The Jordan Rules (6 page)

Center Dave Corzine, a former Bull, had once explained it well: “It's hard playing on a team with Michael Jordan because you're always the reason the team lost.” It certainly couldn't be Jordan's fault, everyone usually agreed; he was the best, wasn't he? There was not much anyone on the team could say publicly.

But Jordan would be ready for Game 3 back in the Stadium. He was angry and chastened, a little contrite perhaps, but also demanding payment for assorted sins.

Phil Jackson did the talking for the next few days following Tuesday's Game 2. Jordan, usually playful during practice, wasn't saying much. After practice Wednesday, with the media waiting and watching, most of the players skipped out the back door directly to the parking lot, which is what they always did when they wanted to avoid the press. But after complaints from the media, Jackson told Jordan he would have to go out the front door on Thursday—to run the gauntlet, as the coaches liked to say, although the demands on Jordan from the local media (and the national media, too, for that matter) were never threatening. Jordan carefully cultivated his image, maintaining an air of affability while the media fed a Jordan-crazed public a series of well-crafted cliches. It was a formula that played in Peoria, with sponsors like Wheaties, McDonald's, Chevrolet and Nike lining up to quadruple his $3-million-a-year basketball salary in outside income. He was annually selected to the national basketball writers' all-interview team, and local TV reporters liked to put their arms around him during interviews. “But I don't have to talk to anybody?” Jordan said.

“No, you don't have to talk to anybody,” Jackson agreed.

So following Thursday's practice Jordan did as he was told, exiting through the front door but ignoring the waiting media. Even his teammates wondered what was going on. “Did the General have anything to say?” Craig Hodges wondered when he came out afterward. Hodges liked to call Jordan “the General,” explaining that Jordan gave the commands, ordering players around and out of his way, determining whether the play called by the coaches should be run, and jawing with officials. It was up to his teammates to carry his orders out, which they rarely seemed to do to his satisfaction these days.

“What'd he say?” asked John Paxson when he left the floor of the glass-enclosed Multiplex gym.

“Did he say anything to you guys?” a reporter asked.

“No,” Paxson said. “He talked generally, like calling plays or positions, but he didn't say anything else.”

“Did he say what was bothering him?” asked another reporter.

“No, he didn't say much of anything,” Paxson repeated.

But Jackson had. He read Jordan's actions as a demand for his teammates to step up and be held accountable for their poor play. He agreed with the sentiment, but didn't want to see it in the papers. (Actually, Jackson rarely read the sports pages, but his family and his assistants had summarized the reports of Jordan's fit and the team's sense of betrayal.) He told the team that what happened in their locker room was their business and no one else's. He talked of character and “owning up,” and said that if a little adversity could destroy the team, they weren't the team they believed themselves to be. It was a desperate time, Jackson said, a time to be angry and emotional. It was a time to be held accountable. It was up to them.

As for tactics, the team had to stop its headlong charges into Detroit's interior defense. The Pistons played a zone, simple and effective, Jackson noted. And the Bulls had to get good shots and take them rather than crash in where they had no room to maneuver. They had to retreat better on defense, and they had to rebound.

In Game 3, they did. And it was a series again.

“Tonight,” Jackson offered after the victory, “we showed that it wasn't the rules against Jordan, but that Jordan rules.”

Jordan scored 16 points in the first half, but the Bulls trailed 51–43 after a typically withering Detroit second quarter in which the Bulls were outscored 32–19. Jordan fumed in the locker room and made a decision. “If we're going down,” he thought to himself, “we're going down my way.”

By the time the third quarter was over, a roaring cascade of cheers was tumbling down on the Bulls from the overcrowded Chicago Stadium. The result was no longer in doubt, as the third quarter turned into a Jordanfest. Jordan drove and tipped in his own miss to open the quarter, and blew a pass inside to Pippen for a lay-up for the second Bulls basket of the quarter. He hit a ten-footer for the third. He sliced inside for the fifth, and later added a driving basket for a three-point play and a pair of free throws to close the quarter as the Bulls outscored Detroit 17–6 in the last three and a half minutes to gain control of the game. The fourth quarter saw Detroit push back, but Jordan pushed harder. He scored 18 more points and found himself smashed to the floor by Rodman. He got up, drove again, and was fouled. Then he hit a three-point field goal with time running out on the twenty-four-second clock. The Stadium was shaking in pandemonium.

Jordan had scored 31 points in the second half to finish with 47 points and 10 rebounds. Pippen had added 29 and 11 rebounds while Grant had climbed on the boards for another 11 rebounds, 6 of them offensive. The Bulls had gotten another big assist from Ed Nealy, who had played 22 minutes and scored 8 points. He was slow and couldn't jump much, but Jackson labeled him “his favorite player, the smartest player on the team.”

Jordan was curt afterward. He didn't smile or joke, as he usually does in postgame sessions. He went to the podium and said he wouldn't talk about the locker-room incident in Game 2. He said he never criticized his teammates. He said he only spoke as “we,” not “they.”

“He said that?” Grant exclaimed later when told about Jordan's comments. “Really, no, he really said that?”

Cartwright, sitting next to Grant, shook his head. “Crazy,” he said with a wry smile.

Jordan said he would not talk to the media again until after the next game.

The Bulls would do again in Game 4 what they couldn't do in Detroit. They shot well and scrambled the game. The Bulls' play was to get the game above 100 points, so they trapped Thomas and Dumars into 12 turnovers and Jordan was brilliant in scoring 42 more in a 108–101 win. Bill Laimbeer was 1 of 7 and now just 1 of 13 in the two games in Chicago after shooting 8 for 10 in Detroit.

The Pistons were now 24–5 in the playoffs over the past two seasons, with the Bulls having defeated them four times. The Pistons had lost two straight in the playoffs for the first time in two years. But the Bulls hadn't defeated Detroit in the Palace of Auburn Hills yet.

After Game 5, the Bulls still hadn't. It was a classic Pistons win over the Bulls. Dumars scored 20, holding Jordan to 7 of 19 and 22 points. The Pistons outrebounded the Bulls 45–36, the Pistons' bench outscored Chicago's 35–13, and the Bulls hit just a third of their shots. And it was rough: Thomas slammed Pippen to the floor midway through the third quarter. The Bulls trailed 72–64 to open the fourth quarter, but after scoring a basket, Jordan signaled that he wanted to come out for a rest. He was out for two minutes, and in that time Detroit outscored the Bulls 11–2 and the Bulls never got close again. The Bulls had begun to ignore Laimbeer, and he scored 16 points while Pippen labored through a 5-for-20 game. Grant was brilliant off the boards, with 8 offensive rebounds, compared with 9 for the entire Detroit team. Mostly, though, Detroit was tougher and more aggressive.

In a play that summed up the problems Chicago faced in Detroit, with 10.4 seconds to go in the first quarter Jordan took the ball after a Pistons turnover and tossed up a shot from midcourt. The ball swished through to give the Bulls a 25–25 tie. Vinnie Johnson then missed a drive to end the quarter.

As Jordan went to the bench, he explained to Jackson, “I thought [the clock] said one point four seconds.”

Trainer Mark Pfeil pulled Jordan aside. “We'll go over numbers later,” Pfeil joked.

The only number that mattered for the Bulls now was one. One loss and their summer began. One win and they would get a chance to start over.

Pistons players talked about being mentally tough, saying that now the games would go to whoever wanted them most, whoever played the hardest, whoever was a champion.

In Game 6, the Bulls looked like the champions. The Bulls bolted from a narrow 57–54 lead midway through the third quarter with a 23–9 run to close the quarter and close out Detroit; the final margin was 18. The Bulls grabbed loose balls as if they had Velcro on their fingers. Craig Hodges and Jordan ignited the crowd with long three-pointers. Even Will Perdue was banging around after Bill Cartwright picked up his fourth foul. Everybody was talking about the chance of a lifetime after the game. John Paxson, sidelined with a sprained ankle, said he'd tape his ankle and try to play. Hodges said the sixth didn't mean anything without the seventh. There was a lot of talk about a one-game season and about how the momentum was now theirs.

Jordan still wasn't granting mass interviews by his locker after the game. Since Game 3, he'd chosen to come out, sit on a podium next to Jackson, answer a few questions from the dozens of assembled reporters, and then leave. Jordan would then go to his locker, dress, and be ignored as if he had an infectious disease. Reporters made a wide arc to avoid even getting close to him as they squeezed into the cramped locker room in the old Chicago Stadium.

As Jordan slipped on a sheer, brown floral shirt, his father, James, leaned over. “Son,” he said, “we're there. Now's our chance and we're gonna do it.”

“Right, Dad,” Jordan agreed.

Michael Jordan returned to his team. The dam of silence was swept away by a flood of hope. Jordan was joking on the team bus as it traveled to the Palace, and in the locker room, as if nothing had happened the last two weeks. He made fun of Pippen's shoes and Grant's after-shave lotion. It smelled like a lawn, Jordan said, one just fertilized. They asked Jordan where he'd left his comb. The scene seemed to relax everyone, and it was a calm, outwardly confident Bulls team that readied for the game. This was all Jordan had asked for, a chance. This was a chance to get to the Finals. Let the better team win. Throw it all out there and go on or go home. It was the farthest one of his teams ever had gone.

But the Bulls would go no farther. As Jordan feared, even suspected, his teammates disappeared. Paxson tried, but couldn't go. His ankle was too sore and swollen, and he would need surgery in a week. Hodges, rusty from months of virtual inactivity, couldn't sustain his effort for two games and shot 3 for 13, 2 for 12 on three-pointers. His big, toothy smile was gone and he'd soon be contemplating his feet.

It wasn't much of a game. The Pistons hit 9 straight shots in the second quarter while the Bulls went 2 of 12. The score was 48–33 at halftime and the game was over. The score was 61–39 in the third quarter, and even though the Bulls closed the gap to 10 after three quarters, they never had a chance.

Scottie Pippen was 1 of 10 for 2 points. Stricken by a migraine headache, he was blinking his eyes madly before the game and putting an ice pack on his head during time-outs. He played forty-two minutes, but could barely distinguish his teammates from the Pistons. He broke down and drowned himself in tears in the locker room afterward. Grant was ferocious on the boards, pulling down more offensive rebounds than the entire Detroit team and grabbing a game-high 14 overall, but he shot 3 of 17. Cartwright had worn down and would need knee surgery, and Hodges also would go under the knife. The rookies were deadly—B. J. Armstrong flew out of control in front of the Detroit crowd and was 1 of 8. The Pistons' bench outscored the Bulls' 33–21, as Mark Aguirre had 15 points and 10 rebounds and John Salley had 14 points. Thomas was brilliant in orchestrating the Pistons' break with 21 points and 11 assists. “They may have the best player, but we have the better team,” noted Laimbeer, the mockery in his voice scratching at Chicagoans like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Jordan was left to consider the 93–74 loss. He agreed Detroit was better. The Bulls had to get better. He wasn't the general manager, but if he were … It was obvious the team needed veterans. But he wasn't just slapping at the rookies. Where was Pippen? This was the second straight year he'd vanished in the last game against the Pistons; he'd received a concussion in the first minute of the final conference playoff game in 1989. Were he and his buddy, Grant, serious enough? Paxson had broken down and the other guys hadn't done much. Jordan had scored 31 points, 21 more than anyone else, but he'd also attempted 27 shots. And many were wondering how the Bulls were ever going to win if he was to continue to shoot at that pace.

As for Jordan, he believed he
had
to continue at that pace. Otherwise, who would?

Just before he stepped from the postgame podium and onto the golf courses of America, Jordan offered one final thought: “We have to do some things. We need to make some changes.”

J
ERRY
R
EINSDORF SAT BACK, SURROUNDED BY HIS FELLOW
National Basketball Association owners, at one of their regular meetings, enjoying another wonderful day in the summer of 1990.

He was going to lose a player he would have liked to keep for his Bulls, but little setbacks like that didn't bother Reinsdorf much; he was having too much fun being Jerry Reinsdorf.

Being Jerry Reinsdorf didn't look like it would be worth much when he was growing up. He was just another face in the crowd at Brooklyn's Erasmus High School, which has a reputation for producing special students. Among its graduates are actor Eli Wallach, singer Barbra Streisand, writer Bernard Malamud, playwright Betty Comden, and chess champion Bobby Fischer. And Reinsdorf, the son of lower-middle class parents, his father a sewing machine repairman, vividly remembers his high school graduation day. He was in a class of nearly 1,000 students and the school had given out literally hundreds of awards, for everything from proficiency in English and math to excellence in hall monitoring. Reinsdorf's name hadn't been called. He remembers walking home a long time in silence with his mother, Marion, who finally said, “Couldn't you at least have gotten one?”

He had been just another sports-crazed kid growing up in Brooklyn, but he went on to amass a fortune in real estate after moving to Chicago, eventually selling his business, Balcor, to American Express for $53 million. By then he had fulfilled his lifelong dream of running a baseball team by leading a group that bought the Chicago White Sox. But the White Sox were a financial drain, so much so that Reinsdorf sought to buy an interest in the Chicago Bulls so he could remain in sports if he lost the team. Basketball had never thrived in Chicago, where the Stags disbanded in 1950 and then the Packers/Zephyrs moved in 1963 to become the Baltimore (now Washington) Bullets. The Bulls came along in 1966, but were averaging just over sixty-three hundred fans per game in 1984 when Reinsdorf began negotiations. George Steinbrenner, then the New York Yankees' principal owner, was a Bulls part-owner then and, by chance, mentioned to Reinsdorf that he was embarrassed by the team and wanted to get out. Reinsdorf said he wanted in, but didn't say why. A deal was quickly put together; Reinsdorf would acquire more than half the team's stock for about $9 million. He then watched as NBA revenues soared, aided in no small part by one player, Michael Jordan, who was just joining the Bulls when Reinsdorf bought in. Chicago Stadium was now a complete and constant sellout, and, all in all, Reinsdorf was feeling pretty good.

Ed Nealy, the player the Bulls were about to lose, was a thirty-year-old barrel-chested forward from Kansas who had joined the team for a second go-round before the opening of the 1989–90 season. He was one of those players the newspapers liked to call “much traveled.” Coaches called him “smart.” Both were euphemisms for Nealy's pokiness, his inability to jump very well, and the fact that he was rarely in demand. But he'd had a steadying influence on the Bulls, even a motivating one, for his teammates could look at Nealy and see what hard work could do for a player. Here was a guy with so little talent, yet he was still around after seven years in the NBA. It was tempting to look at him and think, “If he can play seven years, I ought to be able to play until I'm forty,” but it wasn't as easy as that, as most would eventually learn. Nealy didn't cruise the clubs at night and he was always the first one to practice or to work out in the weight room. He never complained when he didn't play and he rarely shot when he did. Playing time and shots: Even more than money, they are the pro basketball player's measures of self-worth. Nealy didn't make an issue of either, so he was a favorite of both management and his teammates. And the Chicago fans took to Nealy because he personified their city—hardworking and blue collar (even though tickets had become so expensive that only the whitest of collars could afford them, assuming they could even find a ticket to buy).

Yes, he worked hard. He set screens, boxed out, took on the strongest inside player. He did the basketball dirty work, even if his limited talent didn't allow him to do it often enough. Still, he had had a 9-rebound, 9-point game in the playoffs against Philadelphia as the Bulls won without Scottie Pippen, who was home after the death of his father. Nealy took several rebounds away from Charles Barkley in the fourth quarter and was chosen player of the game by the CBS broadcasters.

He'd come to Chicago that season unwanted. The Bulls had traded him to Phoenix the previous season for Craig Hodges, but even Suns coach Cotton Fitzsimmons, who had originally drafted Nealy as the 166th pick in 1982 for Kansas City, had no use for him. Fitzsimmons promised to find Nealy a spot in the NBA, and the Bulls agreed to take him back as a twelfth man. He played in little more than half the regular-season games, earning about $250,000, so the Bulls were stunned when he rejected their two-year offer of $400,000 per year; Nealy said he could get almost $700,000 per year for three years. Bulls coach Phil Jackson argued that the team should keep Nealy, but he understood it was impossible at that cost.

Reinsdorf was laughing about the Nealy offer and shaking his head when he turned to Phoenix president Jerry Colangelo. “Somebody's going to give Ed Nealy seven hundred thousand dollars,” Reinsdorf said. “Jerry, who'd do something that stupid?”

Colangelo mumbled something about not knowing. The next day, Phoenix announced it had signed Ed Nealy for three seasons.

Losing Nealy posed a problem for the Bulls. They were a young team, and Michael Jordan didn't think young teams won titles. Jordan made that clear following their seventh-game loss to the Pistons in the 1990 playoffs. Rookie guard B. J. Armstrong shot 10 for 38 and averaged 4.4 points in fifteen minutes per game in the series, and rookie forward Stacey King went 9 for 28 and averaged 5 points in his fifteen minutes per game. Jordan had reserved much of his anger for King, screaming at him to rebound and “hit somebody” several times. “Management knows where we can improve,” said Jordan. “And I don't think they'll be looking at the draft.”

Jordan respected Nealy, even if he doubted his overall athletic talent, for Nealy was the basketball version of rolling up your sleeves, spitting on your hands, and going to work. Jordan would always go to Nealy's side of the court when they were playing together, no matter where Jordan was supposed to be in that particular set. “He's the only one who'll set a good pick,” Jordan said. “He's a tough guy.”

That kind of respect is hard to earn from Jordan, who can be as cold and demanding as a landlord on the last day of the month. Just ask Brad Sellers, whom Jordan regularly derided for his soft play and eventually helped evict from the team. In 1987, the Bulls drafted Sellers, a seven-footer from Ohio State who was projected as a small forward. The obvious pick appeared to be Duke guard Johnny Dawkins, but the Bulls decided they needed a small forward since they were getting rid of Orlando Woolridge and had already arranged a deal to get point guard Steve Colter from Portland. And the Bulls were, to some extent, drafting Sellers to accommodate Jordan: “They liked Sellers because you couldn't leave with your three [small forward] to double on Michael because Brad could hit the jumper,” Jackson explained.

But Jordan believed that Dawkins would be the choice, and he had told Dawkins so in pickup games they'd played in North Carolina before the draft. So when the Bulls skipped Dawkins for Sellers, Jordan felt both betrayed and embarrassed. He felt the team made him look like a fool, and he took it out on Colter, a quiet kid from New Mexico, and later on Sellers, likewise sensitive and uncertain about how to respond to a superstar. Jordan's famous tongue became a whip for these plowhorse players, as he saw them. Sellers would eventually break under the strain of Jordan's attacks, the constant derision during practice, and the physical attacks when Jordan had him in his sights coming downcourt in practice, and Sellers's game would plummet to such depths that he was out of the NBA by the 1990–91 season.

Jordan can be demanding on the court, and it's always been his habit to wave off the point guard to get the ball. That's one reason Paxson had been the most successful point guard to play with Jordan; Paxson isn't a creator. Unlike most point guards, who need the ball to make plays and set up teammates, Paxson feeds off creative players like Jordan and Pippen. He's more comfortable passing the ball upcourt and then spotting up for a jump shot. Not so Colter—or most point guards, for that matter. But Jordan kept running Colter off the ball, demanding the ball in every crucial situation, and criticizing him whenever he'd made a mistake.

It wasn't always Jordan's fault, since his coaches, Kevin Loughery, Stan Albeck, and Doug Collins, all permitted Jordan to stay back to pick up the ball in the backcourt and then run the offense. Jackson tried to change that and Jordan balked much of the 1989–90 season, but Jackson would continue to work on him for the 1990–91 season. He knew what a great weapon Jordan would be for the Bulls if he would just take off downcourt, because the defense would have to follow him and leave the court clearer for the ball handler to advance the ball.

Colter wasn't strong enough to stand up to Jordan; few Bulls ever have been. It's one reason some people felt the Bulls should have pursued Danny Ainge after the 1989–90 season, when the feisty point guard was being made available by Sacramento. The Bulls were looking for a scorer for their second team, but they also needed someone to stand up to Jordan when he routinely ordered his teammates out of the way late in the game. “He'll tell Michael to fuck off when he starts screaming for the ball,” said assistant coach John Bach at the time. “And sometimes we need that.”

Another Bull who appeared to be wilting under Jordan's heat was Will Perdue. “You've got to get Michael's respect to do well on the Bulls,” said John Paxson. “Will had trouble.”

“I never really understood,” admitted Perdue. “I'll always set a screen for him when I'm in there and I know no one else but Ed [Nealy] would. I know Bill [Cartwright] would never do it. But I know Michael hated me and Bill.”

Perdue came out of Vanderbilt, known perhaps more for his size-22 shoes than his game. Although he was Southeastern Conference Player of the Year in 1988, he had yet to find a role in the pros. He was slow afoot, although he had a good passing touch and could score. But he often shrank back from contact, which doomed him almost immediately as a pro center. The lane in pro basketball is an area Bach appropriately describes as “an alligator wrestling pond.” All sorts of holding, pushing, grabbing, and clawing is allowed among men who are seven feet tall and weigh more than 250 pounds. The center has to establish his position and then fight to keep it. Perdue often backed away from combat. The daily beatings he took in practice from Bill Cartwright, whose flying elbows had already given Perdue a cauliflower left ear, made him instinctively wary. To many on the team, it didn't even look as if he enjoyed basketball. He appeared to be a big kid who was told he had to play basketball, so he did. That almost was the case, although Perdue had come to appreciate the game for what it could do for him, having been a so-so football player growing up in Florida, where football is king. Finally, he took up basketball at age thirteen.

“I thought, ‘Hey, I can do this. This might get me something,'” Perdue recalls about his introduction to the game. And maybe that was enough for him. He refused to go to the pro summer league after his unsuccessful first season, souring some among the Bulls on his work habits. He'd been described as looking like a character from the painting
American Gothic
and he seemed to have about as much movement. Some of his teammates called him “Shytown.”

Jordan's dislike for Perdue was palpable. He called him “Will Vanderbilt.” “He doesn't deserve to be named after a Big Ten school,” Jordan would explain. Jordan rarely talked to the big center, whom general manager Jerry Krause had projected as the team's pivot player of the 1990s. By Perdue's second season, it was clear that Krause had over-stated Perdue's potential. “If Bill Cartwright plays until he's fifty, Will Perdue will still be his backup,” Bach once told Krause. Krause would grow angry at such observations, but Perdue never did much to change anyone's feelings.

It didn't help that Perdue was backup to one of the most respected players on the Bulls (if not by Jordan), Bill Cartwright.

“Bill's always the one we look to when things aren't going right on the floor or if there's a problem in the locker room,” said guard B.J. Armstrong. “That's just the way it is.”

It was Cartwright who organized players to buy some gag gifts for the coaches at a team party around Christmastime, one that Jordan didn't attend. It was the first time in twenty years in the NBA, Bach remarked, that he'd seen players buy anything for the coaches.

Cartwright admired Jordan's talent and saw him as one of the great individual players ever, an artist and a genius of the hardwood, a man who could spin the straw of effort into the gold of brilliance. Cartwright said he respected that, even if he didn't always care for Jordan's habits. Jordan usually worked hard in practice, but sometimes so effectively that Bulls' practices became disorganized because no one could stop or guard him. It was one reflection of the eternal Bulls problem: Jordan so focused on what he could do that he lost sight of the team's goal in practicing. Journeyman Charles Davis stayed on the team much of one season because he gave Jordan trouble in practice, thus enabling the coaches to conduct some reasonably competitive scrimmages.

But the trouble between Jordan and Cartwright ran deeper than most observers realized. Much of it stemmed from the Bulls' acquisition of Cartwright in a trade for Charles Oakley, Jordan's last good friend on the team. Cartwright wasn't a great rebounder or shot blocker, but he was still a smart, effective center, and in the 1991 playoffs Jordan finally offered him some grudging credit. Adlai Stevenson, talking about journalists, had once said that they do not live by words alone, although sometimes they have to eat them. Jordan would chow down heavily on his words about Cartwright, but he wouldn't sit at the table alone. “You guys,” Jordan told reporters when asked whether he regretted the negative remarks he'd made about the trade for Cartwright, “didn't know either.”