The Last Enforcer, page 3
Jerry Krause gave me my start. I’ll never forget that. And he brought me to a team where I’d meet a guy who would not only become one of the greatest athletes of all time, but one of my best friends: Michael Jordan.
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A year earlier, with a little luck, the Bulls had managed to draft Michael Jordan when he fell into their lap with the third pick. Jerry Krause might be considered the luckiest beneficiary of inheriting a team with Michael on it, even though Michael and Krause would end up butting heads. In fact, Michael would come to really hate Krause. He gave him the nickname “Crumbs,” because Krause was a fat little guy who usually had crumbs on his shirt. I’ll admit that I laughed at that joke from time to time. But most of that would come later—when I arrived in 1985, Michael would say shit here and there about Krause but not a lot. Their conflict really didn’t come to a boiling point until they started winning championships. As I saw it, Krause was a scout at heart who knew talent. Later, when the documentary series The Last Dance came out and people were blaming Krause for all sorts of things, I saw him as the fall guy. Jerry Reinsdorf was and still is the owner of the Chicago Bulls. His name is on the checks, and the buck stops with him. Jerry Krause knew basketball and put the team together. He did his job. He would prove that again and again in the coming years, drafting Scottie Pippen, Horace Grant, and building a dynasty.
When Michael came into the league, he had the whole package—he was talented, good-looking, professional, and had a great work ethic—and of course I knew all about him already as I prepared to join the team. Basketball fans everywhere, not only in Chicago, had fallen in love with Michael right away. By December 1984, in his rookie year, he had been on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and the headline was “A Star Is Born.” He averaged 28.2 points that season, started in the All-Star Game, and was named Rookie of the Year. Most of all, he was competitive and motivated. That’s a lethal combination. Mike was always looking for something to fuel him. Sometimes it was Krause. Sometimes it was a story in the newspaper or something a player had said. It’s one of the things that made him great.
As a team, the 1984–85 Bulls, coached by Kevin Loughery, had won thirty-eight games and reached the playoffs for the first time in four years. They got knocked out by the Milwaukee Bucks in the first round, but the organization knew it had a budding superstar. Now they needed to build around him. And that’s where I came in.
In early July, a few weeks after the draft, I arrived in Chicago and got right to work. I was excited to prove that I belonged. They have one of the best summer leagues, and I started playing ball as soon as I arrived. That’s when Michael and I first got to know each other. By the time training camp started, he had seen that I was a hard worker and that I wasn’t taking anything for granted.
I had a good first training camp and preseason. There were a lot of veterans on the team, including Sidney Green, David Greenwood, and Orlando Woolridge. Green, Greenwood, and Woolridge weren’t comfortable with me out there. When the coaches blew the whistle, I didn’t stop. They had to blow it twice. I wanted to play. I thought of it as a wrestling match with these guys who were ahead of me, to get the chance to play. I came in with the attitude that I’d make my name by outworking and outlasting everyone else on the court.
Mike saw the work I was putting in and recognized I had the same type of drive and work ethic as him. That first year in Chicago I was all business. They said to be at work at 10 a.m.; I was there at 8:30. I was about doing whatever it took to win. I knew that Michael was watching me. I didn’t take shortcuts. I put the work in. He wanted to see how I carried myself on the court. He wanted to see how I carried myself off the court, too.
He was twenty-two, and I was twenty-one, but he cared about what it meant to be a gentleman. We’d go out to eat and he would make sure my manners were good. He wanted me to be respectful. That’s just how Michael was. That’s how he began to trust me. Michael grew up in the South. He was a country kid, and his mom and pops raised him the right way. My mom raised me the right way as well. We could see that in each other.
Back then, Mike didn’t talk a lot of shit. There were vets out there. They weren’t going to put up with a lot of talking from a young player. That’s the way the league was. It was like having a driver’s license—you had to pass a test. And if you talked, you had to back it up. Michael knew his place. Everyone talks about how he was constantly getting on Steve Kerr and Scott Burrell in the nineties. But in Mike’s early seasons, he waited his turn to become a leader. Everyone knew it was coming. It’s like he was the FBI, gathering evidence, studying what it took to lead. It took him a while to get there, but he certainly did.
So that first training camp, I just played hard and didn’t say much either, even if I was pissing off some of the older veterans with my tenacity on the court. I think the coaches and the front office knew I could help right away. I also think that’s one of the reasons Krause made a big move by trading David Greenwood to the San Antonio Spurs on October 24, 1985, the day before our season opener against Cleveland.
At the time I didn’t think much of the trade, but Michael was pissed. He didn’t like it for a number of reasons. On top of trading a veteran player who Michael liked, the Bulls released Rod Higgins on the day of the Greenwood trade. Rod was and still is one of Mike’s best friends. So that pissed him off.
But the biggest problem of all may have been the person who Krause had traded Greenwood to San Antonio for: the one and only Iceman, George Gervin. There was some bad blood there. Eight months earlier, at the 1985 All-Star Game in Indianapolis, Michael felt that George had tried to fuck him over.
I know I’m going on a tangent to say all this, but I think the story gives an interesting picture of what life was like in the NBA when I came into the league—and just how rich and dramatic the friendships and feuds could be. I’m referring to the infamous “Freeze Out” All-Star Game, when a small group of veterans, including Gervin, had a plan to keep the ball away from Michael as much as possible and not help the rookie out on defense. Gervin was involved, but it was principally Isiah Thomas’s idea.
Why? In my opinion, it’s because Isiah Thomas was jealous of Michael. He was from the West Side of Chicago, and he loved to talk about how Chicago was his town. He felt Chicago belonged to him, even though he was playing in Detroit. Michael becoming the king of the town as a rookie pissed Isiah off. (For the record, as I see it, nobody fucking cares that Isiah is from Chicago. Even to this day when I see Isiah he tells me, “We need to sit down with Michael.” Man, he’s not sitting down with you. Kick rocks. You and Magic Johnson sat down and talked about your problems, but Michael is not going to do that.)
The plan was that Isiah, with the help of some veteran teammates on the Eastern Conference roster, would keep the ball out of Michael’s hands. Isiah also planned for two of his friends on the Western Conference roster, Magic Johnson and George Gervin, to attack Michael on defense and wear him out.
Why would Magic and George and Isiah’s Eastern Conference teammates get involved in this plan?
There were a bunch of crazy rumors about what happened before the game that could explain it, though I really think that most of it is stupid shit. There was one report that Michael refused to acknowledge Isiah in a hotel elevator the night before the All-Star Game.
Another version is that, on the Saturday before the game, during workouts, Michael wore his Nike warm-ups in violation of the NBA protocol. He was promoting Nike. So the veteran guys got upset, saying, “Who the heck is this rookie? He’s not acting the way he should.”
Whatever the reason, Michael ended up playing twenty-two minutes, the fewest among all ten starters on the Eastern Conference team. He scored seven points on 2-for-9 shooting. Six players on the East roster took more shots, including the Bucks’ Terry Cummings, who managed to shoot seventeen times in sixteen minutes. Gervin did, in fact, attack Michael on both defense and offense, and scored 23 points.
Mike tried to keep the feud from going public. After the game he simply said: “This being my first All-Star Game, I was very tentative. I didn’t want to be perceived as a rookie going out to steal the show. I was just happy to be there.”
Isiah wasn’t quite so professional, though in his own way he tried to laugh it off, and he’s always claimed that the whole freeze out thing never happened. In response to the rumor that Michael snubbed him in an elevator, he said that if “Michael Jordan ever walked by me without saying hello, I’d probably turn around and punch him in the face.” Isiah was laughing when he said it.
A lot of the bad blood that had started at the 1985 All-Star Game continued for a long time. Isiah thinks that Mike kept him off the 1992 Dream Team. My opinion: Isiah can’t be mad at Mike when his own coach, Chuck Daly, didn’t want him on the team. Isiah had too much baggage. USA Basketball didn’t want that luggage going to the Olympics in Barcelona. Even Magic says that Mike had nothing to do with keeping Isiah off the Olympic team. Magic also claims he wasn’t involved in the All-Star “Freeze Out.” All I can say is, birds of a feather flock together. Magic is a very controlling guy. Isiah is the same way.
Two days after the All-Star Game, the Bulls beat the Pistons 139–126 in overtime. Michael scored 49 points, at the time his career high. He played forty-five minutes and took thirty-one shots. That’s how motivated Michael was by the incident in Indiana. As I joined him on the Bulls, and we became players and teammates, I came to see that quality up close and learn from it.
All of this is to say that Jerry Krause wasn’t being completely honest when he said of the trade for George Gervin just before my first real NBA game: “I don’t think we’ll have any problems with him.” George being in Chicago did cause a problem with Michael.
Personally, I didn’t have any problem with George. In fact, Iceman became one of my mentors during my rookie year. Michael wasn’t the biggest fan of that, but it didn’t matter to me: I was of the opinion that rookies should listen to vets. When you enter the league, you always have one or two veteran players who look out for you as a rookie. It’s a tradition that still exists—I became the vet for a lot of first-year players during my career. And I was George’s “rook.” George was originally from Detroit. He could score, and he had one of the best Nike posters ever. You know the one: in the photo George is wearing a gray track suit and is sitting on blocks of ice while holding two basketballs.
Iceman would always call me “young fella.” That was his thing. He and I lived close to each other in Chicago, so we saw each other a lot, and we talked on the phone a lot, too. He didn’t mind trying to talk to young players and help them. He was thirty-three when he got traded to Chicago. I’d hung around with my uncles when I was growing up, so I was used to being around guys more than ten years older than me. (Years later, Iceman and I coached against each other in the Big3—that’s the three-on-three league run by another Ice: Ice Cube.)
George was a star in both in the ABA and the NBA with the San Antonio Spurs. He averaged 33 points per game one season for the Spurs. He was the team’s all-time leading scorer and held the record for most points scored in a quarter with 33 against New Orleans in 1978. Carmelo Anthony tied that record, and then in 2015 Klay Thompson scored 37 against the Sacramento Kings.
Iceman was scoring points in an era when you were really allowed to play physical defense. Before David Robinson and Tim Duncan came along, George was the best player in Spurs history. The year before we traded for him Ice averaged 21 points, but he was unhappy with the Spurs. A few days before George was traded, he was a no-show at two practices. George didn’t like that he was going to be on the bench behind Alvin Robertson and Wes Matthews. San Antonio’s owner at the time, Angelo Drossos, fined George and asked him if he wanted to retire. George wasn’t ready to call it a career, so the Spurs instead traded him to the Bulls.
When the reporters asked Michael about the Bulls trading for Gervin, Mike didn’t hide his feelings.
“I have no comment on the trade,” he said. “Just say I am unhappy.”
Maybe this was a case of Krause trying to motivate Michael by making him angry. Or maybe the trade, which was a big one to make the day before the season started, was meant to be a distraction from some bigger issues that had been swirling around the team. On the eve of my rookie season, the Chicago Bulls had more to worry about than whether their budding superstar could peacefully coexist with a legendary veteran.
3 BASKETBALL JUNKIE
When the Bulls traded for George Gervin in October 1985, there was already a player on our team, named Quintin Dailey, who wore the number that Gervin had on his jersey his entire career, 44. So Gervin took number 8 with the Bulls. It turned out that Gervin probably should have been given 44 all along, because just as he was arriving to the team, Dailey was in Pasadena Community Hospital’s drug rehabilitation center, being treated for cocaine addiction. He spent thirty-one days there and missed our first thirteen games. Then, in February, he had a relapse and returned to the same facility after failing to show up for a home game against the Detroit Pistons.
This guy was always involved in some type of controversy. When Quintin was a rookie with the Bulls in 1982, there were women’s groups picketing outside of Chicago Stadium because he had pled guilty to an assault charge in an incident involving a woman when he played college ball at the University of San Francisco. He was sentenced to three years’ probation in that case.
He once gained thirty pounds during a season. I had heard the famous story before coming to the Bulls about him having a ball boy get him a slice of pizza and a soda during a game in 1984 and eating it on the bench. He had attempted suicide, and violated the league’s drug policy twice. A third violation would have meant the NBA would kick him out of the league for at least two years. That didn’t happen, but when he was sent to rehab in February 1986, he never played for the Bulls again. Dailey died of heart disease in 2010 at the age of forty-nine. It’s sad, and I have to think that his drug use had something to do with it.
Dailey’s case was extreme, but honestly, not all that extreme.
The NBA had a serious drug problem when I got to the league. In the early 1980s, the Washington Post estimated that “40 to 75 percent” of the league was using cocaine, and that maybe 10 percent were freebasing.
“There is not a team in the league you can confidently say does not have a drug problem,” Frank Layden, the general manager of the Utah Jazz said in August of 1980. “Every team could benefit from a rehabilitation program. I had two [drug] cases out of eleven players last year. We need a place to send these people [for help].”
In January of 1980, the Jazz forward Bernard King, who made his name with the Knicks, had been arrested on charges of sodomy and possession of cocaine. Later, Terry Furlow, a guard with the Jazz, died in a car accident. The autopsy showed traces of valium and cocaine in Furlow’s system.
Larry O’Brien was NBA commissioner in the early eighties. The NBA actually formed a special committee to look into the drug problem. When that report came out, O’Brien said, “The NBA, of course, recognizes that the use of drugs is a problem in our society today. We have no indication that the percentage of players in our league who may have tried drugs exceeds the percentage of the general population which has experimented with drugs.”
David Stern took over for O’Brien in 1984 and wanted to do more to actually address the drug problem. He could have easily started with our locker room in Chicago. There were drugs everywhere.
In The Last Dance, the documentary about the nineties Bulls, Michael told a crazy story about the drug use he encountered on the team when he was a rookie in 1984. Michael said: “Look, guys were doing things that I didn’t see. I had one event, preseason, I think we were in Peoria [Illinois]. I was in the hotel trying to find my teammates. So I start knocking on doors, and I get to this one door and knock on the door and I can hear someone say ‘Shhhh. Someone’s outside.’ And then you hear this deep voice [say] ‘Who is it?’ I said ‘MJ.’ And they said ‘Ah, fuck, he’s just the rookie, don’t worry about it.’ So they open up the door, I walk in, and practically the whole team was in there, and it was like, things I’ve never seen in my life as a young kid. You got your lines [of cocaine] over here, you got your weed smokers over here, you got your women over here.
“So the first thing I said was ‘Look, man, I’m out.’ Because all I could think about was if they come raid this place right about now, I am just as guilty as everybody else that’s in this room. From that point on, I was more or less on my own.”
The problem didn’t seem any better the next season, when I was a rookie. Michael and I became fast friends and did just about everything together. I was spending a lot of time with Michael from the start, and maybe one of the reasons we got along, other than being the same age, is that we didn’t do drugs. We went to dinner all the time, worked out together, went on vacation. Mike flew me to the All-Star Game in Dallas my rookie year. I only played with Michael for three seasons in Chicago, but I probably went out to dinner with him eighty times. I played ten years with Patrick Ewing and went out to dinner two or three times with him. Patrick liked to keep to himself.
Mike and I really had a low-key lifestyle. On a typical night on the road I’d go to Mike’s room, play spades, and we’d just talk. We didn’t hang out at clubs. There would be times we’d go out to dinner and maybe meet up with people, but we weren’t going out drinking and clubbing the night before a game. You’ve got to be focused. At least that was my philosophy. I never smoked weed or did cocaine.
