内容简介
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.
作者简介
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.
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精彩书评
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 精彩书摘
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 re
The Jordan Rules: The inside Story of a Turbulent Season with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls [ 下载 mobi epub pdf txt 电子书 格式
The Jordan Rules: The inside Story of a Turbulent Season with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls [ 下载 mobi pdf epub txt 电子书 格式 2024
The Jordan Rules: The inside Story of a Turbulent Season with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls [ 下载 mobi epub pdf 电子书
The Jordan Rules: The inside Story of a Turbulent Season with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls [ mobi epub pdf txt 电子书 格式下载 2024