The Comeback
Gambling Man
The Thrill of the Kill Keeps Michael Jordan Chasing His Next Game
By Michael Leahy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 14, 2002

Cards. Cards sliding his way. Aces, kings, diamonds, spades -- losers, all losers. The man in Pit 21 had been losing for a good hour by then. Losing what for most people would have been their life's savings. "Yeah, give 'em to me, give 'em to me," Michael Jordan commanded, pushing another $5,000 chip forward. He loved games but craved risky games more. He feasted on adrenaline, the big jolts that mortals don't know.

Besides accounting for a basketball comeback, it had propelled him to this high-stakes blackjack game late on an October evening in Uncasville, Conn., just hours after having played a preseason contest there against the Boston Celtics.

"Give 'em to me," he said to the dealer.

More than mildly addictive, his many games over 18 years necessarily had meant that real life, so devoid of spectacular risk, so steeped in tedium and low on euphoria, had been hard on him during the past three years. Sometimes in his old office at MCI Center his body language had said it for him, when he slid down in his desk chair while talking about his routines as a Washington Wizards executive.

He relished uncertainty, a mind-set that had led him back to basketball and, a little after 11 p.m., past a cacophony of clanging slots and to this table in Pit 21 of the Mohegan Sun Casino, behind a red rope designed to keep $100-a-hand plebes at a distance. He sat alongside young Boston Celtics star Antoine Walker, whom he'd known since Walker was a promising junior high player in Chicago, and across the table from his Wizards teammate Richard Hamilton, with whom his relationship had yet to define itself. Jordan played blackjack into the early morning hours, down half a million dollars at one point, refusing to quit, sinking deeper into the red, trying to recover his losses by succumbing to the sucker's gambit -- raising his bets and playing multiple hands simultaneously.

Around 3 a.m., about the time his prospects looked the dreariest, he called for coffee to replace his drink and lit another cigar. The Jordan party -- bodyguards, teammates, his personal trainer, a few friends -- settled in for what appeared to be an all-nighter. Someone in the party whispered to Jordan that perhaps he ought to get some sleep, particularly as, in only three days, he would be in Madison Square Garden for opening night against the New York Knicks.

Jordan ignored the questions, the veiled admonishments that it was getting late. When he would miss critical shots down the stretch and seem to have nothing in his tank late in the fourth quarter during a narrow loss to the Knicks, it would leave at least one Wizards official wondering what price, if any, he had paid for Casino Night. But no one ever pressed him about such things.

It spoke of the bargain that basketball had made with him long before: Coaches and executives agreed implicitly to take on the burdens of his appetites. They lived with his vicissitudes, realizing that the very restlessness in him that sometimes triggered whispers was the flip side of a bottomless will without rival. He regularly subjected himself to grueling private workouts while his teammates slept. He arrived at regular practice before anyone else, did more stretching, came alone into the Wizards' MCI practice gym after a red-eye flight to shoot for an hour, and then another hour, a solitary figure attempting to regain the old touch of his three-point jump shot and turn back a clock. He was, in most things, a portrait of excess.

And any loss was a shaming for him. "Cards," he called, and a dealer in Pit 21 flicked out three more hands to him -- three more busts, as it turned out, at about 10 grand a hand. He was hemorrhaging cash and chips now. He raised the stakes, playing $15,000 hands, drinking more coffee, finally turning around the game near 4 a.m, drawing about even.

By breakfast he was moving ahead, winning three hands at a time over and over, going up about $600,000, exultant, manic now. Wanting his victory proclaimed, he began happily trash-talking, "Give me those cards, give me those damn cards. . . . You're gonna have to rob a register to pay me" -- not quitting until about 8 a.m., when he walked toward an exit of the Mohegan Sun with arms raised, as if he'd won Game 7 of a playoff series. Chattering. Woofing. Sleepless in Uncasville.

"I returned . . . for the love of the game . . . and to teach," he liked to say, but Jordan's comeback was always more complicated than that. He didn't love the game so much, after all, that he hadn't left it twice already -- the last time in early 1999, when he cited mental exhaustion on his way out the door.

The years that followed were never so much a tale of longing as they were a tale of loss -- the difference between wanting something badly and going back to it because nothing else in his new life was half as thrilling. It was the contrast between exhilaration and emptiness, between having a compass and feeling adrift.

"It's hard for anything to be as good as playing for him," his personal trainer, Tim Grover, had said casually the previous winter, when Grover was still permitted by Jordan to talk. But "loss" was a dirty word in the Jordan camp; "loss" carried with it the image of a void, of something desperate. Jordan and his publicity personnel instead talked about love, which sounded cheerier, as if he were answering a calling instead of fleeing a void. "I have an itch that needs to be scratched," he said winningly.

The basic truth, as former Chicago Bulls and current Los Angeles Lakers coach Phil Jackson privately observed to a friend about the player whom he most treasured, was that Michael liked to dominate.

Rush to Recover

From its first days to the last, his comeback season was like stepping outside at night and running in pitch blackness, risky to the body, riskier still to the ego, but absolutely thrilling, in the not-knowing, in the equal potential for magic and catastrophe.

The turning point arrived early, if unseen. During a summer scrimmage at Grover's gymnasium with a corps of NBA players, Jordan was hurt: two broken ribs, suffered in a collision with an intense, powerful young Chicago Bull named Ron Artest.

He needed four weeks to mend, four weeks during which he sat idle, four weeks in which all the training he had done to that point went for naught -- and after which he maniacally rushed back into his workouts and scrimmages, trying to make up for time lost. Driving at such a furious pace presented its own dangers, thought Grover, who warned Jordan that to play so hard after weeks of inactivity -- and three years of indulgence before that -- would leave him susceptible to tendinitis and worse.

Jordan ignored him.

Now Grover tried to paint a picture of possible calamity looming, putting himself in the unusual position of trying to cajole Jordan into doing what in the old days constituted a training sin: Think of going easier, or not at all -- at least for a few days.

Jordan, more firmly than ever, answered that he understood his body's limits in a way no one else did. Just get me ready, the boss ordered.

The story of Jordan's troubles began in that moment, not with the right knee that would become so famous but the little-scrutinized left one. The tendinitis there troubled him from the first practices in the Wizards training camp in Wilmington, N.C., where Jordan denied the problem even as he ended every practice with a grapefruit-size ice pack fashioned around it. Privately, Grover believed that Jordan was favoring the sore knee, which, if true, meant his right knee already had begun absorbing more stress, leaving it vulnerable to tendinitis, too -- physiology's equivalent of the Domino Effect.

It was the comeback's real crossroads -- Jordan's last chance to attend to his knees' problems before they escalated into something chronic and season-threatening. Grover persisted. Jordan nonchalantly resisted. The unspoken question hung there between them: Do you ease off the pedal or possibly risk the unraveling of a season?

Jordan later found the media and made a vow: "I'll be ready for the opening of the season."

And the unraveling began.

Walking Gold Mine

"Whatever happens, happens," Jordan liked to say at different points in the season. At 38 years and eight months when the season began, he tried playing the part of the stoic about nearly everything, from his knees to his erratic young team. But, privately, he fumed.

What's going on? he privately asked coaches and others in the organization early, when the team was losing eight straight. What the [expletive] is going on? You're watchin' us, what the [expletive] do you see wrong?

Nearly everyone with whom Jordan spoke counseled calm and patience. Most of his young teammates, already accustomed to losing as Wizards after gilded college careers, were sad but philosophical, having perfected that impassive and amiable mien of trampled athletes everywhere, a glazed look that said, I work hard but this is my fate.

At week's end, an outraged Jordan told them that their play was unacceptable, losing like this is [expletive] unacceptable. Only it wasn't, not really; very few things were immediately unacceptable in the NBA so long as big money rolled in. In Washington, more money poured into the Wizards' coffers than ever in the team's history -- despite a team on its way to losing eight games in a row, for nearly three winless weeks.

All the normal gauges of sports -- team standings, wins and losses, playoff possibilities -- had a curious irrelevance by then. A Jordan game throughout most of the year was not basketball so much as a transcendental event, and the Wizards less a losing NBA team than a novelty act, a touring troupe led by a charismatic figure aiming for nothing less than his professional resurrection. It was basketball's equivalent of a fantasy Beatles reunion at Wembley Stadium.

The Wizards were on the way to leading the NBA in total home and road attendance for the first time in franchise history, selling out each of the team's 41 games at MCI, increasing its home attendance by a league-high 32 percent and banking what some industry experts estimated to be an extra $450,000 per home game in ticket revenue -- which translated to a gaudy boost of more than $18 million by season's end. "Michael's impact already has been dramatic," Wizards principal owner Abe Pollin happily said early, already aware that the years of his team's financial malaise were ending.

But even the team's new profits in the 2001-02 season paled against what Jordan the gold mine meant to the NBA as a whole. In the last year of the league's existing television contract, ratings climbed for NBC and Turner, including among 18- to 34-year-olds. Thirty-eight of the Wizards' 41 road games were sellouts. Coupled with a coming-out of new stars and a surge in NBA merchandising, Jordan triggered a tsunami of new gate and ancillary income for the league.

Best of all, for several owners, the new money sparked a casualty. The NBA's so-called luxury tax -- a levy imposed on high-spending teams whose player salaries exceed a ceiling reflective of a defined ratio of league revenue -- has likely disappeared for the season, in large part because the jump in revenue from Jordan's presence pushed the year's salary cap beyond even the most profligate teams' expenditures. Three NBA big spenders originally projected to be hit by the tax -- Dallas, New York and Portland -- consequently will pay nothing, saving their owners an estimated $60 million among them.

Add in the higher gate revenue from Jordan's road appearances and his impact on television ratings, and Jordan's financial boost to the NBA was ineffably high. "If the league wrote Jordan a check for $100 million, the league would still be getting the better end of the bargain," said Alvin Gentry, the Los Angeles Clippers' head coach. "We wouldn't be able to give him enough."

Such gratitude toward the Jordan comeback sparked a powerful deference throughout the NBA, a reluctance to press Midas to do anything he didn't wish, even when his disenchantments prompted the Wizards to break league rules.

Wanting to minimize scrutiny of his practice habits, particularly after his right knee began troubling him, Jordan and the Wizards casually flouted league rules governing the relationship between the media and the players, including those guaranteeing reporters the opportunity to observe the last half-hour of team practices. The vast majority of practices were closed altogether, a decision made mutually by Wizards Coach Doug Collins and Jordan, the coach typically exchanging a glance with his star when a Wizards public relations official asked whether the media could be admitted that day.

"No," Collins said, dispatching the PR man to tell the media to stay put.

Usually, Jordan would be riding a stationary bike by then. From the start of the season, as his tendinitis worsened, he seldom played any basketball outside of games, participating in about one-quarter of the Wizards' practices, according to team observers. He would do a few drills -- a series of sprints, some shooting on undefensed fast breaks, a brief run-through of plays -- before muttering to Collins, "I'll go to the bike." Or Collins, wanting to save the troubled knee for a grueling game coming, would sometimes call to him, "I think you've done enough. Go to the bike."

Consequently, the Wizards seldom scrimmaged full-court, with one team observer saying he had never been part of an NBA organization that practiced so little under game-like conditions.

From Show to Tell

Once a fierce practice player who had taken pride in driving and schooling those around him, Jordan had been responsible in Chicago for dramatically improving the play of several Bulls teammates, most notably Scottie Pippen. Pippen had arrived in the NBA with a reputation as a sieve on defense but who, relentlessly abused in scrimmages by a merciless Jordan, lifted his game to become a premier defender. "You either sink or swim with Michael in practice, and Scottie made it," said Tex Winter, a Bulls assistant who had moved on with Coach Phil Jackson to the Los Angeles Lakers. "You either work hard or Michael has no use for you."

The Wizards had hoped that Jordan's ruthless practice style, particularly his zest for preying on even the weakest in drills, might transform Richard Hamilton and Courtney Alexander, two offensive talents tagged by coaches and foes as serious defensive liabilities. But Jordan's knee made any tough tutelage impossible.

So instead he aimed to play the role of mentor. It was not something that came to him naturally. When injured, he wasn't around much, and when around, his advice had limits. He counseled Hamilton on pump-faking before his jump shot, and Tyronn Lue on making wiser decisions from the point guard position -- but he was not given to lengthy, soul-searching discussions. He'd give Alexander a pair of shoes and snicker that maybe they would lead him to pull down a rebound. End of discussion.

He needed avid listeners but not more friends; friendships invited risk, and he preferred to confine his risks to games. In time his new teammates understood this, but even as familiarity diminished their awe for the icon, their curiosity about Michael Jordan remained. Young men, some of whom had grown up looking at his poster above their beds, sometimes wondered what it might be like to hang with him, if only for a single night on the town. It wasn't going to happen. "Nobody meets Michael," said Jordan's handpicked first-round draft pick, the highly touted 19-year-old Kwame Brown. "You gotta know somebody who knows somebody before you meet Michael."

It was, as Jordan emphasized once to an aide, nothing personal, just habit, the tic of a man who derived comfort from routine and secrecy, dating to his Chicago days, when he would hang out with veteran Bulls teammates like Charles Oakley and Pippen but not younger players. "One of the Jordan rules when he went places with friends was that they respect confidentiality, that what they did together was not to be regurgitated," said an agent representing a Bulls friend of Jordan's. "Younger players were seen as too risky. They might get excited and brag."

As a consequence of needing games, however, Jordan required foils. On many days during the season, it meant finding a young teammate whose money he might be able to take in a post-practice shooting contest.

In Chicago, the day after a January game there against the Bulls, the Wizards had just finished a practice at Grover's gym when Hamilton accepted Jordan's challenge to a shooting competition while the team bus waited for them. The competition dragged on. Ten, 15, 20 minutes. No player but Jordan would have dared to keep a team bus waiting. On this day, the contest involved shooting from midcourt. Hamilton went up several hundred dollars early, happily yelling, while the attendants, fetching balls, kept glancing at watches. Someone finally said: "Probably time to get going, Michael."

No, he said coolly.

Finally, Jordan started finding his range and hit eight of his last 13 shots to win more than $1,000 off the day's prey, now at last wrapping up. He grinned and whooped -- "coo, coo, coo" -- a signal that he had fleeced another pigeon, then pointed in a gesture of amused supremacy at the defeated Hamilton, who, turning his back, quietly walked to the back of the gym to retrieve his sweats, while a delighted Jordan fitted an earring into his left lobe and kept teasing. Hamilton never stopped walking. Jordan stared at Hamilton's back, calling out, "Rip, we'll do it again."

The moment revealed all his sides -- a need for dominance, the compulsion to find another rush, his avuncular instinct to soothe the bruised foe.

He was an alpha personality in a profession teeming with alphas, which necessarily meant there were ebbs and flows to his relationships with ambitious young teammates like Hamilton. From about the midpoint of the season, as Jordan's tendinitis took an irreversible hold, the team's number two star made a frequent point of emphasizing, casually and without edge, that Jordan would not be around in another few years, that the team's future hinged on younger players -- the New Jacks, as Hamilton had referred to them. "I just wish people would see we're more than a team with Michael Jordan; we got the pride to win without Michael, and we're stepping up because we know we got a lot of talent here, and we're going to be the leaders somebody soon," he said.

Never had anyone stated the obvious so directly. It reflected a steadily ebbing veneration of the idol as the season wore on, a new daring among a few players making clear where the future rested.

The Wrath of Jordan

But even so, most were cautious. Kwame Brown became a case study in the risks of angering Jordan, a man famously intolerant of slackers and mediocrities.

When Brown arrived at training camp in October woefully out of shape after a summer illness, Jordan had been patient for a week, draping his arm around Brown and praising his ability to Wizards officials. But Jordan's fascination for his protege swiftly waned. Brown didn't work hard enough sometimes for Jordan's tastes, and it did not help that many in the organization, from officials to teammates, thought that Brown showed no willingness for either accepting criticism or honoring an old basketball tenet that said rookies should play hard, accept bruises and complain about nothing.

For his part, Brown had become maddeningly frustrated, a kid who thought that he was being repeatedly fouled in intrasquad games. He would drive toward the basket and feel himself being bumped by a hard hip off the ball, infuriated that the referees wouldn't blow a whistle. "That was a foul," he finally groaned.

There was an electric silence then. Play had stopped. A wide-eyed Jordan walked toward Brown. "You [expletive] flaming faggot," he exploded. "You don't get a foul call on a [expletive] little touch foul, you [expletive]. Get your [expletive] back on the floor and play. I don't want to hear that out of you again. Get your ass back and play, you [expletive]."

Brown would only say later, "It was pretty rough, but that's Michael Jordan; you deal with it. You learn you're a rookie and you're not going to get calls."

Jordan continued to express hope that, while "lost out there" and not likely to be an immediate star, Brown would be able to contribute in game situations. When Brown didn't, when he couldn't, the question arose whether Jordan had been overly optimistic; that he and Collins had unrealistically tried to rush Brown, even messed with his psyche in publicly skewering his play. When Brown broke down one day in Houston and sobbed, Jordan comforted him, but by then Brown's season was in tatters, and Jordan's relationship with most of his teammates defined.

Jordan had stopped talking about the brilliant future ahead for Brown. "[Before then] Michael [had] shunned him for a while," the Wizards official said. "Kwame went from having the biggest guy on his side to having nobody. It was a long freeze. Michael helped him later when Kwame broke down and cried at practice. But things were done by then."

Ironically, by late in the season, some players expressed relief to friends that Jordan had never sought to hang out with them, wondering whether he would have scrutinized their after-hours life for signs of misbehavior. One player's agent said, "[The player] always asked, 'Am I playing alongside a teammate or my general manager?' "

There were generational and class differences, as well. "They didn't have much in common," the agent observed. "[The player] said it was like playing with an older uncle at a barbecue." Jordan sounded as mystified as a forty-something when sniping about hip-hop -- "the kids' noise" -- blaring through speakers in the locker room. "I'd get amped up and be throwin' balls away and [expletive] if I had to listen to that [expletive] all the time," he said, retreating to his headphones.

But on the court he played uncle and leader, and they looked to him to save them more often than not, particularly in a game's final minutes, which generally reflected the Wizards' utter reliance on Jordan. In the 2001-02 season, he hit no fewer than three game-winning shots in the last seconds. And, at any point in a game when players looked lost, the ball went to Jordan, underscoring his position as a crutch for everyone else.

"I looked at tapes and saw that we basically only scored when Mike is hot and Mike's got it going," said forward Tyrone Nesby. "Mike was doing it all. When he wasn't on the court, everybody looked at each other, like: What are we gonna do?" Nesby didn't learn that Jordan's season had ended until, walking through a Milwaukee hotel lobby, he heard the news from teammates. Jordan was already headed to an airport by then, having broken the news to Collins and packed some bags.

Few things spoke more simply about the remove the idol had perfected. He appreciated teammates for how well they could play games, the bond between them in their shared risk, which is where it ended. One winter day, a group of people that included Wizards guard Chris Whitney walked through the players' underground parking lot at MCI Center, when suddenly they heard a car screeching. Swiveling their heads they saw an Aston Martin whipping around the tight little turns of the lot at seemingly upward of 50 miles per hour.

Alone, Jordan hit the brakes and squealed to a stop in front of Whitney. "See you at the airport," he said. There was no conversation, no need for one. He had a crowd marveling. He laughed. It was enough.

From Valley to Peak

But he wanted order in a locker room. He told aides he wanted everybody focused on preparation. He wanted no autograph signings, no posing for photos, no distractions. Later, when skeptics began raising questions about his right knee and endurance, he used the pregame to work himself into a simmering furor, doing what Michael Jordan did better than anyone else in sports -- convince himself that he was being dismissed and disrespected.

"Scoring six points, my career low, I'm pretty sure you guys were saying how old I was," he said, 48 hours after a poor December performance in Indiana, looking for payback. He shot a look at his inquisitors, searching for confirmation of his suspicions -- a nodding head here, a telling chuckle there. Nobody around him so much as flinched, nobody said a thing. He wasn't through. "I knew with that game, you guys would say I'd lost whatever I'd gained; that maybe the [comeback] wasn't a great idea."

Playing in a frenzy at home against Charlotte, he scored 24 points by the end of the first quarter. He berated veteran referee Derrick Stafford after having one of his jumpers partially blocked by Hornet P.J. Brown and receiving no foul call: "Derrick, what game are you [expletive] watchin' out there?"

Stafford wheeled. Other players gaped.

Jordan kept letting Stafford have it. "How's that not a foul on him? What game are you [expletive] watchin'?"

Stafford looked at him but did nothing, just one more ref being reminded of the uses of Jordan's power. Late in the fourth quarter, with a last binge and a short fadeaway jumper, he scored his 51st point, the oldest player in league history to total as many as 50. MCI Center became a din -- Jorrrr-dan, Jorrrr-dan. On his off nights, he had been a sad reminder of mortality. But on this evening, he was the flickering ember who would not go out -- and so, transfixed, they screamed.

Slightly raising his hand, he finally called it a night. He exited as he had entered -- as a flesh-and-blood Rorschach test: People saw in him what they wished. He was, depending upon the set of eyes observing him, the ultimate representation of male physicality and beauty; he was the post-9/11 symbol of indomitability; he was an earnest superstar trying only to reclaim what he loved; he was a guy who craved the spotlight too much; he was an older dude who did not have the same ups, as kids say of the aging, low-altitude leaper.

Of all these things, only the last judgment visibly nettled him. "I am not the same player," he said, "but when I get going, I believe I can still hold my own. . . . Even in the past, I wasn't dunking that much. . . . I do other things now."

When on a roll, he lost himself in basketball, and on New Year's Eve, as if to prove his masterpiece against Charlotte two nights earlier was no aberration, he scored 45 in a blowout victory over Eastern Division powerhouse New Jersey.

He looked beatific afterward, in a way he never would again that season. Other players rushed out to New Year's parties. Facing the media about 11:30 p.m., his silver earring glistening, Jordan talked longer than usual and, even after saying good night, he lingered, basking in the good feeling, wanting to talk a little more. Somebody in his retinue said, "Gettin' late. We better be goin', M.J."

Jordan raised an index finger like a sword: Wait.

He turned and told a couple of reporters that another 50-point game had been within his reach that night.

There had been only five back-to-back 50s in NBA history, and, though his name was already on that list, oh, man, he muttered exuberantly, how he would have loved to do it again, especially at age 38. "And I would've had it," he insisted, "if I didn't miss that last one" -- an allusion to an errant three-point attempt, after which he'd allowed Collins to take him out for good. "If that one goes," he said, "I'm there [at 48 points] and then . . . " -- he grinned, and flipped his wrist, in a gesture that meant 50 would have been only a hoop away, a done deal.

He insisted he felt great, answering a question no one had posed, talking about his bad knee although he'd spoken about it to the media horde two minutes earlier, preoccupied by the subject. "I'm getting treatment [for it]," he said. "If I can keep this tendinitis away -- knock on wood (he audibly conked his shaven head with a half-formed fist again, in what was becoming a favorite Jordan gesture) -- then obviously, you'll see how I can move."

It was 11:40 p.m. now. Another voice began pleading: Let's go, Mike. He happily relented, starting off on his night, yelling at something in the air, something only he could feel. "Yeah, yeah."

The euphoria would last for all of one more week.

Unhappy New Year

The new year brought two slices of hell -- one he saw coming only too late, and one he saw coming not at all. His right knee apparently sent no signals he could recognize. But a divorce petition seldom sneaks up on a man; a spouse's estrangement is a palpable thing. Twenty-four hours after his wife, Juanita, had filed her petition, Jordan candidly, if curtly, acknowledged his marriage's strains and alluded to his concern for his children -- the first small tentative steps toward trying to effect a reconciliation with her.

Sealed off, Jordan could see little or nothing coming at him. In Cleveland, Robert Mercer -- who made his living as "The Rumpshaker," an exotic dancer who could boast of a brief appearance on HBO's lurid little slice of Americana, the series "Real Sex" -- had mailed a registered letter to Wizards executive and close Jordan friend Rod Higgins, alleging Jordan's involvement in an extramarital affair. Jordan's Chicago attorney, Frederick Sperling, dashed off a response to the dancer, threatening legal action if he made his claims public.

Years earlier, Jordan had empowered Sperling to deal with Bobby Mercers. He wanted to be left alone to concentrate on basketball, and this had happened.

Such a splendid isolation required the vigilance of the Wizards coaches and the club's PR staff, which came to serve as his official gatekeepers. Even with the tight controls, however, people talked, information seeped out: Jordan's knee had grown worse, according to insiders watching him walk more gingerly than ever at closed-door practices that he increasingly sat out. Jordan's personal publicist, Estee Portnoy, made a phone call in an effort to learn the identities of those in the Wizards' circle who had privately -- and without Jordan's authorization -- spoken about the boss. "Michael doesn't like it when people try to make money off him," she told a reporter.

She recited a favorite Jordan aphorism: Those who know don't speak, and those who speak don't know.

It was, among other things, a cryptic order to those in his circle: Don't talk.

If October, November and December had been physically demanding, January was the death march for Jordan's knees. He played 41 minutes a game during one especially brutal road stretch. Phil Jackson privately told people that Jordan was playing too many minutes. Tex Winter, Jackson's highly regarded assistant, said it publicly: "I think he's running a real possibility of injury in the second half of the season if he keeps playing these kind of hard minutes."

A Coach's Postmortem

His right knee gave out on a balmy February Sunday in Miami, and surgery for torn cartilage swiftly followed. After only a three-week rehab, Jordan, the shadow boss, returned to tell Collins when he would play and, generally, for how long. Collins had earlier expressed disbelief that Jordan could possibly return from surgery without practicing several times, only to see Jordan show up in Denver, wanting to play.

As the most famous knee on the planet came back from arthroscopic surgery and swelled yet again, Collins increasingly found himself the subject of questions about the reasons for allowing Jordan to play at long stretches, or play at all.

By then, the coach's self-interest merged with Jordan's desires. In need of inspiring a banged-up squad that had difficulty scoring points, Collins began citing Jordan as the model of the hurting warrior who pushed on. But when Jordan's season ended with a ballooning right knee in a Milwaukee hotel room, the Wizards' playoff hopes succumbed with it, and something changed in Collins. His hazel eyes stopped flashing irritably at questions about Jordan's health. He began searching to explain why the comeback had imploded.

By the regular season's final day, he confessed that his younger players' struggles early in the year "probably seduced me" into playing Jordan too many minutes, noting with regret that Jordan had controlled their relationship.

"Michael has such a dominant personality," he said softly, "that he tells you he's feeling good and you want to believe it even when he's not. There are games when I played him 41 minutes when I probably should have played him 35. But I kept saying to myself, 'There's no back-to-back. He doesn't have to practice much tomorrow.' That [approach] took its toll, no question."

And then came the most surprising disclosure, one that seemingly nullified everything Collins had said for six months. "That knee wasn't right all season long," he said. "He probably hurt it in the summer."

He wondered what Jordan's attitude about such things as playing time might be if he came back for another season. His minutes would have to be cut, Collins said. "And the thing about it is, if it means he gets mad at me, then I'm gonna have to do it anyway, because" -- Collins paused for a split second, looked up in the air, said it -- "he won't do it on his own."

He never had, he never could. His appetites prevented that. Collins knew it now, too.

The Next Gamble

During the last days before his season's end, if only for a moment, the idol pulled up the shade on a mystery. He talked candidly about his tendinitis for the first time all year, grimly offering a theory about the origin of his troubles. His explanation eerily echoed the words and warnings of Tim Grover, six months earlier. The problem began, he said now, with his broken ribs, and the favoring of his hurting left knee. "I came back without that period of building myself up and from there it started: the flaring of the knee, the tendinitis. And parts of the body start to break down. And you start compensating and other things happen."

The next day, April 3, he was gone. He has not spoken publicly since his knee gave out in Milwaukee, leaving unanswered what the season meant to him and to the Washington Wizards.

For their part, Collins and other coaches have told the Wizards brass that the team cannot improve as it stands, triggering uncomfortable questions: How does one rebuild a team around a man just three months shy of 40 at the beginning of the next NBA season? What happens when his departure necessarily means the team must retool? How long are the the New Jacks willing to be the chorus for the Michael Show?

Not all his friends are anxious to see him return. In public, they usually praise his comeback, their reservations expressed only in private or in rare slips of public candor. Jordan was "a shadow of himself," Jackson said after the legend's final game against the Lakers, and few assessments could have cut deeper.

Jordan has spent parts of the last few weeks, friends say, in Monaco and Las Vegas, doing the predictable. There is always a Pit 21 somewhere out there, always a pile of blue chips waiting. Twenty years of breathless gambles played out in the din of arenas have left him with fewer interests than raging appetites, in love with adrenaline rushes that necessarily put a strain on real life to measure up. It hasn't, it can't. Where does he go to find what he wants?

About a week ago he resumed light workouts. No one knows, least of all Michael Jordan at midlife, where all this is going, or for how much longer. He always has given the impression he craves even this. The uncertainty. Some exquisite doubt. He is in love with risk.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company