The Jordan Rules Read Online Free PDF Page B

get enough. Keep feeding the beast, reporters like to say.
    I finished up the post-season basketball stuff for the newspaper, and then went back to putting the final chapters of the book together. Phil Jackson was terrific in walking me through some things I never could have known. He understood the difference between a book and newspaper: that the newspaper was “history in a hurry” and the book was for posterity. He told me about that last famous timeout when he asked Michael who was open. It was the perfect ending I was thinking about. How did Michael finally get it and get there? I thought I’d end the book that way, but the editor asked for a bit of the parade and rally. I was only too happy to be done with the editing process as well.
    I preferred the daily newspaper for the immediacy and opportunity to move onto the next story quickly. It was difficult reading and rereading and editing, and by the summer I couldn’t bear to look at the book again. I sent in probably 100 pages more than they wanted and said they could edit it. I’d read that book enough times. That was in July, and after a few months off I was ready for the next season. I didn’t think much about the book. Really. I’d thought it would come out, get a few mentions and be forgotten. I guess I really was too close to it.

    ***
    First came the White House. Later we’d all learn that Jordan skipped the team trip to the White House so he could go on a gambling weekend with some shady characters. Ultimately his gambling issues would become the stuff of potential scandal but no, the league didn’t banish him in 1993, according to the NBA urban legend that is rivaled only by the myth of NBA lottery fixes, spontaneous combustion, Sasquatch and someone actually committing a charge against Vlade Divac.
    Initially, the Bulls players scattered quickly after the championship, and the organization didn’t have time to schedule the White House trip. The timing wasn’t right once training camp started, so the team asked the players to come in a few days early to go to see the president. Jordan declined, saying he had a family obligation and not even the president was more important than your family. Heck, Michael could have driven over the president after winning a title for Chicago and everyone would have condemned the president for not moving. Of course, the issues that resonated in
The Jordan Rules
—the internal feuds on the team and Jordan sometimes stretching his advantage—became evident. Horace Grant and Scottie Pippen said if Michael wasn’t going they weren’t going either. They didn’t have anywhere else to be, but that wasn’t the point. Eventually, the team leaned on Pippen and Grant to go, but there was no negotiating with Jordan.
    It became a media issue and Jordan addressed it in a press conference as training camp began. The book was still weeks from coming out. I’d asked a few questions at a basically supportive press conference, and Jordan answered me unusually harshly. I wasn’t sure what that was about, but as he walked off I made a small talk comment and he returned a curse and insult. I later learned Jordan had heard details about the book from
Sports Illustrated
, which had some excerpts the publisher was trying to sell.
Sports Illustrated
would turn them down as they were trying to persuade Jordan to do a Sportsman of the Year interview and didn’t think running the excerpts would help. As Jordan has carried on a boycott of
Sports Illustrated
for more than a decade over coverage critical of his baseball playing, I’d say they were right. The excerpts appeared in the Tribune instead.
    And then all heck broke out. There weren’t galleys or review copies of the book since the publisher skipped a step to bring it out more quickly. So no one had it. Jay Mariotti, then a columnist for the
Chicago Sun-Times
and a preeminent provocateur, put together a column