Part 8 (1/2)

When Krause heard about this move, he began to lose faith in Collins's judgment. Why would anyone in his right mind exile Tex Winter to Siberia? The players seemed to be losing faith in Doug as well. He changed plays so frequently-often modifying them in the middle of games-that team members began to refer to the offense flippantly as ”a play a day.”

A critical point came during a game in Milwaukee right before Christmas. Doug got into a battle with the refs and was tossed out late in the first half. He turned the team over to me and handed me his play card. The Bulls were so far behind, I decided to run a full-court press and give the players a free hand running the offense, rather than calling Doug's plays. The team quickly turned the game around and we won handily.

What I didn't realize until later was that toward the end of the game the Chicago TV broadcast showed my wife, June, sitting next to Krause and his wife, Thelma, in the stands. That, as much as anything else, created a great deal of tension between Doug and me over the next few months.

A few weeks later, I was in Miami planning to scout a game when I got a call from Krause telling me that he didn't want me to be away from the team anymore. Doug and Michael, I learned later, had gotten in an argument of some kind, and Jerry wanted me available to step in if there was more friction on the team. Soon after, Jerry began to take me into his confidence.

Eventually things settled down, and the Bulls stumbled through the rest of the season, finis.h.i.+ng fifth in the conference with three fewer wins than the previous year. But the addition of Cartwright and the rise of Pippen and Grant made the team much better positioned than before to make a strong run in the playoffs.

The first round against the Cavaliers went all five games, but Michael was bursting with confidence when he boarded the bus for the finale in Cleveland. He lit a cigar and said, ”Don't worry, guys. We're going to win.” Cleveland's Craig Ehlo almost made him eat his words when he put the Cavs ahead by one with seconds left. But Michael responded with a balletic double-clutch shot, with Ehlo draped all over him, to win the game, 101100. Afterward Tex said to me, ”I guess now they won't be changing coaches anytime soon.” I had to smile. I didn't care, because we were on our way to the Eastern Conference finals. The Bulls had come a long way from their 40-42 record the year before I'd joined the team.

Next we faced the Pistons, and, as usual, it was an ugly affair. Chicago won the first game at the Silverdome, but after that the Pistons overpowered the Bulls with their intimidating defense and won the series, 42. Krause told me later that midway through that series he told owner Jerry Reinsdorf that the team needed to replace Collins with someone who could win a champions.h.i.+p.

After the playoffs I attended the NBA's talent showcase in Chicago, an event organized by the league for draft-eligible players to show off their skills to coaches and scouts. While I was there, d.i.c.k McGuire, my first coach with the Knicks, asked me if I would be interested in replacing New York's head coach, Rick Pitino, who was leaving to coach the University of Kentucky. I said I would, and suddenly the wheels were in motion.

Shortly after that, Reinsdorf invited me to meet him at O'Hare Airport. I'd always liked Jerry because he had grown up in Brooklyn and was a big fan of the Knicks' selfless style of basketball. He'd gotten wind of my interest in the New York job and asked me if I could choose, which team I'd rather coach, the Bulls or the Knicks. I said I had a lot of affection for New York, having played there, but I also thought the Bulls were poised to win multiple champions.h.i.+ps, while the Knicks would be lucky to win one. In short, I said I'd rather stay with the Bulls.

A few weeks later Krause called me in Montana and asked me to go to a secure phone. So I drove my motorcycle into town and called him back from a pay phone. He told me that he and Reinsdorf had decided to make a coaching change, and he offered me the job.

I was thrilled, but the fans in Chicago were not so pleased. Collins was a popular figure in town and he'd taken the team to new heights during the past three years. When reporters asked Reinsdorf why he had made such a risky move, he said, ”Doug brought us a long way from where we had been. You cannot say he wasn't productive. But now we have a man we feel can take us the rest of the way.”

The pressure was on.

CHAPTER 6

WARRIOR SPIRIT

Think lightly of yourself and think deeply of the world.

MIYAMOTO MUSAs.h.i.+

As I sat by Flathead Lake in Montana that summer, contemplating the season ahead, I realized that this was a moment of truth for the Bulls. For the past six years we had been struggling to create a team around Michael Jordan. Now we had the talent in place to win a champions.h.i.+p, but there was an important piece missing. In a word, the Bulls needed to become a tribe.

To succeed we had to get by the Detroit Pistons, but I didn't think we could outmuscle them unless we acquired a completely different lineup. They were just too good at fighting in the ”alligator wrestling pond,” as Johnny Bach called it. And when we tried to play the game their way, our players ended up getting frustrated and angry, which was just what the Pistons hoped would happen.

What our team could do, though, was outrun the Pistons-and outdefend them as well. n.o.body on the Pistons, except perhaps Dennis Rodman, was quick enough to keep up with Michael, Scottie, and Horace on the fast break. And with Bill Cartwright's formidable presence under the basket, we had the makings of one of the best defensive teams in the league. M.J. had taken great pride in winning the Defensive Player of the Year award the previous season, and Scottie and Horace were quickly developing into first-rate defenders. But in order to exploit those advantages, we needed to be more connected as a team and to embrace a more expansive vision of working together than simply getting the ball to Michael and hoping for the best.

When I was an a.s.sistant coach, I created a video for the players with clips from The Mystic Warrior, a television miniseries about Sioux culture based on the best-selling novel Hanta Yo by Ruth Beebe Hill. Ever since childhood I've been fascinated by the Sioux, some of whom lived in my grandfather's boardinghouse, which was near a reservation in Montana. When I was with the Knicks, a Lakota Sioux friend from college, Mike Her Many Horses, asked me to teach a series of basketball clinics at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The purpose was to help heal the rift in his community caused by the 1973 standoff between police and American Indian movement activists at the site of the Wounded Knee ma.s.sacre. I discovered during those clinics, which I taught with my teammates Bill Bradley and Willis Reed, that the Lakota loved the game and played it with an intense spirit of connectedness that was an integral part of their tribal tradition.

One of the things that intrigued me about Lakota culture was its view of the self. Lakota warriors had far more autonomy than their white counterparts, but their freedom came with a high degree of responsibility. As Native American scholar George W. Linden points out, the Lakota warrior was ”the member of a tribe, and being a member, he never acted against, apart from, or as the whole without good reason.” For the Sioux, freedom was not about being absent but about being present, adds Linden. It meant ”freedom for, freedom for the realization of greater relations.h.i.+ps.”

The point I wanted to make by showing the players The Mystic Warrior video was that connecting to something beyond their individual goals could be a source of great power. The hero of the series, who was based loosely on Crazy Horse, goes into battle to save his tribe after experiencing a powerful vision. In our discussion after watching the video, the players seemed to resonate with the idea of bonding together as a tribe, and I thought I could build on that as we moved into the new season.

As I mentioned in the first chapter, management experts Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright describe five stages of tribal development in their book, Tribal Leaders.h.i.+p. My goal in my first year as head coach was to transform the Bulls from a stage 3 team of lone warriors committed to their own individual success (”I'm great and you're not”) to a stage 4 team in which the dedication to the We overtakes the emphasis on the Me (”We're great and you're not”).