We are suckers. We are silo painters and hay stackers. To use one of Dan Hampton’s phrases, we have just fallen off the turnip truck. That must be why we and Phil Jackson and Michael Jordan are treated so shamelessly and cynically by the Jerrys.
“We don’t know where Phil is,” Jerry Reinsdorf said. “Perhaps meditating.”
Chuckle. Chuckle.
I walk out of the Bulls’ Great Explanations, or the “Your Turn, Michael” press conference feeling for my wallet.
This thing is so hollow it echoes.
Hey, Phil, you should have called their bluff. Asked for $12 million and demanded they exile Tim Floyd to the Corn Palace in Mitchell, S.D., for the duration. I have a map. And a floor plan.
You should have seen how far they would really go. See if they would give you the parking and beer concession while you had them in so expansive and generous a mood.
The Bulls wouldn’t ask. They never really would ask Jackson back.
They wanted the press to do that. Or Michael Jordan. Michael, you want Phil, get him back here. Otherwise, meet Mr. Floyd, just in from Ames.
And that’s where we are today. Up to you, Michael.
That was chilling. Introducing Floyd as the in-case coach of the Bulls, like he was Al Gore or Miss Lincoln County, first runner-up and a swell sport.
Is this any way to kill a dynasty?
There never is a good way, but I’ll take the end of the Celtics over this. Larry Bird lying on the floor in a back plaster. Kevin McHale hobbling on one foot. Robert Parish rooted like a lamp post.
How is this one ending? With lies and dares, and, to use Reinsdorf’s own words, “fairy tales.”
Jerry, either Jerry, do you know the one about Pinocchio’s nose?
“If Phil Jackson wants to coach the Bulls, then we certainly want him to coach the Bulls,” Reinsdorf said.
That’s not an endorsement, it’s a concession. Way to woo, Jerry. It took Jackson about two seconds to see through that.
“We were amused by the way they presented it,” said Todd Musburger, Jackson’s agent.
What Reinsdorf knows about romance he can put on a cocktail napkin, the same one he must have used to draw up this cockamamie scheme. I know how good some ideas can seem at closing time.
Did you expect us to buy any of it? Got some imitation third-world luggage and some phony Rolexes you want to get rid of?
Phil Jackson never was coming back. The Jerrys knew he was not coming back. Tim Floyd knew he was not coming back.
So everything said on Thursday at the impertinent strut and pose at the United Center Stadium Club was calculated bunk. This was spin at a whole new cycle. This was such a circle chase, by the end of the hour they were all biting their own backsides.
Floyd treated the occasion, not like the bizarre sideshow it was, but as if it were something to be proud of. He thanked everyone who ever had a hand in his being where he now found himself, wherever that is.
“Director of basketball operations,” Reinsdorf explained, “with duties normally handled by a head coach.”
Riddle me this. When is a coach not a coach? When he is aside.
But just for the sake of context, let’s grant that it was all true.
Floyd would give up a perfectly fine job where he was wanted and respected in order to schlep around as Krause’s fanny pack for as long as Jackson and Jordan and the rest wanted to shun him?
Would you even want a man like this coaching your team?
“This is too great an opportunity and challenge,” Floyd said.
And if it were true, Jordan already had to have been consulted (“I plead the fifth,” said Reinsdorf) and Jackson had to have been sounded out and the assistants advised (“I encourage Tex Winter to return,” said the man who is not the coach of the Bulls) and league approval sought and the fans surveyed.
None of it happened.
This was a hip shoot to put the pressure anywhere but where it belongs, with the Jerrys and their new hire. Let us not misunderstand. They are squeezing Michael Jordan out of basketball.
Floyd talks like the coach, acts like the coach, expects to be the coach and will be the coach. He is the coach.
“This is all about Michael’s wishes,” said Floyd.
All their noses got longer, but Floyd’s most of all.
