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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Since the Wallace incident, the Bulls have gone on to a decent, if unspectacular, season. In many respects, the team reflects the coach-tough, intense, meticulously prepared, and a little short. There's no doubt that Skiles has returned the Bulls to respectability from their post-Jordan wallow. The team managed only 19 wins after Skiles took over for Bill Cartwright in November 2003, but has made the playoffs the last two seasons. Still, there are grumbles. Despite Skiles's "old-school" approach, the team is still given to lapses in fundamentals-failing to box out for rebounds, handling the ball poorly, botching offensive plays. Even more troubling to fans, the team has failed to advance beyond the first round
in its two playoff appearances under Skiles.

Few fans expect the Bulls to recapture the dominance and star power of the Michael Jordan years. The six championships that Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Phil Jackson, and others brought the city are a once-in-a-lifetime lightning strike. But that doesn't mean that Paxson, who was part of that dynasty as a player, will settle for less than another championship. "[The Jordan legacy] puts a demand on what fans expect," Paxson acknowledges. "There's no getting around that-and I understand that better than anybody." Which raises a question that has only grown more insistent as past glories have faded: Is "good" the best Skiles can do in a city starved for a return to great?


After the time-out, down goes another Suns jump shot, and up like a Chucky-in-the-box pops Skiles. He flings his arms up; his face lifts to the rafters as if to ask the gods of Better Basketball, "Why have you forsaken me?"

Skiles sees the look starting to come into his players' eyes-the thousand-yard stare. He cups his hands around his mouth and shouts encouragement. He claps. He cajoles the refs. In and out go the players, tearing off their sweats as they report to the scorer's table. "C'mon!" he yells, giving a toreador's wave as his Bulls rush back down the court. "Push it, push it, push it!" And Deng responds. He slashes to the basket and rises for a layup. Good! Skiles pistons his fist like a hammer blow.


"People have gotten this idea over the years that I'm this authority figure, that I'm some kind of crazy taskmaster," Skiles says in the low, intense, slightly menacing tone that would confirm the general fear for many. And you're not? "Well, I'm not mad at anybody," he says, sounding slightly mad. "That's just my face when I'm thinking about what the hell we need to do. I'm not going to bite anybody's head off." No? "No," he says, laughing. "I have a strong personality. It's part of who I am. It's not intentional."

Glass argues that Skiles's sour puss is a function of his brainpower. "When you're very intelligent you don't walk around like a goofball," the agent says. "You're not a happy idiot."

Of his demeanor, Skiles says, "People who know me really well laugh at it, but if you don't know me that well I understand that I can come across as a little bit . . . unreachable or whatever."

"Unreachable" is an apt word. In the three-plus years since Paxson introduced Skiles as the man to succeed the ineffectual Bill Cartwright, Skiles has given virtually no interviews of the sort that might dispel-or at least soften-the caricature of him as surly and unapproachable. Skiles consented to talk with me for this story only after it became clear that I had talked to a number of people familiar with his career, including critics.

When he does make himself available before and after games, as all NBA coaches are required to do, he is rarely asked-nor would he likely comment-about much beyond what kind of night Ben Wallace had or why Kirk Hinrich isn't shooting better. And so, the ritual is the same: Skiles, clad in a sober, dark suit, strides before the cameras, his jaw set, his head tilted slightly down. His dark eyes, alert, slightly beady, occasionally meet those of the reporters, but not often. Instead, it seems, he addresses the ground, his voice low and measured, intense and barbed with a rural Indiana twang.

So if he hates attention so much, why would he seek to coach in the NBA? Why not Podunk College, where he could teach far from the bright lights and bling of the pros? Simple, he says. "You're coaching the best players in the world at the highest level and you have an opportunity to creatively manipulate the game. Not every game. But you have more timeouts; you can do things like move the ball to half court. I'm not down on the college game. I know I could do very well in college. But the NBA was where I wanted to be."

The persona has been the same since he starred as a point guard at Plymouth High School in north-central Indiana, then later at Michigan State University, where he was perceived as cocky, overly emotional, preachy, and smug-perceptions not helped by three arrests in college, one for marijuana possession and two for driving under the influence. His swaggering reputation continued during his time as an NBA player and later as a head coach for Phoenix, where he was brought in to instill discipline in a team that had grown lax. Despite a 50-win season, Skiles was asked to move on after rumors that several veteran players were sniping about his methods. He was too hard, they complained. They were grown men. They didn't need a dad scolding them as if they were learning the game on a driveway rim over the garage. "There was some resentment," says Tom Gugliotta. "What Skiles ran into was that a lot of players were already set in their ways."

Retreating to his Indiana home near Bloomington, he was without basketball for the first time in his life, faced with an uncertain future, in the state where his destiny, and his fierce persona, were fixed as surely as the plastic basketball hoop in his playpen.


Plymouth, Indiana, some two hours from Chicago, 25 miles south of South Bend, is the kind of small Midwestern town Sinclair Lewis wrote about in Main Street-a 10,000-resident amalgam of family-owned shops and parks, with a bowling alley, a 136-year-old courthouse, a blueberry festival, and a drive-in theatre. Weekend nights revolve around "The Rock"-the gleaming, 4,000-seat gym at Plymouth High School.
This is a place where the number of season ticket holders (about 1,500) is greater than the total enrollment of the school (1,042). "Basketball is big," says Plymouth High athletic director Roy Benge. "It's the focal point of Friday and Saturday nights here. It pays the bills."

"Scotty" Skiles spent his grammar-school years in nearby Walkerton, an even smaller town, where he rooted for the Chicago Bulls on a fuzzy television set. "I'd turn the rabbit ears and I could watch Jerry Sloan and Norm Van Lier," he recalls. "I loved the Bulls." His father had big plans for his son and they didn't include the boy living out his life in an Indiana backwater working 12-hour days in a factory-the old man's story. Rick Skiles had been an athlete, a high-school basketball player. And from the day his son was born he set out to make the boy into what he had not become: a star. Starting with a basketball hoop in the two-year-old's playpen, the father pushed Scott mercilessly in sports-a fact both father and son acknowledge. "I knew when I was seven years old and I was in Little League that if I struck out, on the way home there was going to be some consequences," Scott recalls. "Not getting beat up or anything like that, but there was going to be some pretty firm discussion about it."

On the basketball court, the father literally pushed his young son. "We'd play in the driveway and I'd knock him down and tell him, ‘This is how it's going to be when you get up there,'" Rick Skiles told the Chicago Tribune's Melissa Isaacson in 2003, shortly after his son was hired to coach the Bulls. (The father, who suffered a stroke more than two years ago, no longer grants interviews.) "No matter what he had done, I'd criticize him and never build him up. He may have scored 35 points but had six turnovers, and I'd ask him about the turnovers. I regret that now, that I pushed him that hard."

Scott recalls the parents of fellow players fretting to his mother, a nurse's aide: "They'd say, ‘Do you know what Rick's doing to your son down at practice?'" Scott Skiles says. "He would be hitting grounders to me five times as hard as he would other kids and if I missed I'd have to run laps." Yoked to such expectations, Skiles developed into a brilliant young athlete and a living expression of his father's unforgiving obsession. "I was a pretty sore loser," he admits. "If things went wrong out there, I would get very emotional. I'd throw my hat," glove, bat-whatever piece of equipment was handy.

Today, Skiles defends his father. "Yeah, there were some tough moments," he says. "As a child that small, it bothered me a little bit, but probably not like it should have. I knew that my dad was working 8, 10, 12 hours a day and that he would still come home and hit me grounders until it was dark. My father was a factory worker who gave of his time in a way that I don't think that many people do. I just think he pushed because he thought I could take it and thought I was good. And I wanted to be good just as badly as he wanted me to." (His parents divorced about 15 years ago; his mother still lives in Cape Coral, Florida, where she moved while Skiles was playing for Orlando.)

"What I learned from [my father] was that I was not going to be allowed to blame other people for things that happened," he says. "Things are so sissified now. If I mentioned something that a teammate did, [my father] would say, ‘Go look in the mirror and see whose fault it is.'"

Other boys in the area began to hear of the young prodigy-and his healthy ego. "Even at that age he had a certain swagger to him," recalls Phil Wendel, who would later share the backcourt with Skiles on the Plymouth High team. What made him so special? "He just played so hard," says Wendel. "He had this intense drive. It was always there. I'm sure his dad had a big impact on that."

When Scott was 11, and already a budding star in basketball, baseball, and football, the father packed up the family-including Scott's sister, Brenda, a fine athlete in her own right-and moved them to Plymouth. The town was scarcely bigger than Walkerton, but it had a deserved reputation as a basketball hotbed. Jack Edison, a 2005 inductee into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame who still coaches the high-school varsity team, says Skiles, "was strong, was tough, and, boy, did he hate to lose."

Skiles says his father's tough love served him well in at least one respect. "What I learned from him was that I was not going to be allowed to blame other people for things that happened," he says. "Things are so sissified now. If I mentioned something that a teammate did, [my father] would say, ‘Go look in the mirror and see whose fault it is.'"

Still, Skiles demanded a lot of his teammates-barking at them when they blew plays, telling them where to stand, positioning their feet. "I remember one time he drilled me in the side of the head with the ball, and I was about ready to kill him," says Larry Johns, another high-school teammate. "But when I looked at him, the expression on his face was like, ‘Hey, look, you were open. If you're open, I'm going to pass you the ball.'"

Even some college players were taking notice of Skiles, including a star player at Notre Dame named John Paxson. "When he strutted out there, he just had a confidence you didn't often see in high school," Paxson recalls.

So what was it like to play with Skiles back then? "Painful," says Pete Rockaway, also a high-school teammate. "Practices were brutal. Scott was such a basketball genius that it would become very frustrating to him when other players would make mistakes. It was like trying to explain math to a three-year-old, and we were the three-year-olds. But we knew he was just trying to make us better. And how can you complain? We won the state championship."