“He actually had this curious ambivalence with Jordan,” said Sam Smith, who covered Pippen’s entire Bulls career and wrote the classic book, “The Jordan Rules.” “He wanted to be accepted and part of Jordan’s orbit, and I think that stemmed from, as a lot of it does, from where it came from. … He always really hungered for it, but Michael, being the shark he was, he would recognize that. He was so aware of people wanting to do that. “And then he would belittle Pippen when he was trying to be considered an equal, and then Pippen would go sort of crawling back to Horace Grant and the guys because he wasn’t accepted like he wanted to be.”
