By David Halberstam

Random House

(C) 1999 Amateurs Ltd.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-679-41562-9

CHAPTER ONE

Paris, October 1997

In the fall of 1997, Michael Jeffrey Jordan, once of Wilmington, North Carolina, and now of Chicago, Illinois, arrived in Paris, France, with his team, the Chicago Bulls, to play a preseason tournament run by McDonald's, one of his principal corporate sponsors, as well as a very important corporate sponsor of the National Basketball Association. Even though it featured some of the better European teams, the tournament was not, in terms of the level of play, likely to be competitive for a top NBA team like the Bulls. Nor was it supposed to be: It was a part of the NBA's relentless and exceptionally successful attempt to showcase the game and its star players in parts of the world where basketball was gaining in popularity, particularly among the young. It was also done in no small part because it delighted the league's corporate sponsors by opening up and solidifying critical international markets. Not surprisingly, the American players did not take the competition very seriously. (Nor did their announcers. When the Celtics played in the tournament a few years earlier, their longtime announcer, Johnny Most, a man who did not always have an easy time with the names of American players, gave up completely, and fans back in Boston were treated to, "And so the short guy with the mustache throws it in to the tall guy with the beard....")

    The Bulls arrived to play for the hamburger championship of the world, as they often did these days, with all the fanfare of a great touring rock band. They were the Beatles of basketball, one writer had said years before, and in fact they flew over in the 747 normally used by the Rolling Stones for their tours. There had been a time when Michael Jordan had regarded France as a kind of sanctuary, a place where he could vacation and escape the burden of his fame, sitting outdoors in front of a cafe and savoring the role of anonymous tourist. His appearance on the Olympic Dream Team five years earlier and his subsequent mounting international fame had ended that. His gross income had more than doubled, but he had lost Paris; he was as recognizable and as mobbed here as anywhere else. Huge crowds waited outside his hotel all day long hoping for the briefest glimpse of the man French journalists called the world's greatest basketteur. At the games themselves, the French ball boys seemed unwilling to serve their own team and wanted to work only with the Bulls. Some of the French players inked Michael's number, 23, on their sneakers as a means of commemorating their brush with greatness. At Bercy, the arena in which the games were played, copies of his uniform jersey sold for the equivalent of a mere eighty dollars.

   JORDAN AWAITED LIKE A KING read the headline announcing his arrival in the sports daily L'Equipe. The games had been sold out for weeks, and the French press seemed ready to give Jordan head-of-state treatment and cut him some slack--when, during a press conference, he confused the Louvre, a great museum, with the luge, a dangerous winter sport, no one came down hard on him, though it was just the kind of mistake an American might make that normally the French would have seized on with great enthusiasm, to show the barbarity of the new world. MICHAEL HAS CAPTURED PARIS said another newspaper, and a writer added, "The young Parisians lucky enough to get into the Bercy must have dreamed beautiful dreams, for their hero had been everything they could have hoped for." Noting that Jordan was wearing his celebrated beret, journalist Thierry Marchand enthused, "We shall be able to call him Michel." France-Soir went even further: "Michael Jordan is in Paris," it said. "That's better than the Pope. It's God in person."

    The games themselves were not, in fact, very good; if anything, they were just short of an embarrassment. The Bulls performed sluggishly but managed to beat Olympiakos Piraeus of Greece in the Final. Jordan's celebrated teammates Dennis Rodman and Scottie Pippen were not there, and Toni Kukoc, once the best player in all of Europe, scored five points. Jordan scored twenty-seven, but was not pleased to have to play without two critically important teammates. Staying home would have been more restful, as his toe was infected.

    Jordan was well aware that the true triumph of Paris belonged less to him than to David Stern, the commissioner of the league. The tournament was not merely a reflection of the growing internationalization of the sport, which Stern helped engineer, but a celebration of the NBA's connection with McDonald's, one of America's blue-chip companies.

    Stern, surrounded by most of the NBA executive staff and all sorts of McDonald's executives, had a wonderful time. Almost everybody in the basketball structure who was anybody had come. There was one notable exception, and that was the absence of Jerry Reinsdorf, the Bulls' owner, who rarely showed at things like this. Stern had pushed Reinsdorf to come and enjoy some nachas, a Yiddish word for pleasure, but that kind of nachas did not seem to appeal to the Bulls' owner, a man who seemed to prefer his privacy to the semidubious glitter and adulation that even an owner could be a part of at occasions like this. In addition, there had been a good deal of speculation at the last moment among the NBA people as to whether one other VIP, Dick Ebersol, the head of sports for NBC, would come. There was a powerful rumor sweeping Paris that even though the McDonald's championship coincided with the start of the World Series, Ebersol, whose heart was said to belong to basketball rather than baseball, would come to Paris instead of sitting in some highly visible box seat being seen by his own cameras at the Series.

    Appropriately, given the symbiotic relationship between television and big-time sports, Stern and Ebersol were very close. Ebersol was wont to call Stern his boss, and Stern was wont to call Ebersol his. Stern was the most passionate and sophisticated of modern imagemakers, and it was Ebersol's company that determined which images went out to the nation. Stern understood, as not everyone in the world of sports did yet, that image was more important than reality in their business. He monitored the league's coverage of his sport very closely, and often seemed to take quite personally any departure on the part of the broadcasters and their cameras from what might be considered an image upgrade. In fact, when he had first ascended at the NBA, at a time when the league's image was still largely negative, he had been famous for calling network executives on Monday to complain about any image downgrade that might have taken place on Sunday.

    Both Ebersol and Stern had a shared stake in the good name and the public image of basketball, especially in the public behavior of its best players, and the two men had worked closely in a collaboration that had seen a dramatic rise in the popularity of the sport, and in time in its network ratings as well. That the question even arose of whether Ebersol would bag the World Series for exhibition basketball games against weak opponents in a foreign land for a cup handed out by a hamburger company showed how much the fortunes of the two sports had changed in recent years. This World Series, between Cleveland and Florida, did not, as it was about to begin, seem to the average fan a particularly tantalizing one; it seemed to lack the sense of a traditional rivalry, or at the least, some degree of geographical animosity. It pitted a Miami team, one that few fans knew very much about, against a Cleveland team that was talented but not well known. Neither team, to the general sports public, had yet created any kind of persona. There was no rivalry, neither historic nor geographic, between the two teams. Eventually Ebersol had stayed in America to watch the Series. Stern had teased him about that--"Dick, if you want to stay back in the States and watch the lowest-rated World Series in history, feel free to," he had said. (Stern was wrong: It was not the lowest-rated World Series; the one in 1993, when for the first time the NBA Finals had been rated higher than the World Series, was.)

It had been a very happy couple of days for David Stern: Baseball was struggling with its image and its ratings, and Michael Jordan was bringing the NBA a full measure of fame in a city normally slow to grant homage to American celebrities. Then, on the night of the last game, a tall black man nearing middle age came over to the section where Stern and his wife, Dianne, were sitting. "I want to thank you for saving my life," Micheal Ray Richardson told Stern. Richardson had once been a great young star in the NBA, a high draft choice of the Knicks, but he had self-destructed on alcohol and drugs, and he was one of the first players severed from the league under its three-and-out policy. He was now playing for a team in Nice and lived there year-round. "If it hadn't been for you, I would have kept on using. Because of what you did, I stopped. I'm clean now." It was a poignant moment: Down on the floor, some of the best players in the game were taking their last warm-up shots, and here was someone who had once played at their level, forty-two years old now, a little heavy around the waist, who had virtually destroyed himself with drugs and who was still playing in a low-level league, most of his money surely gone, but grateful for the fact that he still had his life. Normally, David Stern was a man with a quick comeback, but on this occasion he was almost silent. He put his arm around Richardson and gave him a small hug.

    At that moment, with the 1997-1998 season about to start, Michael Jordan stood at the very pinnacle of his fame. Not only was he the greatest basketball player in the world, but there was some debate as to whether he was the greatest basketball player of all time. A considerable body of expert opinion believed that he was. If anything, the question had gone beyond basketball: Was he the greatest team athlete of all time? Comparisons were made with the legendary Babe Ruth, a player who stood far above even the best of his peers. Of course, the comparisons were being made by young men mostly in their thirties, and Ruth himself had died forty-nine years earlier and played his last game in 1935.

    The comparisons being made within the world of basketball were equally hard to calibrate. Jordan's Bulls had at that time won the championship the last five seasons in which he had played the entire season, but the Boston Celtics had won eleven championships in the thirteen years they had the great Bill Russell, a dominating big man of exceptional intelligence and equal quickness and power. That, of course, had been in a very different league, with far fewer teams, where the athletic level of most players was not as high as it was in the contemporary game; it was a league in which the talented Celtics general manager, Red Auerbach, had almost always been able to fleece his rivals and thus surround Russell with exceptional teammates. Therefore, the Jordan-Russell question remained unanswerable, although the noted basketball expert and filmmaker Spike Lee has come up with a devastating argument: Jordan was the best of all time, he said, because he was so complete a player--there was nothing he could not do on the court: shoot, pass, rebound, play defense. Therefore, Lee said, five Michael Jordans could beat five Bill Russells or five Wilt Chamberlains. It was a fascinating point, for it spoke to a certain kind of athletic completeness.

    Whether he was the best or not, there was no doubt that he was the most compelling and most charismatic athlete in all of sports in the nineties. He was the athlete whom ordinary people throughout the world most wanted to see play, particularly in big games, because he seemed always to be able to rise to the occasion.

    He was already rich, having made an estimated $78 million in salary and endorsements in the previous season, and the coming season seemed to promise as much or more. He was well on his way to becoming nothing less than a one-man corporate conglomerate, and he now spoke of the owners of the basketball team he played for as well as the heads of the sneaker company and hamburger company and soft-drink company he represented as "my partners." He was arguably the most famous American in the world, more famous in many distant parts of the globe than the President of the United States or any movie or rock star. American journalists and diplomats on assignment to the most rural parts of Asia and Africa were often stunned when they visited small villages to find young children wearing tattered replicas of Michael Jordan's Bulls jersey.

    There was considerable statistical evidence of Jordan's value to the sport, of how much his own personal luster had added to its amazing success and profitability. Certainly the sport was already on something of a roll, as a result of the remarkable achievements of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, when Jordan's career began to flower, but his arrival in the playoffs added greatly to the game's audience, bringing to the sport millions of people who were fans more of Michael Jordan than of professional basketball. The television ratings climbed fairly systematically in his earlier appearances in the Finals, reaching an unheard-of 17.9 in his third visit, against Phoenix, in 1993. That rating translated into an estimated 27.2 million Americans. But what was interesting about these numbers to Dick Ebersol was that so great a percentage was directly attributable to Jordan.

    The network and the league learned the truth of this the hard way a year later when Jordan was on his baseball sabbatical and the Bulls did not make the Finals. The ratings of most of the other playoff games stayed about the same, but the Finals' ratings dropped dramatically to 12.4, or about 17.8 million Americans. That meant that roughly a third of the audience had been there essentially for Michael Jordan. Two years later, when he returned to basketball and brought the Bulls to two more championships, the ratings went back up to 16.7 in 1996 and 16.8 in 1997, or roughly 25 million people.

    More and more the phrase "the best who ever laced up a pair of sneakers" was being used to describe him. "If Michael Jordan is not flawless in his craft," the Chicago Tribune's Melissa Isaacson once wrote, "he is as close as we have to solid evidence that anything is possible." Again and again he was named the most valuable player in the league and in the playoff Finals, again and again he seemed able to lift a group of good but not always great teammates to a championship level. At the conclusion of each series, the MVP was duly awarded a new car, presented by David Stern himself; in recent years, Stern had taken to calling himself Jordan's car valet.

    More and more frequently, the word genius was used to define Jordan. Harry Edwards, a black sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, not a man lightly impressed by the achievements of contemporary athletes, wary that the self-evident achievements of black athletes cast an imposing shadow over many black youths and pull them away from careers in other fields, nonetheless talked about Jordan representing the highest level of human achievement, on the order of Gandhi, Einstein, or Michelangelo. If, he added, he were in charge of introducing an alien being "to the epitome of human potential, creativity, perseverance and spirit, I would introduce that alien life to Michael Jordan." Doug Collins, Jordan's third professional coach, once spoke of Jordan belonging to that rarest category of people who are so far above the norm, men like Einstein and Edison, that they were identifiable geniuses. Collins had never used that phrase before, certainly not about a player. Jordan's talented teammate B. J. Armstrong, frustrated in his early years with the Bulls by his failure to rise to Jordan's level and apparent expectations, and believing the game was so much easier for Jordan than it was for anyone else, had gone to the library and checked out a series of books on geniuses to see if there was anything he might learn about how to deal with or be like Jordan.

    And when Jordan, after his third championship, decided to retire, he reluctantly went to tell his coach, Phil Jackson, what would surely be the worst of news for him. He outlined the likelihood of his retirement, but added that if Jackson chose to talk him out of it, he would not leave. He did it somewhat warily, fearing the ever-deft Jackson might indeed talk him out of it. But Jackson shrewdly answered that he would not try to change his mind, that Michael had to listen to and heed his own inner voices. But he reminded Jordan of the singular pleasure he would be denying millions of ordinary people when he left the game because his gifts were so special. His talent, Jackson said, was not merely that of a great athlete but transcended athleticism to become an art form. His gift was along the lines of a Michelangelo, Jackson said, and therefore Jordan at the least had to understand that it belonged not just to the artist but to all those millions who stood in awe of the art itself and derived, in a life otherwise filled with the mundane, such pleasure from what he did. "Michael," he added, "pure genius is something very, very rare and if you are blessed enough to possess it, you want to think a long time before you walk away from using it."

    Jordan listened carefully. "I appreciate that," he said, "but I feel like it's something that's done--it's over." He heeded his inner voice and left the game, but the fact that Jackson had not at that moment advanced his own narrow interests cemented an already strong relationship and in some way helped create the process that would one day expedite his return.

    What was special about him was his effect not so much on the fans as on his peers. "He's God's child," teammate Wes Matthews said in Jordan's first year, and there were a number of players more talented than Matthews who agreed, albeit using slightly different wording. "Jesus in Nikes," in the words of Jayson Williams of the Nets.

    Jerry West, acknowledged as one of the five or six greatest players of all time, who eventually became the general manager of the Lakers, also spoke of him as a genius, saying it was amazing how complete he was, not just as a basketball player but as a young man summoned, because of his talents, to become the public image of a once-troubled league. "It's like a generous God sprinkled a little more gold dust on Michael than he did on anyone else," he said.

    After Jordan led the Bulls to their second title, Larry Bird said that there had never been an athlete quite like Jordan. "On the scale of one to ten, if all the other superstars are eight, he's a ten," Bird said.

    "Michael Jordan," said author and Chicago resident Scott Turow, "plays basketball better than anyone else in the world does anything else."

    In addition to his singular physical gifts, he had an unmatched will to excel, an inner competitive rage, a passion unmatched by anyone else in the game. That had become more and more clear over the years. Earlier in his career, observers dazzled by the artistry of his play had tried to explain his rise to a championship level solely in terms of his talent; now, late in his career, when he could no longer pull off all of the individual moves that had once set him apart, it had become increasingly obvious that what had distinguished him was his indomitable will, his refusal to let either opposing players or the passage of time affect his need to win. "He wants to cut your heart out," Doug Collins once said, "and then show it to you." "He's Hannibal Lecter," said Bob Ryan, The Boston Globe's expert basketball writer, referring to the merciless antihero of The Silence of the Lambs. And his own teammate Luc Longley, asked by a television reporter for a one-word description of Jordan, said simply, "predator."

    By the beginning of the new season, presumed by many people to be his last, Michael Jordan had so dominated not just the game itself but the psyche of American sports fans that all sorts of sportswriters were already beginning to write articles about who would become the Next Michael Jordan. One of the first of these, written by Mike Lupica for Men's Journal, had nominated as possibilities Grant Hill of the Detroit Pistons, a young man gifted both on the court and off it but perhaps not as charismatic as Jordan; Kobe Bryant, the teenage star of the Los Angeles Lakers, perhaps more exciting than Hill but possessor of a woefully incomplete floor game; and, of course, Shaquille O'Neal, the huge man-child of the Lakers, a young man of self-evident talent and power. All of this talk about the new Michael Jordan amused the old Michael Jordan greatly. "I'm still here," he told his friend and trainer Tim Grover. "I'm not going anywhere. Not yet."

That there had been even one Michael Jordan seemed in retrospect something of a genetic fluke, and the idea that anyone would arrive in so short a span of time and do what he did both on and off the court seemed highly unlikely. For beyond the surpassing quality of his athletic skills, there were other qualities at work as well. He was dazzlingly good-looking, with a smile that seemed to bestow pleasure and comfort on all its recipients, and he inevitably became well aware of the benefits that derived from being that successful in his sport, and that good-looking as well--the uses of both fame and beauty. He was tall, but not too tall--six foot six--with a body that seemed eerily flawless, with wide shoulders, a slim waist, and only 4 percent body fat. (The average professional athlete is closer to 7 or 8 percent fat, and the average American male is somewhere between 15 and 20 percent.) He cared about clothes and wore them extraordinarily well; he was quite possibly the best dressed American male since Cary Grant, though the range of clothes he could look good in was vastly wider. He looked better in sweats, one member of the team that shot his Nike commercials noted, than most movie stars did in black tie. "Make me look good," Jordan would admonish Jim Riswold, the Portland advertising man who was in charge of the Nike commercials, before each shoot. Riswold once told him, "Michael, I could shoot you pushing little ladies into onrushing cars in the middle of downtown traffic or throwing puppies into boiling water and you'd still look good."

    In the past, America's ideal of beauty had always been an essentially white one; American males had looked longingly in the mirror hoping to see Cary Grant or Gregory Peck or Robert Bedford. Jordan, shaved head and all, had given America nothing less than a new definition of beauty for a new age.

    What America and the rest of the world saw now was nothing less than a kind of New World seigneur, a young man whose manner seemed nothing less than princely. He was most assuredly not to the manner born--his paternal grandfather had been a tobacco sharecropper in North Carolina. His parents were simple and hardworking people, the first in their families to enjoy full rights of American citizenship, and they produced a young man who carried himself with remarkable natural grace. Because of the loving way he had been raised and because of the endless series of triumphs he had scored over the years, his personal comfort zone was dauntingly high: he had an inner confidence that was simply unshakable.

    His manner with all kinds of people in even the briefest of meetings was usually graceful, particularly for someone subjected to so many pressures, and those upon whom he smiled seemed the grander for it. He had charm, was very much aware of it, and used it skillfully and naturally, rationing it out in just the proper doses, holding it back when it served his purpose. He was easy to like, and people seemed to vie to be liked by him. Veteran sportswriter Mark Heisler once noted in a magazine article that he had never wanted an athlete to like him so much as he did Michael Jordan. A vast variety of magazine editors longed to print articles about him because, as with Princess Diana of England, his photo on their covers greatly increased newsstand sales. All kinds of powerful, rich men competed to be his friend, to drop his name casually, and, of course, to play golf with him.

    Because of all this, he had become a great salesman as well as a great basketball player. He sold the game of basketball to millions of people in different lands who had never seen it played before and to millions of others who had never seen it played like this before. He sold Nike sneakers if you wanted to jump high, Big Macs if you were hungry, first Coke and then Gatorade if you were thirsty, Wheaties if you needed an all-American cereal, and Hanes underwear if you needed shorts. He sold sunglasses, men's cologne, and hot dogs. Mostly he sold himself, and it was, year by year, as championship title was added to championship title, as one last-minute heroic replaced the previous one, an easy sell. There was already a statue commemorating his career outside Chicago's United Center, where he played, a building he hated but which had been built in no small part to accommodate the greater number of fans who would pay large sums of money to come and watch him. The statue showed him as Jump Man--Michael rising to dunk--but compared to the man it commemorated, it seemed oddly crude and heavy, art not so much imitating life as diminishing it.

    Each year he seemed to add a new chapter to the legend in the making. As this new season was about to begin, probably the most remarkable chapter thus far had been written the previous June, when he woke up violently ill before Game Five of the NBA Finals against the Utah Jazz. Whether it was altitude sickness or food poisoning no one was ever sure. Later, it was reported that he had woken up with a fever of 103. That was not true: His temperature was high but not that high, not over 100, but he had been so ill during the night that it seemed impossible that he would play. At about 8 A.M., Jordan's bodyguards called Chip Schaefer, the team trainer, to tell him that Jordan was deathly ill. Schaefer rushed to Jordan's room and found him curled up in a fetal position, wrapped in blankets and pathetically weak. He had not slept at all. He had an intense headache and had suffered violent nausea throughout the night. The greatest player in the world looked like a frail, weak zombie. It was inconceivable that he might play that day.

    Schaefer immediately hooked him onto an IV and tried to get as much fluid into him as possible. He also gave him some medication so he could rest that morning. More than most people, Schaefer understood the ferocity that drove Michael Jordan, the invincible spirit that allowed him to play in games when most high-level professionals were betrayed by their bodies and, however reluctantly, obeyed them. During the 1991 Finals against the Lakers, when Jordan badly injured his toe while hitting a crucial jump shot to tie a game, Schaefer struggled to create a shoe that would protect Jordan's foot in the next game. Jordan eventually rejected the shoe because it hindered his ability to start and stop and cut. "Give me the pain," he had told Schaefer.

    Now, seeing him that sick in the Salt Lake City hotel room, Schaefer had a sense that Jordan might somehow manage to play, that Michael Jordan might, as he sometimes did in situations like this, use this illness as a motivational tool, one more challenge to overcome. He did make it to the locker room before the game, still frail and weak. Word circulated quickly among journalists that he had the flu and that his temperature was 102, and many assumed that he would not play. One member of the media who was not so sure about that verdict was James Worthy of the Fox network. He had played with Michael Jordan at North Carolina and watched him emerge as the best player in the NBA, and he knew how Michael drove himself. The fever meant nothing, Worthy told the other Fox reporters. He'll play, Worthy warned. He'll figure out what he can do, he'll conserve his strength in other areas, and he'll have a big game.

    In the locker room, Jordan's teammates were appalled by what they saw. Michael's skin, normally quite dark, was an alarming color, somewhere between white and gray, Bill Wennington remembered, and his eyes, usually so vital, looked dead. As the game was about to begin, an NBC television crew showed pictures of a frail and haggard Jordan as he had arrived at the Delta Center, barely able to walk, but they also showed him trying to practice. It was one of those rare moments of unusual intimacy in sports, when the power of television allowed the viewer to see both Jordan's illness and his determination to play nonetheless. This was to be a unique participatory experience: When before had illness and exhaustion showed so clearly on the face of such an athlete so early in such a vital game? At first, it appeared that the Jazz would blow the very vulnerable Bulls out. At one point early in the second quarter, Utah led 36-20. But the Bulls hung in because Jordan managed to play at an exceptionally high level, scoring twenty-one points in the first half. At halftime his team was down only four points, 53-49. It was hard to understand how Jordan could play at all, much less be the best player on the floor. The unfolding drama of the event transcended basketball.

    He could barely walk off the court at halftime. During the break, he told Phil Jackson not to use him much in the second half--just in spots. Then he came out and played almost the entire second half. He played a weak third quarter, scoring only two points, but Utah still could not put Chicago away. Late in the fourth quarter, when the camera closed on him as he ran downcourt after a basket, Jordan looked less like the world's greatest athlete than the worst runner in some small-time marathon, about to finish last on a brutally hot day. But what he looked like and what he was doing on the floor when it mattered were two separate things.

    With forty-six seconds left and Utah leading by a point, Jordan was fouled going to the basket. "Look at the body language of Michael Jordan," the announcer Marv Albert said. "You have the idea that he has difficulty just standing up." He made his first foul shot, tying the score, then missed the second but somehow managed to grab the loose ball. Then, when the Jazz inexplicably left him open, he hit a three pointer with twenty-five seconds left, which gave Chicago an 88-85 lead and the key to a 90-88 win. He ended up with thirty-eight points, fifteen of them in the last quarter. It had been an indelible performance, an astonishing display of spiritual determination; he had done nothing less than give a clinic in what set him apart from everyone else in his profession. He was the most gifted athlete in the league, but unlike most other supremely gifted players, he had an additional quality rare among superb artists whose chosen work comes so easily: He was an overachiever as well.

Both supremely talented and singularly driven, he had not always been the most tolerant of teammates. But in the years after he had returned from his unsuccessful sojourn to professional baseball, he had often seemed to be a new and on occasion more mellow Michael Jordan. His teammates liked him more. He was a dramatically easier person to play with. Yes, he was still hard on Luc Longley and Toni Kukoc and could be caustic with both men on occasion. Much was expected from those two players and much was not always delivered. But the almost gratuitous, punitive quality of his tongue had softened. Obviously part of the reason for that change was that he had already climbed so many mountains, the three earlier championships not only confirming his greatness but ending the hateful argument, which had haunted him for so long, that he was a great individual player but a person who did not lift his team, and therefore not a winner. Another part of the change came from the fact that he had been away for almost two years from something he loved. Older and more mature, he was at a point in his career when he knew that time was working against him and he had to savor the sweetness of the game, and that part of the game itself was the friendship with teammates and the draining nature of a long and exhausting NBA season and how they all reacted to it. And part of it, of course, was the fact that when he had failed at baseball, he had for the first time realized what it was for a player struggling against his limits--for he had known no limits before, certainly no limits on his individual performance.

    The flu-driven victory over Utah had helped cement the Bulls' fifth NBA championship, and with it a widely held conviction that they were one of the greatest teams of all time, if not the greatest. But it was not always easy to locate them on the pantheon of greatness. Yes, they had won five championships, and yes, during the 1995-1996 season, they had won a record seventy-two games. In the eyes of some basketball people, the question of their exact place in basketball history remained somewhat in doubt, in part because some of their own personnel seemed limited and in part because they had never been tested by another great team, as the Celtics and Lakers tested each other in the eighties. The Bulls beat some very good teams, but did they beat that many great teams? They were, some fans felt, an Ali without a Frazier.

    That argument overlooked how hard their roads to the titles were. In the early stages of the championship run, they beat a very, very tough Detroit team that did not look that good on paper but was sheer murder to play against. It overlooked as well that early in the playoffs over a number of years they had disposed of a very good Cleveland team, which might have been of championship calibre if it had not run into Michael Jordan. The Bulls had a habit of beating teams that, until they had entered the Conference Finals or the Finals themselves against the Bulls, looked very imposing, and often looked better than the Bulls--until the Bulls actually played them and picked them apart. A key to their continued success was their remarkable defensive skill. Very good teams composed of very good players were, in a long series against the Bulls, made to look ordinary.

    A good example of this was the Bulls' victory over the Orlando Magic in the 1996 Eastern Conference Finals. The Magic were, on paper at least, an awesome young team. They had gone to the Finals the previous year. They had all-star players at three critical positions, center, power forward, and point guard: Shaquille O'Neal, Horace Grant, and Penny Hardaway. If anything, Orlando seemed in position to become a dynasty. Yet the Bulls swept the Magic in four games, and Orlando was never the same again; soon thereafter, O'Neal went west, hoping to bring the next dynasty to California instead of Florida.

CONTENTS 1.Paris, October 1997.............................................3 2.Wilmington; Laney High, 1979-1981..............................17 3.Chicago, November 1997.........................................23 4.Los Angeles, 1997; Williston, North Dakota, 1962...............49 5.Chapel Hill, 1980..............................................57 6.Chapel Hill, 1981..............................................73 7.Chapel Hill, 1982-1984.........................................97 8.Chicago, 1984.................................................109 9.New York City; Bristol, Connecticut, 1979-1984................115 10.Chapel Hill; Chicago; Portland, 1984..........................135 11.Los Angeles; Chicago, 1984, 1985..............................149 12.Boston, April 1986............................................159 13.New York City; Portland, 1986.................................177 14.Chicago, 1986-1987............................................185 15.Albany; Chicago, 1984-1988....................................189 16.Chicago; Seattle, 1997........................................207 17.Hamburg and Conway, Arkansas; Chicago, 1982-1987..............217 18.Detroit, the 1980s............................................235 19.Chicago, 1988-1990; New York City, 1967-1971..................245 20.Chicago, 1990-1991............................................265 21.Chicago; Los Angeles, 1991....................................275 22.Chicago, 1997-1998............................................283 23.Chicago; Portland, 1992.......................................291 24.La Jolla; Monte Carlo; Barcelona, 1992........................295 25.Chicago; Phoenix, 1992-1993...................................303 26.Chicago, 1993.................................................317 27.Birmingham; Chicago, 1994-1995................................327 28.Chicago; Seattle; Salt Lake City, 1995-1997...................337 29.Chicago, 1998.................................................363 30.Chicago; Indianapolis, 1998...................................373 31.Chicago; Salt Like City, June 1998............................383 32.Chicago, June 1998............................................405 Epilogue...........................................................407 Acknowledgments....................................................419 Author's Note......................................................423

TABLE OF CONTENTS: "Playing for Keeps"