The Jordan Rules (12 page)

That pride had driven him to his extraordinary accomplishments. Jordan takes being guarded by only one man as a personal insult. He torched Cleveland for 69 points in the 1989–90 season when the Cavaliers insisted on single-teaming him throughout the game. A reporter asked during the 1990–91 season who defensed him the best. “No one, really,” he said. “Everyone uses two or three players to guard me.”

But which player is the toughest? the questioner persisted.

“I don't really ever see one guy,” Jordan said again, “but I'd guess you'd have to say [Joe] Dumars, but one guy really never plays me.”

Jordan even got into a brief public debate with the Cavaliers after that 69-point game when several Cleveland players said it was no big trick to score a lot of points if you're taking 37 shots a game, as Jordan did.

“I wouldn't be shooting so many times,” Jordan shot back, “if I weren't open.”

Tales of his competitiveness are legendary around the Bulls. When former teammate Rod Higgins beat him in Ping-Pong when both were rookies in 1984, he went out and bought a Ping-Pong table and became the best player on the team. He took up golf in college and was playing to a reported 6 handicap by 1990. He'd play games of cards with the ferocity of Mike Tyson going for a knockout. He hated to lose and took it personally.

One unforgettable demonstration of his competitive drive was in 1988 against the Utah Jazz. Jordan stole a pass and got out ahead of the field to dunk over guard John Stockton to a thundering roar. Even on the road Jordan's dunks are cheered, especially in Western Conference cities where the Bulls make just one visit a year. Utah owner Larry Miller was sitting at center court in the first row and yelled to Jordan as he passed by, “Why don't you pick on someone your own size?”

A few sequences later, Jordan again made a steal, but this time was closing in on a basket guarded by 7-0 center Mel Turpin, Jordan sped up just a bit and appeared to grab hold of Turpin's shirt, boosting himself up and dunking over the powerful center.

Running back to his defensive end, Jordan turned to Miller and yelled, “He big enough for you?”

And so when Phil Jackson explained to Collins his theory about superstars and team play and sharing the ball, Collins just stared and said, “Why don't you go out and tell Michael that?”

“Okay,” Jackson said earnestly, “I will.”

So Jackson confronted Jordan, who still knew Jackson only as an odd-looking man who moved as if he had left the hanger in his suit, and told him about the Knicks and Frazier and what stars should do and how they had to help their teammates.

Jackson remembers Jordan saying “Thanks” politely and walking away. Jordan remembers rolling his eyes afterward and thinking Jackson was nuts. “It's a hell of a lot easier to make Earl Monroe look good than it is Brad Sellers,” he thought.

But now, in 1990, Jackson was in charge. Jordan was dubious, but he liked Jackson and had come to respect his knowledge of the game and the way he handled the team. “He's the coach,” Jordan would say after meeting with Jackson. “I'll follow his scheme, but I don't plan to change my style of play. I'm sure everything will be fine if we win, but if we start losing, I'm shooting.”

Hardly a vote of confidence. “I know what I would do if I were coach,” he added a few weeks into the season. “I'd determine our strengths and weaknesses and utilize them. And it's pretty clear what our strength is.”

The first week of October the players started drifting back to the Multiplex, the suburban health club where the team practiced. Jordan said he was getting in shape on the golf course, as always: “I'm walking instead of using an electric cart.” But Jordan had also been to Europe on a promotional trip for Nike, and now he was talking about playing there after his Bulls contract ended in 1996, perhaps for a team he'd co-own with Nike. Jordan was mobbed everywhere he went in Europe, and his agent assured him he could earn perhaps $10 million per year there. Then he could buy his own golf course.

The Bulls had finally assembled the team that would begin the 1990–91 season. Charles Davis and Ed Nealy were gone, as was Jeff Sanders (a 1990 first-round draft choice who was a flop); the Bulls gave him to Miami with the condition that if the lowly Heat kept him, they would have to pay his salary. He would last a week. The Bulls wanted to keep free-agent forward Scott Williams from North Carolina, in part because Jackson thought he was a better athlete than Sanders, with the ability to be a backup at both the forward and center positions; Sanders, whom the players had dubbed “Sleepy” and whose languid ways had made him an object of almost constant ridicule, hadn't even been an adequate backup power forward. Also, Jordan had wanted a North Carolina player on the team, and when Walter Davis wouldn't come, the Bulls agreed to take Williams, whom Krause had scouted extensively before the draft and homed in on as soon as the draft was over.

So the twelve spots were filled: Jordan, Pippen, Grant, Cartwright, and Paxson, the starting five, plus holdover reserves Armstrong, King, Perdue, Hodges, and new additions, Hopson, Levingston, and Williams.

Grant had worked out almost all summer and looked strong, having put on about twenty pounds of upper-body muscle. Cartwright and Paxson, after minor surgeries, were starting to work out again, as was Hopson. Levingston was back in town, finally ready to sign a contract. And King and Armstrong, rookies in 1989–90, were thinking that they might even become starters this season.

Scottie Pippen was thinking he'd just let the Bulls see how they would do without him.

He had left Hamburg, Arkansas, about ten miles from the Louisiana border, and was heading for Memphis in his $80,000 black Mercedes, to the office of his agent and friend, Jimmy Sexton. He had been staying with his mother, Ethel; though Pippen took quickly to the fast NBA life, with new cars and clothes and plenty of night-life, he most enjoyed returning to Hamburg for the summer. His father, Preston, who had been disabled by a major stroke and confined to a wheelchair after working for years in the local paper mills, had died the previous spring during the playoffs. For Pippen, the youngest of twelve children, who had been babieid by his parents and brothers and sisters, home was a place of sweet memories.

“We were poor,” Pippen recalls, “but I always had enough. I'd do baby-sitting for my sisters or wash dishes or run errands. It seemed like there was always something for me to do.”

Pippen's rise to the NBA is perhaps the most remarkable success story among the Bulls. Sure, Jordan didn't even make his high school varsity as a sophomore, and John Paxson would have to stay back a grade to make his high school team; Craig Hodges couldn't get a college scholarship in his own city, and Grant was still thinking about becoming a marine when he was in college. “Players from places like Sparta, Georgia, don't get to play in the NBA,” Grant figured at the time.

But neither do poor kids from Hamburg, Arkansas, especially those whose collegiate goal is to be the manager of the football team. “I just liked hanging around with the guys,” Pippen explained, not at all offended at picking up the dirty uniforms. “I really preferred that, because then I could hang out, but I wouldn't get hurt playing. I had the best job of anyone.

“You always idolize professional sports guys when you're small. But I just liked football a lot when I was young, and I still do. I didn't have the size to play the game, but I wanted to be around it as much as 1 could. I can't say I had any ambition to be a pro basketball player.”

College wasn't a high priority in the Pippen family; only one of Pippen's eleven brothers and sisters had gone. But the family urged Scottie to go; everyone wanted the best for the youngest. Money was scarce, and he wasn't exactly being offered scholarships. Pippen had finally made the varsity basketball team as a senior, although in Hamburg that wasn't a major achievement. His coach, Donald Wayne, recommended Pippen as a possible walk-on candidate, to Don Dyer, the basketball coach at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, just north of Little Rock. Wayne felt Pippen had potential, but he had accomplished so little that no scholarship offers were forthcoming, so Dyer helped Pippen obtain financial aid.

“I was glad about that,” said Pippen, “but I wasn't really thinking about playing basketball. I was going to college to be the manager of the football team.”

In high school, Pippen played point guard, which would prove vital to his development; like Julius Erving, he learned the game as a small man who then grew, and in college he would eventually play all five positions. Pippen was a barely six-foot-one-inch, 150-pound guard in high school, so when he grew about four inches after his freshman year in college, he became an offensive force. He was that rarest of players, one who could take down the rebound at one end of the court, dribble the length of the court, and then finish strong at the other end with a slam dunk. Only a few NBA players can consistently do it.

But those thoughts had hardly entered his mind when he prepared to attend the University of Central Arkansas. Pippen had never traveled much, and life was changing fast. He had grown into a terrific athlete almost overnight. He had the coordination and talent, but was small, so he started lifting weights and working on his conditioning. He improved his diet and grew those four inches after his freshman year, when he played in twenty games but averaged just 4 shots per game, 4.3 points, and 2.9 rebounds. When he came back to school as a sophomore, he was not just better, but better than everyone else.

“I was really a nobody my freshman year,” recalls Pippen, who would grow to a muscular 6-7 and 220 pounds by the 1990–91 season. He remained wispy-looking, his long, flat nose and angular Native Indian features providing the look of an intense warrior. “But then as a sophomore, I was better than any player on the team by far, including the juniors and seniors. I had been playing all the time that summer, so I never lost my coordination as I grew.”

When he was a sophomore, his averages suddenly increased to 18.5 points and 9.2 rebounds on 56 percent shooting, most of that from dunking. Although Pippen would become a proficient three-point shooter in college, his weakness even as an NBA All-Star was his shot. Perhaps because he was so explosive to the basket and dangerous when close by, scouting reports recommended giving Pippen the outside shot. But unlike Jordan, who turned himself into the best shooting guard in the NBA after coming out of college as a suspect shooter, Pippen had a shooting style, with a floppy elbow and loose wrist, that would limit development. Still, he had enough talent to dominate his conference, where he became an NAIA all-American as a junior, when he averaged 19.8 points and 9.2 rebounds, and then again as senior, when he averaged 23.6 points and 10 rebounds.

The NBA pretty much assumes that if you're a good player, good enough to play professional basketball, somebody has discovered you by the end of your high school career and you've gone to a major college. Central Arkansas didn't fit that category, and NBA scouts always looked with suspicion at players with great statistics against inferior competition. There wasn't much interest in Pippen. Not that he expected much; he had become something of a local celebrity in college and was pretty happy with that. But Marty Blake, the director of collegiate scouting for the NBA, checked up on Pippen and sent out a report suggesting he had potential to be a good player. The Bulls listened.

Krause sent his top assistant, Billy McKinney, to check Pippen out, and McKinney discovered in Pippen the characteristics Krause loved in players: long arms, big hands, quickness, and jumping ability. But McKinney, who would later take a brief stint as general manager of the expansion Minnesota Timberwolves, said he couldn't tell how good Pippen was because the competition was so bad. Maybe he was a second-round pick. Krause thought he might have a diamond in the rough and figured he'd fool everyone, but Pippen's stock began to soar after impressive performances against some of the nation's best players in postseason all-star games, which are attended by executives from every NBA team. Krause would eventually grow desperate in his bid to snare Pippen and would ask his agent, Jimmy Sexton, to take Pippen to Hawaii for a few weeks before the draft—the Bulls would pay all his expenses—which could make other teams think Pippen irresponsible so they wouldn't draft him. “Thanks, Jerry, but we'll stay here,” Sexton told him.

A player's value rises and falls dramatically in those all-star games, and a classic Krause tale would emerge from one such gathering: In 1988, Krause had his eye on Dan Majerle, a rugged kid from small Central Michigan University, who would eventually make the Olympic team and become a first-round draft choice of the Phoenix Suns. Krause went to Majerle before the first of those games and asked him to pretend he was injured.

“Then we could get you with our third-round pick,” said Krause.

Majerle looked at Krause as if he were nuts.

“I think I might make a little more money if I were a first-round pick, Mr. Krause,” Majerle said.

Krause had not tried the same tactic with Pippen, though the proposed trip to Hawaii was close. The Bulls had the eighth and tenth picks in that draft, but Krause knew Pippen would not last until No. 8 because Sacramento, which had pick No. 6, was ready to grab him. So when Georgetown's Reggie Williams was picked fourth by the Los Angeles Clippers, Krause worked a deal with Seattle, which had the fifth pick and had wanted Williams. The deal was an exchange of draft choices (Seattle got Chicago's No. 8, plus its second-round pick in 1988 or '89 and the option to exchange first-round picks in 1989). Krause had Pippen, and the Executive of the Year award, as he also came up with Grant a few picks later.

Pippen had some money coming his way for the first time in his life, although not the ability to shake his insecurity about what he had become. He was the fifth pick in the draft, behind big-time stars like David Robinson, Armon Gilliam, Williams, and Dennis Hopson. After him came all-Americans from major universities like North Carolina's Kenny Smith and UCLA's Reggie Miller.