It was a different era.
Michael Jordan was famous, but not the most famous person in the world. Scottie Pippen was a rookie from the backwoods of Arkansas. Doug Collins had a perm and coached practice in a sweater and jeans.
It was a time when you could watch Jordan dunk on teammates and then see a Bull eating yogurt or getting cleaned up in the locker room.
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Those were the days when the Bulls trained in a semi-private health club in a suburban strip mall. Nowadays, NBA teams have private facilities and guard practice information like it’s a state secret. A clap in the hallway might alert reporters that they can come in and watch players get up shots.
But in the late 1980s and the first season of the Bulls dynasty, you could still get up and close and personal with the Bulls.
Artis Gilmore stands while a young Michael Jordan sits during a Bulls practice at the Deerfield Multiplex in 1987. (Courtesy David Marx)“I’m in the shower and Artis Gilmore is in the shower. It’s a weird experience to be in the shower with a future Hall of Famer,” David Marx told me in a phone call.
So who is David Marx? Well in 1987, he was an amateur photographer with a plan.
He knew the Bulls practiced at the Deerfield Multiplex, a new facility. So one day, he ventured there in the early afternoon and got a guest pass with the premise he was looking to join. (He lived in a distant suburb.)
He snuck in a camera and then he waited for Bulls practice to start. He was surprised that no one was there with him, but the members at the Multiplex were used to the Bulls being around.
So he camped out by the court and began snapping pictures. No one stopped him — today a security team would have him arrested, his film destroyed — and Jordan even gave him an autograph when he stepped out of the gym.
He was thrilled with the pictures he got.
In a coincidence years later, Marx wound up working with the Bulls through his job with Ameritech. In 1991, just before the NBA Finals began, Dennis Hopson invited him back to practice where he got another chance to snap pictures of the Bulls.
Michael Jordan and the Bulls prepare to practice before starting the NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers in 1991. (Courtesy David Marx)It would be the last year the Bulls used the facility, which opened in 1986. The Bulls went from practicing in an old orphanage when Jerry Reinsdorf bought the team to the Multiplex to being the first NBA team to build its own facility, the Berto Center, in 1992.
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“Irwin Mandel came up with the Multiplex and we thought that was fantastic,” Reinsdorf said in 2014 of the retired Bulls executive. “But pretty soon we found that the players showering with members of the Multiplex wasn’t a great idea.”
At the opening of the Advocate Center in 2014, Reinsdorf credited former assistant coach Tex Winter with the idea of the Bulls buying a tennis club. Instead, they built the new facility in Deerfield, which was their home for 22 years.
Marx would go on to get press passes for Bulls and Blackhawks games over the years, while also making his way to the Berto Center to do things like help Jerry Krause set up his office phone. He and his wife once sat with June Jackson at a game after delivering a GPS cell phone to their house for their daughter’s European trip.
Marx now lives in Loveland, Ohio, where he owns a consulting business and where Tony Korzyniewski, the deputy director of recreation for the Deerfield Park District, tracked him down in 2019. Korzyniewski helps run the Sachs Center, which is what the Multiplex is called now that it’s the property of the Deerfield Park District. The Sachs Center was supposed to be going through a rehab process to freshen it up and Korzyniewski was looking for pictures of the Bulls to frame in the lobby and near the court.
Doug Collins and Charles Oakley watch as Michael Jordan throws down a dunk in practice in 1987. (Courtesy David Marx)He wanted to honor the gym’s past, which was shown during practice clips of “The Last Dance.”
He found Marx’s website through a Google search and Marx agreed to share his pictures for nothing more than credit. The project is delayed, of course, but Korzyniewski still plans to add the pictures.
The old court, which still has a Bulls logo on it, is still being used, and not just for kids’ birthday parties. The Chicago Sky practice there now. Years ago, I walked in to see Elena Delle Donne filming a Nike commercial on the communal courts. Recently, I saw a Sky player come in to get shots up, only to have to wait for a kid’s birthday party to end.
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The Sachs Center loaned Allie Quigley basketballs and an exercise bicycle before her HORSE competition on ESPN. (Olympic-level rhythmic gymnastics athletes also train there. Less enthusiastically, my daughter takes tennis lessons there as well.)
A neighbor who works at the Sachs Center told me about the pictures last year and I planned on writing about them if the Sky advanced in the WNBA playoffs. They didn’t and I forgot about the idea until last week. That’s when I emailed Korzyniewski and he put me in touch with Marx.
Looking back on it now, Marx is amazed at how easy it was to get up close to the Bulls.
“Yeah, I just went in and got a guest pass,” he said. “I went an hour or two before practice, so it looked like I was a member. It wasn’t that big of a deal. I went over there for practice. Looking back, there weren’t hundreds of people watching. There was virtually nobody there.”
When he returned in 1991, it was a little more formalized (the Bulls eventually put curtains up) but until practice ended, he said he was again one of a few people watching. Marx snapped more pictures, including one of Phil Jackson reacting after getting a basketball in the groin.
Michael Jordan (right) shares a laugh with Phil Jackson, who is covering himself after getting hit in the groin with a basketball. (Courtesy David Marx)Marx was using a basic camera and his pictures, grainy after going through a scanner, capture a simpler time in sports.
While you can see professional athletes and other celebrities at places like the East Bank Club — where thousands of people claim they played basketball with state senator Barack Obama — and suburbanites can hoop with the Bears in Vernon Hills, watching an NBA team practice in a health club is a relic of another age.
It’s not as if Jordan weren’t a big deal at the time and he was certainly besieged by autograph seekers in the parking lot, but the Bulls were able to coexist for a time with the hoi polloi. Jordan even played pickup ball in the city during his brief first retirement.
Around this time, my wife, then a young teenager, was at the Love’s Yogurt on the second floor of the Multiplex when her mom used the cliche, “When there’s a will, there’s a way.” My wife replied, “There’s a Will.” It was Will Perdue getting something to eat.
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