I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It Read Online Free PDF Page A

won Game 5 at home, in overtime. The next series was San Antonio, and I hit the shot at the buzzer to eliminate them in Game 6 and close out the HemisFair Arena. I was so nervous about getting to the Finals. We were up three games to two in the Western Conference finals against Seattle and got our asses kicked real good. I remember sitting on the plane coming back and everybody was scared shitless and nervous. People can talk all the shit they want to, but those deciding Game 5s in the first round and those Game 7s, you ain’t eatin’ and you ain’t sleepin’. You’re nervous and hyper. I remember walking around trying to cheer up guys and you could hear a pin drop. So I figured, this is useless, let me go and get some damn rest myself.
    Frank Johnson came up to me and said, “Look, we’re going to the Finals.” I said, “Frank what do you mean?” And he said, “You’ve never been to the Finals. We’ve got everything on the line in this one game. You play your best game, we’re going to win.” And I thought to myself, “He’s right. If I play my best, the only other person who could beat us in the league right now is Michael Jordan. But nobody else in the Western Conference can beat us if I play my best, and we’re going to the Finals.” I got 44 points and 24 rebounds. Nip-and-tuck game all night, Eddie Johnson tried to bring them back in the fourth quarter, but we won and got to the Finals.
    Then we lost the first two games at home.
    The day of Game 5 in the 1993 NBA Finals in Chicago, I was pissed off. We had won Game 3, in Chicago, to make it a series again. But the Bulls were ahead, 3–1, after four games. Michael Eisner, or whoever was running Disney at the time, had called my agent. And my agent called me in the hotel on the day of Game 6 and said Disney wanted to do something different with its “I’m Going to Disneyland” MVP promotion. He said they wanted to hire me, win or lose, to look into the camera and say after the series, “I’m going to Disneyland” if we won, or “I’m
still
going to Disneyland” if we lost. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I said, “You call that asshole back and tell him to kiss my ass, we’re not going to lose tonight.”
    So I was ticked off all day. Then, I’m sitting there watching the news and they’re boarding up the city of Chicago. The previous year when the Bulls beat Portland in the NBA Finals, there had been some rioting. People got out of control after the Bulls took Game 6 in Chicago to win the championship. And the storekeepers weren’t going to have any more of that crap, I imagine. So I was already seeing dead-red because of Disney, and then to have all these damn public service announcements running on TV in Chicago about don’t hurt the city and don’t riot after the Bulls win tonight . . . I couldn’t believe all that shit. So I started my campaign, “The Suns Will Save Chicago.” And “Don’t Let Chicago Burn.”
    I told the reporters before the game, “I love Chicago. It’s a beautiful city, so I’m going to do my best to keep it from burning down.” We won Game 5 to get the series back to Phoenix.
    •  •  •
    It’s a wonderful life we have. Life is funny. Normal, everyday shit is funny. The guy who set off those pipe bombs a few months ago, said he’s mad at the world. Kid is going to college, says he has a nice girlfriend he loves, is in a band and smokes a lot of pot. What the hell has he got to be mad about? He’s mad?
    I would get mad about stuff, but I wouldn’t stay mad. Life is too short to stay upset and hold grudges. People are probably thinking, “Well, you got mad at the refs.” But I didn’t carry that stuff around. I will say, though, that I never got along with Mike Mathis. He threw me out of a game in Atlanta once. You know how you holler and scream and curse at each other? He threw me out of a game in Atlanta, then threw me out of, like, three more after that. It was never over. I