There Is No Next: NBA Legends on the Legacy of Michael Jordan

CHAPTER 1

There is No Next

I know what you’re thinking: Another Michael Jordan book? C’mon.

For me, it makes a trilogy. And as Michael always likes to point out, a lot of us are making money off his name. Not nearly as much as some, but that’s another issue.

Reggie Miller: "He got a lot of us paid: his marketing, television rights. He got us out of the tight, tight shorts, which was good. He’s the one who went with the baggy shorts and the short socks because before then it was the John Stockton shorts and everyone wore socks up to the knee. So he’s the one that did short socks, black shoes during playoffs. That was Chicago. And the Jordans went through the roof; everybody wanted to have them. He is a cultural icon. I guess you would put him in the same category as Muhammad Ali, Babe Ruth, I’m trying to think of who else. I think that may be it. People talk about Mt. Rushmore of the NBA, the greatest players. But all sports. Maybe you could put Bill Russell in there. Does Michael trump Bill Russell? If you put Bill Russell and his achievements in the 1990s—certainly, yes. Michael just came around when television was huge and the internet was just starting. I guess Jackie, Babe, Muhammad, and maybe Michael. I would say that’s the Mt. Rushmore of sports icons of the last hundred years."

This occurred to me as well in the last few years. Hey, this guy was really good!

More than that—I’ve been there and saw all of it. I sometimes like to point out for a trivia question no one cares about much that George Koehler and I (George is Michael’s famous limousine driver, companion, defender and security chief) are the only ones to have been at Michael’s Big Six, that being his three firsts with the Bulls: The October 1984 opener, his 1995 return after his first retirement and in 2001 with the Washington Wizards. And his three finales: The grand TV spectacle retirement show in 1993, again with somewhat less kitsch in 1998, and in 2003 with the Washington Wizards in Philadelphia. I wrote two books from it: the somewhat infamous The Jordan Rules, the diary of the 1990–91 championship season, and Second Coming, Jordan’s return to the NBA in 1995.

It turned out they were a generation ago.

I began to realize this in the last year or so with increased interest in The Jordan Rules. Just in case anyone finds this book some day in a used bookstore, that would be 2013 and 2014. Of course, no one may know what a bookstore is before long. But, I digress. Anyway, I see tweets and mentions of The Jordan Rules and people say they want to read it or have heard of it, which is flattering, of course. But I also came to realize it’s an entire generation of people who know of Michael Jordan, but really do not know Michael Jordan because they never really saw him in his prime.

I began to think of writing about Jordan again, as Fall 2014 is the thirtieth anniversary of Jordan entering the NBA. It also happened to be a time of dramatic change for the NBA. Obviously, Jordan played a major part in that, if not the crucial part. I concurrently began to realize—which can be dangerous if you haven’t exercised a lot—that Jordan basically hadn’t played basketball in sixteen years. Yes, Jordan played for the Washington Wizards from 2001–03, though that guy was not the Michael Jordan who we know as The Michael Jordan. Given you don’t remember much until you are about seven or eight years old, that means this generation of youngsters—who determine trends and are so important to advertisers and Apple products—doesn’t really know this guy.

He still endorses an amazing amount of products, and his shoes and clothing lines remain among the top sellers. His fashion influences endure, from the guys with earrings to shaved heads. I want to be like Mike has almost become an accepted way of life, whether realized or not.

It’s also generally accepted, if not scientifically proven, that Jordan was the best we’ve ever seen on a basketball court. It’s much debated, as these things are in sports. Some will mention Russell, who had more championships. There’s Wilt Chamberlain with more points, Oscar Robertson had more box score columns filled up and maybe someday LeBron James will. But that it’s not just about basketball is the significance. On the NBA’s official web site, NBA.com, Jordan’s biography starts out: By acclamation, Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player of all time. In 1999, when ESPN did a survey and countdown of the greatest athletes of the twentieth century, Jordan was number one, followed by Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Wayne Gretzky, Jesse Owens, Jim Thorpe, Willie Mays, Jack Nicklaus, and Babe Zaharias. Joe Louis, Wilt Chamberlain and Jackie Robinson were in the second ten. There was some dispute that perhaps Ruth should have or could have surpassed Jordan, though for societal impact it would be difficult to surpass Jordan. No one exactly wanted to Be Like Babe. Jordan stands, or flies in the parlance of his time, at the juncture of change and social significance in twentieth century sports.

It’s where the comparisons to Ali and Ruth and Jackie Robinson arise. They transcended their sports, though not just about social change like with Robinson and Ali. They crossed over from their sports to the American and, really, world consciousness. You didn’t have to know about their sport to know about them, be curious about them, and be influenced by them.

You can make a case for others at times, like Joe Louis, Arthur Ashe, Joe DiMaggio, Jesse Owens, Jack Dempsey, Jim Thorpe, Bobby Jones, and Jack Johnson. That would be fair for the effect they had on the American way of life and mores, though the way Jordan impacted the culture in his sport and beyond is something that’s rarely been experienced. Even just the way he played became something of a harbinger for the video game generation that continues to expand to the point that, in 2014, Amazon paid almost $1 billion for a service that allows the viewer to just watch video games being played. Jordan’s spectacular, seemingly anti-gravitational efforts became models for the games that grew more sophisticated with the advances in computer science.

Elton Brand: "As kids it seemed like the ultimate hero story. No matter how much he’s down or what the odds were, he would find a way to win. And, you know, you’re watching it in the Utah Jazz series. It really stands out. I’m watching it and it’s like ‘They ain’t gonna lose, but…Michael Jordan can’t lose! He can’t lose. He’s not gonna lose.’ And he did not lose; he found a way to win. He hit most of the big shots. Kerr, Paxson, some other guys hit some big shots. But when it came down to the end, it’s not like there was a rebound or something happened and the ball was hit away. No, he found a way. It’s the ultimate superhero story. My brother told me guys were wearing baldheads, and I laughed because I’m a kid then. Baldheads? Why would you wanna wear baldheads? But Michael made it fashionable, mainstream. Because you go back to 80s, early 90s guys. Guys with hoop earrings in their ears. That’s all Michael."

Perhaps it was just timing. It was when marketing in sports with the growth of electronics and the communications of sports was merging. Perhaps it just carried Jordan along. Or that the times needed someone like Jordan, whose skill, physical grace, appealing personality, and appearance with just the right amount of understanding of the world that perhaps was more penetrating that most of us were able to understand was the alchemy to produce the gold of societal brilliance from the game that had been leaden just a few years before.

I remember the late Bulls’ legendary player, coach, and broadcaster, Johnny Kerr, telling me something Jordan said to him early in Jordan’s career. Jordan was fond of Johnny, who traveled with the Bulls basically Jordan’s entire career, and for whom Jordan did his famous talcum powder pregame ritual that was adopted by LeBron James. Kobe Bryant mimicked most everything else.

Jordan was being handed that mythical torch of greatness that represented the face of the NBA, and Johnny asked him about being a legend before he was thirty. Michael wasn’t much for books and history, but he was aware and curious. He had a natural feel for people and the times. He said he never thought like that, that Dr. J was a legend. Jordan mentioned the combination of his marketing and endorsements and said he’d crossed racial barriers. He said when people see him they don’t as much see black or white, but a basketball player they enjoy watching and who gives them pleasure. Consider the Daily Beast and MSNBC commentator, author, and music journalist Toure, who wrote, The moment where you have a Michael Jordan ad where lots of little white kids are saying, ‘I want to be like Mike.’ That is an extraordinary, watershed moment. I don’t think that was happening before.

Jordan could be questioned or criticized by activists at times for supposedly not doing more about the plight of blacks in America, for not speaking out, for not taking a position about the overseas sweatshops that produce the products he endorsed, of not getting involved with his influence. But I thought Jordan did have influence, though the way he used it probably was actually more appropriate and effective than what some more vocally demanded—an offshoot, in effect, of the nonviolence preached by the most effective civil rights leader of the era, Martin Luther King, Jr., who also was often criticized by the more aggressive wings of the movement.

Magic Johnson: "When I talked to him after I announced [having the HIV virus in 1991], I called him and he was right there. He was right there to write a check. He was the first one to write a check to the foundation and be a part of it. Embracing me at the 1992 All-Star game and signaling it was OK to embrace those with the disease. Because it was his league. Everything was centered around Michael and what Michael thought, what Michael did. When he came over that just relaxed everybody else. He opened the door for the world to accept. Not just those guys, but that was a worldwide thing because Michael Jordan was the biggest thing in the world."

I’d probably gotten Jordan in some trouble as well when I’d used his joke when I was asking him why he wasn’t working for or endorsing Mayor Harvey Gantt in the Senate race against Jesse Helms, who had a history of racist behavior. Jordan with a sharp retort, which was his way of engaging in conversation, said Republicans buy sneakers, too. I hadn’t used it in The Jordan Rules, but had mentioned it in conversation over the years. It was Jordan at his challenging best. If you knew or were around Jordan, you understood it was merely his native quick response. Hey, he was born in Brooklyn, after all. You questioned him about something and he’d try to top you, sort of winning the conversation, that legendary competitive streak everyone talks about. Like his dad once said when gambling questions came up in the early 1990s: Michael didn’t have a gambling problem; he had a competition problem. It was basically a joke, but it was taken to define a political philosophy, that Jordan preferred principal over principle. It wasn’t that Jordan didn’t care, but there were different ways of effecting change.

In many respects, Jordan did his part as well as the great activists of the civil rights era. I’m not suggesting Jordan as some Martin Luther King or Paul Robeson. Civil rights wasn’t his constant cause, though Jordan had his share of racial strife growing up in Wilmington, N.C. He had famously been suspended from school a few times as an adolescent for responding physically to racial insults. His mother, who worked in a local bank, actually had him spend the days he was out of school sitting in her car in the bank parking lot so she could watch him out her window. His home and his teachings from grounded and responsible parents were respect and equality for all. Though no one could tame his desire or demands in an athletic setting, his values of respect and fairness were exemplary.

Some might say, Where does this come from for you, Sam Smith, who wrote that book, the one critical of Jordan, the one he didn’t like? Now he’s perfect?

Not exactly. We know Jordan’s peccadilloes from gambling to a messy divorce to his lack of patience with teammates. That was part of the narrative of The Jordan Rules. It’s OK to not be perfect. Families feud. The Jordan Rules was a diary of a season, and in that season the Bulls just happened to win the NBA title. And Jordan, with Phil Jackson’s shepherding, grew from just the scoring star to the teammate with needs that would prove to be fulfilled. I know from being around Jordan all those early years with the Bulls that he was urged by his business representatives to always maintain a perfect image lest he lose his place in the game and society, and then perhaps his commercial leverage. It made him somewhat unnatural at times. Not that I’m taking any credit, but I always felt after The Jordan Rules was released and the controversy faded it helped free Jordan a bit. He didn’t have to be perfect. People still would like him, love him, really.

Which returns to the element of his influence in race relations. Perhaps the biggest issue this nation has faced since its founding has been race relations and the embarrassing history of slavery, violence and abuse. I’m not one to evaluate the causes or the solutions, though I do see Jordan now more akin to the behavior and methods of President Barack Obama. Jordan has become more politically active in his post-playing life. He has been an active Obama supporter and has had fundraisers for the president.

What’s always seemed to me little understood about the nation’s first black president was that he matured as a community organizer, a Harvard Law Review editor who brought differing philosophies and visions together. Though some suggest President Obama has revolutionary views and methods—and I won’t get into that debate—I always saw him more trying to be a facilitator. It’s why it seems to me his so-called base, the liberal Democrats, often express disappointment that he didn’t go far enough in health care and other issues when he and they had the power to do so, while his opponents said he went too far. I think Jordan was more comfortable in that vein. He really wasn’t a great leader in basketball like, say, a Magic Johnson. Jordan would lead more by deeds rather than demands. He’d be vocal, as teammates widely attested, but was more naturally a performer.

Larry Bird: "I don’t know who’s the best ever. If you look at the stats, it’s Wilt Chamberlain. Come on: 50 points a game and all that. But Wilt was a big guy. He should do that, you know? But what Michael accomplished at two guard! There have been some great two guards. But I just know in my time from the 80s ‘til now Michael is the best player I’ve seen. He’s the best I’ve played against. I think he’s the best our league has seen. Not because of the championships but how good he was."

Basketball is what we came to debate and the fun part. But here also was a man who could be admired and respected for what he did, who became a model, if not some ideal fantasy role model, in a society which still debates how it should handle race relations. The advances and gains from just the 1960s and Martin Luther King’s era are substantial, though issues like the Donald Sterling comments that arose late in the 2013–14 season demonstrate even in an organization like the NBA, where there is a majority black population, acceptance comes in many forms.

Yet, there is little doubt of the level of acceptance of Michael Jordan, and perhaps, in part, because he refrained from telling people how they should think, instead providing a model of achievement and behavior that could be reached from humble beginnings. Maybe you really could be like Mike. Other than on the basketball court, of course.

But it’s not just being present at the pivotal moment in time with the growth of the league, it’s marketing and commercial business and media; it’s more so being the right guy with that it factor. Other great players had shoe contracts before, like Bird, Magic, and Erving as Converse dominated the basketball shoe market. There was more than that to Jordan.

Americans tend to see an inevitability in events—that something would have happened because it did happen. Sure the Bulls would have won because they had Jordan. But they won, which also elevated Jordan’s stature, because Jordan—despite the team sport element—would not accept any other way. He didn’t join great talent like Bird and Magic did, and like LeBron James went on to find for a time.

There’s something you see in sports, and basically American life, from business to politics. When there is success, it can become ugly in the rush to claim credit. The great leaders understand a rising tide lifts all boats, that if you are part of success, you’ll profit from that. It would become an issue with the Bulls and Jordan as it has with most organizations, the elbowing to the spotlight like subway commuters when the doors are closing.

But it was Jordan who drove that sporting success, perhaps more than the events provided a platform for his explosion. It’s not necessarily a definable set of elements. But only a few have it, like Babe Ruth or Muhammad Ali, transcendent figures whose feats might be matched or succeeded, but whose impact on the times and the public are not.

Mark Heisler, Hall of Fame journalist: "I was a beat writer [in Philadelphia] for Julius Erving, and I loved him as did everyone who ever covered him. Really sweet guy, really patient, really down to earth. But Michael was everything there ever was coming together. I remember the first time I saw him live was in Indiana, the Olympic tryout camp in 1984. He was just kind of like jogging across the floor and he looked so beautiful. He looked like a thoroughbred racehorse. On top of everything else he was like the best looking basketball player there ever was, his body, the way he moved. He was so graceful, so fluid. And I’m used to beautiful athletes, used to über athletes. The NBA is made up of them, guys who are beautiful, Dominique Wilkins. But even more than that I remember the first game I covered him in the old Chicago Stadium and in the tiny dressing room afterwards there was a big crowd around him. I was towards the back and I didn’t know him and there’s like 20–25 guys around him and I’m thinking to myself, ‘If I ever wanted a professional athlete to know me and like me, that was the one.’ Sportswriters all say we’re not supposed to think that way or admit it if we feel it. But I think everybody does feel it to some extent. I’ve seen sportswriters’ faces when players are being nice to them. They look like cats who are being petted. I’m sure I’ve felt that a lot of times with a lot of guys. But I was never so conscious of it as I was that moment with Mike. You remember him in the beginning. He was really nice, boyish, really loved the press; loved talking to the press. It was just boy-next-door multiplied times a thousand. Michael was the one above all of them that I was really conscious of. He didn’t just open the door for African-American athletes to do commercials. When he got the door open a crack he went to the sky. He didn’t just make sports possible for African Americans to do commercials. He made it possible for athletes—black or white—to become huge. Everything in the Michael story is about everything coming together with Michael. Sneaker companies realizing there was this huge untapped market out there; teens would pay $100–$175 for a pair of sneakers. Nike, which wasn’t that big at the time, rode Michael like a rocket. You don’t get that big with just black teenagers. The same way I felt attracted to him, I think everybody loved him. I’ll never forget. There was a Saudi princess who wanted to meet him in DC. The Saudi royal family wants to meet him and it wasn’t happening. [Bulls staffer] Tim Hallam’s quote was: ‘There’s a Saudi prince in every city.’ Michael was on the Barcelona team. And I remember we used to laugh our heads off. All these foreign guys who aren’t used to Michael Jordan. They’d all say ‘Um, when will you come to my country?’ And then I remember there was one guy who asked him ‘Are you a God?’ he said ‘No, I’m from Chicago.’ The Dream Team inspired all that kind of stuff, but Michael was the pinnacle of the pinnacle. Magic was as avid to hang around him as anybody else was. Magic really wanted to get on his good side. Magic adored him."

Yet, Jordan also spent more personal time being ordinary than extraordinary. He cherished and demanded loyalty, which is why I always believed he was mad at me about The Jordan Rules. Though not part of his inner circle, Jordan was comfortable with me as a media person. We’d been out to dinner a few times and to play golf. I never considered The Jordan Rules a betrayal, though at the time it was depicted in some media reports as an attack. I’ve always been secure that it was a fair portrait of him and his team at the time. I suspect a reading now generally provokes the, What was the big deal? response. But I also saw that attraction Heisler talks about. This really is a more ordinary person, still close with childhood friends and to this day reveling over his babies in his second marriage, who reached an extraordinary level of success and who also comes with flaws and warts. When he was being inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2009, he made sure to have Hallam and Joe O’Neil, the latter the Bulls ticket manager who took care of his multitude of requests in his playing career, travel with him to Springfield on his plane even though he’d barely seen them the previous ten years. I wrote in The Jordan Rules about how he melted before one game meeting with a little girl in the Make-a-Wish program. Jordan always stayed with it and became Chief Wish Ambassador in 2008 and wrote the foreword to a 2014 book, Wish Granted, about celebrities in the program. He loved to stop for kids and I wasn’t surprised that he was having children at fifty. Because I knew he was still a kid himself when he was playing ball and wasn’t the father he wished he’d been and what his father had been to him because of his basketball and celebrity schedule.

So he really does look a lot like America and you can feel good, as he said to Johnny Kerr, about what he’s done but also who he’s been.

If you were born around the time of ESPN in America, which was about 1979, you really don’t know all that much about Michael Jordan. Sure, you know Michael Jordan and you know what’s he’s done and all the numbers and famous shots replayed on various endless loops. But you never saw the actual picture. That’s what this book is about, Michael’s life and fabulous basketball career at this thirtieth NBA anniversary in what was basketball’s version of the Greatest Generation marker. When the transformation of marketing, business, communications, competition and athletic talent came together to produce the greatest era of NBA play with Jordan its face and driving force. This book is in a combination text/narrative/oral history format with the people who have played against him and watched him the most offering views and commentary along the way. Yes, it’s another Jordan book. But it’s always relevant when it involves one of the preeminent figures in our history.

It’s also the end of the argument: There is no next after Jordan. There really cannot be.

The Next Jordan question has been played out in discussions the last twenty years among Grant Hill, then Kobe Bryant, now LeBron James and certainly more to come. A better player may arrive—or maybe not. That could be debated, but not who Jordan was and what he represented in his time to the culture, society and the world, really. He still may be the most famous person in the world thirty years after his first NBA game. And one cannot claim that merely for playing a game.

President Barack Obama: For those of us who lived in Chicago at the time, Michael and the Bulls brought a constant, wonderful diversion to our lives. But it also brought a city together, a city that in the past had been known for its ethnic and racial divisions.

I also think Michael represented the first black athlete—or maybe black figure, period—to truly enter the American mainstream as its preeminent crossover global icon. Figures like Robinson, Mays, Gibson, Russell were admired, but never had the same platform. Ali in his prime, like Jim Brown, remained divisive for much of white America. Magic shared top billing with Bird. But the combination of Michael’s on the court brilliance and Nike’s marketing genius and the shift in the culture and racial attitudes taking place in the 90s all put him in a category that no black athlete had ever occupied. Like the success of Oprah, or the Cosby show, or Michael Jackson before his personal problems overwhelmed him, Michael was both an expression of a shift in the culture and someone who helped solidify that change. Taken together, those shifts probably contributed to the possibility of a black president.

Of course, the downside has been that the commercialization of black celebrity that Michael represented may sometimes give the larger society an excuse to avoid some tougher questions about the structures of racial inequality and division that remain in place. But I’ve never viewed it as realistic to expect any athlete or entertainer to carry the primary load of major social issues, although it’s heroic when they do. All those kids from different backgrounds, even different countries, growing up wanting to be like Mike. That’s been a net plus.

CHAPTER 2

A Chicago Basketball History

Michael Jordan was a star when he arrived in Chicago in 1984, already with a gold medal from the 1984 Olympics where he was the best player, a title-winning first Shot from the 1982 NCAA championship game, the third overall pick in the 1984 draft, though the latter would give everyone, and particularly wary Chicagoans, some pause. After all, they had seen these high-scoring, fancy guards with the franchise basically going nowhere. It had been a star-crossed franchise, the loser in the 1979 draft coin flip for Magic Johnson, who had wanted to remain in the Midwest and play for the Bulls. His agent, George Andrews, said Magic wanted to play with a great center, and at the time the best were considered Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Los Angeles and Artis Gilmore with the Bulls. It’s why Magic decided to leave school after his sophomore season—rare in that era. It was the chance to win immediately, and Magic was about winning. Staying closer to his Michigan home also was appealing, though not meant to be, as Magic did OK in Los Angeles.

The Bulls hadn’t won much. But when they lost to the Trailblazers in the 1977 playoffs, Bill Walton said it was Portland’s most difficult series on the way to the title. Chicago Stadium was rocking, albeit for a moment, with the largest crowds in the NBA during that series. But the Bulls, having agreed to poll fans on whether to select heads or tails in the coin flip to decide the number one overall pick in that 1979 NBA draft, called heads based on fan input. The Bulls would put their tail between their legs and walked off with David Greenwood.

There would be so many so close calls in those few years before 1984.

Including with Isiah Thomas, the West Side prodigy who as a ten-year-old was sneaking into the old Chicago Stadium to watch that one almost-great Bulls team with Jerry Sloan, Norm Van Lier, Tom Boerwinkle, Bob Love, and Chet Walker. The youngest of nine children and famously protected by his mother, Mary, from the gangs and drugs which claimed several of his siblings, Thomas woke at 5 a.m. daily to travel an hour and a half to suburban St. Joseph’s High School, where his basketball legend developed. He went to Indiana University, where he led the Hoosiers to a title in 1981 and was ready to reach his dream as the Bulls had the number six pick in that draft. Thomas was too good to fall that low, but he’d hoped a bit of Bulls maneuvering and his own well-practiced guile would produce his dream.

Thomas and his good buddy from the West Side of Chicago, Mark Aguirre, had a plan. They both were