Excerpt from Pipeline to the Pros by Ben Kaplan and Danny Parkins. Reprinted with the permission of Triumph Books. You can buy the book HERE On March 10, 2020, Mike Budenholzer and the Bucks needed a break. They were back in Milwaukee, recuperating …
On March 10, 2020, Mike Budenholzer and the Bucks needed a break. They were back in Milwaukee, recuperating after a disastrous road trip. The three-game jaunt was a homecoming of sorts for Budenholzer, the Bucks’ head coach. The first game—a loss to Frank Vogel’s Lakers—was played just 40 miles due west of Pomona College, Budenholzer’s alma mater. Then the second loss—this one at the hands of the inferior Phoenix Suns—brought Budenholzer back to Arizona, the state where he grew up in the shadow of six older siblings, a politician mother, and a high school basketball coach father.
Fortunately, the schedule gods had the Bucks’ collective back: two days off, followed by a four-game homestand tipping off on March 12. There were rumors that, due to the new virus, they’d have to start playing games without fans. Oh well, Budenholzer figured. I played Division II. I’m used to empty stands.
By March 1990, Jerry West had had a good long look at Magic Johnson, had witnessed it all up close, first the transformation Johnson had brought to the Los Angeles Lakers a decade earlier, and then all that followed: the championships, the MVP seasons and performances, the virtual onslaught of victory and success, the building-pumping celebrations at timeouts after every fast-break run, the high fives and hugs and general glee that shook both Los Angeles and the National Basketball Association out of the deep slumber and ennui that had settled over the American pro game like a blanket in the late 1970s.
All that Jerry West had witnessed unfolded in sharp contrast to his own Hall of Fame career that saw West and his Lakers teammates suffer through the agony of seven losses in the league’s championship series between 1962 and 1970 only to finally succeed on the eighth attempt, a seemingly joyless victory in 1972 that had been met by numbness and confusion and conflict in the locker room afterward.
With all the winning in the 1980s, Johnson had helped a bit to shoo away the pesky ghosts and demons that for far too long occupied the belfry of Jerry West’s personal torment. Johnson and West had quietly formed a partnership over the years, the executive’s agony balanced by Johnson’s great joy and success.
That contrast, in part, was the reason this writer had traveled that March of 1990 to interview West over two days in a hotel room in Dallas, where West had gone to scout college basketball talent in search of the next good player for the team.
By that time, West, the self-appointed guardian of the Lakers, was on his way to becoming what many considered the game’s top front office figure. West “could spot talent through the window of a moving train,” L.A. Times columnist Jim Murray would declare during the era.
West, indeed, was a manic genius and a nearly impossible perfectionist.
He could see so many things in the furious action on the court and was known as an “active” general manager, the kind who never hesitated to address problems he saw with Lakers players. Just how “active” was West? One former Lakers head coach, Del Harris, explained in a 2004 interview that the team was never really his, but Jerry’s.
Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson drives to the basket to make a layup shot over Blair Rassmussen of the Denver Nuggets during their NBA Pacific Division basketball game on 21st November 1990 at The Forum arena in Inglewood. The Lakers won the game 141 – 121. (Photo by Stephen Dunn/Allsport/Getty Images)
During the Showtime era, West the GM was both vigilant and instructive with so many players, but he revealed over that weekend in 1990 that over the years he had hardly ever said a word to Johnson about his play and even then only if he thought Johnson was becoming “predictable.”
The great Magic predictable? You might just as well have accused Marilyn Monroe of lacking her steamy charm.
At that moment in 1990, Magic Johnson was perhaps the sporting world’s most widely admired and successful star. Over the years, it seemed that just about everybody had come to love Magic. And that had included a high school junior in Wilmington, North Carolina, way back in 1980, by the name of Mike Jordan.
Yes, as a teen, the once and future king of basketball had had one true idol—Magic Johnson. Even then, Jordan’s competitive nature rendered him absolutely unsparing in his disdain for rivals and other players. Yet Jordan tried to mimic so many things he saw in Johnson’s play that for a time he even fancied himself a point guard, attempting in high school practice each day the no-look passes and brilliant fast-break play of his idol.
How great was the infatuation? Jordan gave himself the nickname “Magic Mike” and by his senior year in high school had a vanity plate by that same title for his very first car. Jordan drove all over his hometown proudly telling the world that he was Magic Mike. Yet when Jordan got to the University of North Carolina as a freshman the next fall, coach Dean Smith promptly advised him to lose the nickname.
There was only one Magic, Smith supposedly explained.
Jordan, of course, went on from there to become what fans worldwide would call “the God of basketball.”
At times over his career, Johnson himself had occupied a similar roost in the hierarchy of the sport. In fact, his accomplishments and infectious style of play defined the great Showtime era of Lakers basketball with a team that so often seemed to play beyond the reach of everybody else. As such, Johnson came to occupy a status as the game’s last great analog star, one who finished his playing career in the early 1990s only to watch the digital world rapidly overtake the game as well as its messaging and marketing, just in time to lift up that kid from Wilmington who once considered himself Magic Mike. These circumstances help explain a belief among many serious students of the game as well as among many, many fans, that Magic Johnson, along with Jordan and others, should be in the conversation as perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time.
“I never quite understood why he’s never been involved in the conversations for the greatest player ever, what he brought to the game,” remarked longtime NBA coach Alvin Gentry, a comment echoed many times over by numerous veteran observers of American pro basketball.
The argument goes that if Michael Jordan is indeed the so-called God of Basketball, at the very least, Johnson is the Other God, one who accomplished so much in addition to presiding over what many consider to be the greatest era in the history of the game, the 1980s.
For others, such lofty status seems an odd place for a player who, by his own admission, never jumped all that high; who was considered to have a suspect jump shot; who by far prized winning over scoring or acrobatics, who came into the NBA with what many experts considered a weak left hand, a serious limitation for anyone attempting to survive as a point guard in the league, especially a tall person with an impossibly high dribble ripe for the plucking.
“I still had doubts about myself,” Johnson himself would confess, looking back on his early days as a rookie in 1979. “I wasn’t sure I could make it in this league.”
Which, in turn, helps explain why that March of 1990, long after he had seen it all, Jerry West revealed that he wasn’t convinced in 1979 that the Lakers should have taken Magic Johnson as the number one overall pick in the NBA draft.
Speaking for recorded interviews, West said Johnson’s great run of leadership and success would remind him of a conclusion about scouting talent: You could see what players could do on the floor, their physical capabilities, but you couldn’t always read their hearts.
“I thought he would be a very good player,” West admitted. “I had no idea he would get to the level that he did. No idea. But, see, you don’t know what’s inside of people. Physically, you can see what they can do on the court. The things you could see you loved. But you wondered where he was going to play in the NBA, how he would be able to do it.”
That comment then pretty much summed it up: Earvin “Magic” Johnson was defined as that unseen quality, that great mystery of human performance that made the business of talent scouting seem so uncertain.
West paused a moment in the interview, searching for an answer to his own question about Johnson’s greatness, then added, “Through hard work, he just willed himself to take his game to another level. I don’t think anyone knew he had that kind of greatness in him. The athletic ability is the easiest thing to see, but it does not constitute what a great basketball player is.”
Asked to expound on greatness, West observed that while there were a number of very good players at any given time in pro basketball, truly great players could be counted on one hand.
Looking back on the 1980s, West said, “Obviously Magic Johnson is one of them. Larry Bird. “Obviously Michael Jordan,” West added, then let the thought trail off from there.
The tremendous challenge to being a truly great player is hard for the public to understand or even see, West finally offered. “It is a burden.”
As for the nature of Johnson’s particular greatness, West said, “It’s like a macho thing. Magic Johnson had a macho-ness that came out in him, a desire that ‘No one is gonna beat me.’ ”
Johnson would display that quality night after night over many seasons, that vast intangible factor, prima facie evidence that he possessed perhaps the biggest heart in the history of a game of very big hearts.
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Boston had blown through the Knicks in the first round, then met the Atlanta Hawks just as the Hawks were hitting their stride. Detroit – whom the Celtics would face if they reached the conference finals – had to watch and wait.
Boston crushed Atlanta in Game 1 at Boston Garden, with the front line – Larry Bird, Robert Parish, and Kevin McHale – combining for 85 points. They did the same in Game 2. Then, on the way to Atlanta, seemingly every Celtic caught a cold. In addition to cortisone, the doctor was shooting players full of antibiotics. The ball looked like it weighed a hundred pounds in Bird’s hands at the Omni Coliseum in Game 3. He played forty minutes and led Boston with 22 points, but the numbers give the wrong impression—he belonged in bed. The Celtics, having sneezed themselves into a stupor, lost three out of the next four games, setting up a Game 7 in Boston Garden that some consider the greatest game ever played.
“The game started, and even though the crowd was crazy, I remember it being quiet,” Atlanta guard Tree Rollins said. “I could hear sneakers screeching on the floor. I could hear coaches screaming out plays. I could hear my teammates talking on offense and defense. That was the highest level of concentration I attained as a player.”
McHale scored 33 points that night. Doc Rivers collected 16 points and 18 assists. Danny Ainge hit two big 3s late. But Bird vs. Dominique Wilkins was the show.
“We were running downcourt, me, Bird, and Kevin Willis,” recalled Wilkins, who was shooting hoops behind his house in suburban Georgia as he told me this story decades later. “Kevin reaches across to me and says, ‘Don’t let that son of a gun score anymore, man.’ And I’m like, ‘Shut up. He can hear you!’ And I look over, and Bird’s eyes are like this big. I knew it was on after that. Those are the words that woke him up. That’s really when the shootout began.”
“My mindset in the playoffs was you play, see how the game is going, figure out what your team needs, and do that,” said Bird. “We were rolling early and I was just trying to feel out the game. Dominique was scoring and I just watched. Then, in the fourth, I got hot. That’s when Dominique and I started matching basket for basket.”
“Bird was hitting impossible shots,” said Willis. “Dominique, he was not going to be shown up, especially in a big game. So it became a show. Even though we were in the game, we were really just watching the show.”
“It was like HORSE,” said Atlanta forward Cliff Levingston. “Bird makes this shot off the glass. Dominique comes down – off the glass. Bird goes all net. Dominique goes all net. Larry gets a layup. Dominique gets a layup.
“Larry would tell you where he was going to shoot the ball, and how he was going to shoot it,” Levingston continued. “He would take you all over the floor, setting picks, coming back, and next thing you know, you look up and he’s on his favorite spot and you’re like, ‘Oh no!’ ”
The Lakers had gathered in Magic Johnson’s mansion in Bel Air to watch the game on TV. They were hooting and hollering every basket.
Byron Scott said Atlanta would win; Wilkins was just too hot. “No, no,” said Magic. “Don’t underestimate my boy Larry!”
Bird won the game and the series on the last shot: a 3-pointer taken a foot away from Atlanta’s bench.
Barkley: A Biography by Timothy Bella. Hanover Square Press; Original edition (November 1, 2022). The end sounded like a sharp crack. On a bitter cold night in 1999, Charles was introduced to the crowd in Philadelphia for the final time as a player. …
Barkley: A Biography by Timothy Bella. Hanover Square Press; Original edition (November 1, 2022).
The end sounded like a sharp crack.
On a bitter cold night in 1999, Charles was introduced to the crowd in Philadelphia for the final time as a player. A full-circle moment that seemed to lack glory.
“When he came back, it was almost like a Charles we didn’t recognize,” said friend Mike Missanelli, the Philadelphia sports radio personality.
Eighteen games into the season, the thirty-six-year-old was firmly looking ahead to life after basketball. He was beginning to temper his expectations and channel gratitude.
“I don’t think a championship would do that much for me,” said a reflective Charles. “It won’t make me feel like, well, now my life is complete. Trust me, my life is pretty damn complete. And I always tell people, I don’t think that anybody could have had a better life than me. I really don’t.”
Stepping onto the floor on December 8, 1999, the Philadelphia fans who adored him then spurned him were now greeting Charles with an extended standing ovation. The harsh feelings that came with his unceremonious exit seven years earlier had subsided. The Sixers flew in Charcey and Johnnie Mae for what was to be a celebration of the franchise’s finest player of recent times.
That changed seven minutes and fifty-one seconds into the first quarter.
(TOM MIHALEK/AFP via Getty Images)
With both teams struggling to break 20 for the quarter, Charles grabbed an offensive rebound and thought he could post up Todd MacCulloch, the Sixers’ seven-foot rookie. Though he was still getting 10 rebounds a game, Charles’s offense had taken a sharp turn due to his health. “I was pump-faking so much I had to go see the chiropractor like three days a week,” Charles said years later about that period in his career.
As the Sixers sprinted down the floor in transition, Tyrone Hill, a journeyman power forward, drove the baseline. Never known as a shot blocker, Charles went up to redirect Hill’s shot. Then, he lost his balance.
When the admittedly out-of-shape Charles landed awkwardly, he felt that something was seriously wrong. Unable to move, he immediately grabbed his left knee.
“I thought he was gonna get right back up,” Hill said. “When he was down for a long period of time, I was hoping it was nothing really serious.”
By the time Rockets’ trainer Keith Jones came over, Charles’s knee was bloody and grossly distorted. The celebratory mood inside the old Spectrum, then called the First Union Center, had turned to gloom.
“We could see that quad muscle roll up on his leg in a horrible and frightening way,” said Rockets’ radio announcer Jim Foley. “It was like seeing someone break a leg.”
Rupturing his quadriceps tendon brought a new kind of pain – worse than any he’d experienced in the past.
“I knew it was over as soon as I saw it,” Barkley said. “I saw the way the kneecap was bulging through my leg and I said, ‘Well, it’s been fun .’” Barkley was grimacing, but silent. He lay immobile on the floor, talking quietly to Jones, his teammates, and coaches, with 19,109 people staring on in horror. “You didn’t hear a shriek of pain, but you saw the end of a career,” recalled Phil Jasner of the Philadelphia Daily News. “You knew, without question, that it was over.”
Barkley was helped off to the locker room, limping, with his head down and towel around his neck. He needed some time to compose himself before returning to a spot behind the Rockets’ bench on crutches, wearing a knee brace. Looking down the bench, Rudy Tomjanovich held out hope that Charles hadn’t played his last game, but said he was crushed knowing he likely would not call Barkley’s number again.
“You’re just not coming back from that,” the coach said.
Charles would sign about one hundred autographs and joked with teammates and coaches, trying to lighten the mood. When the final buzzer sounded on a forgettable 83–73 win for the Sixers, Charles received another thunderous ovation as he used crutches to leave the court one final time.
On a training table, his knee was wrapped in ice when he called Maureen. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he relayed the news he was just beginning to come to terms with.
“It’s over,” he said to his wife.
(GERARD BURKHART/AFP via Getty Images)
He limped and waddled to the podium for the postgame press conference. Wearing an all-black suit, as if he were attending his own funeral, Barkley had Johnnie Mae sitting to his right. The room was packed with local and national media, many of whom had covered Barkley throughout his sixteen-year career.
In true Charles fashion, he had a slight grin and a one-liner ready.
“I’m just what America needs – another unemployed Black man,” he said.
He limped back to his Philadelphia hotel room after going out with his teammates to Bridget Foy’s. He told Sixers star Allen Iverson, whom he had taken to task for treating the game like a birthright, that it was his league now and to cherish his time on top.
Sitting on the hotel bed, Barkley was no longer invincible. Yet fittingly, almost poetically, his career had all but ended in the city where it all began. He cried.
A red light flashed on the room phone. Barkley picked up the receiver and began to listen to the dozens of messages left for him. The first voice mail? It was Michael Jordan.
“I’m here if you need me,” his friend said.
(VINCENT LAFORET/AFP via Getty Images)
He had scripted a much grander end. In fact, the end had begun before the season, when he had announced his sixteenth season would be his last. He had done it in grand fashion, returning to his native Alabama for a preseason game in October 1999.
That night, down a back hallway of the Birmingham-Jefferson Civic Center, Charcey had reserved a meeting hall for family and friends who made the short twenty-one-minute drive from Leeds to celebrate their hero over ribs, chicken wings, pasta salad, and cornbread. The mayors from Leeds and Birmingham stood by the entrance with the Barkley brothers and Michael Glenn, a cousin, and Charcey, eagerly awaiting the guest of honor.
“It’s always special to see him play,” Charcey told friends lingering by the door after the October exhibition. “Just like the first time.”
Standing at half-court with his mom and grandmother, Barkley formally announced his retirement.
“It’s time for me to do something else,” Barkley said. “It’s time for me to have some fun now. I don’t think my life could get any better. But it’s time to do something else.”
In doing so, he also told the crowd of ten thousand that he had donated three $1 million gifts to each of his alma maters, Leeds High School and Auburn University, and to Cornerstone Schools of Alabama. In total, the donations accounted for a third of his salary that year.
Sonny Smith, his coach at Auburn, lauded his former player’s “generosity and love for the area.” The two had come a long way since Barkley nearly transferred out of the school.
Everyone wanted a piece of Barkley that night. He didn’t have time to eat or drink. He took photos and signed balls. He never said no; it wasn’t in his nature. Hugging his grandmother on the way out, he was happier than he had been in a long time.
“It’s a great night for me,” Barkley said to his guests. “I feel great relief and am at peace with myself.”
(PAUL BUCK/AFP via Getty Images)
The four months following Barkley’s injury had him balancing a future in which he wanted to “learn to play the piano, finish college, and get really, really, really fat.” But he was also rehabbing as much as he could to achieve one last goal on the court: to play a few minutes and leave the sport with dignity.
“My objective is to play in the last game of the year,” he said. “I want to be able to walk off the court.”
With his left leg still in an immobilizer, trainer Tim Grover forbade him from taking to the court until he had the cast removed. Grover, who had trained the likes of Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Kobe Bryant, had continued working with Charles in Houston because, as he noted in his 2013 book Relentless, Charles was “probably the most athletically gifted individual I’ve ever seen.” Though he trusted his trainer, Charles rejected his suggestion.
“He looked at me with that death stare and demanded a ball,” Grover said. “Then he stood under the basket and dunked ten times off the healthy foot. Dunked. Ten times. One foot.” He added, “The boot never touched the ground.”
For the last game of the season, fans came ready with their Barkley bald caps and No. 4 jerseys for the Rockets’ match-up against the Vancouver Grizzlies.
For one night, Barkley was back.
“He’s done a lot for this organization and if he wants to walk off the court instead of being carried off, then I’m all for that,” Tomjanovich said. “It also gives the people a chance to pay one last tribute to him.”
His knee was maybe 70 percent. But nothing was going to stop him from playing in his last game on April 19, 2000.
Not everyone was going to make it easy on him. Lionel Hollins, his assistant in Phoenix who was the interim head coach for Vancouver, wanted to do whatever he could to prevent him from scoring on his team.
“I told the players, ‘I don’t care if it’s his last moment, we’re not going to let him have anything,’” Hollins recounted. “As much as I love Charles, we were not going to give him anything. He really shouldn’t have been in the game.”
Charles, for his part, was feeling nostalgic.
“This is a sad day for me,” Barkley said. “I’ve been playing basketball since I was nine years old and now, I’m not going to be playing anymore. That’s the only thing that makes me sad. I won’t miss the limelight.”
While the circumstances of his last game were not what he envisioned, Barkley was getting to enjoy himself. But first, he had to be good, at least for one more moment.
“It’s important for me from a mental standpoint to get out there,” he said before the game. “It’s a mindset thing. It’s been a grueling ordeal to get to this point. I just want to walk off under my own power.” He added: “It’s just something I have to do. I don’t have anything else to prove.”
(AFP via Getty Images)
Starting off on the bench, Charles was all smiles. His youthful vigor had returned. Almost four minutes into the second quarter, Tomjanovich got to call Charles’s number for the last time. He rose from the end of the bench, snapping off his warmup pants and red shirt. At the next substitution, the crowd jumped to its feet. He was nowhere close to a hundred percent, looking nervous as he checked in. He might have been only months removed from playing, but Charles was mostly stationary and looked almost out of place on the floor.
The contest between two sub- .500 teams took a back seat to the bigger question of the night: Could Charles produce one more glimpse of greatness?
Almost immediately, the power forward tried to do just that. Off a pick and roll with Cuttino Mobley at the 3-point line, Charles rolled toward the baseline, waiting for the pass. Mobley flung the ball to an open Charles. You could hear the crowd begging Barkley to shoot. He paused for one second before launching a baseline jumper. The ball bounced off the front iron and the crowd sighed.
In the second quarter, shortly after another shot clanged off the rim, Barkley’s body began to break down. A couple of possessions later, backup guard Moochie Norris got a screen from Matt Bullard at the left wing of the 3-point line. Norris slipped through two defenders and made a run at the hoop. In two dribbles, Norris got to the lane and floated a one-handed teardrop over the outstretched arm of Obinna Ekezie. Down low stood Barkley, boxing out Felipe Lopez, a guard with the same height but not nearly the same size. Charles hadn’t really tested out his capacity to rebound.
Luckily, he didn’t have to jump too much. The ball careened almost directly to him. With whatever spring he had left in his knees, he snared the ball from a jumping Lopez and pulled it to his hips. He wasn’t going to pass it. Not now.
“Charles! Charles!” yelled Rockets’ color man Calvin Murphy from the sidelines.
Barkley threw a wild pump-fake before laying it off the glass, drawing contact from Ekezie. Count the bucket. And the foul. The crowd hadn’t been that loud all season.
“Charles Barkley,” rumbled play-by-play man Bill Worrell, “gets a bucket in his final game!”
He was stone-faced in the seconds that followed, taking high-fives from an excited Bullard and rookie Steve Francis. When he walked toward Mobley, he offered the slightest nod, before finally letting out a smile.
“About time,” he told Mobley, hugging him at the free throw line. Barkley shrugged and smiled. What more could he have asked for?
Soon after he missed the free throw, Tomjanovich called Kenny Thomas’ number, telling the twenty-two-year-old rookie to check in for Barkley. He had played six minutes and seven seconds, scoring 2 points and grabbing a rebound. He laughed coming off the floor to a standing ovation, with Tomjanovich wrapping his arm around his neck and Rogers giving him a bear hug.
At halftime, Dawson presented Charles with the backboard that he just grabbed his last rebound from only minutes earlier. “You really own this one,” Dawson told him.
Charles then walked over to the baseline to give an interview to CraigSager, the TNT sideline reporter known for his warm demeanor and outlandish suits. Sager asked Charles if coming back for one night had been worth it.
“It was worth it. It was definitely worth it,” he said to Sager. “I put a lot of time and effort into my rehab. Hey, my last memory was scoring a basket, not being carried off the court. That was a bonus. I really just wanted to get a rebound, and it took me a long time to get a rebound. The doctor was nervous the whole time because my knee is only about 70 percent. And that rebound came to me, so I got lucky. I couldn’t have jumped to get it.”
Sager reminded him that he was about to finish his career in the top-15 all-time in points and rebounds.
“Well, the big fella up there gave me some stuff that a lot of people didn’t have,” Charles replied. “I can’t take credit for it. I want to, but I can’t. God just gave me a tremendous amount of ability. I can’t take credit for it though, Craig.”
The Rockets lost, but no one cared. It was Barkley’s night. He offered a few words to the team, saying it had a bright future with Francis and Mobley. “It’s unfortunate I didn’t come to Houston until I was on the downside,” he told the fans. “I wish I could have played my entire career here.”
His voice quavering, he gripped the microphone and pushed aside his regrets to convey his gratitude.
“Basketball doesn’t owe me anything, I owe everything in my life to basketball – everything,” he said. “I’m thirty-seven years old. I’m rich beyond my wildest dreams. I have great material things. I’ve been all over the world and it’s all because of basketball.”
(ROBERT SULLIVAN/AFP via Getty Images)
He retreated from the standing ovation to the locker room, where his teammates were waiting for him with beer and champagne, hoots and hollers. He never won an NBA title, but this champagne was a celebration of everything Charles had accomplished.
Soaked in sweat and alcohol, Barkley talked to reporters in the locker room one last time. The regularly loud Barkley grew quieter than usual, taking on the kind of reflective, humble tone he had shown to Sager earlier in the night. All he ever wanted, he said, was to make $1 million and play in the league for ten years. His only goal was to take care of his mother and grandmother.
As cocky and insufferable as he was at times, he never expected to be talking about his own Hall of Fame career, he said. The individual numbers speak for themselves. Career averages of 22 .1 points, 11 .7 rebounds, and 3 .9 assists in 1,073 games. He’s one of the most prolific offensive rebounders in the game’s history and the shortest player to ever lead the league in total rebounding. He made eleven All-Star teams and twelve All-NBA squads in sixteen seasons. Charles finished top-ten in MVP voting in nine years, including his first-place finish in 1993. As of publication, he is one of seven players in league history to record 20,000 points, 10,000 rebounds, and 4,000 assists – and by far the shortest to do so.
So, how did it happen? Even with his mistakes, and there were too many to count, his exhaustive charisma pulled him toward success and worldwide adoration.
“The difficult thing is that nothing I’ll do in my life from now on will come close to what I’ve accomplished in basketball in the last sixteen years,” he noted.
But he sure as hell had to try.
Barkley: A Biography by Timothy Bella. Hanover Square Press; Original edition (November 1, 2022).
‘Steve Kerr: A Life’ adapted from Steve Kerr by Scott Howard-Cooper. Copyright 2021 by Scott Howard-Cooper. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. ” J O R D AN A W A IT ED L I KE A K I NG ,” bl a r ed the …
‘Steve Kerr: A Life’ adapted from Steve Kerr by Scott Howard-Cooper. Copyright 2021 by Scott Howard-Cooper. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
“JORDAN AWAITED LIKE A KING,” blared the headline in the country’s major sports daily, L’Equipe. “Michael Jordan is in Paris,” the paper France-Soir fawned. “That’s better than the Pope. It’s God in person.” “The young Parisians lucky enough to get into [the arena] must have dreamed beautiful dreams, for their hero had been everything they could have hoped for,” another writer passed along. That Jordan was seen wearing a beret meant “We shall be able to call him Michel.”
The thirteen-year-old North Korean known as Pak Un, said to be the son of an official at the embassy in Bern, Switzerland, was driven 375 miles from the Swiss capital to see his beloved Bulls. In time, friends he made in the West would talk of seeing photos of the shy student posing with Kukoc and Kobe Bryant, on separate occasions and in unknown locations, and a room filled with basketball memorabilia in his apartment at 10 Kirchstrasse in the town of Liebefeld. Pak had a collection of Nikes and drew pencil sketches of Jordan.Althoughitwasunclear whether he watched the October 17 win over French club Paris PSG Racing or Chicago beating Greek squad Olympiacos the next day for the championship as Kerr scored ten points or both, his presence inside Palais Omnisports de Paris- Bercy would be noted decades later, once it became known that the teenager studying in Switzerland was future North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un.
Returning to the United States and coming together again once Rodman re-signed in time for the start of the regular season brought the realization that 1997–1998 would be the last season together for the original core with five titles (Jordan, Pippen, and Jackson) and the second wave that had been part of two titles (Kerr, Harper, Rodman, Wennington, and Buechler). “The finality of it gave the season a certain resonance that bonded the team closely together,” Jackson wrote. “It felt as if we were on a sacred mission, driven by a force that went beyond fame, glory, and all the other spoils of victory. We were doing this one for the pure joy of playing together one more time. It felt magical.”
(JEFF HAYNES/AFP via Getty Images)
It was the most difficult of the three full seasons on the court since Jordan returned anyway, with an inability to win close games and an early 8-6 mark for the strange sight of the Bulls in eighth place. Additionally, Pippen got drunk on the flight from Sacramento to Seattle and launched into a tirade against Krause during the bus ride to the hotel. As Christmas approached and Jackson pondered his tradition of giving books, he considered AnyIdiotCanManagefor Krause. “But in the end,” Jackson said, “I didn’t buy him anything because I couldn’t find it in myself to give him something of value.” Kerr’s contribution to the gloom was a cracked femur that cost him ten games in November and December. He was back about a month when Derrick Coleman of the 76ers landed on Kerr after a block attempt, resulting in a broken left clavicle and twenty-nine games lost. Worse, Kerr had the added frustration of believing Coleman could have avoided the hard contact. After playing eighty-two regular-season contests the previous four seasons, he would make it into only fifty in 1997–1998, the fewest since 1991–1992 as a Cavalier, joined by the disappointment of dropping to 45.4 percent overall and 43.8 percent on threes.
He could at least be encouraged that he was returning with enough time—the final quarter of the schedule—to reclaim rhythm and conditioning before the playoffs. Starting the comeback on March 8 against the Knicks at Madison Square Garden, with a Manhattan energy that made it one of Kerr’s favorite stops, was a bonus. He shot the first time he touched the ball, after entering late inthe first quarter, such a change from his usual approach of gently sliding into the flow of a game that reporters brought it up after the easy Bulls win. Kerr said he felt like Wennington, referencing his fellow Moth who was typically so eager to launch that Jordan had tagged him “trampoline hands.” Kerr made the inaugural attempt and three in all in five tries while Jackson ran him back into shape with twenty-six minutes in the first game action he’d seen in seven weeks.
“That’s one of the things about injuries, you have a lot of time to think,” Kerr said. “I really thought about my situation here and my future, and I realized that early in the season I was probably pressing a little bit because of the uncertainty over next year, me being a free agent and nobody knowing what was happening with the team. I realized that I was gonna have probably 20 games left and then the playoffs. And then, who knows? That might be it. So I better enjoy it and be aggressive and try to have as much fun as I can when I do come back.”
His coach had a similar mindset. Wanting to appreciate what little time the group appeared to have left, Jackson scheduled a meeting before the playoffs and asked players and staff members in advance to write a paragraph on the impact of the season and the team on their lives, anything from their own words to lyrics from a song to a spiritual verse. Choosing to gather in the video room in the training facility signaled a special level of importance as the spot Jackson had informally renamed the “tribal room,” in tribute to the Native American beliefs he admired. He even added the decorating touches of a bear-claw necklace, an owl feather, and photos of a newborn white buffalo, among other items, and he would bang a drum to alert players to gather.
Half the participants followed the instructions and arrived with written sentiments, including Jordan in the form of, in Jackson’s words, a “very moving” poem that praised the team’s dedication and expressed hope that the bond would last forever. Kerr was shocked at the gentle words from a velociraptor. His contribution— unwritten—was to share the thrill of becoming a father to Madeleine while with the Bulls and bringing four-year-old basketball fan Nick to meet Jordan, Pippen, and Rodman in the locker room. The pieces of paper were crumpled and dropped in a coffee can after each reading, the lights were flicked off and Jackson ultimately lit the wads on fire. Kerr was one of many brought to tears. “I’ll never forget that moment,” Jackson later wrote. “The quiet aura in the room. The fire burning in the darkness. The intense intimacy we felt sitting silently together and watching the flames die down. I don’t think the bond among us had ever been stronger.”
(ROBERT SULLIVAN/AFP via Getty Images)
The vibes carried over to the court as the Bulls opened the playoffs by eliminating the Nets 3–0 and the Hornets 4–1 before beating the Pacers in the first two games of the East finals. When Indiana pushed back by evening the series, Chicago responded to its first postseason test by winning two of the last three to advance to a rematch with the Jazz in the championship series, this time with Utah on ten days’ rest and with home-court advantage. The noise in the return to the Delta Center, Jackson said, was “astonishing” and “beyond the realm of tolerance. Last year, I’d go back to my room and my ears would ring for hours. They toned down the motorcycle sounds some, but the introduction is the worst—the bombs, the flares, the balloons bursting in sequence.” Worried about permanent ear damage, he wore earplugs.
Invisible in the 1997 Finals until the last ticks, Kerr was everywhere a year later. In Game 1, Jackson left him in to defend Stockton and paid for the gamble when Stockton got Kerr in the lane and made a nine-footer with nine seconds remaining for the winning points, a portion of Stockton’s seven points in overtime that turned into a Gonzaga recruiting visit. Two days later, down a point with forty-eight seconds remaining, Kerr missed a twenty-five-footer in front of the Jazz bench, only to move in to collect the long rebound between six-nine Malone and six-seven Russell. “That’s true desire,” Jordan said. Kerr then quickly spotted Jordan open under the basket and delivered the pass that gave the Bulls an 87–86 edge and a key moment in the 93–88 Chicago victory that evened the series.
Just like the year before, Kerr was on the court for the final Bulls possession, except this time Jordan finished off the Jazz by himself with an iconic seventeen-footer over Russell with five seconds remaining. Kerr didn’t have to bail him out again.
“My story is not quite as exciting this year, but I’ll share it with you anyway,” Kerr said at the latest Grant Park party, looking out over the sea of people. “When we called timeout, we were down three with forty-five seconds left. I kinda thought to myself, this would be a great chance at a three-pointer to tie the game. And I mentioned that to Phil. And Phil looked at me with this disgusted look and he said, ‘Steve, let’s face it. Last year was a fluke. Get the ball to Michael and get the hell out of his way.’ So that’s what I did. You know what happened. You know the rest. And for what it’s worth, I thought I did a fantastic job of getting out of his way.” With that, Kerr turned and went back to his seat on the stage.
The improbable last contribution, an offensive rebound-turned-assist, was a fitting ending after an unlikely five seasons in Chicago that almost didn’t happen and then turned into three titles. Joining the Bulls changed the history of the unwanted reserve trying to claw out one more contract, from the long-term implications of connecting with Jackson to hitting the shot to clinch the ’97 title that Kerr was certain put his life on a new course. As the search for the next opportunity began amid the looming breakup of a championship roster, it was hard to avoid the strange reality that for all the eventual Hall of Famers in the organization, it was possible that no one gained more from the second Jordan run than Steve Kerr.
The only four-day, three-state reporting trip in Sports Illustrated history to include an impromptu last-minute trip to Las Vegas and a macaw parrot started on a Thursday night inside a popular hangout in the Beverly Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, called Sanctuary. A few hours earlier, the San Antonio Spurs eliminated the Los Angeles Lakers from the playoffs in Game 6 of the 1995 Western Conference semifinals. Spurs forward Dennis Rodman spotted Sports Illustrated writer Michael Silver as he walked off the court.
“Come on, bro,” he said. “Let’s fucking go.” After graduating from UC Berkeley in 1988, Silver joined Newsday as a summer intern. He covered the San Francisco 49ers at The Sacramento Union before joining the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. “I was growing disenchanted with the older and more established writers,” Silver said. “I self-promoted a lot and wasn’t subtle about it. I was always trying to push for bigger and better things for myself. They were not vibing with me. I was reassessing whether I wanted to stay in the business when I got the miracle call from Sports Illustrated in 1994.”
A year later, the magazine needed someone who could keep up with the 34-year-old power forward with red-and-orange hair who dated Madonna, listened to Pearl Jam, wore Oakley sunglasses and plaid flannel pants to games, started the season serving a three-game suspension after throwing a bag of ice at his head coach’s face, and loved to party.
Their pro football writer seemed like the right choice. Silver regularly hung out with football players and coaches until the sun came up. “I would go out with guys until three in the morning,” he explained. “I wouldn’t get a single tangible thing for my story, but three years later, I would be able to walk into a locker room and talk to them after an important game.”
A 12-passenger limo whisked a group including Rodman and Silver from the Great Western Forum to Beverly Hills. Silver watched celebrities inside Sanctuary line up to greet Rodman. He was the center of attention. A Hollywood agent pitched Rodman the idea of becoming a movie villain in an upcoming Quentin Tarantino–directed picture. It was four in the morning when Silver found himself standing outside the club listening to the Spurs forward explain his breakup with Madonna to the bouncer.
“I thought I could party with this guy, but I had no idea what I was in for,” Silver said. “I was applying my ‘I’m in my 20s, I’m from Northern California, I drink a bunch of beers with the dudes’ standards. We got to the club and we’re immediately on the Goldschlager and Jagermeister.”
The most memorable reporting trip of Silver’s career was just getting started as he raced toward the airport a few hours later to catch a flight to San Antonio.
Rodman was an introvert growing up in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, Texas, with his sisters, Debra and Kim, both All-American college basketball players. His father, Philander, left the family and relocated to the Philippines when he was three. Rodman developed a rebellious streak. He drifted across several jobs before working as a janitor at the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport after quitting high school basketball. Rodman stole 15 watches one evening from the airport gift shop and was jailed for a night. His mother, Shirley, kicked him out of the house.
Rodman played on the Cooke County College basketball team in Gainesville, Texas, for a semester before leaving due to poor grades. He blossomed into the country’s best rebounder at Southeastern Oklahoma State, averaging 24.4 points and 17.8 rebounds as a senior. Rodman was selected by the Detroit Pistons in the second round in 1986 and became a critical part of two championship teams with his rebounding and defensive presence.
One evening in February of 1993, Rodman dropped off what appeared to be a suicide note to a close friend before leaving for a late-night workout. The cops found him asleep in his pickup truck with a loaded rifle later that night. His personal and professional life was a mess. Rodman was heartbroken after losing custody of his daughter Alexis in a divorce settlement with his ex-wife Annie. He was also upset at his team for parting ways with head coach Chuck Daly, a personal friend and father figure. Friends and family members were concerned for Rodman’s mental well-being after the incident. The Pistons forward assured everyone he was fine. He wasn’t contemplating suicide but was symbolically killing his old public persona to show the world who he truly was.
The Spurs traded for Rodman several months later before the start of the following season. He decided it was time for a new look. Rodman showed up to his first public appearance with his new team with a brand-new blonde hairdo inspired by Wesley Snipes’ blonde-haired character Simon Phoenix from the 1993 science fiction action film Demolition Man. He received a standing ovation from the fans.
USA TODAY Sports
Silver arrived in San Antonio for day two of his reporting trip nursing a hangover. Rodman, meanwhile, was at the practice facility going through rebounding drills as if the previous night didn’t happen. The two would end up in Las Vegas by the end of the night, thanks to Dwight Manley.
A renowned coin collector from Orange County, California, Manley was in Las Vegas for a bachelor party in the summer of 1993 when he first met Rodman at a craps table. In the months leading up to his trade to the Spurs, Rodman had put up a “For Sale” sign at his Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, home and stayed at The Mirage in Las Vegas for the entire summer, blowing through $35,000 playing craps.
“I invited him to a George Carlin show,” Manley recalled. “The next day, we hung out and hired some entertainers for the bachelor party. It was a good time. We swapped numbers before saying our goodbyes.”
The two quickly became close friends, visiting each other during the season, and occasionally returning to Las Vegas together. The Spurs had a few days off before the Western Conference Finals, so Manley asked Rodman if he wanted to party. The answer, as always, was a resounding yes. Hours after landing in San Antonio for his second day of reporting, Silver was running through the airport trying to make a flight to Las Vegas. The group landed at ten in the evening and immediately headed to the craps table, calling it a night just before sunrise.
Manley’s hotel phone rang at five in the morning. It was Spurs head coach Bob Hill.
He wanted Rodman back in San Antonio in the afternoon for a Saturday film session.
Hill’s relationship with Rodman got off to a rocky start in the preseason after he replaced John Lucas as head coach. He suspended Rodman for three games after he arrived late to practice, skipped several team meetings, and threw a bag of ice in his direction during a preseason game.
The feud continued throughout the season and into the playoffs.
After Rodman was benched in the second half of a Game 3 loss in the second round against the Lakers, he refused to join his teammates in the huddle, sitting by himself with a towel over his head near the bench. Hill sent his starting power forward to the locker room for the remainder of the game and didn’t play him in Game 4. “I’m getting punished for some stupid reason,” Rodman said. “It didn’t hurt me at all. I can play or not play.” Hill responded: “I would always listen very closely to Dennis, and then, probably, whatever he says, the opposite is true.” The war of words continued when Hill said he hoped Rodman had learned his lesson. “Learned my lesson?” Rodman told the media. “I’m 34 years old. I’m a grown man. I know what I’m doing. So, no, I haven’t learned my lesson.” Hill managed to get in the last word, saying, “It’s all part of our existence here. Dennis is just playing a little game there. He’s trying to keep himself in a position of power. That’s what he’s about.”
Vince Bucci/AFP via Getty Images
Rodman did not want to go back to San Antonio but common sense prevailed after some pleading by Manley and teammate Jack Haley and a flight home was booked for noon. Silver was still waiting for a sit-down interview with Rodman as the third day of his reporting trip started.
“Mike came up to me and said, ‘What do I do?’” Manley recalled. “I said, ‘Go with Dennis, and you sit with him on the way back because I’m going back to California.’ He told me the next day it was the best advice ever.”
During a one-hour layover in Houston, Silver and Rodman watched Hakeem Olajuwon’s Rockets beat Charles Barkley’s Phoenix Suns in Game 7 of their second-round series. The Sports Illustrated writer finally landed his interview when they sat together on the connecting flight back home.
Silver got Rodman to open up about everything, including his suicidal thoughts (“Sometimes I dream about just taking a gun and blowing my head off .”), murder fantasies (“Yeah, I’d kill somebody… in my mind. All of a sudden I lose control of what I’m doing. I’m in a torture chamber, and I’ve got to fight my way out. I definitely come out with a vengeance.”), celebrity status (“They hide behind their money, fame, and success. Then all of a sudden they have no opinion, or they’re afraid to voice it because they’re afraid someone will take away what they’ve got.”), his sexuality (“I visualize being with another man. Everybody visualizes being gay. They think, ‘Should I do it or not?’ The reason they can’t is because they think it’s unethical. They think it’s a sin. Hell, you’re not bad if you’re gay, and it doesn’t make you any less of a person.”) and Madonna (“She wanted to get married. She wanted to have my baby. She said, ‘Be in a hotel room in Las Vegas on this specific day so you can get me pregnant.’ She had ways of making you feel like you’re King Tut, but she also wanted to cuddle and be held.”).
Rodman landed in San Antonio and joined his team for a film session and dinner afterward. He met up with Silver in the evening to show the Sports Illustrated writer one of his favorite local gay bars before they both retreated to Rodman’s place. After spending the night writing in the guest room, Silver filed his story to his Sports Illustrated editor just before his Sunday morning deadline.
Silver woke up the following day, walked downstairs past 15 exotic birds, two German shepherds, and found photographer John McDonough setting up in Rodman’s kitchen.
McDonough graduated from Arizona State University with a photojournalism degree and worked for SPORT, The Los Angeles Times, and the Arizona Republic before joining Sports Illustrated as a photographer in 1982. He met Rodman two years earlier for the first time at a photoshoot in San Antonio.
“Dennis didn’t have much money then,” he recalled. “Here I am, a photographer, and here he is, a multi-millionaire, and I was buying him meals. We ended up hanging out for a few days. I remember telling him, ‘I’m not going to sit around and judge whatever issues or problems you have. I just want to know who you are.’ That’s how our friendship started.”
McDonough had asked the Spurs forward for ideas a few days before the photoshoot. “Dennis told me, ‘We’re not taking a picture of me in my uniform again,’” he recalled. “So now I’m driving in my rental car to his place, and I’ve got absolutely no idea what I was going to do.”
Rodman finally came downstairs to greet McDonough and asked if he could be photographed naked on the Sports Illustrated cover.
“We ended up making a few calls to the editors and were told it wasn’t going to work,” McDonough said. “Dennis was a little disappointed. I’m looking at the skylight coming through the front entryway, and it started to go. I’m starting to worry because there wasn’t time to set up any lights. Dennis comes back to us and says, ‘Okay, how about I wear hot pants and a tank top?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s fine, that’s great.’”
McDonough sat Rodman in a chair and placed one of his macaw parrots on his arm for dramatic effect.
“The bird was getting fussy and started to bite him,” he recalled. “I was shooting as many photos as I could.”
Rodman went upstairs for a wardrobe change and came back wearing a pair of jeans with a rip in the crotch, exposing his privates.
“I was just laughing at this point,” McDonough said. “I couldn’t believe what was happening. It was a stressful day, but I managed to pull a rabbit out of my hat.”
The second part of the photoshoot took place on a red leather zebra skin couch where the Spurs forward sprawled out in a position where McDonough could shoot the pictures without exposing his subject’s crotch.
Silver watched the entire three-hour photoshoot unfold while going back and forth with his editors fighting to keep every detail of his cover story in print. He was not convinced the feature would run.
“To my understanding, it was batted around a lot,” Silver said. “It would have been a tough decision. It was 1995, it was Sports Illustrated, and we had an old, white readership. The photos themselves were risqué by their standards.”
To his surprise, a photo of Rodman wearing a shiny tank top, metallic hot pants, and a rhinestone dog collar, while seated in a leopard-print patterned chair with a parrot in his arm appeared on the cover of the May 29, 1995, issue of Sports Illustrated. The cover line read RARE BIRD in red and yellow, matching the parrot and Rodman’s hair dye.
Sports Illustrated/John McDonough
It became one of Sports Illustrated’s best-selling May issues ever. Shortly after the cover hit newsstands, the Spurs lost in six games to the Rockets in the Western Conference Finals. San Antonio weighed the pros and cons of having Rodman on their roster moving forward and eventually traded him to the Chicago Bulls in exchange for center Will Perdue in the offseason.
The Sports Illustrated cover story elevated Rodman to a different kind of celebrity status. He partied with Hollywood A-listers including Leonardo DiCaprio, Chris Rock, and Courtney Love. Rodman modeled a G-string for supermodel Cindy Crawford on MTV and starred in the action-comedy film Double Team with Jean-Claude Van Damme. Manley became Rodman’s agent and used the Sports Illustrated cover story’s popularity to land him a book deal. Silver was Manley’s first choice to write the book, but he couldn’t convince his Sports Illustrated editors to give him time off. Manley and Rodman narrowed their list down to Jeremy Schapp and Tim Keown, who ended up writing the book. ‘Bad As I Wanna Be’ was a 1996 New York Times best-seller. Rodman orchestrated a book signing stunt by showing up at a Barnes & Noble in New York wearing a wedding dress a day after telling late-night talk-show host David Letterman he was getting married.
AP Photo/Mark Lennihan
Silver—who ended up writing Rodman’s follow-up book Walk on the Wild Side a year later—saw another side of Rodman beyond the controversial stunts in public.
He saw someone who openly questioned masculine stereotypes in sports, spoke about the dangers of drug use, wore t-shirts supporting same-sex marriage to the arena during a time when homophobia was common among athletes and society at large and colored an AIDS awareness ribbon into the back of his head for a nationally televised playoff game.
“He had this huge groundswell of support by a wave of people who felt marginalized and misunderstood,” Silver said. “They felt like they had been cast in the freak bin too. I saw people react to him. They tore their hearts out and thanked him. He was their guiding light.”
The Sports Illustrated cover embodied the qualities of a perfect magazine cover. The magazine picked the right writer and photographer to capture their cover subject’s essence and profiled their cover subject at an ideal time in his career. Even Phil Taylor, the magazine’s lead basketball writer at the time, admits Silver was the right choice to write the most talked-about basketball profile of the year.
“When I read Silver’s story, I was jealous to a degree,” Taylor said. “But I also realized it probably would not have gone that way for me if I hung out with Dennis. I was a bit more buttoned-up and not as flamboyant. I get the feeling Dennis would have dropped me off at the hotel after the first night and said goodbye.”
A year after Rodman’s controversial Sports Illustrated cover, Taylor pitched his own feature idea on the power forward making an impression in his first year with the Bulls. “Everyone had written about his eccentricity,” Taylor explained. “I told my editors, ‘How about just a real hard basketball story about him?’ His rebounding just stood out. It looked to me sometimes like he had this sixth sense of where the ball was going.”
Before a game against the Miami Heat, Taylor found Rodman sitting by himself in the locker room. As Taylor walked over, Rodman started breaking down film from the previous night’s game against the Atlanta Hawks. “It was interesting because every time I talked to Dennis, he was a different person,” Taylor said. “No two interviews were at all alike. It was consistent in that if I tried to talk to him about on-the-court stuff, he would get all weird on me. But when I tried to talk to him about the things he was doing off the court, he would invariably shift into talking about setting screens and the X’s and O’s of basketball. He was just so into what he was doing this time it was almost like he didn’t realize he was being interviewed.”
Rodman took the remote and gave Taylor a step-by-step walkthrough of his process, fast-forwarding to find a possession during the Hawks game where Scottie Pippen shot a three-pointer from the top of the arc. He stopped the tape and pointed to the other players on the court, fighting in the low post for rebounding position. When he pressed play again, Taylor watched as Rodman slid past everyone to the right side of the basket, perfectly anticipating the carom off the rim for an offensive rebound. He fast-forwarded to another Pippen miss from the same spot and then a later miss from Michael Jordan, also at the top of the key.
“Anytime I see Scottie or Michael shoot from the top of the key,” Rodman explained to Taylor, “I know the ball will come off the rim to the right.”
On every possession he showed Taylor, Rodman was the only person on the court who knew precisely where the ball was going. He had spent hours in the gym rebounding for Pippen and Jordan to study the trajectory of their jumpers from every spot on the court. Taylor was blown away by the meticulousness with which Rodman approached his rebounding. “I definitely came away with a greater appreciation for what he did,” he said.
On the cover of the March 4, 1996, issue of Sports Illustrated was a photo of Rodman soaring to snatch a rebound away from an opposing defender with the cover line: THE BEST REBOUNDER EVER? DENNIS RODMAN REVEALS THE SECRETS OF HIS INSIDE GAME.
Richard Mackson/Sports Illustrated
While every cover story tried to replicate Silver’s blueprint, Taylor managed to find a new angle to share with a national audience. Meanwhile, other magazines like Rolling Stone—who depicted Rodman as the devil on the cover, photoshopping the red-haired power forward with his tongue sticking out with a pair of devil horns—and GQ—who asked Rodman to pose naked next to scantily clad model Rebecca Romijn on the cover—tried to recreate the magic of the Sports Illustrated cover and fell well short. The moment had passed.
Sports Illustrated also tried to recreate the magic in 1999, when they asked Silver to write a feature on Derek Jeter. The 25-year-old New York Yankees shortstop had a recent high-profile fling with singer Mariah Carey and was known for his love of the city’s nightlife as one of the most eligible bachelors in the Big Apple. It had the makings of another memorable cover story.
But Jeter had been trained to portray a much different image to Sports Illustrated.
“We were in his apartment, and he’s telling me how he’s a homebody,” Silver said. “Meanwhile, there’s one chair, a television, a bed, and a refrigerator with nothing in it. I spent days with him, and he didn’t take me partying.”
He called Sports Illustrated baseball writer Tom Verducci.
“I asked him, ‘If I write a story about how Derek Jeter just likes to chill at the crib, am I going to be the biggest idiot in the world?’” Silver recalled. “Tom said, ‘Absolutely. You cannot do that.’”
A photo of Jeter running mid-stride to catch a fly ball at Yankees Stadium appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s June 21, 1999, issue. The cover line said GOOD FIELD. GOOD HIT. GOOD GUY. WHY DEREK JETER IS SO EASY TO ROOT FOR.
Silver’s story explored the Yankees shortstop’s relationship with the city of New York. The most controversial part of the feature was an interaction between Jeter and a Circuit City employee, who heckled Jeter as he was shopping for a videocassette recorder in the store.
Silver still remembers a moment he shared with Rodman on their connecting flight home from Houston to San Antonio after a Friday evening in Las Vegas.
“Dennis asked me what my next story was going to be when we landed,” he recalled. “I told him, ‘Believe it or not, it’s this NASCAR thing.’ He said, ‘Aw bro, that’s going to be so fucking boring. It’s never going to get better than me. You’re never going to get someone who is this weird, this good, this open, and this funny. So enjoy this.’”
He was right.
Silver never found another cover subject like him again.
This excerpt from The Midrange Theory: Basketball’s Evolution in the Age of Analytics by Seth Partnow is reprinted with the permission of Triumph Books.
This excerpt from The Midrange Theory: Basketball’s Evolution in the Age of Analytics by Seth Partnow is reprinted with the permission of Triumph Books. For more information and to order a copy, please visit Amazon, Bookshop.org, or TriumphBooks.com/MidrangeTheory.
This is a book about analytics. I hate analytics.
Not the discipline mind you, but the word. The word has become hopelessly poisoned, reduced, confused, and misapplied. But we’re stuck with the word so we might as well define it properly. Before we do so, there are plenty of misconceptions to cast aside. So, here is what won’t be in this book: one neat trick to solve basketball.
Basketball analytics is often portrayed as a realm of hubris, unearned certitude, and disrespect for knowledge gleaned without the aid of a calculator. Of trying to reduce the game’s artistry to spreadsheets and graphs. I have to admit, these charges aren’t made from whole cloth; it is not difficult to find real world examples of each. But those missteps are not “analytics,” they are “analytics done poorly.” No true Scotsman could think otherwise.
Done well, analytics is the realm of constant curiosity. The hard-won expertise of experienced professionals is vital to the process, even if the lessons drawn from that expertise are occasionally challenged. While many techniques do require some flattening of events for easier calculation and comparison, this is not the aim unto itself, rather in service of creating a deeper and more nuanced understanding and even aesthetic appreciation of the game.
Analytics exist at the intersections of math, statistics, and computer science. However, those are merely the tools rather than the field itself. They might even be the primary tools as applied to basketball and other sports. However, the tools aren’t the thing. Rather, it is a mode of thought seeking to reduce the impact of the cognitive biases we all suffer from. In a world wrought with imperfect information and uncertain outcomes, it is about putting oneself in a position to be less wrong. Or if you’re an optimist, to be correct more often than the competition, and by doing so winning big.
For as much backward-revised narrative as there can be describing why certain drafted players “make it” and others bust, we’re talking about the degree to which you can know what an 18-year-old will be when he’s 24. Such projection is incredibly difficult and inexact. On players, you do the best you can, make the pick, and take your chances. These wagers can have better or worse odds of success, but the lens of hindsight won’t always help separate out good bets from wild-assed gambles that happened to come in.
Anyone who has been buffeted by the winds of macroeconomic trends in their first job out of college – which is to say, all of us who entered the job market upon graduation – understands the degree to which things are often out of one’s control. My own first job was at an e-commerce startup, which basically failed around 18 months after I joined. Could I have done more to prevent this? Sure, but I don’t think slightly better merchandising choices by a 23-year-old business analyst was the difference between riches and ruins. For me, it was wrong place, wrong time.
And so it is with young players. Some will become long-term NBA stalwarts, a few even All-Stars and MVPs. Most won’t.
Sometimes these outcomes were easily predictable. For others, the invisible forces of the basketball universe aligned against them. They ended up with the wrong team, the wrong coach, in the wrong city. Picked the wrong agent or business manager. The wrong trainer. Got injured. Got sick. Developed the wrong skills for the direction in which the league or his team was moving. Sometimes, shit happens even to the most “can’t miss” of prospects. Greg Oden was in parts unlucky and doomed by his own physiology even though when he was able to be on the court, he was every bit as dominant as the evaluation which had him as the consensus top pick over Kevin Durant would have suggested.
Even for established players changing teams, fit can vary from perfect to abysmal. When I was in the Milwaukee Bucks front office, we signed Brook Lopez to a one-year deal for the biannual exception. As the name implies, this “BAE” provides a mechanism, usable once every two seasons, for a team to exceed the amount otherwise allowed by the salary cap to sign a player. Sounds impressive, but the BAE is the second-smallest exception available under the league’s collective bargaining agreement. It allows for a player to be paid an amount for which you are happy to find a decent seventh or eighth man. Not a starter and certainly not a high-impact player.
It was a good get for us. We upgraded our center position without having to give up any long-term assets or trade chips.
By reputation, Lopez had been an excellent scorer but mediocre defender for much of his career. As he hit free agency in the summer of 2018, he had become known as much for the bloated contract that had just run out as for his play on the floor. That previous deal, signed just before the “traditional” center was hit by the asteroid that was the Golden State Warriors, made him appear to be an overpaid dinosaur rather than a difference-making acquisition.
Signing Lopez was a low-cost, reasonable-upside play, addressing what had been a weakness by adding a proven player who had developed the three-point shooting desired for the offensive system we wanted to play.
Brook immediately became the linchpin of the defense which graded as the best in the league for the next two years. He had the perfect combination of size, surprising agility, thorough understanding of the NBA’s illegal defense rules, and willingness to get physical in rebounding battles that we needed.
So did we make a brilliant signing of a player the rest of the league dramatically undervalued, or did we just get lucky? In short, both.
Were some of the signs of Brook’s excellence-to-come there when we decided to bet on his fit and value? Sure.
We believed the perception of him as a player around the league was overly negative, more about his previous contract than his current contributions. More importantly, we had reasons to believe that his defensive shortcomings were overstated. His poor reputation in that area was largely due to both his poor individual rebounding totals and his inability to function in the aggressive defensive schemes in vogue around the league for much of his career.
In terms of rebounding, Lopez was a nearly perfect example of the difference between individual and team stats. He might not have grabbed many rebounds himself, but his team always ended up corralling the bulk of opponent misses while he was on the floor.
Among the 100 centers who played at least 2,500 minutes over the five seasons prior to his arrival in Milwaukee, Lopez ranked 94th in defensive rebounding percentage. Over the same period he was rated as the sixth-most-positive impactful player on his team’s defensive rebounding, according to Regularized Adjusted Plus/Minus techniques. In terms of team success, is it more important for the center to accumulate defensive rebounds or for the team to “finish” defensive possessions by virtue of someone grabbing the board? To ask the question is to answer it, and over his career Lopez had proven himself elite at the truly important bit of helping his team gain possession of the ball.
We also suspected that the defensive scheme we wanted to play would better fit Lopez’s ability than what had been the trend for most of his career to that point. With the success of first Boston (Kevin Garnett) and then Chicago (Joakim Noah) in using an agile center to “hedge” on ball screens in the late 2000s and early 2010s – Garnett would frequently chase a point guard nearly to half court! – many teams adopted this brand of coverage. While Lopez is quick and very agile for his size, “for his size” is still 7’1″ and 280-ish pounds. Cue the hippo ballet from Fantasia.
Though he was never going to win a race with the league’s point guards at the top of the floor, Brook had shown a consistent ability to defend at the rim. According to the NBA’s player tracking data, over the same five seasons in which he had been such an impactful rebounding presence, opponents had only managed to score on 53.7% of shots in the restricted area with Lopez within five feet of the shooter as the closest defender, 87th percentile among all players and just a tick behind Anthony Davis. In the conservative defensive strategy our coaching staff planned to employ, Lopez would be asked to protect the rim first, second, and third, relying upon our guards to chase and harry opposing ballhandlers.
Given these statistical and schematic arguments, we were fairly confident he’d be a perfectly solid defender for us. Had we (or anyone) thought he would make an All-Defense team, he wouldn’t have been available as such a bargain signing. After all, he had received a grand total of zero (0) votes for All-Defense honors to that point. Ever. This isn’t to say he never made the First or Second Teams. He hadn’t shown up on a single ballot. Even by accident. And every year a few truly wretched defenders garner stray All-Defense votes.
So, while we made an astute signing, correctly predicting that Lopez would outperform his reputation, we also got really lucky.
The temptation will always be there to say, “See, it worked” after positive outcomes no matter how that outcome came to be. That sort of results-oriented thinking is the most common form of bias to fight against. Good decisions will sometimes go poorly, while ludicrous decisions will work out just fine at times because the universe has a dark sense of humor.
That will never change. Good process and analysis can serve to tilt the odds in one’s favor. Basketball analytics isn’t always about having the answers, it’s about asking the right questions so that you can be on the right side of those odds often enough to come out ahead in the long run.
Excerpted from From Hang Time to Prime Time: Business, Entertainment, and the Birth of the Modern-day NBA, published on December 1, 2020 by Atria Books.
David Stern was begging for a loved one’s life. There was little justification for CBS Sports to show mercy.
Since its deal with CBS Sports, the NBA had not fulfilled its promise as the sport of the 1970s. President Bob Wussler and Larry O’Brien had shaken hands on an extension, but “we agreed somewhat reluctantly,” said Neal Pilson, then director of business affairs for CBS Sports. “It was not a substantial deal.” The NBA’s ratings were not great, but there was a history. On the heels of improperly paying tennis players money at “winner-takes-all” events, Wussler resigned in April 1978. New president Frank Smith wanted the NBA excised from the network’s schedule.
Here’s how Pilson remembered hearing the news:
Smith: “I want to cancel the NBA. I want to do more golf.”
Pilson: “Frank, we have a handshake [deal] with Larry O’Brien.”
Smith: “I don’t give a damn. It’s a handshake. It doesn’t bind me. I want to drop the NBA. Get Larry O’Brien over here.”
Pilson: “Jesus, Frank. We’ve had the NBA for years. It’s a good product. We don’t have a substitute for it.”
Smith: “I don’t care.”
O’Brien was stunned. The CBS and NBA had a good relationship, he explained, plus the NBA had a deal with Wussler. Stern asked Pilson if they could talk outside. There, like a manager enraged with an umpire over a bad call, Stern got right in Pilson’s face and put a finger in his chest. “You can’t do this to Larry. You can’t do this to the NBA. You had a deal. You have to stay with it. We need to continue on CBS!”
Pilson knew Stern was desperate. Without CBS, he thought, the NBA would disappear from network television. Jack Kent Cooke, unhappy with CBS Sports, had already crawled back to ABC, but the network harbored resentment over the league’s shifty defection to CBS. Pilson promised to talk to Smith. Stern and Pilson ended their sidebar. Everyone agreed to defer the decision. Pilson then did his best to convince Smith: The network had nothing to replace the NBA. It’s profitable. It’s a good deal. Let’s stay with it. The four-year deal was renewed. O’Brien later said Smith, who died in 1998, initially couldn’t honor Wussler’s deal, because it hadn’t been approved upstairs.
The $74 million contract failed to resolve every issue. “We were never given the opportunity to determine whether we were ready for prime time,” O’Brien recalled later. At one league meeting, O’Brien announced that its cocktail reception with CBS was scheduled for 5:30 p.m. After a beat, Jim Foley, then the Houston Rockets’ PR guy, responded, “Is that 5:30 p.m. real-time or tape-delayed, Commissioner?” The league’s championship series coincided with May’s networks sweeps. The ratings for that period dictated what advertisers would pay for the next season. There was no conceivable way the NBA Finals would draw as many viewers as The Dukes of Hazzard and Dallas – two of the 1980s most popular shows, for better or for worse. It was an easy decision to make. David DuPree covered the Golden State Warriors–Washington Bullets 1975 Finals for the Washington Post, one of five publications reporting on the series. The NBA, he said, barely had a national presence. (According to basketball historian Todd Spehr, seven Finals games were shown on tape delay. And of those seven, three aired live somewhere in the nation).
The irony was the level of play was increasingly watchable to a general audience: Julius Erving launched a generation of aspiring basketball players, who had a role model widely available for adulation and imitation. Larry Nance, the future All-Star and Slam Dunk Contest champion, spent hours confronting his backyard hoop – reinforced with double planks of wood by his father—trying to dunk. When he finally did, his first thought was, I’m Doctor J. The television coverage did not match the product, though basketball fit the medium perfectly. It was selfcontained. There were no home runs or shanks. “The game is in front of you” and allowed for a wider variety of camera angles, said Don Ellis, a longtime television executive, who worked on NBA games in the 1950s for NBC. The court served as a perfect stage. The players, ostensibly dressed in their underwear, were always visible. They didn’t wear helmets; they didn’t retreat into dugouts. CBS devoted little energy and few resources to the NBA, and it showed. The NFL and television had come of age together, leading to Howard Cosell and the innovative coverage of Monday Night Football. Major League Baseball had grown up with America, burrowing into metropolitan areas, creating a bond with each Mel Allen “How ’bout that?” or rapturous Vin Scully sentence. The NBA had no identifiable hook, no bouncy theme song, no memorable broadcast duo. CBS’s ubiquitous play-by-play man Brent Musburger was a star, but the color analysts through the 1970s and 1980s left little to be desired: Oscar Robertson, Elgin Baylor, Rick Barry, Bill Russell.
When the NBA’s contract was renewed in 1982, Pilson was CBS Sports’ president. He asked Ted Shaker to helm the NBA’s coverage; it wasn’t because Shaker was a major talent. “It was, ‘No one else wants it, do you want to give it a whirl?’ ” said Shaker, who previously worked on The NFL Today, CBS’s pregame studio show. Shaker’s lawyer, Todd Musburger, Brent’s brother, advised him to turn it down. Todd Musburger’s verdict: “This is where people’s careers end.” Shaker decided to give it a try, though he knew the NBA’s reputation: the players didn’t play hard, there was no structure or strategy, everybody freelanced. “You could check off the clichés, and that’s what the general perception was,” Shaker recalled. “And people didn’t watch.”
As the Boston Globe’s Jack Craig pointed out, the NBA’s $88 million contract in 1982 was hardly good news. First, there was inflation. Second, the NBA’s deal was nightstand change compared to the NFL’s $2.4 billion, five-year contract from the three networks – an increase of more than $1.7 billion from the previous four-year deal. CBS aired fewer regular season games –seven in the 1982–83 season, down from nineteen the previous season – in addition to the All-Star Game and the postseason.
Shaker had one big advantage in what the NBA billed as a “less is more” approach: he could work with limited interference from higherups. CBS held little interest in the NBA, Brent Musburger recalled, because it was more concerned with profitable prime-time programming, including the NFL, which made 60 Minutes. The NBA was in the sports division’s hands. Shaker and his allies’ “tiny brains” concocted a two-part plan to generate relevancy. First, the NBA had four bona fide stars: Abdul-Jabbar, Erving, Bird, and Magic. Free of regional restrictions, a game would feature at least two of those players. The network focused on players and rivalries. That was easy to do, Pilson said, because the NBA wasn’t as deep as it is today. Some teams never aired.
The second aspect: to further turn NBA games into events, not afterthoughts. Fortunately, the network had a ton of sports showcases as a foundation. Shaker managed to get the NBA on after the Daytona 500, the Super Bowl of NASCAR, and before the actual Super Bowl. Unlike today, the hours before the NFL’s final game cum advertising extravaganza lay barren. “If there’s this early part of the day and people are going to build their day around the Super Bowl, there will be some percentage of the audience that will be looking for something else to watch before the game came on,” Shaker said. “We would do one of those match-ups at 1 p.m. on Super Bowl Sunday and have that until 3:30 p.m. It was a big success. These games got a lot of viewers, against all odds.” By the start of the postseason, Shaker felt something was happening aside from hours being swallowed.
“It wasn’t an overnight success,” said Mike Burks, a lead producer for The NBA on CBS. “It was kind of slow and go. I think we had an underlying feeling – I can remember saying this any number of times – that if we treat the league like it matters, the public will perceive that it matters.”
That included halftime. The affable, precocious Pat O’Brien, formerly from KNXT in Los Angeles, hosted an irreverent halftime report. O’Brien had a glint in his eye, thought John Kosner, then manager of sports programming at CBS. “He was clever and different,” Kosner said. “He wasn’t another blow-dried announcer on at halftime.”
Time-killers such as H-O-R-S-E contests shuffled off to the glue factory. Now O’Brien revealed that Buck Williams, the bruising Nets forward, developed his blue-collar game by playing against his sister when they were kids. (Williams also showed his chops on the piano.) The player-centric pieces got viewers to know these young men, whose personalities and backstories were obscured in concerned editorials. “I think our group coming in, in being fresh faces and also being able to articulate a point in front of the camera, let America know you were all right, so to speak,” said star Detroit Pistons guard Isiah Thomas, who entered the league in 1981. At the time, TV was largely bereft of positive black images. “The self-deprecating role of blacks as comic relief in television is not unlike those that were once so pervasive in films,” journalist Knolly Moses observed in 1979. Portrayals tended to stick.
Media experts George Gerbner and Larry Gross suggested to Moses that television was used to test reality. Eventually, the stereotyped portrayal became real and behavior in real life was guided by the expectations derived from the stereotypes.
Pat O’Brien encountered some resistance. When the mustachioed newsman called the NBA to request access to players for halftime pieces, the voice on the other end asked, “Why?”
CBS’s coverage grew more refined. Rick Barry, a transcendent talent, had a lifelong knack for irritating people. Bob Bestor, the Golden State Warriors’ director of public relations and marketing, said Barry was a smart, stand-up guy who couldn’t keep quiet. He’d offer advice to flight attendants on how to do their jobs on flights. Little changed during his time at CBS, which dropped him. “He was brutally honest,” said Bob Stenner, lead producer for The NBA on CBS and a friend of Barry’s. “Some people have a tone in their voice that sounds condescending. What they’re saying is accurate; it just sounds nasty. That’s who Rick was and is. That’s held him back.” Russell owned a keen, curious mind but his thoughtful, meditative approach wasn’t a good fit for the broadcast table, Stenner thought. But another Celtics legend, the excitable Tommy Heinsohn, could keep up. In his interview with CBS Sports, Heinsohn offered some advice. Stop with the Basketball 101 approach. “Every game is different; every game can be a murder mystery,” he said. The broadcast can provide clues as to who was murdered and how. The picture creates an idea of how to win the game.
Jan 18, 1981; Boston, MA, USA: FILE PHOTO; Boston Celtics forward Larry Bird (33) in action against the Los Angeles Lakers at the Boston Garden. Mandatory Credit: Malcolm Emmons-USA TODAY Sports
Director Sandy Grossman obliged. Broadcaster Dick Stockton, an on-air staple of CBS’s NBA coverage during the 1980s, said the beauty behind Grossman’s approach was that he captured players’ reactions. Shots of a frenzied crowd served no purpose. But Larry Bird whipping a towel from the bench, turning the Boston Garden into a rock concert, did. Michael Cooper lying on the floor in astonishment after Ralph Sampson’s improbable buzzer-beater sent the upstart Houston Rockets to the 1986 Finals told a story. Reporter Lesley Visser, who went from the Boston Globe’s heralded sports department to CBS Sports in the early 1980s, was floored at the behind-the-camera talent. “They were all giants,” she said. The emerging talent in the NBA, she thought, mirrored the NBA on CBS’s crew. Two supporting members – Artie Kempner and Suzanne Smith – went on to brilliant careers directing NFL games for Fox and CBS, respectively. It wasn’t about showing up and putting on another game, Smith said. Burks would arrive with a yellow pad filled with forty things to do. He made sure, Smith recalled, to have a player’s head shot and some personal information accompany their stat line. It put a face to the players and familiarized them to the viewers. Hey, this guy also likes chocolate ice cream.
What also helped, Stockton thought, was that viewers were no longer plopped into a game. Here’s how the two teams are performing going into today’s game. Here’s what’s at stake. Here’s what to look for. The elements were presented like a feature story: facts accented with color. Heinsohn, a former head coach, got scouting reports for both teams, and fed that information to help the crew set up shots. Visser felt her role didn’t change on television. Instead of writing on deadline, she spoke on deadline (*Visser and Stockton were married in 1983. They have since divorced).
Added to that mix was an introduction to excite viewers. Husband and- wife production team Bill and Joyce Feigenbaum, with help from the New York Institute of Technology’s computer animation laboratory, created an animated basketball court complete with a bouncing ball and a crowd. It was a grind. Video, said Joyce Feigenbaum, is thirty frames a second; some details-crammed frames took as long as an hour to produce. “We didn’t expect it to be that great,” Joyce said. Larry O’Brien, she said, couldn’t determine whether what he saw on CBS was concocted in a studio or belonged to the material world. Ken Wesley, who went on to do animation and video effects for Star Trek and Pirates of the Caribbean, took the Feigenbaums’ ideas and put them on the screen. In 2019, he laughed when he watched the now-primitive introduction, which could be done now in two days as opposed to two months. But in the heyday of Donkey Kong, it was groundbreaking.
