sore winners

Graeme Wood forwards an article suggesting that FANS OF A TEAM THAT IS WINNING ARE MORE LIKELY TO BECOME VIOLENT.

It is notable that the site of the study seems to be Wales, because my previous sense had been that in most countries except the United States, fans were more likely to be violent after defeats. The great riots during my years in Chicago, however, were always after Bulls championships. There wasn’t the slightest disturbance after the Bulls were shocked by Orlando in the playoffs shortly after Michael Jordan’s 1995 return from retirement.

That heavy blow to Chicago’s gut has largely been forgotten, since the Bulls immediately came back to win three more titles from 1996-98. But at the time it stripped Jordan of some of his aura of superhuman invincibility. What really happened, in my opinion, is that the Bulls were simply too weak at power forward in 1995 following Horace Grant’s departure for– none other than Orlando. Horace ate his old Chicago teammates alive in the ’95 playoffs. And though JERRY KRAUSE is much and often deservedly maligned for his work as General Manager, he did take the necessary gamble on DENNIS RODMAN in the fall of ’95, which many believed would never work out. It worked out spectacularly well, of course, despite a few rocky patches.

It’s a bit of a digression, but I also think Krause deserves credit for one other decision at the time. He was known for giving a battery of psychological tests to all potential Bulls, and I like others assumed that this was mostly power-mongering sadism on Krause’s part. (“If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?”, etc.) Rodman was widely considered out of his mind at the time. In fact, after the Bulls made the trade with San Antonio to acquire Rodman, a jilted JAYSON WILLIAMS joked: “The Bulls brought me in for three days of psychological tests, and the next day they took Dennis Rodman instead.”

At the time it was a hilarious one-liner by Williams. But not so funny these days, following Williams’s manslaughter charges, and reports during the trial that he had earlier gunned down one of his own dogs for no good reason. And meanwhile, to everyone’s surprise, Rodman has not retired into an endless series of “tragic” stories, but has mostly stayed out of the news. Rodman has turned out to be nothing more than an eccentric but likable attention-seeker, not a sociopath or even mentally ill, by any means.

In any case, my respect for Krause’s psychological tests skyrocketed following the Williams shooting incident.

The Bulls also had another brush with a strange story involving a power forward. That would be the remarkable Brian Williams, who provided vital assistance in the 1997 finals against Utah, and later changed his name to BISON DELE before disappearing at sea with three others in July 2002, all of them presumably murdered by Dele’s own brother– who later committed suicide.

Here is the ORIGINAL ESPN STORY reporting Dele and his girlfriend Serena Karlan missing, quite sad with the benefit of hindsight. (The third disappeared person was the French boat captain.)