The Jordan Rules (18 page)

Jordan started dribbling near the three-point circle to the right of the free-throw line. He went through his legs once, twice, three times and back again, Wilkins trying to watch not the ball but Jordan's eyes. Quickly, Jordan moved the ball to his left hand and flashed by Wilkins. It's one of the moves that makes Jordan unstoppable. “He can get through cracks in the defense that other players don't even see,” marvels John Bach. And with his explosive quickness off the dribble, few players can move their feet quickly enough to get in front of Jordan.

In his way was Mustaf, the athletic six-foot-ten-inch rookie. Mustaf jumped. Jordan jumped over him and slammed the ball, sending the Stadium fans into a frenzy.

On the bench, coach Phil Jackson smiled.

It's difficult to read Jackson sometimes. He has an impish sense of humor and can be found sometimes drawing hangman's nooses in his office before games while he watches “The McLaughlin Group” or “The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour.” He knows there's no play in his scheme that calls for Jordan to dribble for ten seconds and then fly down the lane against four players and slam. But it was hard not to appreciate the spectacular athletic move, and as a former player he had some understanding of the imperative of payback.

Jackson has a great fondness for the Knicks—by which he means the old Knicks, the team he was part of. He owns perhaps the only reversible leather coat in the world with a Bulls logo on one side and a Knicks emblem on the other. His days with the Knicks represent a kind of basketball nirvana for him: the unselfish play, the bonding among the guys. Jackson even had a chance to return to the Knicks as an assistant coach when Rick Pitino was hired; he was still stuck in the CBA when Pitino offered him a spot, but he was too wary of the Knicks' corporate ownership to sign on. He had clashed with management after Gulf + Western bought the Knicks and the personnel moves became more and more capricious. “These guys didn't know anything about basketball, about men coming together and bonding their talents,” he said. “They'd say, ‘Let's go get us Spencer Haywood. Uh-oh, he's not working. So we'll get ourselves a Bob McAdoo.' We had built a team with Frazier and Reed and [Mike] Riordan and Jackson, basically unheralded basketball players. And from this unlikely group of players, second-round draft picks, you have a team. You don't build a team by going out and getting stars.”

Jackson may have avoided corporate pressure, but the Bulls management had its own quirks. His name was Jerry Krause.

Jackson has dealt with Krause's paranoia far better than any of the recent Bulls coaches. He's sometimes had to leave his office to take phone calls at a public phone because Krause was concerned someone might overhear the conversation. He's registered under false names at a Chicago hotel during the draft so only Krause could find him. He's listened to Krause threaten to fire anyone on the staff who talked to reporters after supposed “inside” information appeared in newspapers, including one memorable occasion when the leak was something Krause himself had inadvertently let slip.

“Jerry Krause sees the NBA as a covert operation,” says one general manager. One of the team's minority owners adds, “He goes into a closet to change his mind.”

So, despite having to handle the most dominant offensive force since Wilt Chamberlain, while working for the NBA's version of Professor Moriarty, Jackson's generally thrilled to have the job. “I'm having a great time,” he'd tell friends. “This is fun.”

And Jackson felt no different the next night, even though the Bulls lost for the first time at home in eighteen games through the regular season and playoffs, a 109–101 loss to Portland, as the Trail Blazers continued the hot streak that had put them out ahead of the league. It didn't help that the Bulls' bench faltered; Hopson scored just 1 basket while the Trail Blazers turned a 3-point lead into a 12-point margin in the second quarter when the reserves were playing. The Bulls led by a point late in the fourth quarter, but a weary Jordan, who put up 28 shots, committed a turnover and drove wildly into three Trail Blazers, his shot missing the mark. Clyde Drexler then beat Jordan downcourt for an easy basket from which the Bulls could not recover.

Jackson was diplomatic. It was a test, he said, and now the Bulls had an idea how much farther they had to go to play with the league's best. Danny Ainge's words were more direct: “We're just a balanced team. Every night someone different steps up to carry us. We had more weapons.”

The next loss, against Milwaukee, would be harder. The Bulls had dominated the Bucks the last three years, eliminating them from the playoffs in 1990 and winning fifteen of the last seventeen games between them in the regular season. It drove Bucks coach Del Harris nuts. He almost always drew technical fouls in Bulls games, and although he tried to remain calm and diminish the game's importance in the pregame meetings, his neck would stiffen and his words became more clipped when he discussed the Bulls. Jackson did the same thing when the Bulls prepared for Detroit; he went over every play Detroit ran in detail and so often that the players felt they knew the plays too well and were thinking about what Detroit might do rather than reacting to what they actually did. The Bulls were to Milwaukee what the Pistons were to the Bulls.

But Milwaukee was healthy for the first time in several years and had won ten straight at home. And with Frank Brickowski rebounding and giving the Bucks second chances, Milwaukee held off the Bulls, 99–87. Jordan scored 31 points, but he was out for key stretches and, despite playing thirty-nine minutes, he was angry with Jackson for keeping him off the floor. During games, Jordan rarely wants to rest, and it takes all of Jackson's restraint to keep him off the floor; Jordan shouts out the names of players he wants to go in for. Jackson was certain that Jordan would wear down by the end of the playoffs as a result of the load he carried all season long, so Jackson had cut Jordan's playing time to thirty-six or thirty-seven minutes per game.

Some of Jordan's irritation flared after the game. A factor in the loss, Jackson told reporters, was the fact that the floor was slippery. When Jordan was asked about it, he denied it was any problem, and when someone started to ask B.J. Armstrong about it Jordan shouted across the locker room, “Don't make any excuses.”

“I hate when P.J. does that,” Jordan said afterward. “We stink. That's the problem.”

Part of the problem, Jordan thought, was the Tex Winter-inspired offense. During the game, Winter had said pleadingly to Jackson, as both Jordan and Pippen went on mad dashes to the basket, “They're sabotaging the offense. They've got to pass the ball.”

Cartwright, an increasingly strong presence on and off the court, had his own views on the subject. He believed in Winter's offense; Jackson was trying to get Cartwright the ball in a position where he could do something with it. But every Cartwright mistake was seized upon by Jordan. On this night, Cartwright took a pass down by the baseline in the third quarter and spun to the basket, but was called for traveling. The Bulls called time-out soon after, and as they walked back to the huddle, Jordan was furious with Cartwright.

“You've got to give me the ball,” Jordan demanded.

“But M.J., you had two guys on you,” snapped Cartwright.

“Yeah, but one was Fred Roberts,” Jordan shot back.

Jordan and Cartwright had crossed swords before, although by this season, Cartwright's third with the Bulls, an uneasy truce had developed. Jordan could even joke about Cartwright's flailing elbows, of which he'd been a victim in practice. Overhearing Cartwright talking about playing golf, Jordan once asked him if he'd ever elbowed any of the players in his foursome.

Cartwright could laugh about such remarks now, but when he first came to the Bulls, he didn't anticipate the problems that would develop between him and Jordan, even though he quickly recognized their differences. While Jordan is demonstrative, Cartwright is remote. Jordan is congenial, Cartwright is seclusive. Cartwright wears a goatee stained with a splash of white and has a mysterious look about him: sad, with gentle doe eyes and a tiny head that often is enveloped in his large hands when he's working out a problem. One such problem was how to deal with Jordan.

Cartwright was a star of some magnitude, the nation's leading rebounder in his senior year at the University of San Francisco and the No. 3 pick in the NBA draft, just like Jordan, only five years earlier. He averaged 21.7 points and 8.9 rebounds and made the All-Star team as a rookie and added 20.1 points and 7.5 rebounds his second season. But it was his misfortune to join the NBA the same season as Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, and greatness would elude the seven-foot-one-inch Cartwright as if it were thick smoke: He could see it, almost smell it, but he couldn't quite grab it. There were no Olympics for Cartwright, no team promotional campaign like the one the Bulls ran in Chicago for Jordan: “Here Comes Mr. Jordan,” the ads went, a takeoff on the classic 1941 film. New York didn't exactly react that way for Cartwright, who has been described as having the grace of a berserk crane. Centers are the rarest of birds in the NBA, though, and Cartwright was one, even if he reminded few of an athlete. Cartwright didn't even remind himself of an athlete. Sometimes he'd find himself marveling at Jordan or Scottie Pippen flying toward the basket for a slam and say to himself, “Wouldn't it be something to be able to do that, to be an athlete?” Cartwright, as the man said in the Dirty Harry movie, knew his limitations. He also knew that his time would be short in New York when Rick Pitino replaced Hubie Brown as coach.

“Rick wasn't looking for basketball players,” said Cartwright after leaving New York. “If you happened to be a basketball player, fine, but Rick wanted guys who can run and jump, athletes.”

Cartwright knew he didn't fit into that category. But don't tell him he's not a basketball player. There is no forge of athleticism in his movements, but rather the determined precision of a craftsman. Cartwright knows the game. He studied hard under Hubie Brown those years in New York when his Knick teams got close to being great, once taking the Celtics to a seventh game in the Eastern Conference semifinals. But Cartwright always had his critics. He rarely dunks the ball or blocks shots or dominates on rebounds. He's got an unorthodox jump shot in which he grabs the ball as if he's holding an axe, goes into a downward chopping motion, brings the ball up behind his ear while twisting away from the basket, and then squares up and leans in. It was good enough to make him among the league's best percentage shooters his first five seasons, when he averaged about 18 points per game. But he twice broke his foot, missed almost all of two seasons, and became a scapegoat for the Knicks' problems after being replaced by the superior Patrick Ewing. But he never lost his wry wit or keen sense of observation. He's a student of politics and government, a self-made philosopher whose father was a farm laborer and whose mother was a domestic, yet someone who espouses archconservative views. Not only does Cartwright favor capital punishment, for example, but he advocates public executions.

“Sure, it would be great for everyone,” he says with just a hint of a smile so you're not exactly sure he's serious. But he is. “You'd have to have them on late after the kids went to sleep, maybe midnight. And you could show them on cable TV and make enough money to hire more police. It would be a great deterrent. Sure, it would be great. It would work.”

And while Cartwright liked to play the remote tough guy, he was as softhearted as they came. Cartwright's home would often seem like a halfway house, with down-and-out friends staying for months at a time without a demand from Cartwright that they get a job.

But Cartwright didn't get much playing time in New York after returning from those foot injuries. Patrick Ewing had come along by then, and Brown tried a twin-towers approach with Cartwright and Ewing. That approach had come into vogue when Houston, with Akeem Olajuwon and Ralph Sampson, upset the Lakers in five games in the 1986 Western Conference finals; suddenly everyone wanted two centers. But Ewing didn't care to play forward, and when Brown was replaced, Cartwright took a seat on the bench behind Ewing. He didn't like it, but he started to get used to the idea.

“It was like being retired,” Cartwright recalled. “I'd get eighteen, maybe twenty minutes against the backup center. It was hardly like playing.” Cartwright did average 11 points and shot 54 percent in about twenty minutes per game that last season in New York (1987–88), but by then life had become particularly uncomfortable, although more for Cartwright's family than for him. He's a stoic man, quiet, almost impervious to criticism. “I know what I can do and the people I care most about know what I can do, so who cares what anyone else thinks?” he'd say.

His strength was tested often. New Yorkers railed at Cartwright for his fragility. Acerbic
New York Post
columnist Pete Vecsey nicknamed Cartwright “Medical Bill” and “Billy Idle” for his injuries and time spent on the disabled list. It didn't help that Cartwright's injuries came right after he signed a new contract. He was further tested by the health problems of his son, Justin, who had developed a rare heart condition and needed surgery to save his life. It would be successful and he would go on to have a normal childhood, but there were many terrifying moments for Cartwright then, none of which the public or media ever knew about.

One story, though, typifies that period for Cartwright. He was at the hospital waiting out the vigil of Justin's surgery. It was just after his own foot surgery and he was walking with crutches. He was standing outside the operating room with his wife, Sheri, when one crutch hit a wet spot and slipped out from under him. His gangly body collapsed under him and he went sprawling, one of the crutches catching Sheri, who collapsed on top of him. The two of them lay there struggling to get up while their son lay fighting for his life.