I Must Break You
Most Bulls fans know the stories about Jordan punching Steve Kerr or dogging Stacey King or Bill Wennington in practices. He asked a lot of his teammates, and sometimes things got heated. In his interview with Wojnarowski, Krause pulled a new example of that friendly fire out of the vault.
“There was a fine player named Steve Colter. We traded for Steve Colter instead of drafting Johnny Dawkins. Didn’t want Dawkins, thought Dawkins was going to get hurt…We brought Steve in. Steve Colter was a good guy, a good player. Michael wrecked him. Every day in practice, he just hurt him…[MJ] never said a word to me personally, but he made sure that I knew that this wasn’t Johnny Dawkins. This was some guy that I had traded for and that he was going to wreck. And he did. Steve I think played another two years in the league, and was never the same player. Michael hurt him bad in practice every day, and he went after him. Just the way he did with Kukoc. Went after Kukoc the same way, but Toni responded.” – Jerry Krause
Speaking of Kukoc, Jerry goes through the entire scouting process of the Croatian forward in his interview with The Vertical. Most of it is stuff Bulls fans already know. The skepticism from other league scouts, the Dream Team’s games against Croatia in the Barcelona Olympics, etc. But Krause made a point of separating Kukoc from the rest of the players Jordan challenged. And Krause’s final thought on Kukoc is very surprising.
“Michael would get on a guy. He’d say, ‘You don’t deserve to be here’ or this or that. And he’d laugh at them, because he wanted to see the reaction. He could bring nothing out of Toni. Toni was stone-faced and played hard all the time, and he won their respect. The hardest thing I ever had to do in sports was to go to Toni Kukoc’s home and tell him I traded him. Hardest thing I ever had to do. I cried.” – Jerry Krause
Krause cried when he had to part ways with The Waiter. Wow. Fans knew Jerry’s international scouting was the reason the Bulls got Kukoc, but that element of their deeper relationship hadn’t really come out before. Kukoc played in the NBA until 2006, and has returned to the Bulls as a Special Advisor to president and COO Michael Reinsdorf.
Now, back to Krause’s relationship with Jordan, who caught the Bulls general manager completely off-guard when he retired…and came back.
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