He’s Back. : (That’s All You Need To Know) : Jordan & Co. Still Dominate the League, but This Might Be Their Last Season Together

When it’s too wild for everyone else, it’s just right for the Chicago Bulls, slouching now toward Las Vegas, a natural habitat where tumult is never in short supply.

Dennis Rodman plays craps on the Strip until 4:40 a.m., the local paper reports, losing $15,000. (What, a tattooed man with purple hair, earrings, nose rings and a belly button ring can’t have a little privacy?) That night, he is ejected in the exhibition against the Seattle SuperSonics and a teammate barely keeps him from head-butting a referee.

Michael Jordan plays three hands of blackjack simultaneously, betting $500 apiece. Surprising no one, he’s in the casino all night too. “You can’t even think about sleep,” Jordan says, “with all that oxygen they pump into the air.”

How can a red-blooded, oxygenating young megastar like Jordan, who’ll make $30 million this season, stay away? Rodman is getting less--$9 million, or barely Jordan’s FICA deduction--but has millions worth of commercial work, including a Victoria’s Secret hookup. Dennis just got $2 million to do a movie with Jean-Claude Van Damme. As far as he’s concerned, Mike can have Gatorade and Bugs Bunny.

They should be too jaded to care or too tired to do anything about it, but these are the Bulls, winners of four titles in the ‘90s, including last season when they went 72-10, 15-3 in the playoffs and went off for a summer of shoots, deals, Olympics, etc.

This season is supposed to be about the league’s 50th anniversary, with all manner of commemorative teams, patches, retro uniforms and coffee table books (available in a store near you), but let’s face it, it’s about the Bulls, who are the NBA these days.

Last season the Bulls’ TV ratings ran 33% ahead of the rest of the league (when Jordan retired in 1994, finals ratings dropped to early ‘80s levels.) For all the enthusiasm in Los Angeles, Houston, Seattle and New York, the Bulls still get the banner headlines:

BULLS WIN!

BULLS IMMOLATE SELVES!

JORDAN RETIRES/RETURNS!

RODMAN SHOWS UP IN DRESS/

DOESN’T SHOW UP/

HEAD BUTTS REFEREE/

HEAD BUTTS ENTIRE

OPPOSING TEAM/

HEAD BUTTS SEMI

ON FREEWAY!

Get ready for more. As if to handicap themselves (in their four triumphant postseasons, they’re 60-16), the Bulls have sent out for more tumult.

Jordan opted for only a one-year contract. Insiders think he’ll retire unless the Bulls win a title and Coach Phil Jackson is back.

Jackson couldn’t reach agreement on a long-term contract, signed for one year and is expected to leave. The Chicago Tribune reported that during increasingly adversarial negotiations last spring, he asked owner Jerry Reinsdorf to move General Manager Jerry Krause’s office out of the training facility.

Reinsdorf refused. By way of reply, during the victory celebration, he told the United Center crowd, “If you have to give credit to one man, that guy that put them all here . . . Jerry Krause!”

Rodman pleaded for a two-year deal. Reinsdorf and Krause met him halfway. That is, they offered him one year and never budged. Rodman vowed publicly he wouldn’t suffer such an indignity but couldn’t find another bidder. He’s back amid speculation he intends to spread the suffering around.

Scottie Pippen has two years left, but because Reinsdorf isn’t expected to give his problem star a big payday at 33, his days seem numbered too.

Then there were off-season surgeries that sidelined Pippen, Luc Longley and Ron Harper in exhibitions. By season’s end, Longley will be the only starter under 31 and, whatever happens, Jackson will surely feel 1,000.

“That we’re kind of pro-rated for a one-year chance to win a championship, I think, has been judiciously planned by the owner and the general manager,” Jackson says, stepping lightly. “There’s no doubt about that.

“They understand that Dennis is 35 and Michael is 33 and you know, we’ve been doing this for a long period of time, staying at the top of the league. . . .

“It’ll be a very different year. I don’t know what to anticipate. I try not to anticipate, just let it happen. Our whole scenario, our whole buildup with this ballclub, is that we alone can destroy our opportunity.”

The Bulls vs. the Bulls. Looks like a fair fight, at last.

*

Jordan has his farewell address already written. It’s shorter than George Washington’s, consisting of two words:

“I’m done.”

He won’t say when it’s coming, though. He doesn’t want a farewell tour since he doesn’t need any more hassle, adulation, plaques, high school jerseys, portraits of himself, motorcycles or cars. He doesn’t like people knowing what he’s going to do in advance. Why should they if he doesn’t?

He likes surprises, as when he returned to basketball without an announcement, setting off 10 days of paparazzi hell in Chicago, which he ended with another two-word statement (get the symmetry?) released from his agent’s office:

“I’m back.”

Early last season, when everything was going so swimmingly, Jordan said he wanted to play three more seasons. By spring, after Rodman’s head-butting prank, with the Jackson-Krause power struggle ongoing, Jordan dropped it to two years.

After winning the title, he signed for one, suggesting the man who needs a challenge was running dangerously low again.

“I always wanted to make my own call unexpectedly,” Jordan says. “I never wanted to predetermine what my moves are. That’s always been how my career was. I don’t like people to determine what move I’m going to do and what decision I’m going to make.

“With the whole farewell, tour--I wouldn’t want to do that. That’s just not me. . . .

“No one knows, which is the good part about it. I will continue to play as long as I feel I have challenges, and right now I do have challenges. Everyone’s writing me off, saying this is probably my last year and whatever, because of my one-year contract and my one-year contract gives me options.

“It gives the team options too. If they want to choose to go somewhere else, a different direction, that’s fine. I don’t have to tie myself into the situation. I’m just going to take it year by year.”

He says he “definitely” won’t come back without Jackson, though reports circulated last season that Krause was putting together a list of coaching successors, including Iowa State’s Tim Floyd.

He knows Rodman probably won’t be asked back, that Pippen’s days in town are dwindling and that Scottie may be shopped after the season for younger players--that “different direction” Jordan is always talking about.

He thinks they can still shrug it all off for one last hurrah.

“You know what?” Jordan says. “That’s not a bad idea. You play for the moment. A lot of times in the modern-day game, people tend to relax a little bit because they know they’re going to be around for three or four years.

“What we’re showing is that we’re going to play for the moment. We’re not going to sit back and say, ‘Well, we’ve got two more years on our contract, maybe we can take a year off.’ We’re going to come out and play every year like it’s our last.”

*

Rodman wanted to play two more seasons, but during exhibitions it looked as if he could barely endure the thought of one more.

On media day, he announced he was angry with management for the way it negotiated Jackson’s contract, adding he was tired of basketball.

“A lot of things have been bothering me about coming back here,” Rodman said. “Like the Phil Jackson thing. You have a coach like that who’s making $2 million [actually $2.7 million] and you have other coaches making $4 million to $5 million. I think that’s really crap.

“I went through that crisis in Detroit with Chuck Daly, and now coming back here to the same crap is hard to deal with. To have a coach that’s been here and done what it takes to win and they treat him like he’s nobody. I think that’s bull.”

In exhibitions, he was isolated, emotional and/or absent. He was tossed out of the one in Las Vegas and came perilously close to head-butting referee Ken Maurer before teammate Randy Brown pulled him away. Jackson said Rodman was entitled to be upset because Maurer had missed a call.

“I’m just getting ready for the season,” Rodman murmured later. “They [the NBA] will probably try to suspend me, but that’s good, that’s fine. Show how big they really are. . . .

“I just feel like it’s time for me to move on. It’s time for Seattle Slew to get out in the pasture and get to work, start to go out there and start breeding more Rodmans.”

He was buttoning up a sheer purple shirt, tied above his midriff. He walked out of the Thomas & Mack Center, wearing a purple crushed velvet hat lined with flowers, a black scarf around his throat. While fans lining the walls above the ramp screeched and teammates--even Jordan--boarded a bus, Rodman got into his own limo.

Shortly thereafter, he reported a sore hamstring. He missed four exhibitions, failing to even show up in street clothes, a violation of team rules that Jackson, tripping lightly again, ducked.

Question: Why didn’t Rodman attend the game with two other injured players on the bench in suits?

Jackson: “It was too much work taking out his nose rings and earrings.”

One night while the team played in the downtown United Center, Rodman tried to enter the team’s training facility in suburban Deerfield. He didn’t have his card key and set off the burglar alarm, bringing police.

“It is unusual,” conceded Jackson, as light as a ballerina in a mine field. “Dennis is unusual.”

And it isn’t even Nov. 1 yet. It’ll be a different year, all right. A normal team would be finished by now, but these are the Bulls, for whom nothing is improbable or impossible.

* CONFERENCE CAPSULES: C6