We were in and around everything, from the daily routine of practices and shootarounds to long game nights that began hours before tip-off and didn't end until the last live report was done and the last piece of sound sent. It was full immersion in the Bulls, culminating in playoff travel that had us in the team hotel in each city, a front-row seat for so much of the other action.
The only thing I could really have done without was the horrible, choking cigar smoke in a celebratory locker room.
That, and Dennis Rodman.
As hard as it must have been for Jackson to coach him or Jordan to wrangle him, they at least had the occasional luxury of ignoring him when it just got to be too much. Those of us responsible for reporting regularly on his latest antics or whereabouts, however, had no such luck. And it wasn't just the repeated cycle of activity when he'd have one of his behavioral spasms, it was the understanding of how he was actively feeding off the attention he knew he'd create.
We had no choice but to play along, because people couldn't get enough of his grotesque performance art, from his hairstyles to his late nights that turned into semi-excused Berto Center absences the next morning. Whatever it was would be the talk of everything, no matter how dumb or transparently self-aware. At the time, this was a city suffering repeated traffic disruptions from gapers at a Kennedy expressway Rodman billboard, so you can imagine what surrounded the real thing.
Rodman went out of his way to be a spectacle when arriving at the arena, emerging from his ride with an ever-changing coterie of lurid hangers-on and never stopping to answer questions as we coalesced around him like insects in a sad and dehumanizing swarm as he sashayed down the hall of the arena.
"Why did you kick that man in the crotch, Dennis?"
"Why were you so late to practice this morning?"
"Why did you head-butt the referee?"
"Do you really think that about Mormons? Why? What did they ever do to you?"
There were never any discernible or useful answers, not until the team's media relations department released an official statement of some kind that explained what happened and included words from him that were written by somebody else. By then, we had emerged from the scrum to see what body parts needed attention and what recording equipment had to be repaired or replaced.
Coverage in this era was full contact, requiring both a plan and a willingness to be simultaneously jabbed in the ribs by a tape deck and nailed in the back of the head by the leading edge of a 30-pound TV camera. And while it happened daily around Jordan and others, the fast-moving Rodman pile-ups were a danger all their own -- falls weren't uncommon among backpedaling photographers or anyone not remembering where the folding chairs or open doors may be.
And it was so much effort for something so stupid. That's why we'd straggle back to the press room openly asking what the hell we had signed up for and what the point of it was. Covering sports can seem silly enough in its own right, competing to get answers to questions about which way a ball just happened to bounce. But when it necessitated all of that to take part in a production so histrionic and contrived, literally climbing over each other to ask whether Dennis Rodman cared that Oprah cancelled his appearance on her show, it was almost unjustifiable.
Nothing that has happened since those days has done anything to make it any less so.