How He Got Up There

By David Halberstam

He was exhausted after game 7 against the Indiana Pacers, but his friends on the team noticed that when the final game was over, he seemed almost giddy as he raced back to the locker room, like a joyous schoolboy liberated from class after the last day of school. He was equally gleeful on the first flight out to Salt Lake City, Utah, an odd boyishness for a player who was supposed to be old and tired and about to face a team that was rested and that held the home-court advantage. Some thought it came from the fact that he knew the Bulls and he had just barely dodged a bullet against the Pacers, that by the third game, as Larry Bird began to make adjustments, the matchups, particularly in the second half of the games, had begun to favor the younger, deeper Pacers. In particular, Bird was throwing younger, bigger guards at Jordan, most notably Jalen Rose, and they were arriving well rested at a time in the game when Jordan normally liked to take the game over and when his defensive man was usually tired.

In Game 7, with about six minutes left, it appeared for a moment that the Bulls were going to lose: they seemed tired, Jordan palpably weary, bent over, hands on hips when others were shooting fouls, a telltale sign of fatigue with him. Then, in one of those remarkable demonstrations of willpower that have become the signature of his entire career, Jordan's will to excel helped energize his body, and he summoned just enough strength to continue to drive to the basket, get to the foul line, or draw a crowd and pass off to teammates for open shots. That allowed him and his teammates to escape the Pacer bullet. He was still the invincible man. Now at age 35, when it should have been time for younger players from other teams to supplant him and his teammates as champions, he was once again going to the finals.

The boyishness on the plane was a signal that he did not fear Utah, even if the Jazz were well rested, were playing at home at an altitude of some 4,500 feet and were on a roll after inhaling the seemingly mighty Lakers. In truth, they were not that much younger, and what he saw was the matchups: their significantly smaller guards going against him, Pippen, Ron Harper and even Toni Kukoc. He clearly liked these matchups, much more than he had liked what Bird was able to throw at him. He remained upbeat even after the Bulls lost Game 1 to the Jazz in overtime.

In Game 2 they began the process of dismantling Utah, and they did it with their defense. Defensive artistry and intelligence have been the keys to this Chicago team for several years. In big-time, highly contested games, the Bulls have always begun by taking away what their opponents want to do; by playing brilliant, aggressive defense; and then, when they have done that, when their opponents are floundering because what worked all season long no longer works, the Bulls have slowly and systematically begun to exert their own will. Thus their big games were rarely shoot-outs. Nor were they always artistic, or if they were artistic, it was only for those fans who loved the concept of skilled, highly intelligent players' stealing another team's game in front of a national audience. In these big games, even when Jordan and Pippen were not shooting well, they would forgo their jump shots, drive to the basket, and at the very least shoot fouls and slowly take over the tempo of the game. They knew how to grind down other teams when they did not have all of their game. In Game 3 against the Jazz, the 96-54 blowout, that was exactly what they did: they did not shoot particularly well in the first half, but their defensive pressure and their almost instantaneous rotations on defense were dazzling. Afterward, Jerry Sloan, the Utah coach, himself a legendary defensive player, paid tribute to them: he had never seen defensive players quicker to the ball. That, of course, was what had made them champions over the years, the ability to exert their will over other teams that sometimes, on paper at least, seemed to be more talented.

Their trademark was defense. "You don't know how lucky you are," veteran coach Don Nelson once told Phil Jackson, "when your two best offensive players are your two best defensive players." Nelson said that early on, before they added Dennis Rodman, himself a skilled defensive player. It was typical of Jordan, of the almost unique completeness of his game, that he willed himself to excel on defense as well as offense. He had been well coached in college; Dean Smith, sensing Jordan's offensive brilliance and his surpassing natural ability and that he had the possibility of a professional career without limitations, pushed him early on to work on his defensive game. Jordan did that in college and then in the pros, unusual for a young player who came in with such remarkable offensive skills. For not many players who can score that readily have much taste for the exhausting, gritty work at the other end of the court.

But to Jordan it always mattered--playing good defense, he was taught at Chapel Hill, was what won close games, and what he always hungered for was championships, not individual honors. Early on in his professional career, he mentioned casually to reporters that he hoped one day to be named defensive player of the year as well as MVP. A young writer named Jan Hubbard, then with the Dallas Morning News, wrote at the time that it could not be done, that it took too much additional energy to be that kind of defensive star and that no one would have enough energy to do both. But then in 1987-88, Jordan was named both the MVP and the defensive player of the year, and Hubbard wrote that he had been wrong. Michael Jordan, who always wanted the last word, never let Hubbard forget what he had written, that he had, however momentarily, underestimated Michael Jordan, certainly more than a journalistic misdemeanor and perilously close to a felony, and there would be periodic references when he saw Hubbard to all that crap he once wrote years ago.

Scottie Pippen, of course, prospered under Jordan's tutelage in practice; he had arrived in the league with great but raw natural skills, virtually untutored. He had unusually long arms, a wingspan that exceeded Jordan's and allowed him to play in the backcourt with the quickness of a guard and the reach of a center; as such he had, if anything, even greater potential as a defensive player than Jordan. Nothing in those early years helped him more than playing against Jordan every day in practice, for Jordan was both a teacher and a killer in practice, and he had a reputation for either making or destroying some of his teammates. He may have helped drive some teammates out of the league, but he gave the young, gifted, hungry Pippen a rare daily clinic. The equation was always simple: if Pippen could guard Michael, then he could guard anyone in the league. It was in the end the combination of these two players that was so lethal on defense, of Jordan with the player who, he said, was like having a twin brother with him on the court.

What marked Jordan and set him apart from all the other great players of his era were a number of things: his great natural athletic ability, honed every year to a fine degree as he worked to improve his game; his high intelligence; his shrewd knowledge of the game; and his acute awareness of the strengths and weaknesses--psychological as well as physical--of his opponents. In the end, he emerged as the rarest of players: one without a weakness--and a player who thrived and hungered for big games. To Danny Ainge, who played against him and coached against him, Jordan was the ultimate assassin--"he comes not just to kill you but to cut your heart out."

No one who arrived in the league as an All-Star ever worked harder to improve his game once he began his pro career. When Jordan entered the league, he was startlingly quick and stunningly athletic, but he decided after several years of being pounded by the very physical Detroit Pistons to build up his body. He went from roughly 195 lbs. to 215 lbs. without losing any quickness and started handing out more punishment than he received. Again, before he arrived in the league, no one had ever driven to the basket quite like he did. His jump shot was good, yet hardly great. About a B-minus, thought his first coach, Kevin Loughery. He thereupon worked harder at practice than any teammate to improve it (in part, to prevent defenses from dropping off and cheating on him), and in time he became one of the tiny handful of great pure shooters in the league. Indeed, he was arguably the best jump shooter in the league because, while there were other wondrous pure shooters out there who might be more dazzling with an open shot in the open court, no one was better at creating and getting his own shot in difficult, highly contested games than Jordan. No one had a better jump shot under combat conditions. Late in his career, his pure physical skills just slightly diminished, he added a new twist to his jump shot, one in which as he hit the apex of his jump, he fell back slightly. That, because of his jumping ability and the threat he posed to drive, gave him just the right degree of separation to get his shot and made for a virtually unstoppable one.

What most fans saw was the balletlike quality of his drives to the basket, and what basketball professionals, coaches and scouts saw was the complete quality of his game, the almost perfect fundamentals he brought every night and the shrewd sense of each game's tempo, which made him almost a coach on the floor. When Jordan was at his prime, it was common among some professional basketball people to joke about the Carolina program and to zing Dean Smith for, it was presumed, suppressing the greatness of Jordan's game during his college years. But the reverse was true. It has become obvious that Smith did not limit Jordan's game, but instead made it what it is. Smith and his assistants knew from the first time they saw Jordan that the great physical ability and the hunger for the game were a given, and so Smith set out in the three years he coached him to add all the other little things that became so critical to Jordan's greatness: the little moves on defense that came from repeating endless, boring drills; and the skills that allowed him to know when and how to pass off the double team or how to split it. The result was an almost perfect basketball player, a man with skills that few other players of comparable physical ability could match and that eventually would set him apart at the championship level. For that was when the professional game changed from a somewhat casual full-court game that showcased pure natural ability to a fierce, defensively driven half-court game in which pure athletic ability was of a more limited advantage and the discipline and completeness of a player's skills were equally important. As such, Jordan is a reminder to us of something desperately undervalued in contemporary America: the value of a real apprenticeship for even the most talented of people.

The truth about Michael is that we are not likely to see anyone like him again--anyone with that great and complete a game. It is not that we will lack for players of comparable physical ability again but that physical ability is only a small part of it. For the way the basketball system, ever more predatory, operates these days, players of that ability are not likely to hang around college for more than a year or two at the most, and it is going to be harder than ever to get them to listen to their coaches even while they are. More and more, they will arrive on their own terms, and they will depart on their own terms as well. Then, once in the pros, there is simply too much money already guaranteed for most of them to work as hard as Michael Jordan did, year after year, to perfect his game.

David Halberstam is completing a book about Michael Jordan and the Bulls. His recently published book, The Children, is about the early civil rights protesters he covered in 1960.