The Jordan Rules: The Inside Story of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls

by Sam Smith

Sure, Jordan was famous and cool, but the NBA was still Magic and Bird, and the rest of the season was a warm-up for their annual championship dance.

I also learned about that out of context thing you hear so much about. There can be something to it. There was always this joke around the newspaper that “95 percent of what you read is true. Except the five percent you have personal knowledge about.” I was getting trapped in a version of that.

Phil felt it was his responsibility to open them up to more than basketball. He knew the birthdays of the wives or girlfriends. I remember him saying that even a nod as a player came off the floor or a question about something going on at home was as important as a game plan. It showed he cared, and that they mattered to him.

Brilliance rarely includes kindness. The really great ones have this streak in them that manifests itself in different ways.

But it also suggested to me what I always felt about Jordan, the basic decency within him from his mother and father, his close family environment and the strong values he received in high school and college. I found him to be a decent man with this overwhelming competitive drive that was a disease as much as a gift. I thought it drove him to lengths he wasn’t necessarily comfortable with.

Center Dave Corzine, a former Bull, had once explained it well: “It’s hard playing on a team with Michael Jordan because you’re always the reason the team lost.”

He did work hard, but he could never understand that modesty is the only sure bait when you angle for praise.

Jackson did not reach this conclusion overnight; he is not a spontaneous man. He is deeply contemplative and tends to internalize. While Jackson rarely discusses his team problems at home, where the frenzy of his four children are a welcome escape, his wife, June, would occasionally turn over in bed at 5:00 A.M. and see Phil lying on his back, his eyes closed and his glasses on.

“We had a rule of thumb in New York,” Jackson said: “A star makes the players around him better. That was our belief. That was the measure of what a star was, Frazier or Reed picking up for you, covering you defensively, allowing you to play harder because they could intimidate an opponent, Walt with his quick hands and ability to make a pass to you, and the same with Dave DeBusschere.”

If you spend time wishing you had other players and scheming to get rid of them or not being loyal, either you end up hating them or they end up hating you, and that cannot be productive.

Question: What’s the hardest thing about going on the road? Answer: Not smiling when you kiss your wife good-bye at the door.

Jackson had long studied philosophy and he knew you get the chicken by hatching the egg, not smashing it. So when he was asked about Jordan’s theory, Jackson offered a narrow smile. “I find as I get older I become more patient,” he said.

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.

Before the New York game earlier in the month, Jordan, Pippen, and Grant, all of whom had boys under three at the time, had debated for a half hour about whose child had the biggest penis. They eventually agreed it was Pippen’s.

I took that year off and I didn’t watch any basketball. I played tennis and golf and I was on my own schedule for the first time in ten years. I had knee problems, so I’m not the player I was, and I have a lesser role and I can’t say I don’t miss playing thirty-five, forty minutes per game and scoring twenty, twenty-five points. But I feel totally different about everything after a year away. I realize what a privilege it is to play in the NBA and how really nice it is. I think now I’ll stay around three or four more years.”

“Imagine how this makes your teammates feel,” Reinsdorf continued. “What are they supposed to think when their captain says we’re not good enough? How are we supposed to get the most out of them? And then how are we supposed to make a deal when you’re knocking your players? Are other teams going to want them when you say they’re not good enough?”

The balls this night in Miami were well below the required 7½ to 8½ pounds. An innocent oversight? Unlikely. With a softer ball players can’t dribble as fast and the game slows. It was what a less talented team like Miami wanted against a running team like the Bulls. Jackson got the balls pumped up and the Heat were deflated. It works the other way, too; Jackson has caught the Lakers trying to sneak balls with 15 to 17 pounds of air into the game. Why? Magic Johnson likes a high dribble, and a livelier ball results in long rebounds that key the kind of fast break the Lakers love to use, especially at home.

“He’s the greatest athlete I’ve ever seen,” he said of Jordan. “Maybe the greatest athlete ever to play any sport. He can do whatever he wants. It all comes so easy to him. He’s just not a basketball player.”

“You’ve got to stand up to him or he’ll never respect you. Brad Sellers never would and he killed him, just killed him. Same with Hop now. We get along a little better now, but that’s only because I told him what he could do with himself. He still pushes me, but he knows when to stop now.”

Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky; And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forward and back— For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

“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.”

“Perfection is only possible with God,” he wrote on the players’ scouting reports. “We expect excellence.”

Embittered and resentful. The Bulls were at the top of their game.

“I’m a gestaltist on this,” said Jackson, who felt his team at a man-for-man disadvantage. “The sum of the parts can be equal to or greater than the whole. That’s the game of basketball. We don’t have a great rebounder, but Pippen and Jordan pick up the slack, and if guys box out and do the right thing, we can find a way to bridge the gap against more talented teams.”

I suspect many teams in pro sports exhibit the jealousies, anger, and resentments that often occur in this story. And why shouldn’t they? Frankly, it’s unnatural to take twelve young men united only by their athletic ability, put them together for about eight months, pay them varying fortunes of money, give them one ball to play with, and then expect them to maintain some sort of storybook, harmonious relationship.