We loved hearing Stacey King’s voice.

Turns out, he loved hearing ours.

Following the shocking, tragic news of Stacey’s death on Sunday, Bulls fans have been taking to social media to share not simply their tributes and condolences but their photos with the man himself. Stacey King made time for every Bulls fan possible. The outpouring of pictures over the years, especially at Bulls games, demonstrates the love we had for him and the love he had for us.

I’m grabbing as many of these tributes as possible from as many social media sites as possible. Feel free to send me yours at readjack6@gmail.com, or tag me, and I’ll add those here too. Our deepest condolences to Stacey’s family, friends and teammates.

Jack

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More tributes to Stacey King:

• Full CHSN tribute from Camron Smith, Kendall Gill, K.C. Johnson, Marc Brady, Adam Amin, Ruthie Polinsky, Horace Grant, Neil Funk, Mark Schanowski, Will Perdue, Matas Buzelis, Ayo Dosunmu

• Sam Smith

• Kelly Dwyer

• Jeff Agrest

• Chicago Tribune editorial board

• CHGO tributes, from CHGO Bulls (Matt Peck, Dave Watson, Will Gottlieb), and CHGO Bulls with guests Mark Carman and Luke Stuckmeyer

• Carman and Jurko with Kendall Gill

• Dan Bernstein and Matt Abbatacola

• Kap & J. Hood

• Mully and Haugh — with Neil Funk and K.C. Johnson

• Spiegel and Holmes with Will Perdue

• Tina Nguyen with David Haugh and Matt Spiegel

• Waddle and Silvy with Adam Amin

This sucks.

There are many other ways to start this story: a tribute to how he delivered the Derrick Rose experience, a heart-pulsating re-telling of his bring-the-house-down jumper in the comeback against the Blazers to seal ring number two, or the way he forever changed what we say when we use hot sauce.

But considering the way this news crushed Chicago, clever feels wrong. Stacey King died Sunday at age 59, and it absolutely sucks. We weren’t ready. We’ll never be the same. Because Ronald Stacey King gave us one of the greatest gifts of sports:

The voice of the fan.

There are two templates for elite color commentators: the analyst and the fan. Each can blend into the other but the best always end up getting known for one more than the other. Obviously Stacey could and did analyze the game, but what made his death hurt so badly was the fan side: he was us in the booth, the spiritual successor to his fellow Bulls lifers Red Kerr and Norm Van Lier.

Stacey became the standard bearer in Bulls broadcasts nearly immediately upon joining the booth in 2006 as a third man with Kerr and Tom Dore. Two years later, the team’s booths reshuffled, bringing radio man Neil Funk to TV to pair with King.

This is where Stacey’s legacy lives. With Funk and then with Adam Amin, Stacey became to the Bulls what Ron Santo was to the Cubs, what Doug Buffone and Ed O’Bradovich were for the Bears in the studio. In a perfect stroke of fate, two weeks after Stacey became the team’s #1 color man, the Bulls won the 2008 NBA draft lottery, leading to the selection of the player whose magnificent play would become King’s calling card: Derrick Rose.

As D-Rose became the most exciting player in a Bulls uniform since Michael Jordan, Stacey King became the voice of our excitement. Most famously was January 22, 2010, when Derrick unleashed his iconic dunk on Goran Dragic and the words flowed out of King in revelation.

Sixteen years later, I find his voice from that night in my head word for word.

“Stop it! Stop it! … What are you doing, Dragic? Did you not get the memo? Derrick Rose can go upstairs!”

“All my stuff is instinctive,” Stacey told ESPN’s Jon Greenberg the next season. “I don’t write it down and say, ‘Let me say that.’ It’s fun and the fans get a kick out of it, but I take my job seriously as an analyst. That’s what I do before anything.”

Stacey’s voice is the backdrop for every chapter of Derrick’s rise, from hometown kid to Rookie of the Year to NBA MVP to tragic figure to comeback tail. In 2017, Bulls superfan Adam Howes produced a Twitter thread of King’s greatest D-Rose calls. The collection of clips underscored just how special the bond was between Rose and King, and between King and us, with Bulls Nation using it as the launch point for a celebration of not just Derrick but our man Stacey.

“It was awesome and brought back a lot of great memories for me and Chicago Bulls fans,” Stacey tweeted as the thread made the rounds. It was the first time I remember Bulls fans taking specific notice of the connection between King and his muse Rose, an acknowledgement that the greatest era of Bulls basketball since the dynasty was made all the more memorable by this man and his microphone.

It was through Derrick Rose’s heroics that we heard Stacey exclaim “Step back and kiss myself!” And certainly no mention of the player and the voice is complete without recalling Stacey’s succinct description of the man wearing #1: “Too big, too strong, too fast, too good!”

With Stacey, the G stood for Gets, the hot sauce was heavenly and we all knew what to do after a Bulls win, because Stacey told us: “Drive home safely, Chicago!”

What’s fun about that last one is that so often, he didn’t — at least not until he’d celebrated with fans. My guy Stephen Noh pulled up so many tweets from Stacey where he tells fans that he’s happy to meet them after the game. All throughout Sunday as news spread, Bulls fans posted their pictures that they took with Stacey at Bulls games. He was a favorite on Cameo, recording messages for fans on their birthdays or other celebrations. I attended Derrick Rose Day in January of 2025, and trailing only Derrick that night and maybe Joakim Noah for fan reception was Stacey. He was our voice, and we never felt as if a Bulls moment was complete until Stacey was part of it.

For much of his playing career, that was not the case. I think about that a lot: how Stacey’s broadcast career completely transformed his relationship with Bulls fans. Drafted sixth overall in 1989, King’s Bulls career was rocky, especially the first two seasons. His attempts to overtake Horace Grant as starting power forward never materialized. The team’s vets, especially MJ, lit King up in 1991, as documented in painful detail in The Jordan Rules.

At the 1991 Grant Park rally, when Red Kerr announced Stacey to the crowd, Bulls fans booed.

Entering his third season, King wanted to shake the funk of his first championship season. He changed his number from 34 to 21.

“I just wanted to get rid of last year,” King explained. “I had a bad year, and I know I can play better than that.”

Stacey didn’t become a starter, but there’s a saying in basketball: it doesn’t matter who starts, it matters who finishes. In the final game of the 1992 season, with the Bulls trailing the Trail Blazers by 15 points to open the fourth quarter, Phil Jackson rolled out an atypical lineup, Scottie Pippen joined by four men off the bench: B.J. Armstrong and Bobby Hansen in the backcourt, Stacey King and Scott Williams down low.

Toward the end of the comeback, Stacey’s huge jumper brought the team within three, prompting fist bumps and shouts on the bench from MJ and Horace.

“It was gut-check time, and Phil put our quick lineup out there,” King said after the game. “It was our job to hustle — to claw our way back.”

Recalled Scottie: “We needed him now, and he delivered.”

That comeback drove the Bulls to title #2. When Red Kerr introduced Stacey to the fans at Grant Park that time, they gave him a hero’s call.

“Last year they booed him,” ABC’s broadcasters said. “This year he’s a hero. As well he should be, after that performance in the final four minutes.”

A few minutes later, Kerr called King up to speak to the crowd. Once again, they showered him with the adoration of a favorite Bull.

In February of 1994, the team traded King straight up for Luc Longley, meaning during the second three-peat, Stacey became a symbol of how Jerry Krause transformed one three-peat into another. And that’s where his Bulls story would have ended if he hadn’t returned to the booth in the 2000s, one of the multitude of Bulls alumni to whom Jerry Reinsdorf showed loyalty.

He returned the favor. Boy did he ever.

“We enjoy what we do,” Stacey said recently. “Every night I go to work, win, lose or draw, I’m having fun.”

Stacey King built himself into one of the great voices of Chicago sports. He is a fixture in the annual sports media power rankings from Sun-Times sports media reporter Jeff Agrest, who placed King 12th last year and has ranked him in all six years of the feature. Stacey’s goal on the broadcast is simple: make sure Bulls fans are happy.

“We want you to come to Bulls games, but if you can’t come, you’re going to be entertained at home,” he explained. As the team staggered through the post-Rose years, Stacey’s fellowship was our lone reprieve. When there was nothing to celebrate, Stacey kept us hopeful. When DeMar DeRozan was drilling winners, Stacey gave us vocal high-fives. When a blatant Bulls bungle left us shaking our heads, we would hear Stacey shaking too, sometimes just saying, “No, no, no.”

And when we were kissed with the magic of sports, like Josh Giddey’s halfcourt winner against LeBron’s Lakers, Stacey’s words brought immortality.

“That’s a shot for the ages!” he said. “That will be replayed when we’re all gone.”

No one expected Sunday to be that day for Stacey. It doesn’t seem fair to wake up to a world where Stacey King is with us and go to sleep to one where he’s not. The next season of Chicago Bulls basketball will rightly be played in his honor. His legend will grow in the years to come, until one day a young Bulls fan yells “Gimme the hot sauce!” and has no idea why.

I bet that would be just fine with Stacey. A Bulls fan had fun. And he helped.

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Rest in peace to our man Stacey. Condolences to his family, his teammates and the entire Bulls organization. Drive home safely, Stacey. We’ll miss you.

Another sad occurrence: last week, NBA lifer and Naismith Hall of Famer Rick Adelman died at age 79. Adelman played a season and a half with the Bulls in the 1970s under Dick Motta, and his legendary coaching career included a magnificent run in Portland, where he coached the Trail Blazers to the NBA Finals in 1990 against the Pistons and 1992 against the Bulls. Rest in peace.

Roger Ebert: “How good of an actor do you think you are?”

Michael Jordan: “I’m a learning actor. I can’t say I’m good because I haven’t been in this business that long.”

Ebert: “Do you think that you could make a movie a year and look at this as part of your career?”

Jordan: “No. I think I need to take a step back and evaluate a lot of other things in my life before I can make this a whole other career. I’d like to make this a hobby and learn more about it, and pick and choose the parts I feel comfortable with. Maybe I’m not ready for a starring role.”

— Roger Ebert and Michael Jordan at the Space Jam premiere, Nov. 6, 1996

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Michael Jordan might soon be an Oscar-winner.

Michael B. Jordan, that is.

The 90s Bulls were part of every aspect of popular culture, including TV cameos, McDonald’s promotions, books, music, wrestling and of course merchandise. With the Academy Awards upon us — and with Michael B. Jordan possibly taking home a statue for Sinners — let’s take a look at how the 90s Bulls pervaded Hollywood.1

Spike Lee kicks things off

I could be missing something, but the first glimpse we had of the 90s Bulls on the silver screen came in 1986 with Spike Lee’s film debut She’s Gotta Have It. Spike famously played Mars Blackmon, a young New Yorker and big Jordan fan, with an MJ cutout appearing in the trailer. Spike repped MJ again three years later in Do The Right Thing, as his Mookie is introduced in a scene wearing a generic Jordan jersey.

More famously, Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) feuds with a white man in a Larry Bird jersey (John Savage) for stepping on his new, clean, white Air Jordans. (Cost: “One hundred and eight with tax!”)

In 1990, a lifesize MJ cutout played a crucial role in Home Alone, and in 1992, Jordan made perhaps his first cameo appearance in a post-credit sequence of Malcolm X, as MJ and Magic Johnson were among the celebrities who wrote checks to Spike when the film went over-budget2. He and Magic donned the instantly iconic X hats, which Jordan also wore to Bulls practice.

What we didn’t know was that four years earlier, a team of filmmakers captured Jordan’s performance in the 1988 NBA All-Star Game in Chicago by filming a Chicago teenager watching the game on TV — all for a movie that wouldn’t come out until 1994.

Hoop Dreams

• Oct. 14, 1994

• Bulls on screen: Michael Jordan (many references), Dr. John Hefferon

To my knowledge, no movies came out during the first three-peat that featured members of the Bulls — but one was being made. In October of 1994, while Michael Jordan was retired and playing baseball, Hoop Dreams was released and would become a groundbreaking success. The film about two young Chicagoans building their basketball careers opened with one of the two, William Gates, watching the 1988 NBA All-Star Game on TV from his home in Cabrini-Green, about three miles away from the game itself at Chicago Stadium.

MJ does not appear in the film. He merely hovers over and all around it, no surprise for a basketball movie filmed from 1986 to 1991, and in Chicago no less. Isiah Thomas is a more tangible figure, the Chicagoan appearing in the movie when he speaks at his alma mater St. Joseph’s, where both Gates and fellow doc subject Arthur Agee attended. Agee even gets to play against Isiah at St. Joseph’s, with Zeke sporting a Pistons warmup jersey.

Jordan and the Bulls are always floating around the story. Gates and his family watch a Bulls-Pistons playoff game at one point (Gates’s brother Curtis: “Jordan might shoot 15 out of 40”), and when Gates injures his knee, his brother-in-law takes him to see Dr. John Hefferon, the Bulls’ team doctor.

Eddie

• May 31, 1996

• Bulls on screen: technically none, as the movie was shot largely in the summer of 1995, but by the time of the release, Dennis Rodman (Spurs cameo) and John Salley (supporting performance) were Bulls, as were Randy Brown and Jack Haley

As the NBA rose in stature within American pop culture, we saw more and more movies set in or around the league. No Bulls appear in Blue Chips3 (1994), Forget Paris (1995), or Celtic Pride (1996), and technically, no Bulls appear in the Whoopi Goldberg vehicle Eddie. But by the time that movie came out in May of ‘96, it did have — count ‘em — four members of the 72-10 Chicago Bulls.

Dennis Rodman filmed scenes while a member of the Spurs, and John Salley starred as one of the fake members of the New York Knicks, Nate Wilson #6. They each have lines in the trailer. Rodman’s then-Spurs teammate Jack Haley is credited, as is then-Kings guard Randy Brown, who is visible in the trailer during the conversation about black holes.

Two future champion Bulls are in the movie too, from their time with the Hornets: Scott Burrell and Joe Kleine. That’s six future-champion Bulls in a movie about the Knicks. It’s all the way live!

Solo

• Aug. 23, 1996

• Bulls on screen: Michael Jordan (reference)

You didn’t know this one was coming, did you?

Solo is a 1990s action film starring Mario Van Peebles that was largely forgettable except for one key point: Van Peebles plays a government-built Terminator-esque killing machine that gets to choose its own face — and selects Michael Jordan.4

“Like… Mike,” the cyborg grunts, pointing to the TV. The young scientist, played by Adrien Brody in one of his earliest big roles, responds: “You’ve got good taste.”

My friends and I rented Solo not long after it came out on VHS simply for the Jordan connection. It was pretty dull and I never watched it again, neither good enough nor bad enough to be memorable. Case in point: Siskel and Ebert didn’t even name it in their “Worst of 1996” special.

The trailer is really all you need:

Space Jam

• Nov. 15, 1996

• Bulls on screen: Michael Jordan, starring role as self, and several Bulls in uncredited roles

I won’t spend a lot of time telling you about Space Jam, other than to make a few points. First, a bit of background: the earliest reporting I’ve found is from the spring of 1995, with blurbs noting that on March 24, 1995, when MJ made his return to Chicago against the Magic, Warner Bros. sent four cameras to the game to shoot footage for a “Roger Rabbit-style” movie with MJ and Bugs Bunny. The film’s working title: “Hare Jordan.”

Second, a Roger Ebert interview revealed that there was some truth to MJ’s minor league baseball scenes in the movie:

Third, Friend of the Program The Notorious Lex shared an incredible story with me a few years ago, in which her father took her to meet Michael Jordan at a summer barbecue at Juanita Jordan’s mother’s house, and a young R. Kelly showed up and told Jordan he would one day write a song about him.

Lastly, this article from February of 2020 by Steven Perlberg is a fascinating look into how Space Jam weaved pro-labor politics into its plot.

B.A.P.S.

• Mar. 28, 1997

• Bulls on screen: Dennis Rodman, cameo

On March 24, 1997, Dennis Rodman appeared at the Oscars with date Vivica A. Fox5 in part of his promotional work for his first starring feature, Double Team, dropping the following month.

But moviegoers got a look at the Bulls’ star four days after the Oscars in his closing credits cameo in B.A.P.S. with Halle Berry. This was a very quick appearance, showing Rodman’s budding pop cultural stardom.

Double Team

• Apr. 4, 1997

• Bulls on screen: Dennis Rodman, starring role as character

With Double Team, Dennis Rodman joined Shaq as the only NBA star in the media-fueled David Stern era to star in a feature film in which he was playing a character. Yes, Rodman’s weapons merchant Yaz has a lot in common with Rodman himself, but this is not Michael Jordan as “Michael Jordan” nor is it a supporting role like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Airplane! Rodman was the #2 star after Jean-Claude Van Damme, used on the poster and heavily in the trailer.

The studio sold Double Team to audiences not as a Van Damme movie but as a Van Damme-Rodman movie, giving Rodman a ton to do and even giving him the movie’s last line. It wasn’t a hit, but it turned a profit, and when I rewatched it last year, I was surprised by how much fun I had watching Rodman as a lively action star.

He Got Game

• May 1, 1998

• Bulls on screen: Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan, cameos as themselves — and Jordan in a newspaper about Jake Shuttlesworth’s escape

Michael Jordan’s first film appearance was with Spike Lee, and his final film appearance as a Bull was with Spike Lee, too. Not counting his uncredited appearance in Space Jam, He Got Game is the only feature film of Scottie Pippen’s career. He is part of the montage of NBA stars and college basketball coaches who shout “Jesus!” at the camera for the SportsCenter segment on Jesus Shuttlesworth.

Spike pays MJ the ultimate compliment by letting him end the montage with the movie’s title:

As with She’s Gotta Have It and Do The Right Thing, He Got Game features a character rocking Air Jordans, as Denzel’s Jake Shuttlesworth uses his fleeting freedom to buy the 13s. (Cost: “One fiddy with tax.”)

Things weren’t all sunshine and montage kickers for Spike Lee, who could not resist a mild burn on his good friend.

In a closing scene, characters are reading the New York Post reporting on Jake Shuttlesworth being “caught” by authorities. The camera pans and shows the sports page with the headline “KNICKS GORE BULLS” and “Jordan Held to Ten Points.”

MJ’s actual career low vs. the Knicks: 15.

Simon Sez

• Sep. 24, 1999

• Bulls on screen: technically none, as the movie was released after Rodman had already been with the Lakers (and before he signed with the Mavericks). But in terms of pop culture, he still felt like a Bull.

Dennis Rodman closed out the Bulls decade with his follow up to Double Team, a starring role in Simon Sez, reportedly a byproduct of Rodman’s free time in the summer of 1998 during the lockout. I never saw this one and don’t know anyone else who did. The box office reflects that, and it does not in any way appear to have the even minor cult status of Double Team.

Fittingly, those who once graced the screen are now the subject of it. First came Air in 2023, about Michael Jordan signing with Nike. Next up, Hollywood will turn its gaze on Yaz, as Lakeith Stanfield plays Rodman in the forthcoming “48 Hours in Vegas” movie.

The flick looks poised to put the “based” in “based on a true story,” in more ways than one:

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The Oscars has an incredible database of every acceptance speech that you can search by keyword, and of course I went hunting for Bulls references. The only one? You guessed it: Spike Lee, when he received an honorary Oscar in 2015. He wore “Oscar edition Air Jordans, given to me by the great Michael Jordan for this occasion.” Go ahead, Spike!

Tex Winter is often mistaken as the creator of the Triangle Offense. He didn’t invent it. But he did write the book on it.

That would be The Triple-Post Offense, which Tex published in 1962 when he was at his height as head basketball coach of Kansas State, his ninth year runni…

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When Carlos Medina left his house in Cicero with his father and friend in the early hours of June 16, 1998, he didn’t know he was going to make Bulls history. But that’s Michael Jordan for you.

He always stands out.

Medina, then 17, attended the final Bulls championship rally with his friend Alfonso and his father Carlos Medina Sr., a painter who in 1996 created a huge image of Michael Jordan removing his cape to reveal the Superman symbol. The painting was an immediate hit with fellow Bulls fans, landed prominently on at least the FOX broadcast of the rally and SportsCenter, brought the Medina family photos and interviews everywhere from the Tribune to Eddie and JoBo… and 22 years later, a spot in The Last Dance, leading to a renaissance for Medina Sr.

“He put it out of his window and people were coming by and taking pictures with it again,” Medina says today. “It’s a nice little piece of memorabilia that we have.”

A Michael Jordan superfan, Medina has continued his love of the Bulls and Chicago sports as co-founder of CHIngon Deportes Network1. The team, including Carlos Medina Sr., broadcast a podcast at Fabre Studios in River North and hosted massive Bears playoff watch parties — and in a full-circle moment, they are credentialed Bulls reporters.

Now in this interview, Medina reflects on his legendary moment in the Bulls dynasty: his father’s Superman poster.

This interview has been edited.

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Tell me your day — was this your first rally?

CARLOS MEDINA: It was my first rally, and it was precisely for that reason. I was telling my dad, “We gotta go.” I don’t know if you remember: the Bulls, they won the championship out in Utah, and they were selling tickets to watch the game at the United Center. That’s what we ended up doing. I told my dad, “They’re going to dismantle the team. We’ve got to go to the rally.”

My dad had made that painting in ‘96. I told him, “We have to take the painting.” We had these huge sticks, and when we got to Grant Park, they told us that they weren’t allowing any sticks. We couldn’t take that into the park. So we went back to the car and we were going to leave the painting rolled up in there, but I said, “Dad, I really want to take it.”

We’ve got these pieces of wood hanging out of it, so we broke them, and we were able to get the painting into Grant Park. We had no idea what kind of hoopla this was going to create.

What time did you get there?

Maybe six in the morning. I remember getting there super early. We ended up setting up shop on the back end. We put out a couple blankets. We were just hanging out. And I told my buddy, “Let’s open this thing up. Maybe we can get Michael’s attention.” That was my big thing, because Michael is my idol.

How early were you there compared to other people? What was the crowd like when you got there?

It was packed already.

At like six in the morning.

Oh yeah. There was a line to get in. I don’t remember what time they opened. But as soon as we opened it up and unrolled it, we took like three steps and people were like, “Oh my God, can I take a picture with that?” So there was a line to take pictures with the painting. People started coming up to us — WBBM-AM, a bunch of radio stations coming up to my dad to interview him. Eddie from Eddie and JoBo started interviewing my dad. It was crazy. It was absolutely nuts.

When the rally started, I told my buddy, “Let’s try to get as close as possible.” Remember, we were way in the back. And a couple of guys — I was 17 at the time, but I was a big dude. I’m like 6’3, 6’4, a couple hundred pounds, 220 maybe. And my buddy was about the same height. These shorter guys, they were probably 5’8, 5’9, and they were like, “We’re gonna get you on our shoulders!” And sure enough, these guys picked us up and we tried to get the painting up as high as possible so that maybe Michael would see it.

Without the internet back then, without our phones, it wasn’t until the next day when we saw the pictures of the painting on the Tribune, the Sun-Times. I logged into Yahoo or AOL and it was the first page. My dad got invited to do an interview in studio on B96 with Eddie and JoBo. He had a little 15 minutes of fame.

That’s so great!

Yeah, it was really cool man. It was a really cool experience. And just recently when they had The Last Dance, he brought it out. He put it out of his window and people were coming by and taking pictures with it again. It’s a nice little piece of memorabilia that we have.

That’s amazing. How was the sound system in there? How easy was it to hear all the speeches?

Oh man, I don’t think we heard anything! You would cheer when everybody was cheering. (Laughs.) We were really far back. I didn’t realize how far back we were until we got home and I was able to see the aerial view. “Wow, we were really far back there.” It was a cool day. A really cool day.

We’d never experienced anything like it. My dad is an artist, so he’s done galleries, lots of paintings. He was used to people saying, “That’s really nice.” But this was on a whole other level. The amount of people standing in line so that they could take pictures with it, ones with their kids, things of that nature, it was a really cool experience.

Tell me about going to the United Center to watch Game 6 from Utah.

Yeah so, again, I was 17, I was a senior in high school, and I told my dad that I wanted to go out with the festivities. I said, “We have to go to the United Center. It’s gonna be crazy. Everyone’s going to be there.” And it was pretty close to a sellout.

It’s standard definition on a Jumbotron. It was terrible. We left the game recording at home so I got home to watch it and actually enjoy it. But after they won, we celebrated. My dad had this cargo fan, like a Dodge — some type of minivan.

Where were you guys sitting in the stadium?

The 2 or 300 section. Everyone was trying to sit there because you were eye-level with the Jumbotron.

But once they won, we went driving around on Madison. We were driving around the neighborhoods. We would open the side door and we were high-fiving people on the street. It was a madhouse — literally a madhouse!

How much were tickets to go to the United Center to watch a game that’s in Utah?

They were ten bucks. We couldn’t afford to go to a game. I think I saw Michael Jordan play one time.

I saw him twice, and one of those was when my brother won a contest to shoot hoops at Chicago Stadium. That was one of them, and the other was the big Hanukkah present. My parents got them in ‘96. I was so excited.

The only time I ever went: my uncle got me tickets in ‘89 or ‘90 at the old Stadium. But I never got to see Jordan at the UC, so the fact that I got to go to the United Center to watch a game for ten dollars — I thought it was the most incredible thing.

Tell me what the streets looked like. You walk out of the United Center: what do you see?

Everybody is coming out of the stadium and we’re all high-fiving everyone. This is a natural high. We get into the minivan, and this is an old minivan so we’re able to open the door as the car’s moving. There’s no safety back then. (Laughs.) We opened up the side door and we were high-fiving people.

There was so much traffic that we’re moving really slow. My dad started driving around random neighborhoods and the entire city — it was crazy, the amount of people out. Everyone rocking Bulls.

What did you wear?

I had a reversible black and red Jordan jersey. And then the only pair of Jordans that my parents ever bought me were the 12s. So I was wearing the 12s. They were the white with black on the side. And it’s funny: I still have that jersey.

But yeah dude, it was an incredible night. When we went to go watch the game, I went with my mom, dad, sister, my friend Alfonso. There were a few of us. My little sister was I think 15. Completely bored out of her mind. But the rest of us were out there celebrating.

You got the 90s minivan! Everybody get in!

It was a cargo van! My dad’s an airbrush artist, and he had airbrushed this minivan with these paintings. On the side of it was this mermaid and the other side was half-man-half-horse. Epic-ass drawings. When he bought it, it was an all-white van, and he bought it specifically to paint it. So this thing was always grabbing attention no matter where we went.

We’re driving around this minivan and we just opened up the side door and we were waving. We had these little Bulls flags, high-fiving everybody that would come by the van. We ended up calling it a night when they started shooting fireworks at us. My dad was like, “Alright, that’s enough.” (Laughs.)

That was the first time I had ever — so, we would watch the games at home, and we would celebrate at home, and we would sit around the TV and watch all the coverage. Mark Giangreco getting champagne in his eyes. Tim Weigel. Johnny Red Kerr. All these guys getting sprayed. We would sit around watching these guys, and it never dawned on me until that last season to actually go to the rally. It was the best rally I’d been to until the Cubs won the World Series.

Any other memories from either Game 6 or the rally?

The thing that really stands out is those two guys, these two African-American gentlemen, who said, “We’re going to put you on our shoulders.” I was like, “Uh, the hell you are! I’m not going to let you carry me.”

Because you were bigger than them.

Yeah. I’m literally 6’4, 220 in high school. My friend was 6’1, 230. These guys were no more than 5’10. I was like, “You are going to pick us up?” And sure enough they got down, picked us up, and said, “Come on man — wave it! Let Michael see it!” (Laughs.) Everybody around us was trying to make noise and get attention so that Michael could see the painting. I don’t know if he ever saw it.

Now that I’m thinking about it, we had a meeting at I think the Tribune, and they were thinking about making it an insert. But then all of a sudden these attorneys started coming in. … They’re trying to get my dad to put it up for auction. He got offered a few thousand dollars.

I’m glad he kept it. Where did he keep it all these years?

He’ll bring it out. He had it in the living room. And we had it at a gallery for a while. It was up at a restaurant for a little bit. And then he had it in storage in his basement for a few years. And maybe four or five years ago we started doing a podcast and I asked him if we could put it in the background.

The podcast never really took off — it was just a bunch of buddies talking — but now I have a studio out in River North, so we do production and podcasts and TV shows and interviews and all kinds of stuff. I told my buddies, “We have a studio now, let’s launch this network.” I told my dad, “We’re going to give it new life.”

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Thank you Carlos for calling me back and giving me your time! Salute to Mr. Medina on his incredible painting. Have great photos of yourself at a Grant Park rally? Drop a note in the comments or email me at 6ringsbook@gmail.com.

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Want more Bulls art? A Shot On Ehlo reader R.J. Casey shared with me this interview he did about his amazing Bulls art collection:

Beauty Of A Game

RJ Casey: A Collector Bullish on Basketball Art

Intro Last Fall, I posted a Karl Hubenthal cartoon from a 1958 issue of The Sporting News to Instagram. RJ Casey commented on the post, and we struck up a conversation regarding our mutual admiration of Hubenthal’s work. I couldn’t help but notice that…

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5 months ago · 5 likes · Beauty Of A Game

“Dear Santa,

I would want a Michael Jordan Pro basketball, (a) Bulls sweatshirt and pants and I want a Bulls coat and I would like a bulls towel … and I would like Chicago bulls pillow … and I would like a chicago bulls hat and I would like a short sleve chicago bull shirt…”

— A young Bulls fan from Mount Carmel, Illinois, 1992

I’ve written a bunch about the power and influence of Bulls merchandise, and a perfect way to crystallize that is Home Alone. In 1990, when Kevin McCallister rigged his living room into a crime-fighting mannequin dance party, Michael Jordan was already a national hero, making Buzz’s full-size MJ cutout perfect to attach to a train set to fool the Wet Bandits.

Roger Ebert memorably described the traps in Home Alone as “the kinds of traps that any 8-year-old could devise, if he had a budget of tens of thousands of dollars and the assistance of a crew of movie special effects people.” That’s true, but the component parts were mostly real, including MJ — kids really were buying life-size cardboard cutouts of Jordan, often adorned like the one in Buzz’s room: with a ruler, so that you could compare your height to Jordan.1

The MJ poster in Home Alone works as a character detail, but that wouldn’t be enough justification for set design in a movie sold to a national American audience. The filmmakers weren’t absolute sticklers to location truth: Joe Pesci shows up in Winnetka dressed as a Chicago cop with the Chicago flag on his jacket, and no one notices.2

Then later, when the McCallisters get the local police to send someone to the house, another cop with a Chicago flag on his jacket shows up. These are avoidable errors, and I assume they are made because for a national American audience, it’s more fun to see a police officer with a recognizable flag on his jacket than whatever the Winnetka police wore.3

That’s the key to the Michael Jordan poster: it fits because the McCallister family would have that poster and because a national audience would get a tickle out of seeing cardboard MJ circling on the train tracks. Mike was that famous. And the McCallister boys would have absolutely asked Santa for an MJ poster. Many Illinois kids did.

I know that because my brother and I did, and because thankfully, loads of newspapers published these Santa letters. Below is a sampling of these requests, along with a wonderful team Christmas photo from the 1985-86 season, shared by Stuart Albeck, granddaughter of the late Bulls head coach Stan Albeck.

Looking for a last-minute Secret Santa gift for tomorrow? Get the Bulls fan in your life a subscription to this newsletter! Or, if you want to give someone an I.O.U. and deliver them a gift closer to New Years, grab a copy of “WHY WE ROOT.” I’m donating half of my proceeds in December to Chicago youth journalism/media organization True Star. Please join me!

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Amazon best-seller WHY WE ROOT

And now… Illinois kids asking Santa Claus for Bulls gear.

1990: Ben Brown has been a good boy and wants a Bulls hat.

1991: Jose has been a good boy and wants a Bulls coat.

1992: Tyler Weikle would like an MJ sweatsuit “and any Scottie Pippen stuff you have”! I love the Pippen request.

1993: Dave Demitropoulos, age 7, requests a full Michael Jordan outfit: a jersey, shorts, a long-sleeve shirt and a hat.

1994: Chloe Torres, 18 months old, would like a Chicago Bulls outfit like Joey’s.

1995: Notable historical point here, as Christopher Grant Stoltz requests not just a black Bulls jersey and shorts.

That was new that season; the Dennis Rodman jersey I bought that fall was black.

1996: Mike, a reader of the Northwest Herald, wants a triple Bulls lineup in the aftermath of 72-10: an MJ shirt, and Rodman and Pippen jerseys.

But he also wants a Mark Rypien jersey? Huh?

1997: 2nd grader Gary Lynn Green Jr. has two Bulls requests: one coat, one back pack.

1998: This is a rather curious request list from Jordan Torbert of Forsyth, Illinois.

Young Jordan requests jerseys of Scottie Pippen, Shannon Sharpe, Mateen Cleaves in his junior year at Michigan State, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and John Elway. Tough run for the Bears here at the end of the Wanny era.

1999: Incredibly, after the dynasty ended, no children in Illinois wrote to Santa requesting Bulls gear. At least none that were published in the newspaper.

But C.J.H. of Decatur requested “Michael Jordan clothes.” That'll work.

Lastly, as promised, the 1986 Chicago Bulls in Christmas hats, courtesy of Stuart Albeck, granddaughter of Stan, who is seated in the middle row between Jerry Krause and Tex Winter. What a gem.

This story is made possible by the wonderful Newspapers.com. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!

Best,

Jack

“One, Michael never flew there to get him…”

— Outtake from my interview with Dennis Rodman’s Bulls agent and longtime friend and business manager Dwight Manley, on problems with how The Last Dance portrayed Rodman’s famed 1998 Vegas trip

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“My love of the game (clause) within my contract … if I was driving with you down the street and I see a basketball game on the side of the road, I can go play in that basketball game. And if I get hurt, my contract is still guaranteed.”

— Michael Jordan, 2025, NBC

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In 1996, Dennis Rodman was tied for the 101st highest paid player in the NBA.

But he was 9th on the Forbes list of highest earning athletes in all sports.

That’s a testament to Rodman. It’s a testament to the dynasty Bulls, where even Bill Wennington had a signature McDonald’s sandwich1.

And it’s a testament to Rodman’s business manger-turned-agent Dwight M…

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“Michael’s upset about the fact that he lost a twenty-year relationship with this guy. He was hurt. Whoever was advising Scottie, to me, that’s the issue.”

— Phil Jackson in the new book Masters of The Game, written by Phil and Sam Smith

When I boil the 90s Bulls down to one concept, it’s not greatness. It’s joy. Those are linked, of course. We wouldn’t have the joy without the greatness. But the enduring emotion is the joy that this organization brought us, both as a team and the individuals on the team.

And it all starts with two people who apparently are not on speaking terms: Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen.

What’s up dude? I’m getting word that you’re upset with me. Love to talk about it if you have time.

That’s what MJ texted Scottie on May 19, 2020, two days after the conclusion of The Last Dance. Scottie used that text as the opening of Unguarded, his 2021 memoir.

“Michael was right. I was upset with him,” Scottie wrote. “It was because of The Last Dance, the ten-part ESPN documentary about the Chicago Bulls’ final championship season.”

Scottie says that they spoke two days later, with Pip calling out Michael over his portrayal in the groundbreaking, instantly iconic documentary series. According to Pippen, the two haven’t spoken since. His social media seems to confirm that: he doesn’t appear to have tweeted or posted on IG specifically about Jordan since tweeting this picture of them together for Jordan’s birthday in 2018.

Breaking down a feud between two other people is hard enough even if you know both people. Few of us know Scottie or MJ. And publicly, Michael has been silent on the subject.

So while I have my views on how this happened and who was most in the wrong, like the question of greatness vs. joy, I’m left with one emotional reaction more than any other: sadness.

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My overall reaction to The Last Dance was twofold: it was a lot of fun, and it was unfair to two people in particular: Scottie Pippen and Jerry Krause.

I disagreed with how the documentary treated Krause, but I understood it. Because while I think the doc would have been more interesting, and more fair, with a fuller perspective on Krause, if someone who was not around in 1998 watched The Last Dance, they would at least understand how Jordan, Pippen and Jackson felt about Krause, and why they perceived him as breaking up the team.

What that viewer would not accurately understand is Pippen’s importance to the dynasty and the “last dance” season of 1998. We all knew the film would be skewed toward Jordan. MJ had rights to the footage and his inner circle co-produced it. What we didn’t know were the ways in which it would be skewed against Pippen.

“I don’t know what you are selling,” Scottie recalls telling Jordan when they spoke in May 2020, two days after Jordan’s text. “Was I great or was I a villain?”

I had the same critique: was this a documentary about Jordan, or about the Bulls? If it was about the Bulls, then where was one of the greatest moments in dynasty history, the Pippen-led comeback in Game 6 of the ‘92 Finals?

If it was about Jordan, then why make a huge deal about Scottie’s infamous 1.8 seconds? If the filmmakers wanted to use that as a plot point about how Scottie came to better appreciate MJ in the second three-peat, and how their dynamic changed as a result of each of their experiences apart, then fine.

Instead, the 1.8 seconds was given the same run as The Shot, The Walkoff and any other extended Bulls backstory. The occurrence simply did not fit with the documentary’s biggest angles: the story of 1998, the backstories that contextualized 1998, a broader Bulls dynasty history and a broader MJ history.

“I asked (Jordan) why he had allowed the 1.8-seconds game to make the final cut,” Pippen wrote. “He didn’t say much other than to apologize and acknowledge that if it were him, he, too, would be upset.”

That was about as much as we heard on the subject from MJ.

Until two other masters of their games published a book this month.

One person who wasn’t caught completely off guard by the fallout from The Last Dance was Phil Jackson.

This month, Jackson and Sam Smith published Masters of The Game, in which they discuss every player from the NBA’s 75th anniversary team. In the Pippen section, they address the Jordan-Pippen falling out, and Phil shares that he anticipated the potential for bad blood:

I had a couple of conversations with Michael about The Last Dance when they wanted to interview me. I called him up and said, “I don’t want to do this Last Dance. It’s going to make a lot of money for somebody, and I think people should get paid.” He said, “I’m not getting anything for it.” He just said, “If you don’t want to do it, tell them.” He said whatever he gets goes to his foundation and nothing to him personally.

I called Scottie, left a message on his cell phone that I wasn’t making any money either on it. I said, “I know how you feel, and I can’t stand ESPN. They’re going to make a lot of money on this.”

MJ not taking a payout is news that did not reach Scottie, who wrote that Jordan made $10 million on the project “while my teammates didn’t earn a dime.” That appears to be wrong; the reporting I’ve seen, including from Forbes, supports what MJ told Phil, that Jordan’s fee — much lower, at $3-$4 million — went to charity.

Scottie’s broader point stands: that on The Last Dance, Michael was driving the bus. Perhaps MJ came to realize that the documentary was not totally fair to his teammates; he said as much in 2021 when he participated in the Australian public television two-part documentary on Luc Longley, who was largely left out of the movie. Jordan’s explanation:

“You look back and say, ‘We should have included Luc.’ ‘We should have included other players who were significant to the team’ — and it’s hard. I had no control over that. It’s unfortunate. And I can understand why Australia would say, ‘Why wouldn’t we include Luc?’ And we probably should have.”

That’s the only instance I’ve seen of Jordan publicly acknowledging the flaws in The Last Dance’s portrayal of other Bulls players. He doesn’t have a personal social media account and gives few interviews.

So the conversation in Masters of The Game between Sam and Phil says a lot:

SAM: The confusing part was Michael always was crediting Scottie, like in his Hall of Fame speech, being his most important teammate, couldn’t have done it without him.

PHIL: One of the things about the relationship is that Michael, whatever their differences, trusted Scottie in the clutch, like in the flu game that was not a flu game, Michael was dehydrated and Scottie was supporting him the whole way though the game. “You score, I’ll do all the other work. I’ve got you.”

Michael’s upset about the fact that he lost a twenty-year relationship with this guy. He was hurt. Whoever was advising Scottie, to me, that’s the issue. Who’s he talking to behind the scenes? I’m not mad at Scottie.

Pippen, meanwhile, does nothing but talk. And his explanations are often contradictory and confusing. In an interview earlier this year, he described the May 2020 conversation with Jordan as “good and final.” Why would their discussion be “final” if it was also “good”?

Pippen’s biggest piece of news around Unguarded was calling Phil Jackson racist in June of 2021 during his own book tour, only to completely reverse course in the book itself, published in November, claiming that on the subject of Phil as a racist, “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

I’ve just never seen someone have to correct their own statement on a book tour by revising the book they were promoting. “Only when I saw my words in print,” Scottie wrote, “did it dawn on me how wrong I was.”

As a historian, I’ve learned to be careful when sourcing Scottie1. As a fan, I’m more forgiving. Scottie’s had a rough five years, to say the least. His son Antron died in April 2021. When Pip gave an interview a few months later for Luc’s documentary, he looked dazed and worn down.

His divorce with Larsa Pippen finalized in December of 2021. In January 2023, after months of rumors, Larsa was official with her new boyfriend: Michael Jordan’s son Marcus.

Add it all up and I understand Scottie’s frustration with MJ. And if Jordan is mad at Scottie, I understand that too. Pip bashed him relentlessly during his book tour and was still at it a few years ago. Even now, Scottie still gives interviews where he needles Jordan; asked in September about their relationship, Pip said “it’s never been on the top shelf.” Sure, the doc did Pip no favors, yet even Pip concedes that nothing about him in The Last Dance was actually false; the problem was the framing and context. Maybe like Scottie seeing his words about Phil in print, MJ didn’t really understand the impact until he saw the movie himself.

The irony is that in his book, outside of his Last Dance critiques, Scottie is largely complimentary of Jordan. Phil too. If someone’s only knowledge of Scottie’s book came from, you know, reading Scottie’s book, he would see a portrait of a player who still supports and even celebrates both his longtime teammate and coach.

My question is what it will take for them to get back to who they were in those days of joy.

Last year, I asked Bill Cartwright about the notion that our beloved Bulls suffer from “discord,” as I called it. Cartwright disagreed.

“I think that only happens with two guys. The rest of us are fine,” he said. “There’s discord? There’s not. There’s two guys who get a lot of press.”

That made me happy. Most everyone is on good terms. But the duo at the heart of the dynasty has splintered. And while they have their reasons, and it’s not my business or that of any other Bulls fan, the dissolution of the relationship between Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan has dampened one of the most joyous runs in sports.

“We don’t have that much time, so I would say to MJ and Pip, I pray and hope that you guys can settle this silliness,” Horace Grant said recently.

Phil sees it too.

“It’s unfortunate,” he told Sam in Masters of The Game. “Bill Bradley sets up a Zoom with all his teammates. I don’t see that happening with the Bulls, thirtieth anniversary, fiftieth anniversary.”

Fourteen years ago, these concerns did not exist. In 2011, the Bulls celebrated the 20th anniversary of the first championship, inviting the entire 1991 team back to the United Center for a ceremony. Nearly everyone was there, and the few who weren’t simply could not make it.

“When we get together, it’s like we never separated,” Craig Hodges told me last year about the reunion. “Everybody laughing and joking and we’re here to do what we do.”

Among the attendees was Johnny Bach, the brilliant and beloved assistant coach of the first three-peat who passed away in 2016. I wrote about Bach earlier this week. The quotes alone made writing it super fun. I loved how more than 20 years after playing just one year under Bach, Kendall Gill was still quoting him, drawing on Bach’s words about how to solve a challenge:

“I don’t care how rough the seas are, bring the ship in.”

Everyone loved Bach, especially Michael and Scottie. And as I wrote that piece, I wondered what their relationship would look like if Bach was alive. This could be me reaching, a nostalgic and grateful Bulls fan. Perhaps nothing would be different. But it made me wonder.

Because while Michael and Scottie may have never been best friends, they were more than colleagues. People forget that the Crying Jordan meme came when MJ began talking about Scottie, and the special partnership they had. It makes me sad to think of a world in which Jordan and Pippen grow old with no contact. I want them to find their way back to a connection. I want them to remember what they accomplished together. I want them to know what their partnership means to so many. I don’t care how rough the seas are, bring the ship in.

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I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving! If you want to read some of the stories I mentioned here, such as my interviews with Cartwright, Hodges, Will Perdue, Scott Williams or Joe Kleine, make sure to bump up from your free subscription to a paid one for the low low price of Paxson a month or Pippen a year.

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Subscribers yesterday got to read a truly wild interview with Dennis Rodman’s longtime agent Dwight Manley. Part 2 of my interview with Dwight around how Rodman became a global star — with stories about the movie “Double Team,” Rodman’s MTV show, his Chicago nightclub “Illusions,” and Tom Cruise turning into a Rodman fanboy at the Oscars — is coming next week, also for subscribers.

Lastly, heading over to the Chicago History Museum? Pick up a copy of WHY WE ROOT, on sale there now!

Amazon best-seller WHY WE ROOT

After two intense seasons as Dennis Rodman’s agent, Dwight Manley laid down on Jerry Krause’s office couch and began to cry.

The situation seemed untenable; as the Bulls prepared for their 1997-98 season, the free age…

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“That was a complete job of butchering. My players handled the ball like there was a rattlesnake on it. To cover Larry Bird you need two Dobermans.”

— Johnny Bach, Golden State Warriors head coach, 1984

They were the white-haired senseis on either side of the Zen Master. You watched the Bulls bench and you were never just looking at Phil Jackson. You were looking at the Obi-Wans on either side of him. Today their fame is tiered. Tex Winter is widely known among basketball fans, often by name, definitely by the triangle, the offense he perfected.

Yet during the first three-peat, Tex had a mirror image. Nearly the same age. Nearly the same height. Nearly the same head. Two lifers in the game. One offense. One defense. One introverted. One a charmer. From 1990 to 1994, you never heard the name Tex Winter without hearing another right beside it.

Johnny Bach.

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“Bach was a master of Eastern-style basketball, the aggressive, in-your-face version of the game played East of the Mississippi,” Phil wrote in Eleven Rings. He was handsome, gregarious, worldly, combative yet tender — a man’s man who left an impression on everyone, no matter their short time together. Kendall Gill played for Bach for just one season, in 1996 with the Hornets. More than 20 years later, Gill would fondly recall Bach telling the team: “I don’t care how rough the seas are, bring the ship in.”

Bach’s military service helped define his coaching, in his words and his manner. “You can manicure your nails on the crease in John Bach’s tie,” Doug Collins once said about him. By the end of World War II, 12.1 million Americans were service members1, with approximately ⅓ of the male population aged 15 or older joining the armed forces2. Obviously not all of them returned home with a permanent dedication to the discipline, culture and symbols of war, but John William Bach, a U.S. Navy veteran whose identical twin brother Neil died in combat in 1944, who a year later was in a fleet heading for Tokyo when the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, never missed a chance with the Bulls to draw the ace of spades on the board, symbolizing an opponent they needed to destroy3.

Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that while Fred “Tex” Winter built and taught the Bulls’ offense, Johnny Bach commanded the defense, preaching endless waves of ferocious energy.

“He calls us hungry dogs going after meat,” Scottie Pippen said during the 1991 Finals. “It’s something out there, and we’re not going to stop going after it until we get it.”

This was Bach’s famed “Doberman Defense.” A player once asked Bach why he always used that dog specifically. His response was simple as it was brilliant.

“The players understood that a Doberman was a tough-ass dog: big, mean and ugly,” he said.

“I love it,” Horace Grant said during the ‘91 Finals. “I get the most satisfaction being out there hustling and turning the ball over. You don’t get a lot of glorification out of it, but I love it.”

Because the Doberman Defense was discussed more as a philosophy and attitude compared to the intricate triangle offense, Bach never received the broad, almost pop-culture acclaim that came to Tex. But Bach was similarly dedicated to being both a student and a teacher of the game.

“Unlike Tex, Johnny didn’t subscribe to any particular system of play,” Phil wrote. “He was a walking encyclopedia of basketball strategy who relied on his quick wits and photographic memory to devise creative ways to win games. When I was in the office, Johnny would often show up at my desk with dog-eared books by coaching geniuses I’d never heard of and videotapes of current NBA teams using moves invented years ago.”

Phil recalled one such day when he was watching tape of the Bucks, trying to determine what type of offense they were using. When Phil was a fellow Bulls assistant coach, he and Bach coached defense together. Now Jackson was leading the pack, always drawing from the nearly 90 years of combined coaching experience from Bach and Tex.

He called Bach into his office to look at the Bucks tape.

“Oh, that’s Garland Pinholster’s pinwheel offense,” Bach responded after one quick look.

“Then he proceeded to explain that Pinholster was one of the nation’s most innovative coaches in the fifties and sixties,” Phil wrote, Bach sharing how Pinholster dominated at little Oglethorpe College in Georgia using “the continuous-motion offense he’d invented” before losing his desire to coach and going into politics and the grocery business.

That wasn’t going to be Bach. After the war, he finished his college career at Fordham University, played one season with the Boston Celtics and was hired as Fordham’s head basketball coach in 1950. He coached Fordham and then Penn State for a combined 28 years, was an assistant on the doomed 1972 Olympic team, and came to the NBA in 1979 as an assistant with the Warriors. He took the reins as their head coach in 1983, spending three years in the top spot, including the day in November of 1984 when Bird and the Celtics picked the Warriors apart like a boy with a daddy long legs, a 135-91 ass-kicking that led Bach to declare his need for “two Dobermans.”

He found them in Chicago. In 1986, the Bulls hired Bach’s old Olympics guard Doug Collins as head coach. Never shy about strong-headed, emotional coaching himself, Collins quickly added his old coach to his debut staff.

“He screamed at me a lot on defense,” Collins said about his time with Bach in the Olympics. “He said I couldn’t guard an ice cream cone.”

Bach and new assistant Phil Jackson coached the defense together under Collins, and when Jerry Krause fired Doug and promoted Phil, Bach settled in alongside Tex and Jim Cleamons to form one of the greatest coaching staffs in NBA history. Atop the mind-bending athleticism of Jordan, Pippen and Grant, Bach welded layers of insight and information that the Bulls used in their on-court communication, which he gathered from close observations of the opposing sideline combined with his own unique mind. He picked up on everything, like the Hornets using a hand signal of a pistol to call an isolation play for their shooters, or the color schemes Knicks players used to trigger certain sets.4

To knock off the Pistons in 1991, Bach and Cleamons devised an arsenal of disguised traps that they used to disrupt the start of many of Detroit’s preferred actions.

“They were better prepared than we were,” Isiah Thomas conceded after the series.

Even though the Bulls had the best offensive weapon in the game, and Scottie was a masterful offensive talent too, I always thought of us as a defensive team first5. How fitting that both three-peats ended with a defensive play: Horace’s block on KJ, Ron Harper’s tipped block on John Stockton. Michael and Scottie fit well together on offense, but their true devastation as a tandem was on defense. That’s where I picture them first: swarming and attacking, Pippen at the top of the key on the point guard “cutting the head off the snake,” Jordan dashing in passing lanes. Horace was active all over the court, John Paxson seemed to relish taking every charge, and Bill Cartwright was the rare center who could make Patrick Ewing pay for every point.

“Johnny Bach used to say our defense is on a string, meaning each man is connected to the other four,” Pippen wrote in Unguarded. “If, for example, the rotating man on the back end of defending a screen-and-roll doesn’t move correctly, the whole defense will break down and the other team will likely score. If it happens once or twice in a game, you can live with it. More often than that, you won’t trust the man anymore, and that’s a problem.”

Team defense was also at the heart of the second three-peat. Harp and Dennis gave the team unrivaled defensive versatility. And still there were Jordan and Pippen, playing like the hungry dogs Johnny Bach loved. This was Bach’s gift: his belief in his players engendered a fox hole-level loyalty. Pippen loved him. Will Perdue6, Bill Cartwright, Stacey King and Bill Wennington have all lauded him the past few years. Horace developed a deep kinship with Bach, one enhanced by a perfect piece of personal connection: Grant’s dog was a Doberman.

“You know what the Doberman Defense was built on? Trust,” Grant said in 2016 after Bach passed away. “Who created that trust? Johnny.”

Jordan and Bach were made for each other, too. MJ famously said during his Hall of Fame speech in 2009 that when Tex Winter told Jordan to stay in the offense because “There’s no I in ‘team,’” Jordan would lovingly reply that there was an I in “win.” Eventually, Jordan became a top advocate for the triangle. But at the outset, when he was struggling to adjust, he turned to just one man for consolation and encouragement.

“When I’m having trouble, I go to Coach Bach and ask him if he has any suggestions,” Jordan said7. When he did finally give that Hall of Fame speech, he made sure Bach was there, flying him to the ceremony.

“He encouraged me, worked with me and really helped me to mold my game,” Jordan said after Bach’s death. “Without him, I don’t know that we would’ve won our first three championships.”

Perhaps Bach’s greatest season in Chicago was his final one, 1993-94. When the Bulls lost MJ, the principles that Phil and his staff had espoused were put to their greatest test. The team responded by winning 55 games to 1993’s 57, Scottie having his greatest season, B.J. and Horace becoming All-Stars and the team finishing 3rd in fewest points allowed to counter their offense finishing 23rd.

The Bulls declined to renew Bach’s contract at the end of the season, a controversial move at the time that remains muddled in its explanation. Bach was stunned and hurt. Grant, an unrestricted free agent, was incensed.

“I’ll put it like this: if I was trying to sign a free agent, and I knew the relationship Johnny Bach had with that free agent, no way would I have fired him,” Grant told the Tribune that week. “They talk about loyalty, family and trust. It’s a tragedy to let a guy go like that, and I will never forget it.”

Bach wasn’t out of the game long. His legion of supporters made sure of it. Grant said that if he did indeed leave the Bulls, and “if I have anything to do with it,” he would see to it that his next team hired Bach. That didn’t happen — Bach actually suffered a heart attack, recovered and went to the Hornets before Grant’s eventual contract with the Magic was completed8.

Doug Collins was next up, becoming head coach of the Pistons and hiring Bach away from the Hornets. Collins was let go in 1998, and Bach was out of the league for three years. He focused on his art: he was a watercolor painter who would later show his pieces at a gallery in Skokie.

But then MJ came out of retirement with the Wizards, hired Collins as coach and recruited Bach to return.

“I was in Maine, sketching, when (Jordan) called and said, ‘Johnny, get down to Washington. I’ve got a bunch of young kids that need teaching,’” Bach explained. “I’m a better coach today than I was in ‘54. Age tempers all bad traits, like rage and frustration and the inability to deal with losses. You don’t coach with the same frenzy.”

Jordan retired with Washington after two seasons, the same month that his old backcourtmate succeeded Krause as Bulls GM. And who did John Paxson hire immediately as an assistant? The 77-year-old Navy veteran with 51 years of coaching experience and the Ace of Spades at the ready.

“I’m ecstatic,” Bach said. He had a new set of young Dobermans ready to heed his call.

“I love Coach,” 21-year-old center Tyson Chandler said. “He always has a saying when he comes in, like ‘Fellas, today’s a great day to die!’ You gotta love him for it. He can yell, pass the ball, dribble and shoot, and show us what to do. I just hope I can do half the stuff he can do when I’m that age.”

Time hasn’t healed all dynasty wounds. Some have even deepened. But one man who seems beloved by everyone was Bach. While with the Pistons, he reconciled with Krause over his 1994 departure. In 2010, with the Lakers in town to play the Bulls, K.C. Johnson shared a lovely scene, tweeting that Phil and Bach were hugging in the U.C. hallway. Bach was on hand in 2011 for the celebration of the 1991 Bulls championship. And I love this picture that Pippen tweeted of Johnny, Scottie and Stacey King on court during a 2013 Bulls-Nets playoff game.

Tonight, Johnny Bach enters the Bulls Ring of Honor. The celebration should be sweet, a beautiful evening for all involved, especially his three co-inductee former players: Paxson, Cartwright and Horace.

“I have at least 400 pictures of Dobermans,” Bach once said. “People send them from all over the world. It’s amazing. I’m an assistant coach and I named my defense ‘Doberman.’ I said, ‘Put it on, tear into them, take ‘em to pieces!’ Michael loved — he loved to be a Doberman.”

Coach, with you at the helm, we would have all been so lucky.

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Rest in peace to the great Johnny Bach! Thank you for all you brought to Chicago.

Want another story on a legendary OG basketball coach? My interview with Bulls legend Dick Motta, now 94 years old, is available for subscribers — at the low cost of Pippen a year or Paxson a month!

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Amazon best-seller WHY WE ROOT

Dick Motta stared at a wastebasket and held the future of professional Chicago basketball in his hands.

The head basketball coach at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, Motta had crossed paths with Chicago Bulls founder and GM Dick “D.O.” Klein in late 1967, still the ear…

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“Before I got there, Phil had made a bit of a name for himself in NBA circles by handing out books for everyone to read on the west coast trips. … He figured if he gave us each a book, we might actually read it, improve ourselves, and make better use of our downtime on the road. If a book actually kept us out of trouble, even for a night, all the better.”

— Bill Wennington, Tales From the Hardwood, Chapter 9, “Reading Material”

On Nov. 14, 1989, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus came to Chicago Stadium for a two-week stay, sending the 4-2 Bulls to the west coast for seven straight road games.

And for the trip, new head coach Phil Jackson did something for his players.

He gave out books.

“It’s a long trip and it’s something I thought they would enjoy,” he said.

Thus began a tradition that would come to define Jackson’s tenure at the highest ranks of the NBA. Every November, the Bulls hit the road when the circus came to town. And every November, Jackson gave each player a book that he thought would speak to him.

“B.J. is from Detroit,” Jackson said about giving Elmore Leonard’s City Primeval to rookie B.J. Armstrong, “and that’s where the book is set, so I thought he’d like it.” That was Jackson’s angle: to find a book that connected with the player in a personal way, sometimes related to basketball, more often related to his life.

“Phil and I bonded right away,” Craig Hodges wrote in his memoir Long Shot. “He gave me a book called Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman. It’s a New-Agey book about staying present and following your bliss. Phil wasn’t afraid of looking soft or strange, and I respected him for that.”

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The basketball impact of pivoting from Doug Collins to Phil Jackson came most significantly in the full-time implementation of the triangle offense; Jerry Krause had tried to convey its importance to Collins, but the former 20-point guard believed in keeping the ball in the hands of a dynamic scorer. And why not? He had the best one in the league.

Where Collins resisted, Phil embraced. As a Red Holzman acolyte, Jackson was right at home with Tex Winter’s triangle. The challenge was selling that to Jordan.

“Phil had his ideas, but he wouldn’t push them on you,” Hodges wrote. “If he wanted to say something deep to a player, he’d give him a book, usually before a long road trip. He gave Michael Jordan Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, which opens with a character, an insurance agent, trying to fly off a roof but instead plummeting to his death.”

Hodges notes that the book ends with a line “so perfect for Jordan”: “If you surrender to the wind, you can ride it.”

“Phil provided each of us with something we could incorporate into our lives,” Jordan wrote in For The Love of the Game. “He didn’t force-feed us, he just provided options. He presented the thoughts intelligently. … He would appear to direct a thought or idea to the entire team, but usually the message was for an individual player. If you were that player, you got the message even though it was delivered to the entire group. That was one of Phil’s gifts, his ability to talk to us individually within the collective.”

Phil’s boldest book choice to Jordan was a copy of Alex Kotlowitz’s award-winning There Are No Children Here, which follows the lives of two boys who live in the Henry Horner Homes, across from Chicago Stadium. As far as I have found, this was the only case of Phil giving a player a book that the player was also in. Kotlowitz writes about the boys loving Jordan, and their frustration that Chicago Stadium ticket takers sometimes would not let them into Bulls games even when they had tickets.

Jackson gave Jordan the book for the 1992 Circus Trip, just two years after Rick Telander’s Sports Illustrated cover story “Your Sneakers or Your Life” about kids killing each other for Air Jordan’s and other NBA merch.

“I thought it might be a source of information,” Jackson explained, “because a lot of people were clamoring about his inattentiveness to the people in Chicago, and I thought it was a good book for him to keep and to have.”

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One of Jackson’s approaches to his relationship with Jordan was never asking him for autographs. That kept the pathways open with MJ, and perhaps gave Jackson enough slack in 1995 to give Jordan a Shoeless Joe Jackson biography. He gave Dennis Rodman a book on motorcycles the year after Rodman bought Jackson a motorcycle. After Luc Longley separated his shoulder while body surfing, Jackson gave him Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger, a book described as “a true story of man and the sea.”

“You think he’s trying to make a point?” Longley joked afterward1.

“He does provide a sense of camaraderie,” Armstrong said about Phil in 19962. Playing for the Warriors, B.J. could not remember the books he received from his old coach. “I remember getting them, then thinking, ‘Let’s get back to the real world,’” he said. “I liked what he did … He always gave you something to ponder. But as for affecting me personally, it had no bearing.”

“The books weren’t always enlightening, academic, philosophical books,” Wennington wrote. “I remember when Toni first came to the United States, he spoke broken English and didn’t read English well, so Phil gave him a comic book. It was something he could read. Whether Toni read it, or anyone read their books, I don’t know. I know I read mine, and Steve Kerr read his.”

For Phil, his players actually reading the books was a bonus. He wanted them to, and he later considered stopping the custom if the cost didn’t meet the outcome3. But simply giving players books was an avenue to coaching them. B.J. didn’t read Phil’s books, for instance, but he took meditation seriously. Whatever Phil could do to connect, he did.

“I didn’t go along with some of the Zen stuff he introduced to the team … nor did I read the books he handed out every year as presents,” Scottie Pippen wrote in his memoir. “On the other hand, I totally bought into what he was saying about a basketball team being a pack, not a collection of separate individuals. More than the X’s and O’s, that was Phil Jackson’s most valuable contribution to the Chicago Bulls. He got us to bond. To be one.”

“I realized early on that some of the practices Phil spoke about I had been doing innately my entire life,” Jordan wrote. His best example was the sports psychologist Phil brought to the team to talk about mindfulness. “I had been there before so I understood the concept,” he wrote. “I just couldn’t comprehend how to get myself in the zone consistently. He provided methods and practices designed to get us all into the zone all the time.”

While Jordan acknowledged that being in the zone for all 48 minutes was unlikely, the techniques that Jackson offered gave Jordan greater control of his mind, focus and emotions in key situations, namely the fourth quarter. Jordan:

“When we first started meditating during stretching before practice, I thought it was crazy. I’m closing one eye and keeping the other eye open to see what other fool is doing this besides me. Eventually I became more accepting because I could see everyone making an effort. I opened my mind to meditation and Phil’s teachings.”

In Jordan’s final game as a Bull, in the most important moment of his career, he tapped into Phil’s mindfulness training. “Crowd gets quiet. The moment starts to become The Moment for me,” Jordan wrote. “That’s part of that Zen Buddhism stuff.”

There is something fitting about so many of Jackson’s Bulls writing memoirs. Jordan has multiple ones, as does Rodman, including an iconic best seller. Longley wrote one that is out of print. Wennington published in 2004, Hodges in 2016, Pippen in 2021, Scott Williams in 2023 and Cartwright this year. I’m not saying these are the result of Jackson’s Circus Trip gifts. But maybe in some ways, the old coach’s influence is still sneaking through.

“Some players read every book I gave them; others dumped them in the trash,” Phil wrote in Eleven Rings. “But I never expected everyone’s 100 percent engagement. The message I wanted to convey was that I cared enough about them as individuals to spend time searching for a book that might have special meaning for them. Or at least make them laugh.”

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Thanks for reading, everyone! Congratulations to Phil Jackson and Sam Smith on their umpteenth respective book but their first collaboration, “Masters of the Game.”

And if you missed it, I published the most comprehensive list available of Jackson’s book gifts for Bulls players.

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“Challenging the players’ minds and getting them to share their views on topics other than basketball helps build solidarity, too. … (One) way I expand the players’ minds is by giving them books to read on road trips.”

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