The Book of Basketball (102 page)

Jordan measured everything by the result and every teammate by his capacity to care about that result. He tested them constantly and weeded out the ones who folded: Dennis Hopson, Brad Sellers, Will Perdue, Stacey King … it’s a longer list than you think. He punched teammates in practice to reassert his dominance. In the early years, he went too far and his bloodthirsty fire crippled a few of his teams; you never want to affect teammates to the degree that they’re afraid to assert themselves in big games. Craig Hodges told Michael Wilbon about a 1990 incident in which Pippen made the mistake of challenging Jordan in practice, when Michael “proceeded, literally, to score on Scottie at will. It was incredible. I mean, Scottie Pippen even then was one of the best players in the league and Michael just rained points on him. Scottie had to step back and say, ‘Slow up, man.’” For years and years, Jordan couldn’t rein himself in. He cared about winning, but only on his terms—he also wanted to win scoring titles,
drop 50 whenever he pleased and treat his teammates like the biggest bully in a prison block—which led Phil Jackson to adopt the triangle offense in a last-ditch effort to prevent Jordan from hogging the ball (and, Jackson hoped, embolden his supporting cast). By the 1991 playoffs, when his teammates had advanced to an acceptable level, Jordan found a workable balance between involving them and taking over big moments. The rest was history.
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You know Jordan’s “best ever” credentials: his playoff chops, individual records and all-around honors surpass those of anyone else who ever played. He owns more iconic moments than anyone: the 63-point game at the Garden, the ’87 Slam Dunk Contest, “the shot” against the ’88 Cavs, the “Ohhhhhh, a spec
-tack-
ular move!” layup in the ’91 Finals, those 6 threes in the ’92 Finals (along with the shrug—you can’t forget the shrug), 41 points per game in the 1993 Finals, the 72-win team in ’96, the Flu Game in ’97 and The Last Shot in ’98. He demoralized eight memorable teams in eight years—the Bad Boy Pistons, the Showtime Lakers, Riley’s Knicks, Drexler’s Pistons, Barkley’s Suns, Shaq’s Magic, Malone’s Jazz and Miller’s Pacers—and none was ever quite the same.
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He accomplished everything with just two Pyramid teammates (Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman) and a bunch of role players and pseudo-scrubs. When he captured that last title in 1998, we all agreed:
This is the greatest basketball player we will ever see.
That didn’t stop us from looking for the next him. We spent the next eleven years anointing false successors, hyping young stars who weren’t ready and overrating imitators who weren’t really him. We need to stop looking.

My personal belief: Nobody will surpass Jordan. Ever. And I have four reasons why …

Reason no. 1: the four peaks
Most basketball players peak once and that’s it (a career year, as we call it). An elite few peak a second time: Hakeem in ’90 and ’94, Barkley in ’90 and ’93, West in
’66
and ’70, and Shaq
in ’95 and ’00, to name four. In rare cases, an athlete peaks three different times: Bird (’84, ’86 and ’87), Magic (’82, ’85, ’87), Kareem (’72, ’76, ’80) and Wilt
(’62, ’67
, ’72) released a 3.0 version that exceeded the 1.0 and 2.0 versions in many respects. Only Jordan peaked four times, and arguably, Jordan 4.0 was better than the other three versions. Here are the models:

• MJ 1.0 (’89-‧90).
  His fifth and sixth seasons, normally when a star makes the leap and scratches the ceiling of his talents. Jordan carries a lousy ’89 Bulls team to 47 wins and an Eastern Finals cameo during an extremely competitive year, finishing with the best all-around statistical season since the merger: 32.5 PPG, 8.0 APG, 8.0 RPG 2.9 SPG, 54% FG, 85% FT (regular season), 34.8 PPG, 7.0 RPG, 7.6 APG, 2.5 SPG, 51% FG (Playoffs). The following spring, he enjoys the finest Playoffs of his career (43.0 points, 7.4 assists,
  6.6
  rebounds and 55 percent shooting against Philly) before falling to Detroit in seven. As a pure athlete and scorer, here’s the stretch when Jordan peaked: matchless athletic ability, maximum speed and explosiveness, Larry /Magic-level respect from officials, extreme durability (played 99 of 99 games despite old-school rules that allowed teams like the Pistons to hammer him on drives) and multiple defenders required to stop him. Unleash ’89 Jordan into the current NBA with no hand checking or hard fouls and it’s all over. He’d score 45 a game.
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• MJ 2.0 (spring ’93).
  He’s mastered everything at this point. A rigorous workout routine sculpts his body and whips him into superior shape, enabling him to absorb hard fouls, stop tiring at the end of games and abuse smaller defenders on the low post. He’s a savvier all-around player, with a better sense of how (to use his teammates) and when (is the right time to take over a game), even defending his teammates (which he did repeatedly against Riley’s Knicks, personified by the memorable “And one!” layup where he stood over Xavier McDaniel and yelped angrily at him) instead of undermining them publicly and privately. Only one problem: the man suddenly has no peers. He’s the only NBA super-duper star without a relative equal driving him to remain on top. That puts him in a no-win situation. Once the media pressure and public attention becomes too much, he makes one of the most curious decisions in NBA history: he walks away at his apex.
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• MJ 3.0 (winter ’96).
  Jordan shakes off the baseball rust,
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  rebuilds his body for basketball and and plays more physically on both ends—instead of Barry Sanders, he’s Emmitt Smith, picking his spots, plugging away, moving the chains and punishing defenders for four quarters. MJ 3.0 features descriptions like “extremely resourceful” and “cerebral on the Bird-Magic level,” and as if that’s not enough, his baseball foibles taught him to embrace his teammates, accept their faults and adapt his own considerable skills to complement theirs. He finally understands The Secret.
  

• MJ 4.0 (spring ’98).
  My favorite version. His hops are pretty much gone, yet he makes up for it with renewed intensity and resiliency. Rarely does Jordan exhibit emotion anymore; even game-winning jumpers are celebrated with a simple fist pump and a relieved smile. Like Ali in the mid-seventies, he relies on guile, experience, memory, and heart and knows every trick (like the Bryon Russell push to win the ’98 Finals).
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  Jordan 4.0 demonstrates a (I hate to use this word, but screw it)
  surreal
  ability to take command in optimum moments. You could say he evolved from the greatest basketball player ever to the greatest closer ever, and his collection of performances against superior Pacers and Jazz teams—as he fought the effects of his third straight 100-game season, coaxed as much as he could from a thirty-six-year-old body, carried Scottie Pippen’s slack (derailed by a bad back) in the final two games and
  still
  managed to carry the Bulls to a title—remains the most extraordinary athletic achievement of my lifetime. Watch Game 6 of the ’98 Finals some time. He wins it by himself. No help. Just him. He scores 41 of Chicago’s first 83 points, biding his time even as he’s manipulating the proceedings. Down by three with 40 seconds to go, he goes for the kill—explodes for a coast-to-coast layup, strips Karl Malone on the other end and drains the game-winner, all in one sequence—without a single teammate touching the ball, a fitting conclusion to the most brilliant basketball game ever played. I know LeBron James is fantastic right now, but if he’s still winning championships by himself at thirty-six on the fourth version of himself, we can start talking about him and Jordan. And only then.
  

Reason no. 2: pathological competitiveness.
I can’t imagine a killer like Jordan happening again, and here’s why: the NBA is too buddy-buddy now. These stars grow up together, befriend one another, hang out during summers, play Team USA together, text and email each other … it’s a big circle jerk. Watch Kobe greet Carmelo after an allegedly hard-fought game; they look like old roommates reconnecting at a college reunion. The greats from Jordan’s era always maintained a respectful distance; even when Magic and Isiah smooched each other, there was a coldness to it.
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When Jordan and Barkley became close, part of me always wondered if Jordan sniffed out Barkley as a potential rival—a little like Russell with Wilt, or even how Natasha Henstridge hunted for a mate in
Species
—then befriended him as a way to undermine him competitively. You know what moment killed Barkley’s chance to be a Pantheon guy? Game 2 of the 1993 Finals in Phoenix. He played as well as he possibly could (a 42–13 with 16-for-26 shooting), but Jordan exceeded him by tallying a 42–12–9 and destroying
Dan Majerle down the stretch. You could see it written on Barkley’s face as he walked off the court:
I can’t beat this guy.
And he couldn’t.

That goes back to that aforementioned Russell-Jordan gene. Jordan wanted to vanquish and fueled himself by overreacting to every slight (real or manufactured). Rick Pitino questioned the seriousness of his hamstring injury during the ’89 Knicks-Bulls series; Jordan made them pay.
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The Magic knocked an out-of-NBA-shape Jordan out of the ’95 Playoffs; Jordan made them pay. Malone lobbied for the 1997 MVP; Jordan made Utah pay. That’s just how it went. When Bulls GM Jerry Krause—someone whom Jordan openly detested
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—glowingly courted European star Toni Kukoc, Jordan and Pippen wrecked Kukoc in the ’92 Olympics with particular fury. Before the 1989 draft, it bothered Jordan that Krause had become infatuated with Majerle’s potential, so he torched Thunder Dan in the ’93 Finals and screamed “Fuck you, Majerle!” as the Bulls celebrated right after Phoenix’s final miss in Game 6. Did Majerle do anything to him? Of course not. Jordan just convinced himself that he did. That’s how the man thought.

The two defining “Jordan was secretly a hypercompetitive lunatic” stories:

Story no. 1: It’s Game 1 of the 1992 NBA Finals and the painfully forced “Drexler or Jordan?” storyline (page 396) is in full swing, as well as Portland’s “we’re gonna make them beat us by shooting threes” plan that they were stupid enough to mention to the press. Clyde Drexler is about to get athletically sodomized by Jordan on national television. We just don’t know it yet. Portland jumps out to a 17–9 lead with six minutes remaining. Chicago’s crowd can’t get into it. Portland is running the floor and gaining confidence. Here’s the Cliff’s Notes version of the next 17 minutes of game time: MJ 3 … MJ 2 + 1 … MJ 3 … MJ 3 … MJ 2 … MJ 2 (first quarter ends: 33–30, Blazers, Jordan has 18 and
sits down for a breather) … MJ comes back in (45–44, Chicago) … MJ 2 … MJ 3 … MJ steal +2 … MJ 2 … MJ 3 … MJ follow-up dunk for 2 … awkward Drexler air ball 3 … MJ 3 + shrug
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… third Portland time-out of quarter … Chicago
66
, Portland 49. Jordan scored 33 points in 17 minutes, 35 for the half, outscored Drexler by 27, and broke the record for playoff threes in one half. This actually happened.

Story no. 2: Jordan’s opponents learned to leave him alone by the mid-nineties, leading to a phenomenon unlike anything else we’ve witnessed before or since: Michael became basketball’s version of a sleeping tiger. In a league full of smack-talkers, chest-thumpers and yappers, incredibly, he remained completely off-limits. This was just understood. Implicitly. Even during the summer of 2001, when Jordan was running the Wizards but reportedly mulling a comeback, a slew of NBA teams voyaged to Los Angeles to watch a few California prospects work out. Jordan was there. So was L.A. native Paul Pierce, who spent a little time with Jordan because of his friendship with Chicago native (and then-Pierce teammate) Antoine Walker. At some point, Pierce started talking smack to MJ.
You better not come back. This is our league now. We don’t want to embarrass you.
That kind of stuff. Jordan nodded happily with one of those “Okay, okay, just wait” faces, finally saying, “When’s our first game against you guys? I’m gonna make it a point to drop 40 on you.” You could almost imagine Jordan pulling out a piece of paper and adding Pierce’s name to the list of Guys Whose Butts Need to Be Kicked. Of course, Pierce’s coach at the time (Jim O’Brien) overheard the running exchange and quickly pulled Pierce away, imploring his star,
“Never
talk to him. You hear me? That’s the one guy you don’t talk smack to!” And this was when Jordan had been retired for three full years. Three! Even then, at thirty-nine years old, a current NBA coach considered him a viable threat and someone who shouldn’t be angered under any circumstances. Wake me up when this happens again in my lifetime.

Reason no. 3: command of the room.
As I mentioned in David Robinson’s section (page 456): Manute, Bird, Robinson and Jordan were the Mount
Rushmore of great entrances in the Nancy Parish Memorial Tunnel. Jordan was a walking E. F. Hutton commercial. Remember those dopey ads when somebody said, “My broker is E. F. Hutton and he says …” and everyone else in the room suddenly shut up and leaned in to hear? That was MJ. Seeing him unhinged people like Beatles fans in the mid-sixties. Jordan possessed what a Boston writer named George Frazier once dubbed
duende:
a charisma, an Eastwoodian swagger, a sense of self-importance that can’t be defined. He swallowed up the room even if 16,000 people were in it. As soon as Jordan entered the building, nobody else mattered. The way people’s expressions instantly changed, the sounds they made … those little moments leave an imprint even fifteen years later.

Those reactions didn’t change when he stopped playing basketball. At a party during the 2006 All-Star Weekend in Houston, Celtics honcho Rich Gotham and I were smoking stogies on a not-so-crowded cigar patio and ensuring bad breath for the rest of the night. Out of nowhere, Charles Oakley sauntered through the doorway
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followed by a human tornado with Jordan and his posse at the epicenter. Here’s what happens when MJ enters a room: it immediately becomes an entourage scene. No matter how you felt about the party leading up to the moment, the party jumps from (fill in whatever grade) to a solid A+. Like MJ’s presence validates the entire night. So Jordan ambled in, glanced around, puffed on a cigar for a few seconds, then traded a few barbs with Oak while pretending
there weren’t twenty-five people packed around him snapping cell phone pictures. Ninety seconds later, they’d had enough. Time for a new room. Just like that, they were gone and the patio was mellow again. As Rich said later, it was like a “gust of wind.” MJ was the gust; everyone else was the twigs, leaves, and branches flying around.