Hall of Fame basketball writer Sam Smith has been covering our Chicago Bulls since the start of the Michael Jordan days. Beyond his time on the Bulls beat — which started at the Chicago Tribune and now continues on Bulls.com — Smith has also authored several books about the Bulls.
His first tome, the legendary New York Times bestseller The Jordan Rules: The Inside Story of One Turbulent Season with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, is perhaps the quintessential account of that dynastic Chicago squad’s initial rise during a championship-bound 1990-91 season.
Smith has also written Second Coming: The Strange Odyssey of Michael Jordan, There Is No Next: NBA Legends on the Legacy of Michael Jordan, and the Derrick Rose memoir I’ll Show You (the latter a co-write with the 2011 MVP).
Now, he and former Bulls head coach and Hall of Famer Phil Jackson collaborated on a terrific new book, Masters of the Game: A Conversational History of the NBA in 75 Legendary Players. It’s less a historic cataloguing of the 75 (actually 76, but 75 is catchier) players listed among the NBA’s 75th Anniversary Team, and more using those names as a jumping-off point for several fun exchanges. Smith tells Bleacher Nation that the intended cumulative effect is to make it feel like you’re sitting courtside for a conversation between himself and Phil Jackson, who’ve maintained a collegial relationship since Jackson was an assistant coach under Doug Collins.
© Robert Hanashiro via Imagn Content Services, LLCHow Sam Smith’s Michael Jordan-Era Bulls Coverage Blossomed Into A Legendary Tell-All
To hear Smith tell it, there was no guarantee he was ever going to write a basketball book, let alone an abundance that also include 2017’s Hard Labor: The Battle That Birthed The Billion-Dollar NBA.
So what prompted him to transition from a daily beat to a more long-term document like The Jordan Rules?
“I kind of fell into it,” Smith explains. “I was covering the team, I was traveling with the team and writing about it and was completely satisfied, really. I had no interest in doing anything else. Enjoyed it, never sort of planned to be even a sportswriter,” Smith notes. “And this is sort of a growing time, and I’m telling you — there was almost a unanimity of opinion at the time that there’s no way you can win a title if Michael Jordan’s your best player. You’d hear it in Chicago. There were a lot of columnists in Chicago — they’d deny it now — [who] wrote columns then saying, ‘You can’t win because of this guy. He shoots too much, he doesn’t pass the ball. And the Bulls, they’re not doing well in the playoffs. Lakers are a dynasty, Celtics are a dynasty.’
To set the scene with Chicago: Jordan’s greatness had led the Bulls to some deep playoff runs already, but the team kept running up against the buzzsaw that was the Isiah Thomas/Joe Dumars-era “Bad Boy” Detroit Pistons.
Heading into 1990-91, Jordan had already won MVP and Defensive Player of the Year honors, but was seen in some media circles as being too much of a score-first option and too selfish to win it all (inaccurate claims, but such was the narrative). Scottie Pippen had already established himself as an All-Star.
After finishing with a 55-27 record on the year, Chicago had fallen in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals the previous spring, after a Pippen migraine headache effectively leveled him during the contest. Jackson was in only his second season coaching the club.
Smith, inspired by a legendary tome documenting Bill Walton’s snakebitten 1979-80 Portland Trail Blazers (as well as their charmed 1976-77 championship run), decided to document the Bulls’ bid to ascend to champion status.
“So, I’m covering the team. The team’s doing fine, but not great. 45, 50 wins kind of team. My mother always had books all over the house, always sort of reading all the time. Myself, not so much. Not a great student! From that, I sort of got the sense that a book is sort of a special thing. It’s not what I’m doing. I’m writing, a lot of people might say, ‘Journalism is just history in a hurry.’
“But I was covering a team, writing a story, getting on the next day, writing another story. It was sort of this relay race of information. And I’m starting to meet some of the kind of famous sportswriters, more so, and this guy’s written a book, and that guy’s written a book. And I’m going, ‘Well, I know more than that guy. That guy’s not so smart!’ So I thought, ‘Hey, it would be cool if I write a book.'”
That year, the Bulls’ climb reached completion. Chicago won 61 games and went 15-2 en route to their first franchise title. All told, the Bulls would win six championships across eight seasons. Not too shabby.
“David Halberstam’s Breaks of the Game was like my favorite sports book. It was kind of a diary of the Blazers in the late ’70s,” Smith says. “So I think, ‘I’ll write this diary of a team going through a season.’ The Bulls win, Jordan becomes the face of the league almost instantly, beats Magic in the Finals. The other part of it: when the book comes out, it comes out in the fall as the next season’s starting. Jordan skips a trip to the White House. Turns out he was [off on] a gambling weekend with a convicted felon. The world blows up. All of a sudden I’m in the middle of this, [after] figuring I just wrote this little diary.”
The Jordan Rules caused a kerfluffle when it was released in November 1991. Bulls players expressed their frustration with the book’s honest depiction of some intense moments, including Jordan’s clashes with Will Perdue, Stacey King, and Bill Cartwright, and his frustrations with rising stars Pippen and Horace Grant.
Ultimately, it’s an honest portrayal of one of the all-time great teams discovering just what it costs to realize that greatness, and an essential read. So is Masters of the Game. This is the first of several pieces from a long, Bulls-centric conversation Bleacher Nation enjoyed with Smith. Buckle up.
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