veganfan21 wrote:
Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
long time guy wrote:
Caller Bob wrote:
long time guy wrote:
The Oakley trade was sort of a big deal back then too. For me it was sort of a where were you and what were you doing sort of thing as it happened Freshman year of High School. It was the same night as the Tyson-Spinks fight.
Interesting that Jordan was praising the trade in the documentary, if I recall there was a story where Jordan and Oakley were at the Tyson fight the night the trade went down and Jordan was furious.
Yeah definitely the way it was portrayed at the time too. Jordan didn't much care for Cartwright because of that. I remember there being story about Cartwright threatening to break Jordan's leg in the locker room over something after one of their games. Forget the specific incident but he told Jordan directly that he would do it.
Yeah, I forget what shitty thing Jordan did or said that made Cartwright so furious. Cartwright was so pissed off he started to cry.
Bill Cartwright was a center whose elbows the Bulls compared to Scud missiles: They were lethal but you never knew exactly where they were going to land. First, Jordan showed up Cartwright by throwing him no-look passes he couldn’t catch. Then, during the 1989–90 season, he ordered Bulls players not to pass the ball to Cartwright late in games. Cartwright told Jordan that if he heard of a similar ukase, Jordan would "never play basketball again." Jordan and Cartwright got along OK after that. (As Horace Grant would note, the one way to gain Jordan’s respect was to challenge him.)
There was more too. It's all in Smith's book.
https://www.theringer.com/2017/6/9/1603 ... b12d6d3e15JORDAN AND BILL CARTWRIGHT
MJ and Bill Cartwright were, for a time, co-captains of the Bulls.
Sam Smith, in ""The Jordan Rules"" wrote that Jordan had no respect for Cartwright, told his teammates to keep the ball away from Cartwright in crucial late-game situations (even if coach Doug Collins called a play involving Cartwright), and bellittled the veteran publicly. Cartwright confronted Jordan:
Excerpt: He didn't do or say anything to anybody until late that season, when he told Jordan he needed to talk to him.
There was little small talk exchanged. "I don't like the things I've heard you saying about me," Cartwright told Jordan.
Jordan stared at him.
"If Iever hear again that you're telling guys not to pass me the ball," Cartwright continued, "you will never play basketball again."
That was it. But as Cartwright began to move better after surgery following the 1989-90 season, Jordan began to accept him more.
David Halberstam, in "Playing for Keeps," paints a similar picture.
Note: Jordan can be wrong. Very wrong.
Excerpt: Jordan did not respect Cartwright as a man or as a player. He called him Medical Bill because of his past injuries. He thouught Cartwright had bad hands, so sometimes in practice he threw him passes that were unnecessarily hard so that Cartwright would fumble them and prove Jordan's point. About no other player was Michael Jordan to prove quite so wrong as about Bill Cartwright, both as a man and as a player, but it took him almost two years to realize it and admit it.
Janet Lowe, in ""Michael Jordan Speaks: Lessons from the World's Greatest Champion"," explained how MJ admitted his error, with big-time class:
Excerpt: Jordan acknowledged later that he had been unhappy when the Bulls traded away his friend Charles Oakley in 1988 to bring in Cartwright, a veteran in the waning years of his playing career.
Later, Michael made amends to Cartwright and to management who arranged the trade with a tribute to Cartwright across a two-page spread of Jordan's coffee-table book, For the Love of the Game: My Story. A sprawling headline across the top of pages 40-41 read: "I was wrong about the Charles Oakley-Bill Cartwright trade in 1988." Across the bottom was written, "I loved having Charles on the team, but Bill made the difference."
http://www.espn.com/espn/page2/story?page=merron/041109
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