Hello, NBA operator? Get me Charles Barkley. I’ll take Shawn Kemp. Shaquille O’Neal, even. Anybody but this John Karl Mockton, or whoever this detritus is in purple and pallid.
Utah? P.U. Tah.
Is it too late to start these Finals again, with actual players, actual warriors, actual adversaries?
Hey, Alonzo Mourning and the Miami Tepid will do. It was good for laughs, at least.
Let’s round up that Angolan Olympic bunch, the ones who looked like stick figures in borrowed skivvies. Then when the Bulls win, at least the national anthem has not been wasted.
Boy, did this thing turn into shirts and skins in a hurry, your basic let’s-switch-stars-at-the-half-to-make-things-even playoff. Last team to 50 gets Michael Jordan.
“You can’t let somebody destroy your will to win,” Utah coach Jerry Sloan advised. “You have to hit somebody and let them know you are around.”
Now, there’s a man who recognizes intimidation when it smacks his team around.
“I’m always amazed how easy it is to be intimidated in this business,” Sloan said. “We were intimidated.”
Welcome to the East, or as close to it as anyone should safely get.
“We got waxed, no doubt about it,” Karl Malone said.
Waxed. Buffed. Polished. Rubbed. And wiped clean.
“Our job now is to go out to their place, win two of three and then deal with the consequences,” Michael Jordan said.
Ah, back to that. The consequences. Even in victory, the question of what happens next year looms larger than what happens next Friday.
This Bulls babble is beginning to resemble one of those dreaded pop-quiz math questions.
If Scottie Pippen is traveling to Philadelphia at 87 m.p.h. and Michael Jordan starts walking to North Carolina beginning June 15 while Phil Jackson circles both Vancouver and Golden State in the wheelbarrow he borrowed to carry his money home, how long will it take Jerry Reinsdorf to admit he is an idiot?
We shall see how important it is to have Michael Jordan for a friend, something Pippen and Jackson have to recognize is their primary advantage. Singly, or together, the both of them will never get Reinsdorf to do the right thing.
“I think people should get to see Michael Jordan playing basketball, that’s the important thing,” Jackson said.
Jordan does not have to play basketball in Chicago, of course. People saw him play baseball in Birmingham and other sites as remote and unworthy as, say, Salt Lake City. So, just Jordan playing before an audience is not the issue.
What Jordan is trying here is simply the most audacious power play this side of Koufax-Drysdale, and that one was when players had absolutely no clout.
Jordan has his global popularity, his immense if inevitably diminishing talent, most of corporate America, every stranger on the street and the prayers of orphans and widows everywhere all bearing down on Reinsdorf.
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Transcendent games like the one Jordan had Wednesday are a bonus, the least and most reliable thing he does.
“If this is the last game here,” Jordan said, “I hope it is for this year. I hope not for future years.”
Whether it is or not may depend entirely on how egregiously the Bulls dismiss the current falafel from out west. Who were they again? The Jazz?
If Game 2 is any hint, Reinsdorf might as well just pass a pre-endorsed checkbook around.
Strange strategy to sustain a dynasty, threaten to break it up in the heat of the championship run. Stranger response, too, to so thoroughly humiliate the best of the West that it makes the owner look like a motivational genius.
Sure, this must have been Reinsdorf’s plan all along.