Blood on the Horns Read online

  As it turned out, the situation was just one of several sequences that ensured the ‘97 playoffs would long be remembered in Bulls lore for their strangeness. For example, there was the great Gatorade switchup during Game 4 of the Finals against the Utah Jazz. A team assistant got confused and served the players Gator Lode instead of Gatorade. “That’s something you drink after the game,” longtime Bulls equipment manager John Ligmanowski said of the Gator Lode. “It’s a high carbohydrate drink. So they each had the equivalent to 20 baked potatoes during the game. It slowed ‘em down a little bit.

  “Dennis and Michael and Scottie, they all had stomach aches,” Ligmanowski added. “They were drinking Gator Lode instead of Gatorade. Dennis had to run off the floor to go to the bathroom. Scottie was laying down, and Michael asked to be taken out of the game. And he never asks that, or very rarely.”

  Trying to figure out what was going on, trainer Chip Schaefer discovered the mistake late in the game and was furious. But by then it was too late. The “baked potatoes” had begun to weigh heavily on the Bulls’ bellies.

  “We were in control of the game,” Schaefer recalled, “and late in the game one guy after another starts complaining about cramping and upset stomachs and stuff. I’m wracking my brain trying to figure out what was going on. The Jazz happened to be a Coca Cola or Powerade team. In his misplaced loyalty, the ball boy tried to smuggle Gatorade onto the floor in a gym bag and picked up the wrong cans. It’s a dense, thick drink. It’s almost syrupy. The ball boy, in his loyalty to the Quaker Oats Company and Gatorade, didn’t want to use Powerade, so he was pouring Gator Lode into cups for them to drink. Of course, the guys come off the floor and gulp down whatever people are giving them. These guys were knocking back thousands of calories of Gator Lode. It was too late to do anything about it.”

  Still, the Bulls had managed to take a five-point lead with about two and a half minutes remaining in the game when the Jazz surged past them, outscoring Chicago 13-2 to win 78-73, tying the series at two-all.

  “Never, ever, ever had I heard Michael ask to come out of a game before,” Schaefer said. “Dennis, Michael and Scottie all had upset stomachs. We later won the title anyway, so we can look back on it and laugh. But it would have been terrible if that caused a swing in the series momentum.”

  Needless to say, Gator Lode was not a problem for Game 5. “We got that straightened out,” Ligmanowski said.

  Instead, Jordan’s health was the worry. He had to overcome a nasty virus, but did so in true Jordanian fashion, driving the Bulls to victory in Game 5 and a 3-2 lead in the best-of-seven series. The action then returned to Chicago for Game 6, where Jordan’s offense and Steve Kerr’s late jumper helped drive the Bulls to their fifth championship. It was another of those sweet title nights in Chicago, where the spray of champagne mixed with the humidity and the swirl of humanity to create an intoxicating steam in the Bulls’ jam-packed locker room. But the celebratory moment ended badly, with Jordan leaving the United Center in a state of fury. Somebody had stolen more than $100,000 worth of his jewelry, including his wedding ring, a watch and a necklace, apparently during the revelry of the celebration.

  It was not a pretty sight.

  But then again, the entire ‘97 playoff run, as beautiful as it was, had been marked by little pockets of ugliness. Especially whenever Jordan killed Krause, which usually happened on the team bus after a road playoff win.

  Team staff members figure it was the alcohol that made Jordan do it. In the first half hour after a game, Jordan and various teammates would pound down five or six beers and often fire up a cigar. It’s not unusual for pro basketball players to drink beer after games. They’ve been doing it for decades. It helped them replace the body fluids they’ve sweated away. Jordan certainly wasn’t wasted when he killed Krause. But he was buzzed enough to turn loose his wicked sense of humor. Some Bulls said Jordan ought to register his sense of humor as a weapon. It was that lethal.

  For years, Jordan had sat at the back of the bus after games, zinging teammates and anybody in range with his laserlike wit. He liked to hit the usual targets. Jordan would zap Kukoc for his showing in the 1992 Olympics, or for his defense, or for that European forgetfulness when it comes to deodorant. Or there was Ligmanowski, an easy target for his weight.

  Ligmanowski would have liked to come back at Jordan, but it was hard to do. Sometimes the team’s longtime equipment man just took aim at Pippen.

  “If it gets real bad,” Ligmanowski said, “I get on ‘em about nose jokes. Like last year in the playoffs (against Miami) when Scottie got hit in the head and he had that big knot on his head. I told him, ‘You scared the hell out of me. I thought you were growing two noses.’ He got a little hot about that. They get on me about my weight and stuff sometimes. If you’re gonna dish it out, you gotta be able to take it.”

  Jordan used the humor to police the roster, Ligmanowski said. “If he doesn’t feel somebody’s doing their job, or sucking it up to go play, he’ll say something. He’ll get a dig in and let them know how he feels.”

  “I don’t take things too seriously,” Jordan said. “I take them serious enough. I’m able to laugh at myself before I laugh at anybody else. And that’s important. I can laugh at myself. But then I can be hard.”

  He was particularly hard on Krause during the ‘97 playoffs.

  “That was ugly,” said one observer. “As ugly as it gets.”

  “Jerry Krause! Jerry Krause!” Jordan would yell from the back of the bus. “Hey, Jerry Krause, let’s go fishin’. (Krause had taken up fishing over the past few years.)

  “Hey, Jerry Krause, let’s go fish. It’s B. Y. O. P. Bring Your Own Pole. Don’t worry. If we don’t catch anything, you can just eat the bait yourself.”

  The back seats of the bus, where most of the players sat, exploded in laughter at these darts, while at the front of the bus, where team staff members rode, people bit their lips, some of them frowning at the discomfort of a player belittling the team’s vice president and general manager. Jackson, who was never the target of Jordan’s impishness, seemed to smile with his eyes.

  “Those guys would get a few beers in ‘em back there, and then they’d start in on him,” a Bulls staff member said.

  “Phil sometimes sits there and says nothing,” said another Bulls employee. “You’re Phil Jackson and your boss is being hammered by one of the players. At least say something. Phil does not stick up for him in any of those situations. It’s just like school kids, like school kids ganging up on somebody.”

  “I don’t know in retrospect what Phil could have done,” Chip Schaefer said. “It’s not like he would have turned and said, ‘That’s enough, Michael.’”

  Krause, for the most part, endured Jordan’s 1997 assaults in silence. Occasionally when the barrage got especially heavy, Krause would turn to whoever was sitting nearby and say, “The mouth from North Carolina is at it again.”

  “Maybe it’s a defense mechanism as far as Jerry is concerned,” Tex Winter said of Krause’s silence. “But it doesn’t seem to bother him that much. I think he’s got a pretty thick skin.”

  “Brad Sellers, now he was a good draft pick,” Jordan would be yelling from the back.

  One of the major barrages landed during the NBA Finals in Utah, as the bus struggled up the steep drive to the Park City resort where the team stayed. “We were reduced to like 25 miles per hour in these buses because we’d have to climb up over this big summit to get to Park City,” Chip Schaefer said. “You can make it from Salt Lake to Park City in a car in 30 minutes. But these buses were just terrible, and were reduced to like 25 miles per hour and the cars were just buzzing past us. It just sort of created this situation where it went on and on.”

  “Hey, Jerry Krause, this bus went faster yesterday without your fat ass on it!” Jordan would yell, followed by the team’s laugh track.

 
“Krause doesn’t have much to go back at Michael with. He calls him Baldy or something silly like that,” a Bulls employee observed. “When those guys are having their beers and they’re back there smoking their cigars and they’re buzzed over a victory, if Jerry said anything back to them he’d just be feeding the fire. They would just come back with something worse. That’s the way they are.”

  “They’ll have a couple of beers after a game,” Schaefer said. “I don’t think anybody is abusive about it. They drink their Gatorade and Gator Lode, and they like beer, too. Teasing is a cruel thing. It’s cruel when it’s done on a playground with 6-year-olds and 10-year-olds and 15-year-olds, and it’s cruel with adults, too. Have I heard comments before and cracked a smile? Probably. But I’ve also heard comments before and wished in my heart that he would just be quiet and leave him alone.”

  Center Luc Longley admitted that while Jordan’s barbs made the players laugh, the moment could also be uncomfortable, especially if you were the butt of Jordan’s jokes. “They’re a little bit tense at times. But for the most part, they’re pretty funny,” Longley said.

  Jordan could be wicked, the center added. “He’s on a pedestal, at least as far as he’s concerned. Well, that’s the wrong way to put it. But he’s in a position where he can crack on people fairly securely. But people crack back at him, and he handles that just as well. It’s usually not a mean thing.”

  “I think there’s always been a tension there,” Bill Wennington said. “For whatever reason, Michael just always gets on Jerry. Whenever Jerry’s around he’s gonna get on him, especially if it’s a team function where all the players are around. Michael’s gonna get on him. And the bus is a closed area, so there’s nowhere for anyone to go. So you just gotta sit there.”

  “He’s very smart,” Chip Schaefer said of Jordan. “The worst thing you can do is try to come back at him. If you don’t, it’ll fizzle out. Like if he starts making fun of you, you don’t want to turn back around and say, ‘Who you talking to, Baldy?’ Then you’ve elevated it to his level. You’re better off just laughing it off and hoping it will move on to somebody else maybe.”

  “Michael’s ability puts him in a position where he feels he can go out there and do that,” Wennington said. “As far as what he does with the team, he’s a great basketball player, and he’s our team leader. And team leaders can zing anyone. It’s a totem pole, and he’s high man on the totem pole right now, so everyone under him’s gotta take it. What you gotta do—at least what I do—is just take your lumps. If you start to zing him back, no one’s gonna side with me. They’re all gonna side with him, cause no one wants him zingin’ them. So it’ll be 12 against one. So you just take your two minutes of lumps. I’ve seen guys fire back, and it backfires. Scott Burrell starts firin’ back, and then instead of just your five minutes of torture, you’ve got a whole hour of it.

  “He’ll ride anyone,” Wennington added. “They’ll get in the mood, and they’ll just start pickin’ on someone, and that’s it. But you gotta be careful ‘cause every now and then, he’ll zing someone and you laugh a little too loud, and he’ll turn around and look at you like, ‘Let’s go for you!’”

  Steve Kerr said Jordan’s jabs were a lot easier to take after a win, but he also had comments after losses. “He’s cracking on people all the time,” Kerr said. “Those are fun moments. Those are moments that really last in the memory. He said some incredibly funny things. I think what makes them kind of special is that it’s just us on the bus. It’s just the team. They’re kind of intimate moments because they’re right after an emotional game, one way or another. The guys get going on the back of the bus, and it’s very entertaining.”

  Kerr said there was no question that Jordan was extra hard on Krause. Asked if Krause took it well, Kerr just smiled and raised his eyebrows.

  “Michael is a very funny comedian,” guard Ron Harper said. “He keeps everybody loose. When it’s very tense, when there are tight ballgames, he keeps you very very loose. He has an ability to say things that you don’t expect. He scores from the back of the bus a lot. He gets on Jerry Krause a lot.”

  Asked if Krause took the ribbing well, Harper laughed and said. “He don’t have a choice, does he?”

  “I think Jerry has the ability to maybe recognize Michael for what he is,” Tex Winter said. “He knows that Michael has the personality that likes to challenge people and belittle people and berate people. I think he just accepts that. He really doesn’t have much choice, as great a basketball player as Michael is. And Jerry’s the first to tell you that. Everybody recognizes how valuable Michael is to this ball club.”

  Asked if the conflict added to Krause’s frustrations in dealing with the team, Winter replied, “I’m sure it does. I’m sure it does.”

  Did Jordan cross the line with Krause? “I guess maybe that there isn’t even a line because he crosses it so often,” Winter said, adding that the situation was an obvious byproduct of the mingling of “the personalities, their egos.”

  “Michael can be as stubborn as Jerry,” pointed out another longtime team staff member. “They’re both incredibly stubborn. But that’s what makes people successful.”

  “In Jerry’s case, and Michael’s too, they sort of avoid each other as much as they can,” Winter said. “But there are times when they’ve got to face off with each other and talk about things because that’s part of the running of a franchise and being the superstar on a franchise.

  “It’s unfortunate that Michael has not had a little bit better relationship with Krause,” Winter added. “I’m not gonna take sides on it, but I will say this, Jerry is the general manager. Then again, because Michael is involved in a lot of the negotiations and dealings with him, it’s a give-and-take proposition. It’s too bad that they can’t kinda find a middle ground there. But for some reason, Michael’s had sort of this resentment, and it’s a shame.”

  Another Bulls employee with insight into the relationship said that Krause would never believe it but Jackson had actually asked Jordan to ease up on the general manager. Jordan supposedly replied that he knew he shouldn’t go so hard, “but sometimes I just can’t help myself.”

  “I think they’ve visited about it,” Winter agreed. “Phil has talked to Michael about trying to accept authority a little bit more as it’s handed down from Jerry. I think Phil has helped a little bit in that regard. But on the other hand, sometimes I feel like he doesn’t help as much as he maybe should, to be honest with you.”

  Winter said that he’d told Jackson he needed to do more to ease the situation. Jackson’s response was that getting between the players and Krause was a question of “balance.”

  “Just trying to keep an even balance all the time,” Jackson said. “Trying to present his point of view, where it makes sense, then trying to play an even field. If I present the prejudiced side, I’m unrealistic or not truthful … Jerry’s felt like I’ve been disloyal to him in certain situations. He brought this up to me at one point, and I said, ‘Jerry, I’ve only been fair. I’ve gotten these players to comply with so many things that I think are fairly done and we’ve kept them moving in the right way. But if I hadn’t been honest and they couldn’t read the honesty, then we wouldn’t have been successful. And you know I don’t have anything against you being in this job.”

  Jackson and Jordan had discussed the internal friction. “We’ve sat down and talked about it a couple of times, and I’ve asked him to really curtail it,” the coach said. “It makes it really uncomfortable for everybody else. And he says, ‘Sometimes I think it’s good for the team.’

  “I said, ‘Why?’ And that was his excuse. He’s taking up for Scottie. He’s taking up for the team. He’s airing some things for the team, and he thinks, ‘If all these guys have to take this much, I’m gonna give them back a little bit.’”

  “If anything, it was a frustration,” Jordan said when a
sked about the moments. “It wasn’t really in cahoots with what was happening with Scottie. I mean that was all a part of it, yes. But I didn’t really do it for him.

  “I did it for myself. I don’t think we, as an organ…” he started to say organization and paused, “we as a team, should always have to walk around on our toes with the GM following us everywhere we went. So we didn’t feel like we had freedom. It’s like your father overlooking your shoulder all the time. So sometimes I just felt compelled to vent frustration towards Jerry, which was probably uncalled for. But I was really trying to get him away from the team, so we could be ourselves, in a sense, and do our job without having someone looking over our shoulders.

  “A lot of it was just fun,” Jordan said. “It wasn’t anything derogatory towards him. It was all in jest. He laughed at it, and sometimes he would reply.”

  In the past, Jackson had suggested that Krause not travel with the team because he was “brusque” and “sets the players on edge with his presence.” Jackson supposedly brought up Krause’s travel with the team during his contract renewal talks in 1996. Essentially, Krause only traveled with the team during the preseason, during the team’s first West Coast road trip each November and during the playoffs. At other times, the general manager was usually off scouting college talent for each season’s draft.

  “Jerry felt like any exclusion or any intrusion into that territory, which is his territory, is an effort to keep him from trying to do his job,” Jackson said of the issue. “I suggested a number of ways around that. Flying in the plane, then taking a private car to the games with scouts, with people who are necessary to ride on the bus at game time. Taking a private carrier back to the hotel afterwards. Flying commercially. Doing things like that to keep his distance. But he says, ‘I don’t get a feel for the team and what the team’s all about.’ Well, it’s obvious that since 1991 Jerry really hasn’t had a feel for the mood of the team. Basically, he knows how to run the show and how it goes. It’s a pretty smooth operation.”