Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success (17 page)

By the end of it, Wally and Dennis were so tight we often took Wally on road trips to be Dennis’s buddy. The next year, during a break in the championship finals in Utah, Dennis said he was tired of boring Salt Lake City and rented a jet for them to go to Vegas. What Dennis didn’t tell him was that he’d planned this jaunt as a birthday party for Wally and had invited a bunch of his friends, including actress Carmen Electra, singer-songwriter Eddie Vedder, and hockey legend Chris Chelios. “It was the night of my life,” says Wally.

Wally, who’s now head athletic trainer for the Atlanta Hawks, understood Dennis immediately. Yes, he’s messed up and insecure, Wally says, but he’s also “one of the nicest human beings you will ever meet.” Dennis’s greatest achievement, in Wally’s view, was his ability to create the “perfect scenario for a professional athlete.” “He’s the only pro athlete that people
expected
to go out and party with strippers,” he says. “Joe Namath did it and was chastised in New York, and Michael Jordan got caught gambling on a golf course, and everybody was hell-bent for leather. But with Dennis, moral ineptitude was part of his deal, and he created this persona that made people say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s perfectly normal.’ It’s genius when you think about it.”

That may be true, but I think the secret of Dennis’s appeal was the playful way he bucked the system. This made him an inspirational model for people, young and old, who felt themselves to be on the outskirts of society. I got many letters from special-education teachers who told me that their students who had ADHD loved Dennis because he was successful in life despite his debilitating condition. To them, he was a true champion.

—

What a strange year! Even though we were missing several of our stars for part of the season, we managed to finish with a 69-13 record, tying the 1971–72 Lakers for the second-best record ever for an NBA team. But Dennis and Toni were still recovering from injuries, and the team lacked the cohesiveness we’d enjoyed earlier in the year. One positive addition: In the final weeks of the season, we picked up six-eleven forward/center Brian Williams, aka Bison Dele, to give us more muscle inside. Williams played a key role backing up Luc and Dennis throughout the playoffs.

The first two rounds were uneventful. We swept Washington 3–0, and pushed past Atlanta in five games after losing home-court advantage in game 2, the first time any team had beaten us at home during the playoffs in two years.

The next round—the Eastern Conference finals against the Miami Heat—turned out to be a clash of two radically different basketball cultures. The team had been taken over by Pat Riley during the 1995–96 season and, with Alonzo Mourning at center and Tim Hardaway at point guard, had the makings of a classic Riley team. Much has been made of my rivalry with Pat over the years, particularly in the New York tabloids. But the main difference between us is philosophical, not personal. Riley has had a great deal of success with his bruising, old-school approach to the game. Like Riley’s Knicks, the Heat were physical, aggressive, and primed to foul you on every play as long as they could get away with it. Our approach, on the other hand, was freer and more open. We played intense defense but specialized in stealing the ball, cutting off passing lanes, and pressuring ball handlers into making mistakes.

At first it looked like it was going to be a walkover. We breezed past Miami in the first game, 84–77, led by Jordan, who had a spectacular 37-point, 9-rebound performance. A key factor in the game was the defensive shift we made at halftime, putting Harper on Hardaway and Michael on three-point specialist Voshon Lenard. Next we wrestled our way to a 75–68 victory in game 2, the lowest-scoring playoff game in NBA history. In game 3 we devised a way to counter Miami’s strong-arm defense by spreading out the triangle offense, making it difficult for the Heat to clog up the lane. And we danced to a 98–74 win.

During an off day, Michael decided to play forty-six holes of golf, and he had one of his worst starts ever in game 4, hitting only 2 of 21 shots from the field, as Miami glided to a 21-point lead. Michael nearly put us over the top in the fourth quarter, though, scoring 20 of our 23 points, but we ran out of time and lost, 87–80.

The most important moment came late in the third quarter when Mourning slammed Scottie and gave him a knot on his forehead as big as a golf ball. Michael was enraged and declared that game 5 was going to be a personal grudge match for him. “When my teammate got a knot on his head,” he said, “I got a knot on my head.”

Michael started making Miami pay right away in game 5, scoring 15 points in the first quarter. But the rest of the team had to step up when Scottie sprained his foot in the first quarter after another collision with Mourning and was out for the duration. Toni, who had struggled early in the series, replaced Scottie and hit 6 points in the first quarter to widen the Bulls’ lead. I was particularly pleased by the reserves, who outscored Miami’s bench, 33–12, led by Brian Williams, who put down 10 points, and Jud Buechler, who made some key stops on defense. The final score: Bulls 100, Heat 87.

Riley was humbled by the loss. “Dynasties get better as they get older,” he said, adding that he thought the Bulls were “the greatest team in the history of the game since the Celtics, when they won 11 in 13 years.” This was the fourth time one of his teams had been knocked out of the playoffs by the Jordan-led Bulls. “We all have the misfortune of being born at the same time as Michael Jordan,” he added.

—

The Utah Jazz weren’t convinced. This was the team’s first trip to the championship finals, but the Jazz had some potent weapons: power forward Karl Malone, who had beaten out Jordan for the MVP award that year, and point guard John Stockton, one of the craftiest ball handlers in the game. The Jazz also had a wily outside shooter, Jeff Hornacek, who’d averaged 14.5 points per game that year. Our biggest concern was the Stockton and Malone trademark screen-roll, which had often bedeviled our team in the past. But I also wanted to contain Malone’s inside game. Karl’s nickname was “the Mailman” because he supposedly always delivered. He was big, aggressive, and difficult to manage under the boards, even for Rodman. So I put Luc Longley on him early in the series, hoping that he could slow him down with his size.

In game 1, however, it wasn’t Malone’s drive that decided the game but his restless mind. With the score tied 82–82 and 9.2 seconds to go, Malone was fouled as he battled for a loose ball under the basket. As he went to the line, Scottie whispered in his ear, “The Mailman doesn’t deliver on Sundays.” Karl missed the first shot. Clearly rattled, Karl bounced his second attempt off the rim into Jordan’s hands. I expected the Jazz to double-team Michael on the last play, but instead they let forward Byron Russell go one on one against him, not a good idea. Jordan faked out Russell and put in a jumper to win the game, 84–82.

We breezed past the Jazz in game 2, but Utah exploded when it returned home for game 3, led by Malone’s 37-point, 10-rebound performance. His secret? He revealed that he took the scenic route to the stadium through the mountains on his Harley. The next game, I gave Rodman his first chance during the series to shut down the Malone machine. In true form, Dennis poked fun at Malone before the game, saying he was planning “to go rent a bike and ride in the hills and try to find God or somebody.” But it didn’t do much good. Malone scored 23 points, pulled down 10 rebounds, and made two key free throws with eighteen seconds to go. At which point Pippen said, “I guess the Mailman does deliver on Sundays here.” Later we learned that our equipment manager had mistakenly served our players Gaterlode, a high-carbohydrate drink, instead of Gatorade throughout the game, which explained why the team was so sluggish in the closing minutes. Each of the players, it was estimated, had ingested the equivalent of about twenty baked potatoes.

The next game involved one of the most inspiring acts of perseverance that I’ve ever witnessed. The morning of game 5, with the series tied 2–2, Michael woke up with what appeared to be a stomach virus but later turned out to be food poisoning. It was so debilitating that he skipped the shootaround that morning and spent most of the day in bed. We had seen Michael play through all kinds of ailments before, but this was the most disturbing. “I’ve played many seasons with Michael, and I’ve never seen him as sick,” said Scottie. “It was to the point where I didn’t think he was going to be able to put his uniform on.”

Michael was severely dehydrated and he looked as if he might pass out at any moment, but he persisted, scoring 38 points on 13-for-27 shooting, including the game-winning three-pointer with twenty-five seconds left. This was a remarkable feat, but what most people don’t understand about this game was that it couldn’t have happened without a remarkable team effort. Scottie masterfully orchestrated the coverage to make sure Michael didn’t have to worry about defense and could focus whatever energy he could muster on creating shots. But Scottie didn’t even mention that after the game. “The effort that he came out and gave us was just incredible,” he said of Michael’s performance. “The leadership. He just kept everybody patient and made big shot after big shot. . . . He’s the MVP in my eyes.”

The next game, back in Chicago, was another struggle. We fell back early and were behind most of the game, but the team refused to quit. Scottie and Michael both had exceptional games, but this time it was the reserves that made some of the most inspiring plays: Jud Buechler nailing a critical three-pointer at the close of the third period. Toni making a dazzling spinning layup on Hornacek while hobbling around on a sore foot. Brian Williams standing up to Malone and pushing him off his spots. The most beautiful moment, however, was the shot Steve Kerr, who had been struggling all series, took to end the game.

The Jazz were leading by 9 points early in the fourth period, but with eleven seconds left, the scored was tied, 86–86, and the ball was in Michael’s hands. The Jazz were determined not to make the same mistake they had in game 1. So as Michael dribbled up the left side against Byron Russell, Stockton moved over to double-team him, leaving Kerr open at the top of the key. At first Michael tried to split the defenders, but as soon as he went into the air, he realized it wasn’t going to work. “It was unbelievable how he kept hanging in the air,” Hornacek said later. “Stockton and Byron Russell were on him and I was on Kukoc, and Kukoc cut to the basket, so I had to go with him. I couldn’t give him a layup. And Michael looked at Toni forever, Michael just hanging there, and then somehow he switched and threw it out to Steve.”

Kerr squared up just beyond the free-throw line and shot a picture-perfect jumper to break the tie, and Kukoc made a final dunk to win the game—and the championship.

This had been a grueling journey filled with injuries, suspensions, and other challenges. But the exquisite harmony—and resilience—of the team during the closing minutes made it all worthwhile. Afterward, Michael, who scored 39 points and was named the finals MVP, said he wanted to split it with Scottie. “I’ll take the trophy,” he said, “but I’m going to give Scottie the car. He deserves it as much as I did.”

Michael used the postgame press conference to put pressure on Jerry Reinsdorf, who had been noncommittal with the media, to bring everybody back for another run next season. My one-year contract was expiring, and several teams had already expressed interest. In addition, Scottie was heading into the final year of his contract, and there were rumors that he might be traded. To up the ante, Michael, whose contract was also running out, said he wouldn’t return if Pippen and I weren’t on board.

Three days later tens of thousands of fans crowded into Grant Park to celebrate our victory. The highlight was Kerr’s tongue-in-cheek account of how his famous shot “actually” happened.

“When we called time-out with twenty-five seconds to go,” he recalled, “we went into the huddle and Phil said, ‘Michael, I want you to take the last shot,’ and Michael said, ‘You know, Phil, I don’t feel comfortable in these situations. So maybe we ought to go in another direction.’ Then Scottie said, ‘You know, Phil, Michael said in his commercial that he’s been asked to do this twenty-six times and he’s failed. So why don’t we go to Steve.’

“So I thought to myself, ‘I guess I’ve got to bail Michael out again. I’ve been carrying him all year, so what’s one more time?’ Anyway, the shot went in, and that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

Michael and Scottie were falling over laughing, and the crowd loved it. But as I looked around the audience, I noticed there was one person sitting right behind Kerr who didn’t even crack a smile. That person was Jerry Krause.

THE LAST DANCE

When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.

TULI KUPFERBERG

W
hen I was with the Knicks, Dave DeBusschere taught me an important lesson. In 1971–72 the Knicks brought in Jerry Lucas to back up Willis Reed, who had been struggling with injuries. Jerry was a versatile six-eight forward/center, a great rebounder, and an adept passer with a nice outside shot. Dave didn’t have a high opinion of Jerry before he arrived. He thought he was an oddball egoist who seemed more concerned about bolstering his scoring and rebounding averages during games than about winning. But when Lucas joined the Knicks, Dave figured out a way to work with him. When I asked him how he could switch so quickly, he replied, “I’m not going to let my personal feelings get in the way of us reaching our team goal.”

For the last two years of my tenure with the Bulls, that’s how I felt about Jerry Krause. Though Jerry and I had our differences, I respected his basketball intelligence and enjoyed working with him on building the Bulls’ championship teams. But our relationship had been slowly going south since our disagreement over Johnny Bach three years earlier. Moreover, the negotiations with him over my contract had deteriorated into a cool standoff during the 1996–97 season. As with most relationships, both of us contributed to the collapse. I was driven by the need to protect the team’s privacy and autonomy at all costs, while Jerry was desperately trying to regain control of the organization. This kind of conflict is not unusual in the sports world, but unfortunately for us, our differences were being played out on a large public stage.

Looking back, I think my struggle with Jerry taught me things about myself that I couldn’t have learned any other way. The Dalai Lama calls it “the enemy’s gift.” From a Buddhist perspective, battling with enemies can help you develop greater compassion for and tolerance of others. “In order to practice sincerely and to develop patience,” he says, “you need someone who willfully hurts you. Thus, these people give us real opportunities to practice these things. They are testing our inner strength in a way that even our guru cannot.”

I wouldn’t exactly call Jerry my “enemy.” But our conflict certainly tested my inner strength. Though Jerry and I agreed on most basketball-related issues, we had opposing views on how to manage people. I tried to be as open and transparent as possible; Jerry tended to be closed and secretive. To a certain degree, he was a victim of the system; it’s hard to make good deals in the NBA without being cautious about sharing information. But Jerry wasn’t a very skilled communicator, so when he talked to the players, he often came off as inauthentic or, worse, duplicitous. I felt compassion for Jerry because I knew at heart he wasn’t the coldhearted Machiavellian the media portrayed him to be. He just wanted to show the world that he could build a championship team without relying on Michael Jordan, and he was eager to make that happen.

During the middle of the 1996–97 season, Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf proposed that Krause and my agent, Todd Musburger, work out the basic terms of a new contract for me. We asked for an increase that would make my salary comparable to what other top coaches, such as Pat Riley and Chuck Daly, were making at the time. But despite my record, Krause had a hard time seeing me at that level, and the negotiations fell apart. To his credit, Jerry Reinsdorf realized that it wasn’t fair for me to have to go through the playoffs—the time when most coaching positions are filled—not knowing whether I’d have a job the following season. So he agreed to let other organizations contact me, and soon I had interest from several other teams, including Orlando.

But I wasn’t ready to give up on the Bulls. Shortly after the playoffs, Reinsdorf flew to Montana, and we worked out a one-year deal that worked for both of us. He wanted to bring everyone back to try to win one more ring. Later that summer he also hammered out one-year deals with Jordan (for $33 million) and Rodman ($4.5 million, plus incentives for up to $10 million), pushing the players’ payroll (minus Scottie) up to $59 million for the 1997–98 season. Now the only question mark that remained was Pippen.

Scottie wasn’t having a good summer. He had injured his foot during the playoffs and required surgery, which would put him out of action for two to three months. He was also in the final year of his seven-year contract and was getting increasingly resentful of the low salary he was being paid relative to other players in the league. In 1991 Scottie had signed a five-year extension to his contract for $18 million, which had seemed like a good deal at the time. However, since then wages had skyrocketed in the NBA; and now there were more than a hundred players making more than Scottie, including five members of his own team. So even though many considered him to be the best player in the NBA not named Jordan, he would have to wait another year, until his contract ran out, to cash in on his performance. In the meantime, there was still an outside chance that he might be traded.

To make matters worse, Krause had threatened to take legal action against Scottie if he played in his annual summer charity game and risked further damage to his foot. This infuriated Scottie, who said he felt that Krause was treating him as if he were his personal property. Krause asked me to intervene with Scottie, but I was reluctant to aggravate the situation. So Scottie went ahead with the charity game and, to get back at Krause, postponed surgery until the start of training camp.

I wasn’t happy with this turn of events. Nor was Michael. We had both stood up for Scottie over the summer, but by delaying surgery he was putting the whole season in jeopardy. Scottie did so much to help the team gel, it was hard to imagine getting very far without him for as much as half of the regular season while he was recovering.

During our annual media day before the start of the season, Krause decided to talk to reporters and made the faux pas of his life. I presumed the reason Jerry came to the sessions was to clarify for reporters that my leave-taking was a mutual decision between him and me. In the process, however, he said that “players and coaches don’t win championships; organizations do.” The next day he tried to correct the mistake, saying that what he’d meant to say was that “players and coaches
alone
don’t win championships,” but the damage had already been done. Michael in particular was outraged by Jerry’s dismissive remark and turned it into a rallying cry for the team throughout the season.

Later that day Krause asked me to come to his office and told me, “I don’t care if you win eighty-two games. This is your last year.” There it was. When Reinsdorf had visited me in Montana, we had talked about this being my last season, but it wasn’t until Krause said those words that I really believed it. It was disturbing at first, but after I’d given it some thought, it felt incredibly liberating. At least now I had some clarity.

—

I dubbed the season “the Last Dance” because that’s what it felt like. No matter what happened, most of the players whose contracts were up—including Michael, Scottie, Dennis, Luc, Steve, and Jud—wouldn’t be wearing a Bulls uniform the next year. The finality of it gave the season a certain resonance that bonded the team closely together. It felt as if we were on a sacred mission, driven by a force that went beyond fame, glory, and all the other spoils of victory. We were doing this one for the pure joy of playing together one more time. It felt magical.

That’s not to say it was easy. The team had gotten another year older. Rodman was thirty-seven; Pippen, thirty-three; and Michael and Harper would be turning thirty-five and thirty-four, respectively, during the year. We needed to husband our energy during the regular season so we would be in good shape when the playoffs rolled around. But that was going to be difficult without Scottie on the floor. We needed to figure out a way to manage until he returned.

Without Pippen to direct the action, the team was having a difficult time finding its rhythm and got off to a rugged start. Our big problem was finishing close games, which used to be our specialty. The low point came in Seattle at the end of November when we lost, 91–90, to the SuperSonics and dropped to eighth place in the Eastern Conference with an 8-6 record. Our opponents were starting to smell blood.

During our trip to Seattle Scottie’s anger boiled over. He told reporters that he was so fed up with management that he no longer wanted to play for the Bulls. After the game he got drunk on the bus to the airport and launched into an ugly tirade against Krause, who was sitting up front. I tried to contain Scottie’s outburst by pointing to the beer bottle in my hand and indicating that he’d had too much to drink.

When we returned to Chicago, I hooked Scottie up with our team psychologist to help him deal with his anger. I still worried, though, about his frame of mind. On Thanksgiving he called me late at night to discuss his situation. He told me he was dead serious about being traded, and I tried to get him to think about the problem from a different angle. I was concerned that if he pushed too hard with his demand at that moment, he might get blackballed in the league as a troublemaker and jeopardize his chances of signing with one of the top teams the following season. As far as I could tell, the best move for Scottie careerwise was to finish out the season with the Bulls. I advised him not to let his anger with management poison his desire to come back and help lead the team to a sixth championship. He answered that he didn’t want to give management a chance to break his heart.

I could tell this was going to take time. In the end I decided that the best strategy was to have the players bring Scottie around, just as they had done after his 1.8-second meltdown four years earlier. I asked Harper, Scottie’s best friend on the team, to let him know how much his teammates needed his help. I also nixed the idea of having Scottie travel with the team to prevent another embarrassing confrontation between him and Krause on the road. What’s more, Scottie’s rehab was progressing more slowly than expected because his muscles had atrophied so much. His vertical leap was down from thirty inches to seventeen inches in mid-December, which meant that it would take another month for him to return to form. Which was fine. I figured that the more time Scottie spent working out with his teammates, the more likely he would get in touch with the joy he had always felt playing the game. By late December I could see that he was softening to the idea of coming back to the Bulls.

In the meantime, the team was trying to right itself. In mid-December we were 15-9, after beating the Lakers at home, 104–83, but the team still hadn’t gelled and was relying too heavily on Michael. During a film session I made what I intended as a joke after watching a clip of Luc messing up a play. “Everybody makes mistakes,” I said. “And I made one coming back here with this team this year.” At which point Michael said, “Me too,” in a somber tone. Shortly after that, Luc, who was obviously hurt by our comments, said, “It’s easy to be a critic.” When Tex jumped on him and accused him of having a bad attitude, Luc said, “I wasn’t talking about the coaching staff. Michael is the one being critical.” To which Michael replied, “The only thing that upsets me is when we lose. I think you should resolve to make yourself better next time. Change.”

The room fell silent. “It’s over,” Michael added. “We’re not going to lose anymore.”

Actually, he wasn’t far off. Right after that, we began to rebound and went on a 9-2 run. One move that made a big difference was turning Toni Kukoc into a starter when we played teams with big forwards. This allowed him to act as a third guard, much like Pippen did, and take advantage of his creative ball-handling skills. Toni was a maverick, always looking for the play no one else could imagine. Sometimes this worked brilliantly. However, Toni didn’t have the mental toughness or physical ability to navigate the rugged NBA eighty-two-game schedule as the primary scorer or ball handler. And without Toni to anchor it, our bench was much weaker.

The big surprise was Rodman. He had struggled in 1996–97, and I worried that he might be losing interest in the game again. But during Scottie’s rehab, we asked him to step up and give the team an energy boost, and he suddenly started playing MVP-level basketball on both ends of the court.

Michael likes to tell the story of how he and Dennis bonded during this period. The key was their mutual love of cigars. “When Scottie got hurt, that left me and Dennis as leaders of the team,” recalls Michael. “So I went to Dennis and said, ‘Look, I know your antics. I know you like getting technicals. I know the image you try to project. But I need you, man, to stay in the game. I don’t need you to get kicked out. Scottie is not here. That means you’re going to have to lead from upfront, as opposed to being behind Scottie and me.’” For the most part Dennis lived up to the challenge. Then during one game, he got angry and was thrown out. “Now I’m steaming,” says Jordan. “I’m pissed because we had this conversation and he left me hanging. That night he came knocking at my hotel room door and asked for a cigar. In the whole time we’d been together, he’d never done that. But he knew he had let me down. And that was his way of saying, ‘I’m sorry.’”

—

Scottie returned to the lineup on January 10 against the Golden State Warriors, and the team transformed overnight. It was like watching a great conductor return after a leave of absence. All of a sudden, everyone knew what notes to play and how to harmonize. From that point on, we went on a 38-9 run and tied the Utah Jazz for the best record in the league, 62-20.

As the regular season wound down, I thought it was important for us to have some closure as a team. This was the end of an era, and I wanted us to take some time to acknowledge our accomplishments and the strength of our connection. My wife, June, suggested that we perform a ritual that she had used with children whose parents had died in the hospice program where she worked. So I scheduled a special team meeting before the start of the playoffs and asked everyone to write a short paragraph about what the season and our team had meant to them.