For one brief moment, my thoughts and Michael Jordan’s were remarkably similar, though he later expressed them much more preciously than I ever would. There were 1.1 seconds to go in game five of the NBA finals at the United Center. The Utah Jazz were leading 83-81, but after a time-out the Bulls had the ball, and everyone knew it would be going to one of two persons: Jordan, who’d had an off shooting night but had made so many game-winning shots throughout his career, or Toni Kukoc, who had kept the Bulls in the game almost single-handedly by making 11 of 13 shots from the field, 4 of 6 from three-point range, for 30 points. Jordan was later asked what he was thinking at that point.
Oddly enough, I had felt that same sense of delighting in the moment as the Bulls called a time-out to set up their final shot. I had moved down from a press seat in the upper levels of the UC to a courtside spot vacated by a New York Times writer no doubt facing a deadline and at that moment slaving away in the relative calm of the media workroom. I looked at the Bulls in their huddle and at the writers typing ferociously all around me and at the fans all but bursting with tension, and I gloried in the moment. One nearby writer turned to another and said, “Don’t worry, he makes the shot and we all go home,” and I certainly felt the same. But I wasn’t sure if Jordan would be taking the last shot or acting as a decoy for Kukoc (which is what coach Phil Jackson later said he had in mind, except that the inbounds play was a muddle, and after a second inbounds pass it was Jordan who hurled up a desperation shot that wasn’t close). Not knowing was, as Jordan put it, what made everything so “cute,” but what I knew with conviction was that if Jordan or Kukoc didn’t make a game-winning shot in this moment Jordan would in the next game or–and this is where Jordan’s thoughts and mine diverged, because this last one was really my preference–in the seventh game. As everyone knows by now, Jordan made the game-winning, series-clinching, sixth-championship-sealing shot in game six in Utah, made it at the end of a sequence no less an authority than Jackson called “the best performance ever.” Michael Jordan made the game-winning shot after a game-saving steal after a drive and a scoop lay-in through traffic that cut the Utah lead to one point after John Stockton had hit a three that seemed to give the Jazz the series-tying game. As one United Center placard had put it earlier in the series (at the risk of offending sensitive readers on racial grounds): “Babe Ruth is the Michael Jordan of baseball.”
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Utah coach Jerry Sloan, himself a Chicago sports legend, seemed to speak for that old state of mind when he was asked if it would be worth winning if he had to tolerate Rodman. “First of all I wouldn’t have him,” Sloan said on the day before the fourth game. “That makes the question real simple. Winning has never been real important to me. Would I sacrifice everything for all the other guys on the team? It’s never that important. I’d just as soon lose if I have to be put in that situation.”
In all the commotion over Rodman early last week, in all the contempt that poured over his self-aggrandizement after he said he’d pay for the funeral of that fellow allegedly dragged to death behind a pickup truck in Texas, lost was this quote, as pithy an explanation for the Bulls’ success as there is. Rodman was asked about how the Bulls bench had outplayed the ballyhooed Utah subs. “I think we have the smartest bench in the world,” Rodman said. “As far as talent, we are probably at the bottom of the totem pole. But as far as smartness, awareness, knowledge of the game of basketball, we are the smartest 12 guys in the league. No one else in the league can understand why we win so much. If you look at us 1 through 12, you see why we win so much.”
I have seen that basket dozens of times since then–who hasn’t?–and what gets me every time, what brings tears to my eyes, is the way it goes through without even brushing the rim–not just game, series, match, and sixth title, but victory on style points as well.
