage—became evident. Horace Grant and Scottie Pippen said if Michael wasn't going they weren't going either. They didn't have anywhere else to be, but that wasn't the point. Eventually, the team leaned on Pippen and Grant to go, but there was no negotiating with Jordan.

It became a media issue and Jordan addressed it in a press conference as training camp began. The book was still weeks from coming out. I'd asked a few questions at a basically supportive press conference, and Jordan answered me unusually harshly. I wasn't sure what that was about, but as he walked off I made a small talk comment and he returned a curse and insult. I later learned Jordan had heard details about the book from
Sports Illustrated
, which had some excerpts the publisher was trying to sell.
Sports Illustrated
would turn them down as they were trying to persuade Jordan to do a Sportsman of the Year interview and didn't think running the excerpts would help. As Jordan has carried on a boycott of
Sports Illustrated
for more than a decade over coverage critical of his baseball playing, I'd say they were right. The excerpts appeared in the
Tribune
instead.

And then all heck broke out. There weren't galleys or review copies of the book since the publisher skipped a step to bring it out more quickly. So no one had it. Jay Mariotti, then a columnist for the
Chicago Sun-Times
and a preeminent provocateur, put together a column suggesting he'd seen the book. He hadn't, and his page one column in the
Sun-Times
contained some huge factual errors, such as suggesting the book detailed the nightlife activities of the players. There wasn't one such word, but now the media around the country was picking that up and calling for my firing for writing such a nasty tell-all.

Mariotti went hardest where it would hurt Chicago. He said the book was an attack on the team that would divide it forever, and that as a result, there was no way the Bulls would ever win again. It was the beginning of a chaos that I never saw coming and never could have imagined.

The
Sun-Times
was a big time competitor of the
Tribune
then, and apparently saw a way to undermine the
Tribune
as well. When the book did come out, they rushed to get copies and pulled out sections wildly out of context. Getting tipped off about one such story, I called a
Sun-Times
editor to say I'd add the context. He said they had what they needed and it wasn't about being fair or accurate. It was journalistic mayhem.

By the time the book came out, I was no longer the full-time beat writer; the
Tribune
had created an NBA column for me that allowed me to do national stuff along with some Bulls coverage. As a result, I wasn't on that season's first annual long road trip, I was in Chicago in the middle of the firestorm. The Bulls were in the midst of sweeping the road trip in a 14-game winning streak that gave them a 15-2 start. It took a bit of the end-of-the-world pressure off me, but not much. The publisher was delirious. You can't buy publicity like this, they were saying. But they weren't in the middle of it. Mariotti had even managed to work me into a column about the Cubs and Don Zimmer, condemning me in a tortured way for the Cubs' problems.

A reporter prides himself on not being part of the story. Now I was a big, big part of the story. I stopped answering the phone, and the newspaper told me to stay away for a week until things cooled down. A wire service put out a story of “author missing.” My friend from the
Daily Herald
, Mike Imrem, began calling me Salman Rushdie after the British novelist who went into hiding after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a warrant for his death. He survived, and Imrem still calls me Salman. My wife was a wreck. My son was two at the time and I decided to spend time with him roaming a mall. I'd overhear people saying they'd get that Sam Smith if they ever saw him. Fortunately, I was shorter in person and widely unrecognized.

A local TV reporter doing one of those goofy walking reports was kicking the book down a sewer. Someone told me they'd seen it being burned on TV. But there were uplifting moments as well. Mike Royko, who was a hero for so many writers, never talked to many of us at the
Tribune
. But he sent me a great note saying to tell the
Sun-Times
to shove it, or something similarly colorful. Bill Cartwright called and said not to worry, that these things always pass.

***

My principal mentor in journalism was my first editor at my first newspaper job at the Ft. Wayne, Ind.
News Sentinel
, Ernie Williams. I'd been an accounting student in college and then worked for a CPA firm for a few years before going to grad school to get a Master's in journalism. I was a late starter in finding myself, never having much support at home or in the New York City public school system, where our class sizes were generally 45 to 50 in grade school and high school and the teachers were generally in their 50's or 60's and anxious to get that pension that has bankrupted our municipalities. So about three quarters of the way through my accounting degree at Pace U. in New York City, I took a job as sports editor of the college newspaper. We didn't have journalism classes. This was the era of civil rights and Vietnam and nobody much cared about sports at the university. The job paid. I needed money, and, after all, how hard could it be? I'd read the sports pages of seven daily newspapers since I was about eight. I could write a column. It wasn't exactly classic journalism, but I was playing for the college baseball team, and I was on the bowling team, and I was substituting at times on the golf and fencing teams. So I pretty much knew all the players. It was more like your tree house club newspaper. Since we had no journalism department, the newspaper hired a professor from Columbia, Melvin Mencher, to critique the paper, and for the first time ever in my academic life someone liked something I did. Hey, I finally had a calling.

I'd later gotten caught up in Watergate and Nixon and politics by the time I got to Ft. Wayne, where I was hired to be an investigative reporter. I'd been an accountant, and so a city budget wasn't hieroglyphics to me. There's a general rule about politics, that the lower the level the uglier it gets. I did investigative work when I went to Washington for a regional wire,
States News
. I wrote about congressional misdeeds and outrages. But Ernie taught me the greatest rule, not only for investigative reporting, but for all reporting. I did some major exposes that had people facing jail and ruin. The day those stories ran he always made me go see the person I had written about. This is how you stand behind your work, he told me. So you'd better have it right and better be able to defend it.

So the Bulls came back home from that Western Conference road trip with a 13-2 record, and with
The Jordan Rules
still reverberating, I walked into the Bulls locker room, went over to Jordan who was sitting at his locker idling through those ticket requests, and said, “If you have any issues with me, I'm here and you can let me know.”

He didn't look up. I hesitated for a moment, and then moved on to chat with first B.J. Armstrong, who became closest to Jordan, and then Grant, Pippen, Cartwright. I wasn't trying to show up Jordan, and, in fact, I was uneasy and nervous. But it was something I knew I had to do. And I had nothing to apologize for.

Jordan never has mentioned the book to me nor have I ever heard from any of his close friends, like Rod Higgins and Fred Whitfield, whom I speak with when I see them, about anything regarding the book. I know Jordan didn't like it. After games back then, especially on the road, he'd be asked to sign an assortment of items for everyone from the game official to the team owner. A few times I saw people hand him a copy of the book. I heard him say he'd sign anything but that.

If there was going to be a /files/18/62/86/f186286/public/media fight, I would lose every round to Jordan. I had some respect in the community having been at the
Tribune
since 1979. But this was Michael Jordan. I give him credit, and it was a relief to me. Initially I was hesitant to engage him. Gone forever was the bantering I often enjoyed with him. Initially I was somewhat reluctant to even ask him questions in press conferences. But I had to do so, as well as in group sessions, to do my job. After all, he was always the story. Whenever I'd ask a question, Jordan would answer the same as with anyone else. Occasionally, he'd mention my name first, as in, “Sam, the shot was . . . ” I was a bit surprised, impressed and especially relieved. He had plenty of reason, at least in his mind with the negative onslaught of coverage, to single me out for ridicule. I wasn't winning that one. Of course, he had bigger issues develop from his gambling party with the infamous Slim Bouler and later more gambling stuff during the playoffs.