Bull Buster

Scott Skiles was the ideal coach to pull the Chicago Bulls out of their post-Jordan abyss. A hard-nosed taskmaster, he molded a collection of raw underachievers into a unit that, much like Skiles in his playing days, hustles and sweats and scraps. But now that the team is respectable again, is the short-fused, sharp-tongued Skiles the right guy to lead the Bulls back to glory?

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"Time out. Time out. Goddamn it, time out!"

The gorilla mascot, all fake fur and fury, flies onto the court in his purple-and-gold Phoenix Suns jersey and pummels his chest. Hard-bodied dancers bump and grind to molar-rattling hip-hop. As the Suns players bound toward their bench in a flurry of high-fives, the balding man in the dark suit just glares.

It is a Sunday night at US Airways Center in Phoenix and the home-team crowd, glum for most of the game, roars with almost three quarters' worth of bottled-up frustration. Until now, the Chicago Bulls had dominated the game-building a 15-point lead on one of the hottest teams in the NBA. The Bulls had seemed poised and scrappy, playing the kind of ball sorely missed since the days of you-know-who. Then Phoenix began draining three-point shots as if they were cups of beer. The Bulls, who minutes earlier had snapped passes around the perimeter, now look like an over-40 rec club that has raided the cooler.

The Bulls' coach, Scott Skiles, has seen enough. Leaping to his feet, he snaps his jacket shut and shoots his cuffs. "Time out!" he screams. His piercing dark brown eyes flash, withering his players as they skulk to the bench. With all deliberate venom, he forms, then spits, the f-word.

To anyone who has watched Skiles coach the Bulls these past three years, his face in such moments limns a familiar portrait-a sneering, jaw-clenching mask inflamed by muscle-knotting fury. Chucky the horror movie doll with a clipboard.

It is the kind of reaction that earned him the reputation-first in college, then as a pro player, and later as coach at Phoenix-as belligerent, thin-skinned, a walking temper tantrum, someone with the short fuse (and idiocy) to take a swing at his Orlando Magic teammate, the seven-foot one-inch Shaquille O'Neal. "He's as joyless and red-assed as always, I assume?" says Brian Schmitz, a beat reporter for the Orlando Sentinel covering the Magic. "How intense is Scott Skiles?" adds the Magic's senior vice president, Pat Williams. "He came out of his mother's womb in a three-point stance."

But his temper aside, Skiles, 43, has always impressed with his passion, his command of the game, and his teaching ability. "Even as a player, he was keeping a little book of different things about the game, plays, scenarios," recalls former Atlanta forward Tom Gugliotta, who played under Skiles in Phoenix. "You won't find a more organized, well-prepared, smarter coach. There are guys who might not like it, but that's because he demands a lot."

Since Skiles took over the Bulls in 2003, he and general manager John Paxson have stocked the team with players who seem to buy into the coach's grinding, old-fashioned, defense-first approach to the game. "I'll put him with anybody in terms of knowing the game," says point guard Chris Duhon, who played at Duke under hoops sage Mike Krzyzewski. Adds point guard Kirk Hinrich, "He's old school. I think that's just what he believes-coming in and giving a hard day's work." Luol Deng, the rising star also out of Duke, says that despite Skiles's notoriously hard practices and demanding attitude, "I like playing for him. He has a way of getting us to play hard every night."

And though his public face rarely appears to budge beyond a range of emotions between dour and distant, on rare occasions-even in the midst of a bad patch such as the one this night in Phoenix-he will let something slip: a smile. Seriously. Chucky does smile.


"A guy asked me on Fox this morning-first question: ‘Does Skiles ever smile?'" says Keith Glass, who has been Skiles's agent and adviser for more than 20 years and includes a chapter about Skiles in his book, Taking Shots. "The answer is, Of course. If you ever remember the movie Cool Hand Luke, Paul Newman would give this little smile. That's what I called Scott's smile-that little Luke smile; when he was beating you, when he was losing to you, he'd give that little smile."

Skiles says his players have seen it. "The Ben Gordons, the Chris Duhons, Luol Dengs, they understand my sense of humor," Skiles says. "They know that sometimes when I appear to be really serious, I'm just very focused." Duhon agrees, sort of: "If we're winning, he loosens up. If we're not winning, he's not so funny." Duhon says Skiles can even be patient-to a point. "At first he'll tell you about a mistake in a calm manner, with a calm demeanor," Duhon says. "But if you keep making the same mistakes-let's just say you don't want to be on the other side of that confrontation."

Duhon thinks that Skiles keeps a distance to avoid blurring the line between coach and players. "I think he wants to establish respect," Duhon says. "He's so young as a coach. That's his main goal-not to cross that line." Chicago Tribune reporter K. C. Johnson, who covers the Bulls, doesn't buy into the stereotype of Skiles as overbearing hothead. "Scott's a badass," Johnson says, "and I think he kind of gets off on that. But I don't say that in a negative way. He's a badass because his whole career has been backing up what he believes in and holding those around him accountable. That trait is rare in any profession these days, much less professional sports."

Skiles's approach has earned some not-so-kind words from former players, including Tyson Chandler, the young forward who at one time was considered a cornerstone of the Bulls' post-Jordan rebuilding plan. Skiles "is not a good person," Chandler said in March before his first game back at the United Center after being traded to the Hornets. "That's obvious in the way he treats his players."

Perhaps Skiles's biggest test as the Bulls' coach came last November when he clashed with the newly acquired $60-million Ben Wallace over whether Wallace could wear a headband. The Bulls' rules forbade it. Not only did Wallace defy Skiles; he showed up wearing a band of bold red. "That was a blatant act of insubordination," Johnson says. "It was clearly a case of two strong-willed guys doing a stare-down."

Skiles held Wallace out of the game until the center removed the headband. But just before the start of the second half, Wallace put it on again. Again, Skiles took him out.

What struck Johnson about the incident, however, was Skiles's restraint. Asked after the game whether he was upset at Wallace, Skiles told reporters, "No. I don't know why. I'm just not." Whether he really felt that way-and a postgame, closed-door, raised-voice team meeting suggests he did not-Wallace no longer wears the headband. Which reminds Johnson of a comment Skiles made during the 2003 season: "I've never lost a battle of wills in my life. And I don't plan on doing it now."