Dream Team (10 page)

Scottie Pippen was blinking furiously, trying to focus, trying to will away the pain of a migraine headache minutes before his Chicago Bulls went out to play the Detroit Pistons in Game 7 of the NBA Eastern Conference final at the Palace of Auburn Hills in 1990.

Michael Jordan was no doubt rolling his eyes. Another hard game, another disappearing act by Scottie, another one-man battle against the cold, cruel Pistons, who were, to Jordan, the anti-Cavaliers. Jordan had Cleveland’s number, all the time, every time, but the Pistons had his, all the time, every time.

For the first three years of his career, it was debatable whether Scottie Pippen was the luckiest player ever, having been drafted by Michael Jordan’s team, or history’s most unfortunate player … having been drafted by Michael Jordan’s team. Jordan was already the game’s ascendant star when Pippen—little known, a seeming creation from the secret laboratory of Bulls general manager Jerry
Krause—came aboard in 1987. His multitude of talents and his sometimes astounding athleticism—I’m convinced that Pippen could’ve been world-class in track (400 meters? long jump?) had he directed himself to that—instantly made him the Sundance Kid to Jordan’s Butch Cassidy. But he always came up short in comparison, and who wouldn’t have at that point in time? No matter what Pippen did, he was consigned to that dark spot on and off the court, the shadow cast by Jordan.

Even the positive things Pippen did were the little things, the shadow things that only experienced eyes could discern. I remember Jim O’Brien, then a New York Knicks assistant coach, describing a subtle play that Pippen made in his second season. The Knicks, trailing the Bulls by one with about ten seconds left, were trying to get a simple turnaround jumper for Patrick Ewing on an inbounds play from the frontcourt. But Pippen applied heavy pressure to his man, the target of the inbounds pass, forcing him to get the ball much higher than he wanted. That in turn fouled up the entry pass to Ewing, who now turned in desperation to shoot. By that time, guess who had come over to double? Jordan. He blocked the Ewing shot and drew the plaudits. But it was the Shadow Man who had made the shadow play.

During Pippen’s first three years, he was the subject of much analysis by Jordan and the Bulls’ coaches. Doug Collins, then the head man, thought that Jordan, while the ideal role model in some ways (skill level, competitive temperament, practice habits, etc.), was a hard act to be around because of his superhuman ability to compartmentalize. I’d watch Jordan in the locker room an hour before the game, schmoozing with Jesse Jackson and doling out ticket instructions to ballboys (“Kid ’n Play get these”) even as he kept up a lucid running commentary about the game he was about to play. Then he’d drop, oh, 45, on the opposition. Collins believed that Pippen and the Bulls’ other young buck, Horace Grant, would watch Jordan’s example and believe that they could approach the game the same way. But unlike the Chosen One, Pippen couldn’t multitask while getting ready to play, so his focus and preparation were always a concern.

When Jordan talked about Pippen he did it with a kind of benevolent bemusement, the way Wally Cleaver used to talk about the Beaver. He recognized and praised Pippen’s talents but wasn’t always surprised when Scottie, who had that infantile first name, didn’t deliver.

Pippen was sometimes shy around Jordan, letting the big brother direct the conversation, even though Pippen, a 6′8″ athletic specimen who walked with an erect and almost noble bearing, was the more striking of the two. But that was understandable; it was Jesse Jackson, after all, who was begging for face time with the Chosen One, not the other way around. One night on a team bus in Los Angeles, the Bulls players were talking about celebrities they knew. Jordan, always holding the trump card, picked up his cell, left a message for Janet Jackson, and flashed a triumphant smile when she called back thirty seconds later.

Pippen is about two and a half years younger than Jordan, but in many ways he never fit the little-brother role. Pippen had seen so much more, been through so much more, than the Carolina Kid, whose most cataclysmic childhood moment was famously being put on the junior varsity instead of the varsity at Laney High School in Wilmington, North Carolina.

The men who would constitute the 1992 Dream Team were all over the sociological lot. I don’t pretend to know every detail of their childhoods, but it roughly breaks down this way: Jordan, Magic, Robinson, Stockton, Mullin, Drexler, Ewing, and Laettner came from two-parent homes. None was rich, particularly Magic, Drexler, and Ewing, but all had relatively stable domestic lives. Malone and Barkley came from households dominated by strong matriarchal figures. They were anything but flush, but they got a lot of love. This is not to say that Bird and Pippen weren’t loved. But they had it much rougher than any of their Dream Team counterparts. Bird was one of six children of an alcoholic father who would eventually commit suicide; Pippen, the youngest of twelve, was brought up in the dusty mill town of Hamburg, Arkansas, which was redolent with the smell
of pulp from the Georgia-Pacific plant. In some ways Hamburg was the Arkansas counterpart of Bird’s French Lick.

Pippen talked to me not long ago about that childhood. I began by saying, “Of all the guys in the Hall of Fame, you have to have come from—”

“The lowest?” he interrupted me.

And something he said right after that stuck with me.

“Two in Pampers,” he said, shaking his head. “Man, that was rough. My mom took care of two in Pampers.”

By the time Pippen was in kindergarten, his father, Preston, a Georgia-Pacific employee like almost every other adult male in the town, was all but disabled by arthritis. Several years later Preston Pippen had a stroke, recovered slightly, then had another, more incapacitating one. (He didn’t live long enough to see his son become a champion.)

When Pippen was eleven, an older brother, Ronnie, was paralyzed when a classmate fell on him during a wrestling match. Ethel Pippen stepped in. “Everybody told her there wasn’t nothing could be done for them,” Pippen says, referring to both his father and his brother. “That’s how they treated those things back then. So my mother took care of them. Fed them, put them to bed, changed their diapers.”

Unlike Bird, who looks back fondly (for the most part) upon French Lick, and certainly unlike John Stockton, who treasures the place where he grew up, Spokane, Pippen has ambivalent feelings about Hamburg.

“It was sort of a racist town,” he told me in 2011. “I just always had the feeling that the coaches were pulling more for the white kids. I don’t want to say they didn’t
allow
the black kids to succeed, but they weren’t going to allow a black kid to be the star basketball player, the star receiver on the football team, and then be on the track team. It just wasn’t going to happen.”

Without a major college scholarship—he was a 6′2″ point guard in high school—Pippen went to Central Arkansas on a work-study grant, figuring he would eventually get a chance to play. The most enduring part of the Pippen lore is that he was the
team manager, which is not exactly true. “From the time I got there, my grant was going to be working with the basketball program,” says Pippen. “So some people threw the word ‘manager’ out there. Tell you the truth, I never even handed out a towel. It just made for a good story.”

Still, he had to talk his way into getting a scholarship, which became easier after he sprouted five inches to 6′7″ in a sudden burst (he eventually made it to 6′8″) and discovered the benefits of weight training. And he remained a point guard, his added height only boosting his abilities at the position, à la Magic. Still, even after he became a National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) All-American, he never got the big-time postseason exposure. “We didn’t even make it to Kansas City,” Pippen says, referring to the site of the NAIA tournament.

Consequently, the Central Arkansas campus during the Pippen era was not a stopping-off point for NBA scouts. Except for one—Bulls general manager Jerry Krause. He knew about Pippen. And he wanted to keep it quiet.

“Jerry was like a little cat burglar around me,” says Pippen, laughing at the memory. “Everything was done as a big secret. He didn’t want anyone to know that he even knew who I was.”

What started as mere interest turned into an obsession after Pippen shone in postseason camps, the primary vehicle for borderlines and unknowns to audition for NBA jobs. Whether or not Krause’s secrecy was necessary is a matter of opinion, but the deal he worked to get Pippen at number five in 1987, switching picks with the Seattle SuperSonics (who took Olden Polynice), stands as one of the canniest draft-day head fakes ever. These days YouTube videos of Pippen would have been all over the Internet before the draft, and one can imagine the taglines: “Another Magic Surfaces at Obscure NAIA School!”

“Central Arkansas Sure to Produce Lottery Pick!” Krause wouldn’t have been able to keep Scottie to himself.

Twenty-two years later, it’s still known as the “Migraine Game.” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Maurice Cheeks were among NBA players
who suffered from debilitating headaches, but Pippen, who never had another one, has the clearest association with the word
migraine
. In that infamous Game 7 in 1990, Pippen played forty-two minutes, which is the most amazing stat of all since he says that at times he had trouble distinguishing his teammates from the opposition. He took ten shots and made only one. He had just four rebounds, one steal, and two assists. The Bulls lost 93–74, and, later, in the locker room, Pippen shed tears.

But from the ashes of that game, the Bulls rose, Pippen in particular. Scottie had this eureka moment in the 1991–92 season when he just
got
it, figured out how to be Jordan’s teammate: take the shots when Michael was off, play distributor when Michael was on, and always—
always
—do the tough jobs defensively. They were so good together that it was hard to remember that they had not always been a fibrous and lethal combination. Just months after the Migraine Game, in the fertile soil of a new season, the Bulls would be heading toward their first NBA championship, and a few months after that, Scottie Pippen was targeted as one of the prime “gets” on the greatest basketball team ever. Not bad for someone who did his work in the shadows.

Scottie Pippen strides through the lobby of the hotel, bearing still noble, posture still erect, Roman nose still distinctive. If Michael Jordan has the jangly, tippy-toed walk of the ex-jock, Pippen carries himself with the easy, unhurried grace of a patrician.

In the years since he retired in 2004, Pippen has from time to time been the subject of headlines that haven’t been glorious. He was not happy when his wife, Larsa, signed on as a regular on
Real Housewives of Miami
, though it was on the show that the world—or whatever portion of it watches dishing housewives—learned that Scottie had been chosen to enter the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. I’m still checking, but I’m pretty sure that’s a first for an NBA superstar.

Pippen has had continued financial problems, and a “yard sale” at his suburban home near the Bulls workout facility was daily newspaper fodder in Chicago for a while. (“Boxes of Beanie Babies!”
noted one story.) That explains why Pippen ended his career not in Houston, where he played (and feuded) with Barkley for one season, not in Portland, where he played for four, and not in Chicago, to which he returned for twenty-three ill-advised games (karmic alert: that’s Jordan’s number) in 2004, but in Helsinki, Finland, in 2008, playing for a team called ToPo. I’m still checking, but I’m pretty sure that’s also a first for an NBA superstar.

“Yes, some of the problems remain,” concedes Pippen. “But I don’t work, right? And I drive a Rolls, right? Some of these things were just out of my control, not my fault.”

Pippen seems to nestle comfortably within the bounds of an athletic archetype: the kid who came from nothing and can’t stop spending money when he finally gets it. But that doesn’t precisely fit Pippen, who early in his career fretted about money and says, “You won’t find a more conservative money guy than me.” That’s an obvious exaggeration. But what cost him millions late in his career was a combination of ill-advised spontaneous investments and the advice of bad investors, not a steady orgy of profligate spending. Granted, that might be a distinction without a difference and one that didn’t help his bottom line.

At any rate, in the 2011 postseason Pippen was back working, as an analyst for Comcast SportsNet Chicago, when he suggested that LeBron James might be “the greatest player to ever play the game.” That caused the predictable firestorm because it seemed to demean Jordan. (When I asked Jordan about it in the summer of 2011, he just shook his head and said, “Jealousy.”) Pippen later did some backtracking, but, honestly, I didn’t think what he said in retreat was all that different from what he said in the first place—that James could
someday
surpass Jordan. I don’t happen to agree, but the man is entitled to his opinion, whatever its wellspring.