by Dick MacWhen I was a boy in Boston, I would watch Bill Russell play against Wilt Chamberlain and I (like so many) just assumed that the Boston Celtics would be the NBA champions.
In the 1980s, I was treated to Larry Bird and those amazing Celtics teams that built a rivalry with Magic Johnson and the Los Angeles Lakers.
Then Michael Jordan arrived. He was called the savior of the league, the player that would move the NBA into the big time.
Oddly, I thought the NBA was already the big time and I was under the impression that the league was doing just fine. Shows you what I know.
I continued to follow the NBA through the late-1980s; but I found that the sport had changed. Cheating was rampant, sociopathic behavior was becoming the norm, officiating was embarrassing, and priced rose and rose and rose.
I found Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls to be particularly unpleasant to watch. They weren't like the other great NBA teams I remembered and Jordan is a punk. He's a penny-ante criminal in a big boys game.
Crime is now the norm among NBA players, and thuggery is the rule, not the exception.
Jordan and the dullards who followed him make Wilt Chamberlain's claim to sexual insanity seem quaint and normal.
And the owners of the Bulls enabled this criminal culture. I once heard that Michael Jordan's retirement form the NBA and introduction to baseball was orchestrated by the league, because NBA Security warned that he was about to be implicated in a gambling scandal. If Jordan would vanish from the sport for awhile, NBA Security would make the whole thing go away.
So Jordan, under contract to Bulls ownership was transferred to their other team, the Chicago White Sox and played baseball for a couple years. When the heat was off, he returned to basketball.
Jordan's father was murdered, and the backstory is alleged to be that Jordan and his father were messing with the big boys in the gambling world and that the father's murder was a warning to Jordan about getting his house in order.
Perhaps just rumor, but it really fits the image of today's NBA.
Come now, Chicago Bulls executive vice president John Paxson, who like other sports franchise owners believes that he is above the law. After the Bulls lost to the Suns last month, Paxson confronted coach Vinny Del Negro and threatened him.
The incident was witnessed by many.
It is now in the media: Bulls VP Paxson shoved Del Negro
Why does this matter? Why does anyone care? The NBA is a league of thuggery, and the Bulls are the root of the moral collapse of the sport. Let them all rot! Take the cameras off them and let them go away.
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