Dynasty Is a Mere Memory as Chicago Adjusts to Life After the Fall

Now is the winter of their discontent, made the more forlorn by the forecast that it’s going to be a long one.

The hawk still blows cold off Lake Michigan but the Bulls, the last American sports dynasty, and the only one this place ever knew, are gone, returning one by one as members of someone else’s team, like Phil Jackson with the Lakers tonight.

Every day, it seems, brings a new indignity. The Bulls start this, their second season of rebuilding, 2-26. NBC drops their two scheduled appearances. Another free agent-to-be announces, before they ever get to bid, that he won’t even consider them. Toronto’s Tracy McGrady, listing the stars he would like to play alongside, names Allen Iverson and Shaquille O’Neal, noting, “I didn’t call anybody’s name who’s on the Bulls, did I?”

Trying to do the right thing (finally?), the team fetes Scottie Pippen with a nostalgic video on his return with the Trail Blazers. Moved, Pippen declares all is forgiven.

“I appreciate the organization doing that for me,” he says. “It brought back a lot of memories. I have buried the hatchet. I have moved on. All of the bad feelings are left behind.”

Well, at least until he’s asked why Michael Jordan didn’t come out.

“Why would he want to see the Bulls play?” asks Pippen. “It gives you a laugh to see how management destroyed something that was good for the city of Chicago.”

Pippen adds that the odds on a new dynasty are “slim and none and slim just went out the door.”

Nor are all the insults from outsiders. The team is now running TV commercials with the Bulls Brothers, its version of the Blues Brothers, announcing tickets are available since “the fair-weather, front-running fans are gone.”

This raises eyebrows, since those fair-weather front-runners helped put together a 589-game sellout streak dating back to 1987, four years before the team won its first title.

Not that the organization is apologizing for its short memory.

“How would you characterize somebody who was with you when you were on top and winning championships and who abandoned you when you were not?,” marketing boss Steve Schanwald tells the Arlington Heights Daily Herald’s Kent McDill.

Of course, the “sellout streak,” is now plainly fiction, since rows go empty, obliging the team to use an accounting device, counting the seats in the luxury suites, whether anyone is in them or not. At one sellout, estimates the Daily Southtown of Tinley Park, there were 4,000 empty seats.

Most of the suites are still leased but anecdotal evidence suggests they are no longer hot tickets, either.

“Last year was the lockout so it wasn’t a fair test,” says George Andrews, a player agent who let his suite go. “But we couldn’t give our tickets away.

“We couldn’t get anyone to go. With free food and free parking, we couldn’t get anyone to go. Then [the Bulls] asked us for a five-year commitment, with little likelihood Michael would be back. And they bumped the prices up.”

After an exhibition appearance during his first retirement, Jordan knelt down to kiss the Bulls’ logo at center court, but he hasn’t been back in the United Center since he quit for good.

He went to games in other cities, though, several in Los Angeles, before finally taking over the Washington Wizards, formally severing his ties with the Bulls.

“Let me tell you this,” says David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize winner who spent last season in town, doing a book on the Bulls, “it’s a long winter in Chicago.

“Remember, you’re in L.A. and they’re in Chicago. It’s a long winter and I think there were 10 years there where, in the middle of a winter, three nights a week, a lot of ordinary citizens had something extra to look forward to. I think it’s tough. Life goes on but Christmas comes less frequently.”

Once a year, in fact. Only as often as it comes everywhere else. In Chicago, the 2000s have begun with what promises to be a years-long reality check.

Meanwhile, Back In Real Life . . .

What does it mean, really?

It is Sports Page Truth, and especially Chicago Sports Page Truth, that winning and losing are not merely important, that a championship is the occasion of irreplaceable community pride and losing a civic burden.

Before the Bulls, Chicago was one of those cities whose teams lost so often, fans romanticized losing. Rooting seemed so intertwined with suffering as to become indistinguishable. Cub fans rued their fate like Boston Red Sox fans, but stayed true and kept coming.

In New York, losing would be deemed intolerable and management pilloried in the press. In Los Angeles, losing would be deemed boring and management ignored.

But in Chicago, everyone knew fate had it in for them. Their facilities were ancient. Their owners were cheap. Even if everything went right--like the 1985 Bears’ Super Bowl victory--it was only for a moment, after which they began fighting among themselves and fell off their pedestal.

Then came the Bulls and the transcendent Jordan in the giddy ‘90s, when Chicago seemed to turn into a basketball theocracy.

Everyone misses the dynasty, even if many don’t think it actually compromises the quality of their lives. Columnist Mike Imrem of the Daily Herald compares it to “Seinfeld” going off--you miss it but it’s only a TV show. In the end, it may not be winning and losing that count, as much as the need for a unifying experience, whether it’s cheering for the Bulls or lamenting the prospect of the Cubs winning a pennant in their lifetimes.

In objective terms, things are fine in Chicago. The economy is prosperous. There’s a building boom.

“There’s just a level of entertainment that isn’t there but it’s not something that was vital to your lifestyle or your well-being,” says Imrem.

“I’ll tell you one thing, though, it did mesmerize people here for a long time and I’m talking about people at all levels.

“I would call my mother, who was in her late 80s, or my aunt, she would be watching the game with her friends. My aunt would call me and ask about Michael Jordan and she’s in her 80s. That’s gone.”

Says John Callaway, who hosted a public TV show called “Chicago Tonight,” “I remember one night when a playoff game coincided with a huge event that the Museum of Broadcast Communications had. Mike Wallace was in town. All these stars were in town. When they scheduled it, they didn’t realize they were up against a playoff game so there were all these TVs set up in the museum, and the event ran late because we had to watch the Bulls first. That kind of thing.”

That kind of thing, indeed.

There was another playoff game that coincided with a dinner at McCormick Place for Princess Diana. Jordan’s mother attended but left early for the United Center, while tuxedoed guests spent the evening marveling at Diana’s grace and asking each other if they’d heard the Bulls’ score.

One night in the last title run in 1998, rocker John Fogerty, playing at the Hard Rock Cafe in the Loop, made an offhand remark about the Bulls, and the whole place cheered.

“You guys take this serious, don’t you?” said Fogerty, taken aback.

Yes, they did, but no more.

Only the Uniform Remains the Same

In the NBA, life has to go on. It says so in the schedule they issue every season.

Of course, everything now is upside down. Once the Bulls were lordly. Now they’re as humble as humble gets, with players coming and going as fast as they can sign them off the waiver wire, 18 so far, among them ones named Kornel David, Lari Ketner and Michael Ruffin.

During one game when everyone was really low, the camera panned the bench to show the injured Fred Hoiberg, Randy Brown and Hersey Hawkins in civilian clothes.

“Can you imagine,” the announcer asked, “where we’d be if those three guys were healthy?”

Owner Jerry Reinsdorf and General Manager Jerry Krause used to talk about not waiting too long to rebuild. Now that they’re rebuilding, they don’t say much of anything.

Since Toni Kukoc’s return, the team has actually been OK, going 8-11 after its 2-26 start. Of course, it took more than two months to get Kukoc, one of the last veterans of the glory years, onto the court while people in the organization wondered if he would take the season off with back spasms.

“It has been tough,” says Elton Brand, their still-upbeat and able No. 1 pick, laughing. “It’s payback time for all those years when the Bulls were on top. It seems unfair at times because I had nothing to do with it.”

The man left to do the explaining and hold the tab is another innocent, Coach Tim Floyd, who is doing a good job, considering his resources.

How long that will suffice is another story.

“I understood that the risks were huge when I took the job,” Floyd says. “It didn’t make a lot of sense from a lot of my friends’ standpoint because I had a 10-year contract and some credibility at Iowa State and more money, certainly, than I ever thought I would make and kinda had things going.

“But I didn’t want to look back at 70 and say, ‘Well, you were a coward. You just backed off and didn’t have enough to go step up and go take something on.’ . . .

“I knew there was going to be some pain involved. Two-and-25 pain? I didn’t envision it. There’s reasons for it. I do endorse what we’re doing. I think there’s a value in being bad versus being mediocre and having spent money on mid-range free agents and being middle of the pack and drafting middle of the pack and never being able to get out. I can fully understand what we’re doing, being bad, and having an opportunity to draft high and then bring free agents in on top. But it’s one heck of a challenge. . . .

“There were times when that director-of-basketall-operations-gig that I opened up with [in case the estranged Jackson wanted to return as coach] for six weeks, looked terrific. But when you have a chance to get a night’s sleep and wake up the next morning, the blood flows and you’re ready to tackle it head on.”

In an organization famous for its, uh, unique approach to public relations, Floyd is personable and politically acute. Of course, with his problems, who needs more enemies?

Kevin Garnett, Grant Hill and Eddie Jones, to name just a few, have said they would never have gone, or will go, to the Bulls. Besides the weather, there’s the talent on the roster (thin) and the expectations of anyone in a uniform with a glowering Bull on it (weighty).

This just in: The groundhog just came out of his hole and couldn’t find his shadow. Looks like a few more years, or decades, before the thaw.

LAKERS’ FIRST HALF

Record:

37-11

Standing:

Second-best record in NBA and conference

Tonight:

at Chicago, 5

Ch. 9, TNT

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Losing Their Way

The Chicago Bulls’ winning percentage through heir first 47 games with Phil Jackson and company, and in the two years since their departure.