內容簡介
The most gifted athlete ever to play the game, Michael Jordan rose to heights no basketball player had ever reached before. What drove Michael Jordan? The pursuit of team success...or of his own personal glory? The pursuit of excellence...or of his next multimillion-dollar endorsement? The flight of the man they call Air Jordan had been rocked by controversy.
In The Jordan Rules, which chronicles the Chicago Bulls' first championship season, Sam Smith takes the #1 Bull by the horns to reveal the team behind the man...and the man behind the Madison Avenue smile. Here is the inside game, both on and off the court, including:
-Jordan's power struggles with management, from verbal attacks on the general manager to tantrums against his coach
-Behind-the-scenes feuds, as Jordan punches a teammate in practice and refuses to pass the ball in the crucial minutes of big games
-The players who competed with His Airness for Air Time -- Scottie Pippen, Horace Grant, Bill Cartwright -- telling their sides of the story
-A penetrating look at coach Phil Jackson, the former flower child who blossomed into one of the NBA's top motivators and who finally found a way to coax "Michael and the Jordanaires" -to the their first title
A provocative eyewitness account, The Jordan Rules delivers all the nonstop excitement, tension, and thrills of a championship season -- and an intense, fascinating portrait of the incomparable Michael Jordan.
作者簡介
Sam Smith was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune during the Chicago Bulls' 1991 championship season. He is a Brooklyn, New York, native with degrees in accounting from Pace University and in journalism from Ball State University. He has worked for Arthur Young and Co., the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, and States News Service in Washington, D.C. This is his first book.
內頁插圖
精彩書評
An engaging, sometimes cruelly funny behind-the-scenes look at the Bulls' tantrum-and doubt-filled but finally triumphant journey to the NBA title.
--New York Newsday Jordan boasts a wicked tongue, and not just when it's hanging out as he dunks....[He] manages to blurt out enough in Smith's book to reveal his own narcissistic, trash-talking, obsessively competitive side.
--Newsweek The Jordan Rules entertains throughout, but the most fun comes from just hanging out with the players. Smith takes us into the locker room, aboard the team plane and team bus, and seats us on the bench during games. Sometimes, books reflecting on a team's success don't reach the personal level with the people who made it happen: The Jordan Rules does.
--Associated Press A riveting account...what you want in a sports book: the behind-the-scenes stuff, a peek at the private side of the players, their hobbies and politics and religion, the way they get along or don't...It's fair to compare The Jordan Rules with the campaign books that appear after every presidential race....The difference is not only that The Jordan Rules explains more persuasively than most of the campaign chronicles how the winner was decided -- it's that it does so more interestingly and with more understanding of the human heart.
--Fred Barnes (The McLaughlin Group), The American Spectator 精彩書摘
Chapter One: Spring 1990 Michael Jordan surveyed his crew and got that sinking feeling.
It was just before 11:00 A.M. on May 24, 1990, two days after the Bulls had fallen behind the Detroit Pistons two games to none in the Eastern Conference finals. The city of was awash in spring -- all two hours of it, as the old-time residents like to say -- but Jordan wasn't feeling very sunny. He didn't even feel like playing golf, which friends would say meant he was near death.
The Bulls had gathered for practice at the Deerfield Multiplex, a tony health club about thirty-five miles north of Chicago, to try to get themselves back into the series. Jordan's back hurt, as did his hip, shoulder, wrist, and thigh, thanks to a two-on-one body slam in Game 1 courtesy of Dennis Rodman and John Salley. But his back didn't hurt nearly as much as his pride or his competitiveness, for the Bulls were being soundly whipped by the Pistons, and Jordan was growing desperately angry and frustrated.
"I looked over and saw Horace [Grant] and Scottie [Pippen] screwing around, joking and messing up," Jordan told an acquaintance later. "They've got the talent, but they don't take it seriously. And the rookies were together, as usual. They've got no idea what it's all about. The white guys [John Paxson and Ed Nealy], they work hard, but they don't have the talent. And the rest of them? Who knows what to expect? They're not good for much of anything."
It was a burden Michael Jordan felt he had to bear. The weight of the entire team was on his tired shoulders.
The Pistons had taken the first two games by 86-77 and 102-93, and Detroit's defense had put the Bulls' fast break in neutral: The Bulls had failed to shoot better than 41 percent in either game. Jordan himself had averaged only 27 points, stubbornly going 17 for 43. No team defensed Jordan better than the Pistons, yet he refused to admit that they gave him a hard time, so he played into their hands by attacking the basket right where their collapsing defensive schemes were expecting him. The coaches would look on in exasperation as Jordan drove toward the basket -- "the citadel," assistant coach John Bach liked to call it -- like a lone infantryman attacking a fortified bunker. Too often there was no escape.
Although Detroit's so-called Jordan rules of defense were effective, the Bulls coaches also believed the Pistons had succeeded in pulling a great psychological scam on the referees. It had been a two-part plan. The first step was a series of selectively edited tapes, sent to the league a few years earlier, which purported to show bad fouls being called on defenders despite little contact with Jordan. The Pistons said they weren't even being allowed to defense him. "Ever since then, the foul calls started decreasing," Jordan noted, "and not only those against Detroit."
Step two was the public campaign. The Pistons advertised their "Jordan rules" as some secret defense that only they could deploy to stop Jordan. These secrets were merely a series of funneling defenses that channeled Jordan toward the crowded middle, but Detroit players and coaches talked about them as if they had been devised by the Pentagon. "You hear about them often enough -- and the referees bear it, too -- and you start to think they have something different," said Bach. "It has an effect and suddenly people think they aren't fouling Michael even when they are."
It only added to Jordan's frustration with Detroit.
At halftime of Game 2, with the Bulls trailing 53-38, Jordan walked into the quiet locker room, kicked over a chair, and yelled, "We're playing like a bunch of pussies!" Afterward, he refused to speak to reporters, boarded the bus, and sat in stony silence all the way home. He continued his silence -- other than a few sharp postgame statements -- for the next week. He would not comment on his teammates. "I'll let them stand up and take responsibility for themselves," he told a friend.
Jordan had really believed that the Bulls could defeat Detroit this time. Of course, there was no evidence to suggest it could happen, since the Pistons had knocked the Bulls out of the playoffs the previous two seasons and had taken fourteen of the last seventeen regular-season games between them. But hadn't there been similar odds in 1989 when the Bulls had faced Cleveland in the playoffs? The Cavaliers had won fifty-seven games that season to the Bulls' forty-seven, and they were 6-0 against the Bulls, even winning the last game of the regular season despite resting their starters while the Bulls played theirs. The Bulls' chances were as bleak as Chicago in February.
Jordan promised that the Bulls would win the Cleveland series anyway.
Playing point guard, Jordan averaged 39.8 points, 8.2 assists, and 5.8 rebounds in the five games. And with time expiring in Game 5, he hit a hanging jumper to give the Bulls a 1-point victory. The moment became known in Chicago sports history as "the shot," ranking with Jordan's other "shot" in the 1982 NCAA tournament, a twenty-foot jumper that gave North Carolina a last-second victory over Georgetown. It also sent the Cavaliers plummeting; over the next two seasons, they would not defeat the Bulls once.
The playoffs had become Jordan's stage. He was Bob Hope and Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger and Frank Sinatra. His play transcended the game. It was a sweet melody received with a grand ovation. Others jumped as high and almost everyone slammed the ball, but Jordan did it with a style and a smile and a flash and a wink, and he did it best in the postseason.
"There's always been the feeling on this team," Bach had said after that Cavaliers series, "that if we got to the Finals, Michael would figure out some way to win it. He's the greatest competitor I've ever seen and then he goes to still another level in the big games."
It was true: Jordan's playoff performances had been Shakespearean sonnets, beautiful and timeless. And like Shakespeare, he was the best even though everyone said so. In just his second season in the league, after missing sixty-four games with a broken foot, Jordan demanded to return to the court despite warnings by doctors that he might exacerbate the injury to his foot. The Bulls, and even Jordan's advisers, said he should sit out the rest of the season. Jordan angrily accused the team of not wanting to make the playoffs so it could get a better draft pick. He was reluctantly allowed to return with only fifteen games remaining in the regular schedule. The Bulls made the playoffs, and in Game 2 against the Boston Celtics (who would go on to win the NBA title) Jordan scored 63 points. Larry Bird put it this way: "It must be God disguised as Michael Jordan."
In the 1988 playoffs against the Cavaliers, Jordan opened the series with 50- and 55-point games, the first time anyone had ever scored back-to-back 50s in the playoffs, to lead the team to victory and establish an all-time five-game-playoff-series scoring record of 45.2 points per game. Jordan had become perhaps the greatest scorer in the game's history. He would never equal Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game or his hundred-plus 50-point games, but by the end of 1990-91 season, Jordan had become the all-time NBA scoring average leader in the regular season, the playoffs, and the All-Star game. And he'd won his fifth straight scoring title, putting him behind only Chamberlain's seven.
And now, facing the Pistons in 1990, he was coming off a series against the 76ers in the second round of the playoffs that was unbelievable even by his own amazing standards. The Bulls won in five games as Jordan averaged 43 points, 7.4 assists, and 6.6 rebounds. He shot nearly 55 percent in 42.5 minutes per game. He drove and he dunked. He posted up and buried jumpers. He blocked shots and defended everyone from Charles Barkley to Johnny Dawkins.
"I never played four consecutive games like I did against Philly," he said of the first four, in which he led the team in scoring in thirteen of sixteen quarters.
And then the Bulls, storming and snorting, headed for Detroit to take on the Pistons. The two teams hailed from hard-edged, blue-collar towns, Chicago with its broad shoulders and meat-packing history, Detroit with its recession-prone auto industry. For some reason, though, Detroit's sports teams seemed to have a perpetual edge over Chicago's. In 1984 the Cubs finally won a piece of a baseball tide, but it was the Detroit Tigers who won the World Series, just as they had in 1945, the year of the Cubs' last World Series appearance. Many times Gordie Howe's Detroit Red Wings had come into the Stadium and ruined the dreams of Bobby Hull's Black Hawks. And now there were the Pistons. Detroit had made a habit of beating Chicago. It was a habit Michael Jordan was determined to break.
But no matter how hard he tried against the Pistons, he couldn't beat these guys. In earlier seasons, Jordan had some of his biggest scoring games against the Pistons: a 61-point mosaic in an overtime win in March 1987, an Easter Sunday mural on national TV in 1988 in which he'd scored 59 points. And Jordan was an artist, the ninety-four-by-fifty-foot basketball court being the canvas for his originals, signed with a flashing smile, a hanging tongue, and a powerful, twisting slam. Pistons coach Chuck Daly, a man who appreciated the arts, was not particularly enamored of Jordan's work, and after the 1988 game the Pistons instituted "the Jordan rules" and the campaign to allow what the Bulls believed was legalized assault on Michael Jordan.
The Pistons had two of the league's best man-to-man defenders, Joe Dumars and Dennis Rodman, to carry out those assignments. Jordan grudgingly respected Dumars, with whom he'd become somewhat friendly at the 1990 All-Star game; Dumars was quiet and resolute, a gentlemanly professional. But Jordan didn't care much for Rodman's play. "He's a flopper," Jordan would say disdainfully. "He just falls down and tries to get the calls. That's not good defense." Rodman once "flopped" so effectively back in the 1988-89 season that Jordan drew six fouls i...
前言/序言
飛沙走石的王朝:探尋籃球史詩背後的汗水與榮耀 本書並非聚焦於某一個特定的賽季,亦非專門記錄某位超級巨星的個人篇章。它是一部宏大敘事,旨在描繪一支偉大球隊從默默無聞到鑄就傳奇的過程中,所經曆的那些未被聚光燈完全照亮的、充滿人性掙紮與團隊協作的群像史詩。 我們的故事開始於一個籃球文化尚未完全成熟的年代,那時,芝加哥這座城市對世界籃球的統治力,還僅僅是一個遙遠的夢想。我們不談論那一次驚天動地的“最後之舞”,而是迴溯到構建這支王者的基石時代——那些充滿瞭青澀、挫摺、以及對勝利近乎偏執的渴望的歲月。 第一部分:萌芽與陣痛——構建王朝的藍圖 籃球世界中,真正的偉大很少是憑空齣現的。它需要遠見卓識的管理層,需要一位能夠洞察未來的教練,更需要一群願意為瞭共同目標犧牲個人光環的鬥士。 草根的崛起與選秀的抉擇: 我們將深入探討球隊管理層在早期選秀中的微妙決策。這不是簡單的“選對人”的故事,而是關於風險評估、對潛力無情的挖掘,以及在有限資源下最大化天賦迴報的商業藝術。我們考察那些看似平庸的選秀,如何在新興的體係中找到瞭最適閤的生態位,成為未來王朝不可或缺的螺絲釘。那些在聚光燈之外默默訓練、等待機會的邊緣球員,他們如何通過不懈的努力,完成瞭從角色球員到關鍵先生的蛻變? 教練哲學的碰撞與磨閤: 強悍的體係需要強悍的領導者。本書將詳細解析不同教練風格的迭代。從強調基礎和紀律的奠基人,到那位後來定義瞭現代籃球戰術的革新者,我們關注的不是他們最終的勝利,而是他們如何在中途遭受質疑、承受失敗的重壓時,堅持自己的籃球哲學。我們會剖析那些在訓練場上爆發的激烈爭論——那是關於戰術理念的交鋒,是關於如何將一群天賦異稟卻個性張揚的年輕人擰成一股繩的艱難過程。這些衝突並非破壞,而是塑造,是打破舊有思維定勢的催化劑。 環境的塑造:城市與球隊的共生: 芝加哥這座城市,以其鋼鐵般的意誌和永不言敗的精神著稱。本書試圖捕捉這種城市精神如何滲透到球隊的血液中。我們描繪那些在寒冷鼕夜裏,球館裏那些最忠誠的球迷,他們對球隊的期待,成為瞭球員們必須背負的無形重擔。我們探討球隊如何利用這種環境的壓力,將其轉化為激勵人心的燃料,而非壓垮人的重負。 第二部分:聯盟的洗禮——從挑戰者到統治者 在任何一個領域,想要登上頂峰,就必須先擊敗那些看似不可逾越的巨人。本書將重點敘述球隊在崛起過程中,遭遇的那些“宿敵”——那些曾一度阻礙他們問鼎的強大對手。 宿敵間的心理戰: 這不僅僅是球場上的戰術較量,更是意誌力的角力。我們還原瞭那些經典對決背後的心理博弈。每一場季後賽係列賽,都是對球隊韌性的終極考驗。球員們如何處理被對手的垃圾話激怒後,又如何迅速將情緒調整迴冷靜的執行層麵?我們關注那些在關鍵時刻,因為壓力過載而失誤的瞬間,以及球隊如何從這些失敗中迅速學習、修正,並在下一次交鋒中展現齣驚人的復蘇能力。 傷病與低榖的考驗: 王朝的偉大之處,往往體現在他們如何度過至暗時刻。我們細緻描繪瞭球隊在遭遇核心球員重傷或團隊低榖時,內部運作的真實寫。誰站瞭齣來填補空缺?年輕球員是如何在重壓之下被迫快速成長的?管理層和教練組如何頂住外界要求“重建”的巨大輿論壓力,堅持對現有班底的信任?這些低榖期的決策,往往比巔峰期的光芒更能定義一支球隊的品格。 化學反應的煉金術: 真正的“化學反應”不是偶然發生的。它是通過無數次共同麵對睏境、分享勝利的喜悅與失敗的痛苦而慢慢積纍起來的。本書揭示瞭球員之間復雜的人際關係——友誼、競爭、乃至偶爾的摩擦,最終如何被塑造成一種超越個人友誼的、基於職業精神和共同目標的“戰鬥情誼”。我們探討瞭核心球員如何學會容忍彼此的怪癖,如何理解對方在壓力下的獨特需求,最終形成那種難以被復製的場上默契。 第三部分:體係的傳承與價值的延續 一個王朝的終結,往往伴隨著核心人物的離去。但真正的“體係”並非依附於個人,而是可以被傳承下去的文化。 角色的重新定義: 當一個時代結束,新的麵孔必須登場。我們關注的是,球隊如何在新老交替之際,成功地完成瞭角色的重新分配。老將們如何放下身段,成為新一代球員的導師,同時又如何接受自己職責的轉變?新人們又如何在大佬的光芒下,找到屬於自己的舞颱,並成功地將自己的能量注入到這艘航船中? 超越籃球的視野: 球隊的成功不僅僅是體育成就,它也是一種商業和文化現象。本書將觸及球隊在場外如何運營,如何處理與贊助商、媒體的關係,以及如何在全球範圍內推廣自己的品牌。我們審視瞭球員們如何利用自己的影響力,去影響社會議題,使球隊的影響力遠遠超齣瞭比賽的勝負。 總而言之,這部作品旨在提供一個多維度的視角,去審視一支偉大球隊的誕生、成長、輝煌與轉型。它探索瞭天賦、紀律、運氣、以及最重要的——選擇的力量,是如何共同鑄就瞭籃球史上最令人難忘的篇章。我們關注的是,在聚光燈熄滅後,支撐起這個龐大機器運轉的、那些關於人性、奮鬥與堅持的真實故事。