It had been another of those nights, another of those frustrating nights like he suffered through last Friday at the Stadium. He took personal blame for the Bulls’ defeat in Game 5 of the NBA Finals, and now-in Game 6-Horace Grant was reliving his own personal horror show.
He had controlled Charles Barkley better than he had 48 hours earlier, that was true. But again he did not have a field goal, again he had but a single point, again he had contributed nothing to his team’s struggling offense.
Now there were 13.6 seconds left, and the Bulls were down two, and they were staring at their last chance for a victory on this night. Michael Jordan had the ball, he drove it nearly to half-court, and then it went to Scottie Pippen and finally to Grant, who was close enough to the basket to go up for a dunk. “I wasn’t going up,” he would say later. “My foul shooting, the team’s foul shooting, I wasn’t going to take a chance. You have Paxson open, you get it to him.”
Grant did not even consider shooting. He instead turned and kicked the ball out to John Paxson for a bit of magic. “He didn’t have confidence in his own shot,” coach Phil Jackson would later say, “so he knew where the spotup shooter was.”
“Horace,” said Paxson, “gave me a good pass.”
Paxson, from the left wing, transformed that pass into the scalpel that cut the Suns’ heart, but still there were 3.9 seconds left, still there was a chance for them to send the finals to a seventh game. They called a time out, and in the Bulls’ huddle, assistant coach John Bach told Jackson, “You have to look for Barkley going to the basket.”
“He knew that,” Bach would say later, and the Bulls’ defense would be designed with that in mind. Scott Williams would be on Charles Barkley, who all figured would get the ball high, and Grant would be on Suns center Oliver Miller, who all figured to be down low.
“Horace’s job was to protect the basket. We were fearful Miller would back-pick there,” said Bach, and that is just what Grant did as this game’s last play began. But then there was Barkley, with the ball on the left wing, and he ignored the drive and instead kicked it across the court to Suns point guard Kevin Johnson.
Johnson’s a feared penetrator, and that is just what he did now with the clock rushing toward zero. Grant saw him coming, he pulled off Miller, and as Johnson went up a step inside the foul line, Grant came flying at him from the right. The ball went up, Grant’s right hand went up, ball and hand met, and the clock ran out.
Horace Grant had cut out the Suns’ heart and the Bulls finally had their third consecutive title.
“It was an instinctive play on my part,” Grant later said. “I saw KJ coming, and I got there at the right time. I got the ball at the right time.”
“Horace saved us with an unbelievable save,” Bach said. “KJ did what he did best, then here comes Horace. I don’t know where he came from. But it was like poetic justice. The scapegoat who took too much on himself for not stopping Barkley is suddenly the hero.”
Grant was far from a hero last Friday, which he ended with a single point and near tears. He felt he had failed his team, had been singularly responsible for his team’s defeat, and he talked that night of having to do some deep soul searching. On Sunday, he chose not to speak before the game, which he had done before the others here in Phoenix, and as he laid on a table in the privacy of the training room, Bach shot him a concerned glance.
“What we’re trying to say to him,” Bach then said, “is that Barkley beat the team, not an individual. He took it far too personal, too hard. Especially on the defensive end, he needs to be supported, protected. People have to rush at Barkley (to double him) like paramedics rushing to a victim.”
The Bulls would do that in the hours that followed, rushing a half-dozen different players to Grant’s aid, and that would help him control Barkley. Grant made a pair of splendid individual defensive plays and was active enough around the boards to pull down seven rebounds, yet he had only that single point and the bleak prospect of two more days of soul searching.
But then, like the mythological Phoenix that rose from its ashes, there was Grant redeeming himself, there was Grant making a smart play, a great play and jumping in celebration. Twenty minutes later, after the trophy presentation, there was a smile stitched to his face, there was champagne drenching his body and there was a bottle of champagne clenched in his right hand.
“You know, I never played so bad in my life as I did in Game 5,” Grant said. “It was unbelievable, but tonight I came back and redeemed myself. It’s like night and day. One night I’m crying, the next night I’m laughing.”
His voice cracked, faltered clearly enough that it could be heard over the madness around him, and finally Grant said, “You know, I’m about to cry again.” Only this time they would be tears of a different kind, tears of joy rather than sorrow.
