The Jordan Rules (46 page)

Jackson leaned back. He knew the game was over, the Bulls would be champions, and the whole season's effort had been worth it.

Jordan lured the defense to him and whizzed the ball to Paxson, standing eighteen feet away in the left comer. The shot barely rippled the net going down.

The Lakers would not score again. The final score was 108–101 Bulls. The Chicago Bulls were world champions.

When the final buzzer sounded, a year's worth of effort and emotion burst forth like a river breaking a dam.

“Sweet,” shouted Cartwright. “This is sweet.”

“Seven long years,” Jordan yelled as the players rushed from the pandemonium of the court to their locker room. “Seven long years. I can't believe it.”

Emotion and exhilaration washed over the players. It was purifying, purging the jealousies, resentments, and feuds of the season. What remained was pure, unrestrained joy. And madness.

The Disney people had wanted to have the five starters pose for their “goin' to Disney World” clip on the court, but it was impossible; they would later adjourn to the rest room in the locker room for the brief commercial message. Pippen, dribbling the ball out to end the game, darted from the court as hundreds of Chicago fans stormed their heroes; the fans were representatives of the folks back home, who were pouring into the streets around the Chicago Stadium, around Wrigley Field, and in the downtown area to celebrate the victory.

“Twelve long years,” Cartwright yelled to Jordan. “Twelve long years.”

Jordan smiled.

“Everyone was just being crazy,” Grant would recall later. “It seemed like all we were doing was screaming, acting like kids, yelling and screaming.”

“Nineteen eighty-seven, nineteen eighty-seven,” Grant and Pippen chanted as they fell into each other's arms. It was an old joke; the two would always say that was when the Bulls started to turn around, in 1987, after they drafted Pippen and Grant. “Nineteen eighty-seven, nineteen eighty-seven,” they yelled at one another and danced around in circles.

Hopson was yelling now too, dousing himself in champagne and receiving warm congratulations from every teammate. They all remembered Detroit.

June Jackson looked desperately for Phil on the court, unable to find him amidst the throng, and later edged her way into the bulging locker room, where the players' wives had also gathered. She thought Phil joyous, but later he would say his biggest thrill came in the last minute of the game when he knew it was over. “It's in the game,” he said. “That's where the excitement is for me.”

People, people everywhere in that locker room. TV cameramen wrestled for position and thrust microphones into everyone's faces. Commissioner David Stern began the trophy presentation and no one could hear. “Hey, I got to be a part of this,” Paxson shouted and dashed to the end of the room. Everyone wore champagne like a shiny new suit, and Krause hugged every waist he walked into. But this wasn't the players' time. This was for TV and the reporters and fans who had crashed the party. Finally, Jordan got up to leave for the team bus back to the hotel and the locker room began to clear.

The players boarded the bus and moved to the back, as was their custom, the coaches in front and staff and broadcasters in the middle. It was there they had their moment. All were still in uniform. There would be no showering, at least with water, this night. In fact, the next morning when he boarded the bus for the ride to the airport and home, Jordan was still in his uniform, clutching a champagne bottle and chewing on a big, fat cigar he had used to puff rings of smoke in the face of almost everyone he saw the night before. Jordan still clutched the championship trophy that he had cradled for the TV cameras in the locker room. It was their Holy Grail, so elusive and so desired.

They passed it from player to player. Paxson stroked it as if it were a newborn son. Pippen kissed it. Everyone handled it so gently, almost afraid it would break, as they themselves had threatened to as a team so many times during the season. But Jackson's gentle handling and Jordan's secure hold and everyone's confident support kept the dream from splitting apart. Scott Williams shrieked when the trophy came his way. “Look at me now,” he said exuberantly.

“Easy, easy, be careful,” Jordan counseled. He watched it the way a mother does her baby. The trophy moved across the aisle to Armstrong and back to Hodges and up to Perdue and back to Jordan, finally, everyone putting a mark on it as the others watched.

“We did it,” whispered Paxson to himself as he leaned back in his seat as the lights blinked by outside the speeding bus. “What do you know? We did it.”

O
CTOBER
6
WAS A BRIGHT, SUNNY, EARLY FALL MORNING IN
Chicago. The word had whipped through and singed the city like the Great Fire more than a century before. Michael Jordan, the city's greatest sports figure and perhaps its most beloved hero ever, had decided to retire from pro basketball at age thirty after nine seasons in the NBA. The rumors had swept the city the previous two days. Jordan went to the opening American League playoff game the night before to throw out the first ball. But he had to go scurrying from Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf's private box when TV began reporting the rumors.

Bob Ford, a writer for the
Philadelphia Inquirer,
had been sent to cover the White Sox-Blue Jays series, since the Philadelphia Phillies were playing in the National League playoffs. Ford's newspaper asked him to attend the Jordan press conference, scheduled for 11
A
.
M
. October 6 in the Berto Center, a private practice facility the Bulls built about thirty-five miles north of Chicago. As Ford walked in a rear door, he bumped into a neatly dressed, familiar-looking man.

“Excuse me,” said Tom Brokaw, the anchor for the NBC-TV nightly news.

“This
is
big,” Ford thought to himself.

Michael Jordan had become the biggest star in the NBA, arguably the biggest star sports had ever known. So big had the NBA become with Jordan leading the way that the 1993 NBA Finals, for the first time, drew a higher TV rating than the 1993 World Series.

Michael Jordan had become America's pastime.

And now Jordan said it was past his time.

“It's not because I don't love the game,” Jordan said that October 6 morning, surrounded by about three hundred reporters and flanked by teammates; Bulls officials; and executives from McDonald's, Quaker Oats, and Nike. “I just feel, at this particular time in my career, I've reached the pinnacle of my career.”

And who, really, could question that? Oh, sure, Bulls coach Phil Jackson tried. The day before, when Jordan confirmed his decision to his coach, Jackson tried meekly to change Jordan's mind. The Bulls had a streak going of three straight NBA titles. Why not stay with the run? It's what a gambler does, after all.

But Jordan asked Jackson what he had to prove. “I knew the answer when he hesitated,” Jordan said later.

Just before Jordan came out to make his retirement statement, one that was carried live on all the Chicago TV stations and that interrupted classes in most Chicago public schools so students could watch, Jordan met with most of his teammates. It would become a day in Chicago, like the Kennedy assassination thirty years earlier, when everyone would recall where they were when they heard the news. Scott Williams cried, thanking Jordan for his support. B. J. Armstrong, the only Bulls player to attend the funeral of Jordan's father two months earlier, said Jordan always would remain his inspiration.

In the only truly emotional moment of his closing press conference, Jordan said, “I guess the biggest positive thing that I can take out of my father not being here with me today is that he saw my last basketball game. And that means a lot. It was something that he, we, my family, and me have talked about for a long period of time.

“One thing I learned from my father's death,” Jordan related, “is that it can be gone and be taken away from you at any time.”

And with that, Jordan was a basketball memory.

Two of the seminal events of Michael Jordan's life after basketball were occurring late in July 1993, a little more than a month after Jordan and the Bulls had won their third straight title. It was clear to many close to Jordan that he'd had enough of basketball by then, even if few would believe the strains and stresses would eventually lead to his retirement. “Michael always talked about retiring after the season,” said Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf, “but I figured after three months off …”

Jordan also had talked of playing baseball someday, too. And Reinsdorf was just the right man to talk about it with. He owned the Chicago White Sox, too, and Jordan wanted to play major league baseball.

Jordan had never been much of a baseball player, batting barely .300 when he was a teenager. But there was little Jordan didn't believe he could accomplish, although he had pretty much abandoned the idea of playing pro golf after shooting 80s and 90s in pro-am events, especially after being bested by more than 20 strokes in a celebrity pro-am by the hated Bill Laimbeer.

He'd told Reinsdorf about his baseball hopes and Reinsdorf told Jordan to talk with White Sox General Manager Ron Schueler. The two had decided upon a plan: Jordan would play a few games for the Hickory, N.C., Crawdads, a White Sox Class A affiliate. Jordan had talked several times during his basketball career about playing professional baseball, but he wasn't taken seriously. He'd talked about playing every pro sport, much as Wilt Chamberlain or Jim Brown always did, great athletes who saw the world as their playground. However, George Shinn, owner of the Charlotte Hornets, had told Jordan several times over the years that the basketball great could play for Shinn's minor league baseball team.

The second event occurred while Jordan was playing golf on the Monterey Peninsula in early August: word reached him from North Carolina that his father, James, was missing. Jordan sent some of his security detail to help search for his father, but by the time they arrived, it was much too late. James Jordan had been dead for almost three weeks, a shooting victim in what the Cumberland County, N.C., police said was a random robbery.

Baseball would have to wait.

The events surrounding the death of James Jordan—known as “Pops” to Jordan, and more of a brother than a father to Michael—were hazy to many, if not to the local police in North Carolina. Cumberland County police said Larry Martin Demery of Rowland, N.C., and Daniel Andre Green of Lumberton, N.C., both eighteen, came across James Jordan sleeping in his $50,000 red Lexus with the vanity license plate
UNC
23. The car allegedly was parked along U.S. 74 near its intersection with 1-95. A Quality Inn motel was just a few hundred yards away. James Jordan apparently got off the road to take a nap, although he'd not been driving long on his way to Charlotte. The pair, reportedly attempting to rob James Jordan, shot him in the chest with a .38-caliber handgun and drove off with the car. James Jordan was to turn fifty-six on July 31. Supposedly, the two made calls on James Jordan's cellular phone to 900 sex numbers and friends, and that's how they were traced. Police said the two drove James Jordan just over the border into South Carolina and dumped his body into Gun Swamp Creek.

It was there, on August 3, that a local fisherman, Hal Locklear, spotted a body stuck on a tree trunk. Police labeled the fully clothed but deteriorated body a John Doe despite thousands of dollars' worth of expensive dental work. Although the car was found August 5 by Cumberland County police, South Carolina authorities said they had no connection with the body and cremated it August 6. The car was identified as belonging to James Jordan August 12, and it was not until then the Jordan family filed a missing persons report.

Green, who was on parole from an armed robbery conviction, and Demery, who was awaiting trial on an armed robbery charge, both denied killing James Jordan—they said they found the body in the car—and police said they could not conclusively match the .38-caliber pistol found in Green's house trailer with the bullet that killed James Jordan. But both were being held for the murder since being arrested August 15.

“Two years ago,” said Michael Jordan, he and his father had talked about Jordan's trying a major league baseball career. James, in fact, had counseled Michael to quit basketball after the Bulls won their first NBA championship in 1991. But Michael wasn't ready.

“This is something my father always wanted me to do,” Michael explained about the chance to play major league baseball. Father and son playing catch. Life in every backyard in America. James and Michael. That's how it was in Wilmington, N.C., in the mid-1970s. Then, it was just a kid dreaming about major league baseball, like millions of other kids. In 1994 it is a man still dreaming about it.

Michael Jordan was thirty, retired, and getting up 6
A
.
M
. every day to work with Jim Darrah, athletic director at the Illinois Institute of Technology, across the highway from Comiskey Park on Chicago's near South Side. Darrah had coached actors Tom Hanks and Madonna for the movie
A League of Their Own.
Now, in January 1994, Darrah was working with a
really
big star.

“My father thought I could be a major league baseball player,” Jordan said in January after one of those workouts. “And I'm sure right now he can see me trying. I'm sure he's watching every move that I make.”

And so began Michael Jordan's professional baseball career, which led to an invitation to White Sox spring training, where Jordan attracted crowds of fans and media while accumulating very few base hits. After about a month of unsure swings, some three hits in twenty at bats—most balls Jordan hit being pop-ups and bouncers—Jordan was shipped out to the White Sox' minor league Birmingham affiliate for reassignment. He hoped that he'd get recalled to the majors by September 1, when the rosters are expanded for the last month of the season. “I'm learning a lot every day,” he said, “and I'm not going to quit. I'm enjoying what I do. And isn't that what retirement is all about?”

Jordan faced considerable criticism for his foray into baseball, which mounted as his skills proved wanting. The crosstown Cubs, being deprived of the winter spotlight in the Chicago media by almost daily reports of Jordan's progress, proposed a publicity stunt to have Bozo the Clown, a local kids' TV figure, try out for the team. Bozo's station nixed the idea. Baseball legend Pete Rose and numerous major leaguers mocked Jordan's audacity to think he could walk into baseball as an untried thirty-year-old and make the major leagues. But Jordan received the editorial support of Chicago's largest newspaper,
The Chicago Tribune,
as well as its famous columnist, Mike Royko, who noted it was just baseball, after all.

Ironically, as Jordan patrolled the outfield in the White Sox' Ed Smith Stadium in Sarasota, Fla. February 15, his first day of spring training, he galloped several times in front of an advertising sign for an air-conditioning company that read
UNIQUE AIR
. That was no lie.

Angry teammates, a federal subpoena, and a shrinking desire met Michael Jordan when he arrived at Bulls training camp for what he and his teammates hoped would be a history-making season in 1992. The Bulls were trying to become the first NBA team since the great Celtics' dynasty of the 1960s to win three straight NBA titles. Jordan and teammate Scottie Pippen were coming off a summer with the U.S. Olympic basketball Dream Team's sweep to a gold medal. In an ironic—if unintended—symbolic moment, Jordan had draped himself in the American flag at the gold medal award ceremony. The all-American boy? Hardly. Jordan didn't want the logo of a competing sneaker manufacturer showing. It's all business, it seems.

Then, feeling the pangs of withdrawal that would overcome him a year later, Jordan said a few weeks before training camp opened that he wasn't sure he'd even come to training camp, because he was tired from the Olympic experience. This, of course, was met with the usual disdain from teammates for Jordan's rules. Horace Grant would leave practice in protest a few days after the opening of camp, while private grumbling went on all around.

But Jordan had little concern for that. He admitted that he was losing interest in basketball. “It's a critical concern for me now,” Jordan said as the Bulls opened training camp in what he said would be his final comments for at least a week or more, depending on when he felt like returning. “I've never gone through anything like this in my career. All my life, I've been playing basketball, and it's been a joy. But it isn't now. One day I'm fine. The next day I don't want to see a basketball.”

That's perhaps because Jordan was about to see the walls of the federal courthouse in Charlotte, N.C., to testify in the money laundering trial of James “Slim” Bouler, the convicted drug dealer to whom Jordan lost $57,000 the year before. For the past year, Jordan had maintained that the money was a loan for a driving range. But brought into court, Jordan admitted he'd been lying and it was, indeed, money lost gambling.

Although gambling is illegal in South Carolina, where the events occurred, Jordan was not a subject of the investigation. And, in fact, he was a celebrity even in the courthouse.

“Are you the guy on the Wheaties box?” asked defense attorney James Wyatt in questioning Jordan.

“Yes,” replied Jordan, who told U.S. Attorney Frank Whitney he lied about the money because he was embarrassed about his connections to gambling.

He said he was through with that kind of high-stakes gambling. “Winning is great,” said Jordan. “But when you lose that amount and get all the abuse I got, it ain't worth it any longer. If any problems occur on this team, it won't be because of me. I won't compete on the golf course again.”

The events of the coming season, however, would show Jordan's habits had yet to change.

Jordan returned a week into training camp, saying he had rediscovered his hunger for the game. He had spent the week on the West Coast, shooting TV commercials for sponsors, and said he was now ready for basketball. “Hopefully, we can win nine, ten, eleven titles in a row,” Jordan said. “The question is where we stand as a team in history. I think we can look forward, and I'm not guaranteeing anything, but if we can put this thing together, we can make our own mark in history.”

They were playing the theme music from the movie
Poltergeist
in the Richfield Coliseum November 6 when the Bulls opened the 1992–93 season against the Cleveland Cavaliers, whom they'd defeated in the Eastern Conference finals the previous spring. And once again, as it would continue to be, it was a horrifying experience for the Cavaliers, defeated by the Bulls in three of the last six seasons. “They're baaaaacccck!” It was clearly about the Bulls.