The late general manager’s widow was left in tears by Chicago fans. They forget he helped build a team that gave them great joy
Last Friday the Chicago Bulls held a halftime ceremony to unveil their Ring of Honor, a pantheon reserved for the organization’s greatest contributors, but many of them couldn’t make it. Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen are feuding as a wedding between Michael’s eldest son and Pippen’s ex-wife draws near. Dennis Rodman was waylaid by weather, he says. Jerry Krause, the architect of the team’s 1990s dynasty, died in 2017 – leaving his 80-year-old wife, Thelma, to represent him on court with her children and grandchildren sprinkled among the crowd. She came dressed in black – a sign, maybe, that the loss of her husband is still fresh in her mind. In hindsight, she would have been better off staying home.
When Krause’s name was announced among the 13 inaugural inductees, a sizable number of the 21,000-odd spectators at the United Center booed him long and lustily as Thelma sat on front row center between the son of the late Hall of Fame coach Jerry Sloan (a star guard for the Bulls in the ’60s and ’70s) and longtime assistant coach Tex Winter, mastermind of the triangle offense. Ron Harper, the rugged point man for the second half of the Bulls’ ’90s run, consoled Thelma as she dissolved into tears and threw up her hands, as if crying uncle. “I was totally unprepared for the reaction,” she would say in a later statement to the TV news magazine Inside Edition. “I can’t call them fans because a fan would know better.”
