The Shrug at 30: How Michael Crushed Clyde
30 years ago today, June 3, 1992, Michael Jordan hit an NBA Finals record 6 three-pointers in a half. Then he shrugged. And Clyde Drexler was never the same.
“Clyde is a better 3-point shooter than I choose to be.”
— Michael Jordan before Game 1 of the 1992 NBA Finals
“It seemed like a horror story.”
— Clyde Drexler after Game 1 of the 1992 NBA Finals
Maybe he’s just as good.
Okay, okay, not just as good. But maybe they’re different merely by degree. Maybe Glide does everything Mike does, not as spectacularly, but just as effectively, with just as much impact. And better from three.
Maybe it won’t matter that they have Michael Jordan. Not when we have Clyde the Glide.
In the first week of June, 1992, that was the chatter. The Trail Blazers, back in the Finals after getting upset in the 1991 playoffs, held a favorable matchup with the Bulls, in part because Clyde Drexler was juuuuuust about as good as Michael Jordan. Clearly his press was better. Jordan’s 1992 was a bulging slog. In seven months, from September 1991 through March 1992, Jordan went through:
Questions about whether he helped keep Isiah Thomas off the Dream Team
Questions about why he was a no-show to the White House to meet President Bush and celebrate the 1991 championship1
One of his closest friends in the league, Magic Johnson, contracting HIV and retiring at age 32
The dual-tracked Slim Bouler - Eddie Dow investigation, with David Stern calling him to the league office to discuss
Meanwhile, not known to the public, Jordan was in the thick of the Richard Esquinas buildup — first the alleged $1.252 million debt, which through a process ended up at $300,000, and then Esquinas’s pursuit of the money. A season that was not a walk in the park for Jordan, despite his massive popularity and the season’s success.
Drexler’s 1992 was as the steady underdog. In September, he’d been left out of the initial 10 players selected for the Dream Team, but in the midst of an MVP-level season he was given the final roster slot reserved for an NBA player. That was May 11, coincidentally also the date that Drexler and Jordan shared the cover of Sports Illustrated with a caption reading, “On a Collision Course.”
Seven days later, Drexler finished 2nd in the MVP voting to Jordan. Drexler had finished with his highest scoring average in three years, while Jordan finished with his lowest in six years. Yet Jordan still won the scoring title, outscoring Drexler by five points per game.
That was the vibe: Drexler as the less bountiful surprise, Jordan as the dominant bore.
Some were not buying it. New York Daily News gave Jordan the edge with this salute: “As if Jordan needed any motivation getting this close to his second straight NBA championship, playing against the person deemed by many to be the second-most talented player in the league is sure to fire up Air’s competitive juices.”
Writing in the Statesman-Journal in Salem, Oregon, Greg Jayne ran a column dedicated to presenting and then debunking a list of myths on that year’s Finals. Number four on the list:
Myth: Drexler is as good as Chicago’s Michael Jordan.
Yet the buzz remained, including in Chicago.
“This is the glamour matchup to compare with last year’s Jordan vs. Magic Johnson. But this time the two best players in the league face one another at the same position,” Sam Smith wrote in his Tribune series preview. He noted that while Jordan was outscoring Drexler in the playoffs, (34 a night to Drexler’s 27), Drexler was a bit higher in rebounds and assists. Continued Smith:
“He’s a little bigger than Jordan and they use him to post up often. While Jordan is the Bulls’ best postup player, Drexler will neutralize some of that.”
While Sam ultimately gave Jordan the advantage, he picked the Blazers in 7.
Jordan brought all of this into the Finals.
“I want to just play the games and get it done and forget about it,” Jordan told Tribune columnist and soon-to-be MJ chronicler Bob Greene2 before the playoffs. Greene asked Jordan how his hunger for a championship compared to the year before.
“The funny thing is, after all that’s happened this year, I want it bad — I want it worse than I did last year,” Jordan said. “I didn’t think I was going to. But I do.”
Have you thought about why? Greene asked.
“Sure,” Jordan told him. “To prove to people that the assholes can’t hold me down.”
“Portland and Chicago — it was almost inevitable. They were the favorites in November, and now, they meet in June.”
— Conclusion of Bob Costas’s pregame NBC soliloquy
Noise.
The Tribune wanted to know about noise.
The Bulls had pummelled the Blazers in Game 1 of the NBA Finals by 33 points, Jordan setting new Finals records for points in a half, with 35, and three-pointers made in a half, with six. After the sixth, he turned to Magic Johnson, announcing for NBC3, and shrugged.
And it fit. The Bulls, Jordan said in June, had grown complacent in their dominance, a league-best and new franchise record 67 wins. The fans at the Stadium had too.
“My wife used to have to wear earplugs,” Jerry Krause said before the Finals. “She hasn’t had to use them all season.”
If the fans were flat at the Stadium in ‘92, I don’t remember hearing about it or feeling it while watching on TV. But I tell you, even from home, even on TV, even rewatching 30 years later, when the lights went out in the Stadium for Bulls introductions to kick off the ‘92 Finals, the earplugs came out.
That was why the Tribune wanted to know: Because in Game 1 of the 1992 NBA Finals, the fans brought the noise — swelling, boastful cries with every score. Especially every Jordan three. He was not a three-point shooter, back when certain players were very definitively known as three-point shooters. On the Bulls alone, Craig Hodges, John Paxson, B.J. Armstrong.
The Bulls had lost Game 1 of the Finals at home the year before, but anyone who was at both games — players, coaches, announcers, stadium employees, fans — quickly knew this game wouldn’t match that one. Jordan dazzled with not only the six threes, but an array of jumpers and assists.
Late in the half, Jordan clicked into God-disguised-as-Michael-Jordan mode: a three, a steal, a basket, a put-back dunk on a Pippen miss, and then stepping into another clean three, his sixth, something no one had ever seen.
At this point, not even the earplugs would work.
Immediately we called it “The Shrug.” In 1991, the newly bolstered fleet of NBC cameras captured MJ’s “spec-tac-u-lah move” from six replay angles. This time, it was Jordan’s three and then shrug in front of a speechless Clifford Robinson that NBC captured in the round.
The shrug was so instantly iconic that six years later, one of the members of his security team parodied it on film, and 22 years after that, that footage became public, and that became a meme. The shrug is now a meme of a meme.
So it might seem as if the Blazers were pushovers. In fact, for the rest of the series, they were one of our best playoff opponents in the entire run. Drexler rose from 16 points in Game 1 to 26 and up to 32 in Game 3. Portland won Games 2 and 4, and forced the Bulls to a 17-point deficit just before the end of the 3rd quarter in Game 6 back at the Stadium.
Then of course came the comeback for the ages, the pulsing, frenzied fans and that unforgettable stadium soundtrack.
Jordan finished the series with his second straight Finals MVP award and a series scoring average — 35.8 — that was third all-time. Fourteen days later, on June 28, Jordan, Pippen and Drexler were all back in Portland for the 1992 Tournament of the Americas, the basketball tournament where the Dream Team would attempt, ha, to qualify for the Olympics.
Here were Jordan and Drexler, together again. And while Jordan spent the run-up to the Finals not giving his opponent a single scrap of bulletin-board material, he was now giving it freely and joyfully to his teammate, a practice opponent. David Halberstam, in his book Playing for Keeps, on Jordan’s trash talk to Drexler during one practice in La Jolla, California:
“Didn’t I just kick your ass? … Anything here look just a little familiar? … Think you can stop me this time, Clyde? … Better watch out for the threes, Clyde.”
Halberstam reported that some of his teammates, led by Charles Barkley, asked him to cool it on Drexler, as they were now teammates. Jordan did by word, but not by deed, tightening his defense on Drexler in every practice. Assistant coach Mike Krzyzewski told Halberstam that his impression was that Jordan, through on-court domination, was drilling into Drexler’s head that he, Drexler, was no longer a threat, just in case Portland made it back to the Finals.
According to Halberstam, Jordan’s post-Olympics report back to the Bulls coaching staff was that Drexler grew so flustered, he showed up to practice one day with two left sneakers and refused to attempt to swap one out. He simply played practice with one shoe on the wrong foot.
About 20 years later, after Drexler had won a championship with the Rockets, made four more All-Star teams, made one more All-NBA team and of course won a gold medal in the ‘92 Olympics, the now Hall of Famer Drexler sat in his Houston home and speculated that, you know what? Maybe he was just as good as that MJ guy.
“I came real close to being MVP of the (1992) All-Star Game, MVP of the Finals, and MVP of the season,” he told Dream Team biographer Jack McCallum4. “I feared no one. I didn’t think there was any better than me.”
McCallum asked: Even Jordan?
“Are you kidding? In my mind? Jordan was damn good, but was he better than me?” Drexler paused. “The question is not really is he better. The question is, do you think you can win against him? And the answer is absolutely. I had a lot of success against Jordan. I beat him often. At his game. Which is also my game. I was bigger, faster. I did everything he could do.”
Drexler stopped, McCallum wrote, and smiled.
“Except shoot more.”
The story of Julia Judson.
While reading papers for this piece, I came upon a lovely story of Trail Blazers superfan Julia Judson, who was 84 years old in May of 1991 when her hometown Statesman-Journal of Salem, Oregon, profiled her and her Trail Blazers scrapbook.
Her birthday was June 2, so a year later when the paper interviewed Blazers fans about how they were feeling for the next day’s Game 1 of the ‘92 Finals against the Bulls, they interviewed a now 86-year-old Judson.
“I hope they don’t lose their tempers, and I hope they abide by the referees’ decisions,” she said. “If they do that, they’ve got it made.”
Judson passed away on July 2, 2001, one month after her 95th birthday. Here is the feature on her. Enjoy!
Best,
Jack
2025 update: That was the same White House trip where Craig Hodges presented President Bush with a letter. Here is the full letter, public for the first time.
Mark Carman grabbed the perfect Game 1 backstory from Magic during All-Star weekend 2020 in Chicago
“Dream Team” by Jack McCallum, page 117
Glad I found you thru Goff. Love your content.