The Jordan Rules Read Online Free PDF Page A

he got up before 4 a.m. or 5 a.m.), and get ready for the game.
    How did I decide what to put in the book? Well, there were several other beat writers with the team. So it was obvious what was being reported daily. My job as an author was to create more depth for the book, expanding on what everyone knew or thought they knew. The depth basically came from the follow-up meetings and storylines I pursued and things I’d find out months later. So that’s what happened? It was often made clear from players and coaches there were things they were okay with in a book they did not want to see in a newspaper. Something in the newspaper meant a cascade of immediate questions and perhaps a distraction for the team. So many times players and coaches would tell me I could write something but not for the newspaper, and we’d do the interview on those grounds. Certain things were vital for history if not necessarily for immediacy.

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    The Jordan Rules
wasn’t a difficult story to get if you looked. For several years, players would tell me something about how Jordan had held someone up to ridicule, or skipped a mandatory workout of some sort. Phil had explained publicly, which was part of his brilliance, that the pretty girl gets kissed. In other words, some people just get better treatment because society sees them as more special than others. For instance, it was mandatory for everyone to listen to Phil’s pregame talk. Michael never did. His pregame habit, or at least one of them, was to have a bowel movement while Phil was making his pregame remarks. I don’t believe Michael was making any sort of editorial statement. But it became a habit, and fortunately for him he was very regular. Players would tell me to write about it. I would tell them to say it and I’d quote them. They couldn’t do that, of course. So players were only too happy to fill me in on intimate details about the team. For example, as told in the book, Michael was brutal with Dennis Hopson. It was nothing personal, sort of like his and Pippen’s stupidity toward Toni Kukoc during the 1992 Olympics, brutalizing him only because Krause was so committed to recruiting Kukoc. Hopson wasn’t open to discussing the situation, but teammates and friends were anxious to talk about how he was treated.
    Michael regularly picked on Horace Grant to the point of embarrassment, and Horace was happily anxious to talk about it. I’ve been friendly with Horace and many have suggested he was the main source for the book, and certainly the source of certain information. But any reading of the book shows so much he could never have known about. Scottie would hang out with Michael, but then Michael would tell Scottie to fetch something for him and Scottie would be furious and quite open about it. He’d invite me back to his home and fill me in. For Michael, it was just fun, and often I thought the players took the joking too seriously. But it’s not easy spending so much time together, especially with someone so celebrated when you’re used to being a star athlete your whole life. For all of Michael’s teammates, that ended as they were pushed out of the way, literally, as people tried to get at Jordan. Fans would ask Pippen and Grant to get Jordan’s autograph for them.
    Michael had been marketed as perfect. And he looked the part with that magnificent smile and spectacular game. I always figured
The Jordan Rules
took some pressure off him by showing he wasn’t perfect and didn’t have to be, and that the fans would still love him. Not that the book did him any great favors. But he always worried about being unloved and unpopular, and here I was writing about him being a real guy, hardly a criminal but difficult at times. How dare me! And you know what, they still loved him. Maybe even more.
    I did see in Michael the elements of sporting genius. I wrote in the book about how B.J. Armstrong went to the library (they