The Jordan Rules (8 page)

Fear of public criticism controlled many of Jordan's actions. When teammates once suggested he come out publicly against then-coach Doug Collins, who was splitting the team in two with his incessant criticism of certain players, Jordan refused. “I'm not getting into one of those things like Magic did,” he said, recalling the damage to Magic Johnson's image and endorsement potential when he orchestrated the firing of Lakers coach Paul Westhead. Westhead was fired eleven games into the 1981–82 season (after guiding the team to the NBA title in the 1979–80 season) when the team rebelled against his playing style and Johnson spoke up. Jordan agreed with his teammates about Collins, but he was unwilling to be that kind of lightning rod.

But image aside, Jordan simply was not going to stand for making less than Sam Perkins. And the full weight of the public's support would be on Jordan's side, the Bulls well knew. The team had to think about Scottie Pippen as well; Pippen had made the All-Star team in 1990, but was earning only $765,000 in 1990–91 under his first contract. So the Bulls backed away from Perkins, which didn't concern Jordan too much, for he was sure Walter Davis would accept the Bulls' offer.

The Bulls had identified two principal weaknesses after the 1990 playoff loss to Detroit. They needed more frontcourt strength, preferably a tough guy. They had had a chance to get Rick Mahorn from Minnesota the summer before when Detroit lost him in the expansion pool, but they were concerned about his back. With Krause reluctant to give up the first-round draft choices Minnesota wanted, a deal wasn't made, even though Jackson had interceded with Timberwolves GM Billy McKinney, who had left the Bulls and was not on speaking terms with Krause.

The Bulls also needed a scorer off the bench to counter Detroit's strength. The Bulls' starting five usually played well against Detroit's starters, but Chicago couldn't compete with Detroit backups like Vinnie Johnson, Mark Aguirre, and John Salley. Davis was a big-time scorer, a former All-Star, and a player whom the coaches felt answered that need.

Meanwhile, the Bulls also wanted to add a big guard. All their guards other than Jordan were 6-2 or under—that's why they rejected the overtures of Detroit free agent Vinnie Johnson—and a big guard playing alongside Jordan would give Detroit matchup problems the way Milwaukee did with Jay Humphries, Alvin Robertson, and Ricky Pierce. The Bucks were clearly inferior to the Pistons, but always did better against them than the Bulls did. There was ample sentiment for acquiring Ainge, the former Boston Celtics star who'd been shipped off to Sacramento and was now being offered around as the Kings tried to rebuild under Dick Motta. It was not going to be easy for the Bulls, given the relationship between Motta and Krause. But few teams really liked dealing with Krause, who had developed a reputation around the league as a bargainer who often demanded something for nothing.

That was never clearer than before the 1990 draft when Krause tried to get Atlanta's first second-round pick, No. 36 in the draft. The Hawks weren't anxious to add rookies to their team, so they were willing to deal the pick. “What will you give me?” asked Hawks president Stan Kasten.

“Nothing,” replied Krause.

“Then why should I give you the pick?” responded Kasten.

“Because you can get the same guy with your second pick [No. 41], and then you won't have to pay him as much,” explained Krause. The Hawks were not impressed by the logic.

The search for that big guard ended with the acquisition of Dennis Hopson of New Jersey. Hopson was the third player selected in the 1987 draft, two places ahead of Pippen. But he had been a bust with the lowly Nets, shooting poorly and eventually getting into several disputes with Bill Fitch when the former coach of the Cavaliers, Celtics, and Rockets took over the Nets in 1989. Fitch had coached Phil Jackson when Jackson was at the University of North Dakota, and he assured Jackson that Hopson had talent that might develop in the right atmosphere. The feeling in New Jersey was that there was too much pressure on Hopson to produce with a bad team and that he could help a good one. But Jordan had his doubts.

“When you play a guy, you know,” said Jordan. “You can see it in his eyes. He's scared. He's got no heart.” Later, Jordan would regret not speaking up against Hopson. “Especially when I heard he needed knee surgery (the summer before joining the Bulls),” said Jordan. “Nobody told me that. If I had spoken up, he wouldn't have been here.”

But when the Bulls began talking to Hopson, the season had ended and Jordan was just anxious to get a big guard and get to the golf course. So when the Bulls couldn't fit Hopson in under their salary cap because the new TV money wouldn't increase the salary cap until August 1, Jordan agreed to defer $450,000 of his $2.95 million 1990–91 salary. There was one condition: The Bulls had to try to sign Davis. Done, said Krause.

Jordan had been talking to Davis regularly. He would become a free agent and select his team if he desired. But Reinsdorf refuses to make a player an offer and allow him to shop around; his practice is to tell a player to get his best offer—“Find out what your market is”—and then come in to talk. Reinsdorf told Jordan to bring Davis in and they'd make a deal. But Jordan couldn't deliver. Davis's wife had concerns about Chicago; the family was comfortable in Denver and the kids liked their schools. “She says there's too many gangsters in Chicago and she's not moving there,” Davis told Jordan.

Jordan was stunned. “Was she watching too many TV shows?” he wondered.

The deal Davis signed with Denver paid him less than the $1.3 million a year for two years that Chicago was willing to pay. Davis had wanted to continue to play for Denver coach Doug Moe, and Jordan knew that was important because Moe had played at North Carolina and the loyalties remained strong. But when Moe was fired and replaced by Paul Westhead, Davis found himself unhappily trying to figure out how to keep his thirty-five-year-old legs going in Westhead's idiosyncratic running system. Davis would later tell Jordan how much he regretted his decision.

“I'm just glad it was Michael who tried to get him,” Reinsdorf said. He knew the kind of fallout there'd be if Jordan saw this one as another opportunity screwed up by Krause.

In northwest Indiana, near a small town called La Porte, Craig Hodges had purchased a farm. Hodges was a city kid, having grown up in the projects in Chicago Heights, a suburban ghetto community about forty miles south of Chicago. Hodges was raised in what he called an extended family. “I called my grandma and grandpa ‘Mom' and ‘Dad,' and I had lots of uncles and aunts around who were like brothers and sisters.” All lived within a few blocks of one another. The young Hodges says he was a gym rat at four, even though he didn't know it, because his grandfather ran the local park. And although Hodges became a good basketball player, he was not highly recruited. He eventually won a scholarship at Long Beach State University from coach Tex Winter, who had been at Northwestern and had heard of Hodges. Hodges was 6-2 and an excellent shooter who would find a place in the NBA as a specialist, mostly coming in to hit the three-point shot. But he also was a player teams liked to have around, upbeat and full of encouragement for younger players, active in the community and always the first to accommodate the team when it needed speakers at high schools. He'd even started his own youth organization to help teenagers with their problems; it got little publicity, which wasn't unusual for any venture that didn't involve Michael Jordan. “My idea was to stay on course and get an education,” said Hodges, who had majored in Afro-American history in college with the full intention of becoming a history teacher. “I felt I had to use basketball instead of letting it use me.”

Unlike most of his teammates and colleagues around the NBA, Hodges looked at basketball as a transitional phase in life, which was why he had begun working with black entrepreneurs in hopes of landing contracts, some for NBA merchandise. “Change in our community must come through economics,” said Hodges, who had strong beliefs about black development. “We need businesses to give us jobs.” He was viewed with alarm by some players for his association with radical black militant groups and his devotion to the Muslim religion and the Koran, which he often quoted to his teammates. But Hodges realized it was a white world he worked in, even if most of the workers were black, and he kept his views shielded from management and the general public.

Hodges had tried to interest Jordan in going into the shoe business for himself when his first Nike contract expired after the 1987–88 season. “Just think of the jobs and contracts you can provide for your people,” Hodges told Jordan. But Jordan wasn't interested, and he always wondered later whether Hodges had anything to do with the Operation PUSH boycott of Nike products, which proved embarrassing to Jordan in the summer of 1990. Here he was, the hero of every black ghetto kid at a time when perhaps the most prominent black citizens' organization in the nation—at least in the Midwest—was accusing Nike of profiting from the black community and giving little back.

And it was Hodges who was among the strongest backers of an additional pension program for the players that went into effect late in the summer of 1990. The plan was to provide money for players in the years after they retired until their pension plan went into effect at age forty-five. It sounded good, but it also meant that each team would have about $1.5 million less under the salary cap to sign players now. The concept upset the players' agents, who earned 4 percent commission on contracts and clearly preferred a bigger cap; with more money under the cap, the teams presumably could renegotiate some deals, like Jordan's. One of the leaders of the opposition was Jordan's agent, David Falk, who had enlisted Jordan's support. Publicly, it should have been an embarrassing position for Jordan to take, seeking a raise at the expense of players who were less fortunate. But the issues became muddied by charges and countercharges and never became clear publicly. Late in the summer, Hodges got a message to call Falk. “You know, Michael is against this proposal,” Falk told Hodges, the Bulls' player representative, who would cast the team's vote at the upcoming union meeting. “He'd really like to see it rejected.” Hodges heard the underlying warning—go against Michael and you risk your position on the team—but he believed the issue was more important than his own security. “If Michael's got a problem, tell him to call me,” Hodges told Falk. Jordan never did, and Hodges joined in a near-unanimous vote in support of the proposal. As Hodges walked out of the meeting, smiling broadly if a little nervously, he went up to a friend and joked, “You know he's going to have me traded now.”

And, frankly, Hodges wouldn't have minded, even if it meant leaving home again. It seemed as if he'd had his chance and never would again. Late in the 1988–89 season, Hodges's first with the Bulls, Doug Collins had inserted Hodges into the starting lineup and shifted Jordan to point guard, a move that helped the Bulls sweep a four-game Western Conference road trip for the first time in their history. Jordan then played perhaps the best series of games in his career, recording seven straight triple doubles—at least 10 points, rebounds, and assists—as the Bulls won ten of eleven games. One of those wins was over Golden State, and Hodges recalls Don Nelson, the Warriors coach, generally regarded as the best strategist in the NBA, telling him, “Well, they finally figured it out there. I would have been playing him at point guard from the day he showed up as a rookie.”

Putting Jordan in the middle of the floor as point guard instead of to the side as a shooting guard made it more difficult to double-team him effectively. But Jordan was assured by Collins the move was only temporary, and after the season he told the team he preferred to return to his shooting guard role. Why? The official reasons were that he would get too tired playing point guard and that he'd have trouble defending against the smaller, quicker point guards and that, too, would wear him out. But the fact was that Jordan continued to have grave doubts about his teammates' ability to score, saying, “How am I supposed to be the principal ball deliverer and the main scorer?” Phil Jackson would later reject his assistants' suggestion to move Jordan to point guard, arguing that Jordan's passing was not consistently good enough and that giving Jordan the ball even more would reduce the chances of dividing up the scoring load, one of Jackson's main goals.

Hodges, meanwhile, suffered an ankle injury in that game against Golden State in March 1988 after averaging 18 points, almost double his career average, and shooting 22 for 31 from three-point range in his previous six games. He would miss the rest of the regular season, be hampered in the playoffs, and never truly regain his health the next season. With Hodges still hobbling at the start of training camp in 1989, John Paxson moved in as starting point guard, and Hodges went on to have the poorest season of his career.

The team never truly believed there was anything wrong with Hodges. Their reports merely noted some soft-tissue buildup and said that Hodges would be able to play through it. The Bulls were also angry because Hodges had been a free agent after the 1988–89 season and, fearing they might lose him to Portland (which was prepared to make an offer), they gave him a four-year, $2.6 million contract, and now he couldn't play effectively. Hodges kept saying something was wrong, but he wasn't getting much response from the team, which had a reputation for such things (such as downplaying the extent of Scottie Pippen's back problems in 1987–88 until after the season, when it was finally determined he needed disc surgery).

With the Davis negotiations dead, the team called Hodges and told him to see the team doctor so they could determine once and for all what his status was. It was mid-July and Hodges was preparing to go to a golf school for a week and then on a cruise with his family, but the Bulls wanted to try to package Hodges for the shooter or rebounder they were seeking.