The Jordan Rules (38 page)

But there was trouble in the Bulls camp as they prepared to head to New York for Game 3. The trouble was coming from the Bulls' wives. They wanted to go to New York and they were angry. Jackson had issued an edict: The wives wouldn't travel until the Finals, if the team got that far. And several were furious. “I don't care who Phil Jackson thinks he is,” said Donna Grant. “He can't stop me from going to New York.” In the end, she wouldn't go. But she would require some soothing from Jackson's wife, June.

June Jackson had raised four kids and had participated in almost a dozen moves with Phil over the years, but life at last seemed to be settling down. She's an energetic, petite brunette with a small, turned-up nose and dancing eyes who looks ten years younger than she is. She had met Phil back in New York after Jackson's first marriage dissolved. She'd been committed to raising a family, and now that her kids were growing, she went back to school, working on her master's in social work. In many ways, she helped Jackson maintain his sixties consciousness; she often wondered how they could be making so much money. Jackson would sardonically tell her to call him to discuss it from her car phone.

But she remained a devoted basketball fan and had inherited the distaff-side problems. She planned a meeting with the wives. It was time, she said, to support the men. No arguments, no pettiness. Let's not create problems about going to New York, she said.

It was an attitude recently expounded by 76ers' forward Rick Mahorn. “You've got to let your family sit back this time of year and let you play basketball,” Mahorn explained. “It's no time for the little nitpicking things, for, ‘Oh, honey, you've got to cut the grass or pick up so-and-so.' Nothing against your family, but this is when you have to be selfish and when the summer comes and you're champions people will be saying, ‘There's so-and-so's wife. She's a champion.' We're champions, they're champions. Everyone's a champion. That's when you reap the benefits.”

The wives watched Game 3 on TV.

The Bulls could see the end coming quickly. Game 3 was set for Tuesday, April 30, in New York. Game 4, if necessary, would be Thursday. Jordan scheduled a tee time back in Chicago for Thursday morning.

“How are you feeling?” someone asked Jordan after Game 2.

“I'm fine as long as the weather stays nice,” he answered.

Translation: golf weather.

Cartwright decided to pack for just one night.

“They're a team without emotion,” Bach told Jackson. “They've got no soul, no anger, no hatred. They just seem dead. It's funny, but only Mark Jackson seemed to have that, but he's not doing anything. You get the right coach in there, and I think Pat Riley would be a huge success, and they could do some things. But now they can't seem to come together.”

The Knicks had one last cartridge left and they squeezed it off in the first quarter, taking a 31–25 lead behind 11 points from Gerald Wilkins. The Knicks went ahead by 12 midway through the second quarter, but the Bulls sent a calling card that would ultimately signal the end of the series. First, Pippen came down the lane and rose and slammed over Ewing, and then Jordan, deking and wriggling along the baseline, split two defenders and also powered over Ewing, almost throwing himself through the basket with the ball. The Bulls had made their point: They had attacked Ewing and he had retreated, a beaten man who symbolized the fate of his team. The Knicks were backing off from the challenge. The Knicks led by a point at halftime, but the game was already decided, an eventual 103–94 Bulls win. By the end of the third quarter, the Bulls were ahead by 12 points and were watching the scoreboard for Philadelphia's sweep over the Bucks. They'd meet the 76ers again in the second round, just as they had last season.

There would be no celebrating. There was a long way to go and this was to be expected. It was almost like an exhibition-season version of the playoffs. It was time for the real games to begin.

When Phil Jackson left the locker room and walked into the narrow hall outside to answer reporters' questions, he saw the Reverend Jesse Jackson. The former presidential candidate, lately a talk-show host, made a habit of showing up at such events. Reporters, cameras, action! Phil Jackson knew that the Reverend Jackson had called Bulls players in their rooms during the playoffs the last few seasons to pray with them and occasionally to suggest plays. Two years earlier, in the playoff series against New York, he'd started giving interviews about game strategy. He'd try to jockey close to the bench before games and get into the locker room and say a prayer with Jordan. Jordan confided to friends that he never quite knew what to make of Jackson; he was fearful of offending him because of Reverend Jackson's clout in the black community, but he was wary of the reverend's motives. Phil Jackson had stopped all of that, and this year the Reverend Jackson would be getting no free publicity from Phil Jackson's team.

“Only accredited media in the locker room, and that includes you, Jesse Jackson,” Phil Jackson shouted in the tight corridor off the Madison Square Garden floor as he walked out of the locker room.

The Reverend Jackson looked hard at the coach and then away, as if no one had heard. Next to the Reverend Jackson stood filmmaker Spike Lee, who'd done Nike commercials with Jordan. He had started to hang around with the players, and Grant and Pippen were wearing T-shirts that read, “Give Us Our 40 Acres and a Mule,” a reference to the promise made to freed slaves, and also to the name of Lee's production company. Lee, too, was waiting to get into the Bulls' locker room. Jackson looked at Lee. Lee started to back away, as if saying, “If he ain't letting Jesse Jackson in, no way I'm gettin' in.” The Reverend Jackson left unobtrusively, but a few days later he would show up in Chicago at the opening game of the series with the 76ers. After Game 1, he would be seen sitting next to Charles Barkley and whispering in Barkley's ear while dozens of reporters tried to get at Barkley for postgame comments.

5/4 v. Philadelphia; 5/6 v. Philadelphia; 5/10 at Philadelphia; 5/12 at Philadelphia; 5/14 v. Philadelphia*; 5/17 at Philadelphia*; 5/19 v. Philadelphia*
*lf necessary.

The Bulls were more worried about the 76ers than the Knicks, particularly because of Charles Barkley and Philadelphia's physical upfront play. Jackson had felt the team would need mental toughness for this series, and had taken a quote he said he found from Thomas Jefferson to lead into the scouting report on Philadelphia: “Nothing can stop the man with the right attitude from achieving his goal,” Jackson wrote, “but nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong attitude.” But there also was the question of the 76ers' unpredictability, which Jefferson did not address. “The players call 'em ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,'” Jackson noted. “Jimmy Lynam [the 76ers coach] has done a great job with that bunch, not only because of injuries, but because you never know what's going to happen with those guys.”

So Jackson wasn't surprised when, early in the opening game, 76ers' center Manute Bol, the seven-foot-seven-inch African tribesman, started screaming at him. “Zone, zone,” Jackson started yelling as Bol stood near the free-throw line on defense. Jackson had complained going into the series that the referees allowed Bol to play in a zone without guarding his man, and he was going to point this out.

“Mother fuck, mother fuck, mother fuck,” Bol shouted at Jackson in a sort of soprano hyena form of broken English. “Why you pick on me, you mother fuck?”

Jackson could only laugh.

But there were other reasons to laugh, for Jackson's five, as the Bulls management liked to advertise the team, was having itself a laugher over the 76ers. Barkley was magnificent, virtually unstoppable, as he bulled past Bulls to the basket—he scored 34 points and had 11 rebounds—but the other four 76ers' starters combined for 17 points in a performance the Bulls players recognized only too well.

“It was a total reversal of what we used to be,” Jordan agreed afterward. “I'm familiar with that, because you want to be a competitor and try to carry the load. But sometimes you'll come up short. If Charles continues to score almost half their points, we'll win. You're bound to get tired when you have to score and rebound and play defense. I know. I've been there. Our main focus was to contain Barkley, let him have his points, and shut down the other guys.”

It seemed to his teammates that Jordan was finally beginning to understand. He scored 29 points in the game as the Bulls took a 20-point lead in the first quarter and never allowed the 76ers to bring the deficit under double figures. The Bulls' smothering team defense limited Armon Gilliam to 2-of-10 shooting as Grant drove him away from the basket, while Pippen closed down Ron Anderson in a tummy-to-tummy bump session that held him to 3-of-ll shooting; by the end of the game it seemed as if Anderson had “Bulls” written backward on his chest. Jordan's man, Hersey Hawkins, could do little in a 2-for-9 shooting effort; Jordan was so wrapped up in his defense that when he came out at the start of the second quarter, he demanded of Jackson as Craig Hodges took his place, “I've stopped him. Now don't let somebody else get on him and let him get off!” Jordan would be back in the game four minutes later after Hawkins got free for a three-pointer, and the 76ers' All-Star guard from Chicago wouldn't score the rest of the quarter.

But perhaps more than anything, one Jordan play call signaled the apparent change in Jordan's attitude. “Five-three, five-three,” Jordan hollered as he stood near the top of the floor, dribbling the ball.

“Five-three?” Bill Cartwright thought to himself. Jordan had never called that play before. It was a screen play for Pippen with Cartwright blocking out Manute Bol. Pippen had the advantage because of Bol's lack of lateral quickness, but Jordan rarely called plays for others, especially when he had the ball on the top of the floor. He'd either dump off the ball and step back, or take it up the middle, trying to score and then fanning the ball out on the wing or inside when the defense collapsed.

Cartwright nodded to himself and smiled. And Pippen scored.

Jordan would end the game with just 15 shots, 1 fewer than Pippen.

Cartwright and the others didn't know about a conversation Jackson and Jordan had had as the playoffs were getting started. Jackson wanted to talk with Jordan about the postseason. And Jordan said that since his history was to come out smoking offensively—he held the scoring records for three- and five-game opening-round series—he'd hold off. “I'm going to lay in the weeds because they'll be expecting me not to,” Jordan told Jackson.

This was just what Jackson wanted to hear. That it came from Jordan only made it better. The Bulls would have their best chance if Jordan played that way and then pounced when it was his time, in the last five minutes of games. Jackson especially knew that Philadelphia would be looking for an explosion from Jordan because of the way he'd scored against the 76ers in the 1990 playoffs, averaging 43 points and more than 30 shots per game in the Bulls' 4–1 victory. The 76ers hadn't played much double-team on Jordan then, but they'd certainly watch him more closely this year. That would make his passing off all the more effective.

The Bulls were already beginning to look ahead after their 105–92 opening-game win over the 76ers. Jordan had watched the Trail Blazers, considered to be the best team in the Western Conference, and he wasn't impressed, even though they'd beaten the Bulls twice in the regular season.

“They play stupid,” he was saying in the locker room before Game 2. “They take all kinds of stupid shots and then think they can get every rebound. I thought [Danny] Ainge would make them smarter, but he hasn't helped in that way that much, I guess.”

The Bulls had little trouble in Game 2 Monday. After an up-and-down first quarter in which both teams ran and scored, the Bulls clamped down on defense again and took a 9-point halftime lead. Pippen again worked hard to deny Ron Anderson the ball. Jordan forced Hawkins into a series of tough shots, and Grant continued to grapple with Armon Gilliam, pushing him out of the inside position he'd used to score easily against the Bulls during the season. They were rotating quickly on Barkley and then dropping back to protect when the ball was reversed. The Bulls were working hard and were seeing the payoff. The 76ers did make one late surge, but Horace Grant grabbed 3 consecutive offensive rebounds, 2 of which the Bulls turned into baskets, in the last three minutes to keep the 76ers from ever getting closer than 3. The Bulls would win 112–100; it would turn out to be just one of three times in seventeen playoff games when the Bulls would allow 100 points or more.

Jackson was not satisfied. Although the Bulls won, he knew it was due to their relentless effort on the boards. Grant had grabbed 7 offensive rebounds, Cartwright had had 3 while shutting down Mahora again, and the Bulls had outrebounded the supposedly tougher 76ers by 15. But Jordan had shot 12 of 26. Despite his 9 assists, he'd also taken 5 three-point shots, all of which missed badly, while Hodges had hit his only 2, but didn't get any other passes even though he'd popped wide open on the wing several times. It was a worrisome sign. Jackson had watched Jordan studying the playoff statistics before the game.

“Is he worried about not being the leading scorer in the playoffs?” he thought.

“MJ Under Control.” Jackson wrote those words on his game notes as the Bulls prepared to play the 76ers in Philadelphia in Game 3 on Friday. The words would be prophetic, but would be among the least of Jackson's concerns.

Ed T. Rush, Hue Hollins, and Jack Nies. They would be the referees for Game 3 in Philadelphia. Jackson knew what that meant: It meant the Bulls had problems.

Pro basketball is probably the hardest game to officiate because so much judgment is called for. Theoretically, no contact is allowed. But that is unreasonable the way the game has evolved, so the notion is that play out of the ordinary is penalized. Referees make scores of judgment calls in every game, a Gordian knot to be cut day after day.