Beautiful morning, cool and dry, sunlight crashing down on the

street outside. A waiter rushes forward every six minutes to

check on water and coffee, and anything else, sir? Everyone here

in Portland's oppressively quiet Heathman Hotel gives off that

fresh scent of boutique soap and the rustle of expensive fibers.

Everyone here has money to burn. Scottie Pippen sits over his

breakfast by a window. A thin wire snakes down from his left

ear, a wire that, near his mouth, expands into a tiny

microchipped mouthpiece. There is no annoying chirp or ring;

Pippen halts a conversation in mid-sentence and starts talking

to some voice in his ear, and if there were no wire snaking

down, you would think he was a babbling madman instead of what

he is: wealthy, accessorized, constantly in demand. He watches

the cars speed past the window, watches blankly as packs of kids

stop and gawk at him. "All right," he says. "O.K." Just as

abruptly, he turns his eyes back to the table.

"I dropped my car off at the Mercedes place to get it fixed, and

they gave me this little-ass car, a Honda Accord," Pippen says

to his breakfast companion. "That was the serviceman calling me

back, and he was pissed, too, at what they gave me. I told the

girl when I left, 'Man, what a damn trade-off: I give you a 2000

Mercedes, a $100,000 car, and you give me a $20,000 car to use?'"

Pippen shrugs oh-so-slightly. He has delivered all this with the

sly, oddly timed grin to which basketball fans have been treated

for the past 12 years, and the same monotone that has left so

many listeners underwhelmed. "People don't see him as an

intelligent person, maybe because he doesn't always make

intelligent choices," says Los Angeles Lakers coach Phil

Jackson, Pippen's former coach with the Chicago Bulls. "But

there's actually this intelligence that can astound you. His

level of awareness on the court is very high."

Pippen returns to the subject at hand: his joy over going from

the Houston Rockets to the Portland Trail Blazers on Oct. 2 in a

blockbuster trade; his happiness with his new teammates'

unselfish ways; his satisfaction--even though he had asked

Houston to trade him to the Lakers--at playing in the piney,

small-town ambience of Portland. Again he abruptly cocks his

head to look out the window. "Hey, Dave," he says. Twenty

seconds pass in silence. "What are you saying? List it for a

million four?"

He is hardly suffering; this you can plainly say. Even after one

of the worst offensive seasons of his career (14.5 points per

game), even after his toxic depiction of former Rockets teammate

Charles Barkley as a lazy, overweight loser, Pippen seems at

ease. This is strange. Last season was the NBA's first in the

post-Jordan era, and no one embodied the league's struggle to

move on better than Pippen. While the league contended with its

bitter lockout, its amputee season and the lowest-rated Finals

in the 1990s, the Rockets' ill-conceived attempt to concoct

championship chemistry by adding Pippen to superstars Barkley

and Hakeem Olajuwon degenerated into finger-pointing, strained

friendships and a first-round exit from the '99 playoffs. No one

this decade had gained more from life with Jordan than Pippen,

and despite Pippen's acknowledged greatness, no one had suffered

more from that association: Scottie couldn't win without

Michael, it had been said before, during and after Jordan's

first retirement, from October 1993 to April '95, and in

Houston, it seemed, there was more proof.

"I miss playing with him," Pippen says of Jordan. "I miss our

body language out on the court, things we developed together. I

miss that we had one another, thatintimidation factor that we'd

bring to the game. I miss winning."

But no, he insists, even with his reputation at such a low ebb,

Pippen feels no need to prove himself without Jordan. Already,

the Pippen-led Trail Blazers have established themselves as one

of the NBA's Western powers, a talent-rich team playing stingy

defense and unselfish, fluid offense, Scottie's kind of

basketball. Everyone seems happy. Coach Mike Dunleavy calls

Pippen "the glue" that holds the Blazers together, the model for

what Portland wants to be.

"He brought that star quality, he brought that aura of winning,

that demeanor," says Blazers point guard Damon Stoudamire. "I

can just see it in him. When he goes by, I look at him on the

sly, see how he walks and what he does. Because he has been

there."

That is Pippen's ultimate answer to all criticism, and one that

gives him license to feel as good about himself as he likes. He

has won six championships--"Six f------ rings!" says Portland

shooting guard Steve Smith--and, at 34, he knows this gives him

an authority that one twisted season can't erase. Jordan was his

role model, the one who taught him about winning: what it took,

how it should be handled, when to know it is over. Jordan taught

him how to pause professorially before answering a question, how

never to appear half naked before the cameras, what kind of

earring to dangle from his left lobe. Jordan showed him the

little things that go into acting like a success, and Pippen

absorbed them like a thirsty child. Now a man who was once poor

has a 74-foot yacht and a contract that pays him at least $14.75

million a year for the next three years and a wife so beautiful

that she seems molded out of plastic. Younger players look to

him for guidance, and few (if any) of his peers can teach him a

thing.

That is why, before home games, Pippen rarely tries to read his

opponents during warmups or watch a teammate to see how he

carries himself. No, before every game in Portland's Rose

Garden, Pippen only has eyes for one. He'll let his gaze drift

over to the courtside seat occupied by Paul Allen, cofounder of

Microsoft and owner of both the Trail Blazers and the Seattle

Seahawks, a man with a personal net worth of $40 billion. Pippen

looks at his employer's geeky exterior and wonders, much as he

wondered about Michael, How does he do it? Make no mistake:

After a year adrift, Pippen has himself a new role model.

"He's an amazing guy to look at, man," Pippen says, his voice

rising. "What does he have? Forty billion? I want to know: How

can I make a billion? I just want one of them! What do I need to

do? But I don't want to approach him like that. I don't want

people coming up to me just for what I do, and I'm sure he

doesn't. So I have to let that relationship grow a little bit.

Like, win a championship, and then I can say, 'Tell me how I can

make a billion dollars. Tell me how I can become a billionaire.'"

He cannot help himself. What he wants, what he needs, what he

deserves--Pippen has never been able to keep all this contained.

Throughout his career he has said and done things unimaginable

for a superstar, vented spleen and spewed bile, displaying for

all to see megadoses of pride, wrath, envy and avarice. That's

four of the seven deadly sins; throw in his two out-of-wedlock

children and you've got lust, too, five of the Big Seven in all.

And that's not quite the resume corporate America seeks when it

looks to sell underwear or a new long-distance carrier.

In 1997 Pippen publicly called Bulls vice president Jerry Krause

a liar, and in his final season in Chicago he said that his

other boss, team chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, could "go to hell"

for suggesting to reporters that Pippen would sign a one-year

deal. In 1995 Pippen threw a chair onto the court after being

ejected from a game, and in 1994 he indulged in his most

infamous fit of pique: Overwhelmed by his jealousy of the

less-talented, better-paid Toni Kukoc, Pippen sat at the end of

the bench, refusing to play the final 1.8 seconds of Game 3 of

the Eastern Conference semifinals against the New York Knicks

because Jackson had called for Kukoc to take the final shot.

"I was surprised that I did it," Pippen says. "I've got such a

relationship with Phil, it was like a father and son fighting. I

was sitting there, like, 'Spank me, then.' I was also thinking,

Man, what did I just do? But by then it was too late."

The moment became a prime example of how modern players had no

respect, of how sports was going to hell, but above all it

became the most durable memory of Pippen's career. Bulls center

Bill Cartwright, tears rolling down his face, blasted Pippen in

the locker room afterward. Opponents, fans, editorial writers,

coaches--all issued condemnations. Jordan, then playing baseball

in Alabama, stated flatly that Chicago would have to unload

Pippen. It is the one moment in his career that Pippen

completely regrets. "It stays with me to this day," he says.

"It's like I ran over a deer in my car. I won't forget about it."

Still, remembering is hardly understanding, and Pippen can no

more explain the Kukoc incident than he can the mysterious

migraine that laid him out during most of Game 7 of the 1990

Eastern Conference finals, against the Detroit Pistons. "It's

just the nature in me" to childishly pull out of the most

important game of the season, Pippen says, just some

inexplicable flash in the brainpan that sends him into bouts of

stubborn moodiness.

"He has a different emotional being from Michael," says John

Bach, a former Bulls assistant who worked with Pippen for six

years. "Scottie had to find out things the hard way. He always

had to put his hand on the hot stove." Yet months, even years go

by without such an incident, and in each lull Pippen's superb

play prompts observers to declare that, finally, he has matured.

"My trainer, Chip Schaefer, says, 'Three hundred sixty-two days

out of the year, Scottie Pippen goes along as a model citizen,

and everything's working quite well for him, and he's in a great

mood, but those other two or three days, he can be the downest,

darkest person there possibly can be,'" Jackson says. "You don't

know where it came from or what happened, but there's a dark

side to him that rarely surfaces. And when it does, it draws

attention to itself."

So when, in late September, Pippen teed off on Barkley, saying

on ESPN that the Rockets' future Hall of Famer was "very

selfish...doesn't show the desire to want to win...just doesn't

show the dedication," Jackson chalked it up to one of Pippen's

black days. But the two teammates had a relationship that had

grown more and more testy, and Pippen was hardly blameless.

Before last season Barkley had taken a $1.2 million cut in

salary to clear cap room for the Rockets to acquire Pippen, and

the two players had worked out together daily. Pippen led

Houston in assists, but he never looked comfortable in the

Rockets' stolid half-court offense, and during last season's

first-round playoff debacle against the Lakers, Pippen publicly

questioned Barkley's judgment after Barkley fouled Shaquille

O'Neal with 28 seconds left in Game 1--even though Pippen later

made a costly turnover. (O'Neal made one foul shot, and the

Lakers eventually won the game by a point.) In the early summer

Pippen began quietly campaigning to join Jackson in L.A. In

August, after Pippen and Barkley spent a week together in Hawaii

on a Nike promotional trip, the news broke that Pippen had asked

to be traded. Barkley returned to Houston and, claiming he had

been blindsided, demanded that Pippen apologize to him, the

other Rockets and their fans.

"I wouldn't give Charles Barkley an apology at gunpoint," Pippen

said on ESPN on Sept. 29. "He can never expect an apology from

me.... If anything, he owes me an apology for coming to play

with his fat butt."

Three days later Pippen was officially gone, traded to Portland

for forwards Walt Williams, Stacey Augmon and Carlos Rogers,

center Kelvin Cato and guards Ed Gray and Brian Shaw. But his

departure brought little peace; he and Barkley continue to

snipe. Barkley vowed that Pippen would regret what he

said--though when the Blazers and Rockets met for the first time

this season, on Nov. 26, there was no incident--and declared

that Pippen had broken an unwritten law by attacking a fellow

athlete. Pippen calls that a joke. "He's been calling Oliver

Miller fat since he's been in the league, and they played

together," Pippen says. "He's always put his teammates down."

If anything, Pippen says, Barkley broke a trust when he declared

that Pippen hadn't told him personally that he wanted to be

traded. "He turned around and lied and said I didn't tell him,

when I had spent a week in Hawaii with him," Pippen says. "Other

NBA guys, like Jason Kidd, were there. We all went out to play

golf one day, and I spoke to Charles about it. Then he gets back

to Houston and starts saying that he'd spent a week with me and

I hadn't said anything. I had." (Kidd confirms Pippen's account.)

This is not a battle Pippen can win. Though his game is as

selfless as can be, though he routinely takes the toughest

defensive assignment and sacrifices points to get his teammates

involved, he is still perceived as selfish. Yet every eruption

of his dark side takes his teammates by surprise. His

breast-beating about paltry contracts in Chicago, his ripping of

Barkley, his refusal to play at the end of Game 3--all of it

hits like a garbage can hurled into a piano recital.

"He may not be the greatest go-to guy in the world," Dunleavy

says of Pippen. "If I'm going to start a team and pick one guy,

there are a lot of other guys I'd pick. But he has the ability

to make all your guys go-to guys. He makes everybody better."

Nevertheless, at heart, Pippen has the look-at-me neediness of a

gunner. Though shooting and scoring are where he is least

valuable, though he is smart enough to know that his

selflessness is what makes him great, he still aches for the

stroking given to those who rack up the big numbers. When Jordan

took his hiatus to play baseball, Pippen took Jordan's locker.

"Which was a statement," Bach says. Pippen wants to get what

Jordan got. He wants to be like Mike.

The odd thing is that Pippen is closer than even he suspects. He

was named to the NBA's alltime top 50 list in 1996, and he

deserved it because he is in the same echelon as his idols Larry

Bird and Magic Johnson--more like them than like Jordan, in

fact, in his instinct to keep everyone involved in the game.

Pippen's problem has always been a lack of sophistication; he

transmits none of Johnson's joy or Bird's simplicity (never mind

that Magic was never as lighthearted nor Bird as uncomplicated

as they seemed), and when set against someone of Barkley's savvy

and wit, Pippen hardly stands a chance.

There was a time in the early '90s when Barkley somehow got

elevated to the status of Bird, Magic and Jordan, even though he

had never won a title, even though no one would argue that he

made anyone around him better. Much of this was due to Barkley's

undeniable personal appeal. He is a natural star, and in this

contretemps with Pippen he has read the situation and shrewdly

reduced the issue to terms easily understood by the common fan.

"I don't care what your psyche is," Barkley says of Pippen.

"When you're getting paid $14 million a year, you've got to

play. When you're getting paid that type of money, you have to

perform--no ifs, ands or buts. It was a shock to him last year.

He got a lot of negative publicity, and I think it affected him.

But I stuck by him through all that."

Let's be serious: Barkley's stature has been shrinking for

years, and for good reason. This is his final season, he says,

and unless something radical happens, he will end his playing

days revealed as a star who couldn't win. "Everybody knows

Charles Barkley is a great guy," says Lakers guard Ron Harper,

"but every year he's talking about winning a championship, and

then he comes to training camp out of shape. That shows what

kind of guy he is. Pip wants to win. If you aren't doing what

you should be doing, he's going to let you know."

When Pippen spoke about Barkley's lack of commitment, he was

echoing only what Jordan said in his retirement press

conference: Charles has never dedicated himself to winning. "I

guess I had to experience it for myself," Pippen says. No one in

Houston claims that Pippen was the poison that killed the

Rockets' championship chances, and without him this season the

team has gone south. "He gets a lot of criticism because he

wanted to be traded, almost like, Hate him because he wants to

be a winner," says Pippen's wife, Larsa. "That's the part most

people don't get. The [Houston] team was sorry. None of them

wanted to work hard, and then they wanted to win."

Still, even if Pippen is right about the Rockets, it doesn't

mean much. He didn't hide his dissatisfaction last season, and

he came off as a whiner. He remains a champion with little idea

of how to be a star. He has been saved from his own worst

impulses only by a remarkable incapacity to feel guilt. Each

time he has said or done something dumb, he has come back to

perform brilliantly. After his shocking refusal to play at the

end of Game 3 in '94, Pippen got 25 points, eight rebounds and

six assists in Game 4. This is one of his greatest talents: He

has always convinced himself that he carries no baggage.

"Sometimes Scottie just wants to be in that position where he

forces an issue or tells it like it is with an honesty that may

not serve him best, and then has to come back and regroup,"

Jackson says. "And he does it. That's the remarkable thing: He's

able to come out of that dark space. He doesn't bury himself."

As for Barkley, Pippen doesn't regret a thing he said. "I'm my

own man," Pippen says. "I make my own decisions. If they're

right or wrong, I have to live with them. It's not up to Charles

to try and guide me. Who is he to be a mentor to me?"

The waiter leans over the table: The Mercedes lady is in the

lobby; should he send her over? This is not quite the service

most people get from their auto repair shops, but it's clear

that having an unhappy Scottie Pippen tooling around Portland in

a Honda loaner doesn't sit well at the dealership. It actually

qualifies, in certain zip codes, as a crisis. The Mercedes lady

rushes up, sits and smiles in an attempt to soften the

situation. "What kind of car did you bring me?" Pippen says. His

eyebrows have shot up in the universal

don't-say-what-I-don't-want-to-hear expression.

"CLK Cabriolet," she says. Pippen gives her the half grin but

says nothing, waiting.

"I wanted to apologize for what happened," she begins. She

explains that she is the "S-Class specialist and service

adviser," that there was some kind of breakdown in

communication. "They should've referred you to me," she says. "I

wouldn't have let you leave in that way. Normally I'd give you

your S-Class demo...." Pippen keeps grinning, not being mean,

exactly, but letting the attractive, well-dressed young woman

natter on, letting her dangle just enough so that this kind of

thing never, ever happens again. It is one of those moments to

which he has grown so accustomed that it feels right, feels

exactly like what life should be. After 12 years in the NBA and

so many millions, there's nothing remarkable to Pippen about

sitting over breakfast in a four-star hotel while a stranger

from Mercedes-Benz begs his forgiveness.

"All right," Pippen says finally. "I appreciate it. O.K."

But it is still something of a miracle, a weird confluence of

timing and talent that has carried Pippen from utter obscurity

to fame and fortune. His life is a cliche--the American dream,

no less--and nothing critics say about his still having

something to prove can diminish what Pippen already holds in his

grasp. Forget that he hasn't won a title without Jordan, forget

what Barkley thinks. This is gravy time. Pippen came from

nothing and created himself. His greatest accomplishment may

have been that he looked around his shabby house as a boy, the

youngest of 12 kids, and decided his life wouldn't always be

that way. "Believe it or not, I used to dream big," Pippen says.

"I always felt I would be rich, I would be successful. That's

the only way you can handle it when it becomes reality."

In truth, all that dreaming was less a plan than vivid

imagining, because Pippen had no role model. No one rich and

famous had ever come out of Hamburg, Ark. (pop. 3,100), and if

you stayed there long enough, you'd most likely find yourself

working at the Georgia-Pacific paper mill, like Scottie's

father, Preston, happy to have a job and enduring the long

hours. Scottie's happiest memory of his father has nothing to do

with sports or Christmas; it was the waiting. Every day Scottie

would look out the window and wait for his father to trudge up

to the house, tired and bent by arthritis. Scottie sometimes

thinks of that now, and of the mill's chemical stench, the stink

of pulp filling the air--"a smell," he says, "you know you don't

want to be smelling the rest of your life."

The six Pippen boys all played ball down at the Pine Street

Courts, "grew up playing in the dust," says Carl Pippen,

Scottie's closest brother. All Scottie knew was that he didn't

want to be trapped in Hamburg, that he had to get out and see

all the cities and countries he'd heard about. But the family

had no money, and by the time Scottie started high school,

Preston had been paralyzed on one side of his body by a stroke.

When Scottie graduated from high school at 17, he was a

frighteningly skinny 6'1 1/2", and no college offered him a

scholarship. His high school coach persuaded the coach at

Central Arkansas, Don Dyer, to pull Scottie into the program as

a manager. When other players dropped out, Pippen got his

chance. He began growing as soon as he arrived on campus, and by

Halloween of his freshman year Dyer had gotten him a full ride.

By midseason Pippen was a starter.

In the summers Pippen would stay on campus in Conway, working

the night shift as a welder at the Virco furniture factory,

getting off at 7 a.m. and then working out before going to

sleep. He'd get up at 5 p.m., drive 35 minutes into Little Rock

and play summer-league games, then get back in time for his 11

p.m. shift. "I did that once in a while, but I couldn't go on,"

says Ronnie Martin, Pippen's oldest friend and a teammate at

Central Arkansas. "Scottie did it daily. He played every game,

and then he'd play more ball on the weekend. He loved the game.

We'd set a goal in junior high: One of us was going to make the

NBA."

By the end of his sophomore year Pippen had played every

position at Central Arkansas. He had a point guard's mind in a

frame that grew to 6'7". Anytime he'd ease up in practice, Dyer

would yell, "There are 5,000 other guys who want what you want!"

Some Arkansas alumni contacted Pippen, trying to get him to

transfer to the state's premier school, and it was tempting.

Here was his first glimmer of the big time, a stroke for the ego

at last. But Pippen stayed in Conway, one of the smartest moves

he ever made. Instead of being pigeonholed into one position

with the Razorbacks, he continued to hone the all-around game

that would give him his pro career. At the time, however, it

seemed like a gamble he was destined to lose: Had he blown it?

Would anyone bother with an NAIA player? Would he get out of

Hamburg?

Not long before his senior season Pippen suffered a hairline

fracture in his right femur. One doctor told him he was done for

the year. Another told him to try to play, and Pippen taped

himself up, never missed a game or practice. He averaged 23.6

points and 10 rebounds and was named NAIA All-America for the

second year in a row, but he still had no idea whether anyone

knew who he was. In his final game, against Harding, with a spot

in the national tournament on the line, Pippen scored 39 points

only to watch in horror as Harding won on a three-pointer. "That

devastated Scottie," Dyer says. "He was sure now nobody [in the

pros] would get a chance to see him. He thought it was all over,

and he just knelt down on the floor and cried."

Preston's last nine years weren't good; the stroke robbed him of

movement and coherent speech. "He had his mind," says Ethel

Pippen, Scottie's mother, speaking from the comfortable house

her son bought her in 1989. Preston never saw his son play as a

pro, not in person, and he died during the 1990 playoffs. But in

June 1987, Preston was sitting before the television set in his

home in Hamburg, the smell of the mill wafting in through the

windows, when his son was chosen fifth in the first round of the

NBA draft by the Seattle SuperSonics and immediately traded to

the Bulls. Ethel looked over at her husband. He had his mind,

all right. Tears were pooling in his eyes.

It was quite a night. Shaq got tossed, Portland rolled 97-82,

and Pippen--the man Lakers owner Jerry Buss declined to pursue

because of his ballooning salary over the next three

seasons--put together his usual all-around clinic against L.A.

on Nov. 6. Aside from getting 19 points, eight rebounds, five

assists and two steals, he did all the little things: deflected

passes, held Glen Rice to 14 points, disrupted flow. Pippen

slapped away Travis Knight's final shot of the first quarter,

twice doubled up on Tyronn Lue to force him to lose the ball

out-of-bounds, harassed Rick Fox so completely on one possession

that Fox lost the ball once, then again and then had to heave a

wild shot before the shot clock expired. Even Harper, Pippen's

close friend and former Bulls teammate, wasn't immune: As Pippen

smothered him just before the half, Harper was reduced to

throwing an air ball.

Pippen has the sleek body lines of a Learjet. There's a tiny

tattoo on his left biceps that reads PIP, and in case that's too

subtle, a white wristband bearing the same three letters often

rests just below his left elbow. Nobody plays the team game as

well as Scottie Pippen, but because of his off-court pop-offs,

few people acknowledge this.

"Everybody who talks about the Chicago Bulls talks about MJ

first," Harper says, "but Pip had a more all-around game.

Defense, offensive rebounds and defensive boards: Pip made the

game easier for us to play. But he may not ever get his due, not

until he brings that other championship ring home."

This is a technical analysis, a basketball purist's take,

because in matters that can't be quantified but mean

everything--heart, courage, response to pressure--Jordan was

incomparable. But the fact is, Jordan never won a championship

without Pippen, either, and for good reason. No one is more

versatile than Pippen. "He's the best defender I've seen,"

Dunleavy says. "I put him in a class with Bobby Jones, Sidney

Moncrief and certainly Jordan. But they're different. Jordan, at

his position, may have been as good as there was. But Scottie

could guard more positions than Michael. Scottie can handle more

sizes."

Jackson wanted Pippen badly in L.A., but Buss never seriously

considered going after him. "I thought it was meant to be,"

Jackson says. "I thought he was a godsend for us in L.A. For me

to have to swallow it and move on was very difficult. On the

Bulls he was probably the player most liked by the others. He

mingled. He could bring out the best in the players and

communicate the best. Leadership, real leadership, is one of his

strengths. Everybody would say Michael is a great leader. He

leads by example, by rebuke, by harsh words. Scottie's

leadership was equally dominant, but it's a leadership of

patting the back, support."

Or, as former Bull Joe Kleine puts it, "Michael was the father

figure saying, 'You're grounded.' Pip was like Mom coming in to

tell you everything's going to be all right."

At week's end the Trail Blazers were 15-4 and leading the

Pacific Division. They had already handled contenders such as

the Lakers and the Miami Heat--without the help of power forward

Brian Grant, who returned from a knee injury on Nov. 17. Team

president Bob Whitsitt gathered together this impressive bunch,

dealing for Pippen and Smith and signing free agent Detlef

Schrempf in the off-season, but Pippen is the one stitching the

team together. "He wants another ring: That's why he's great and

why he has six of them," Smith says. "He could just coast, but

he won't. He still does the little things: He's here early, he

defends. He still plays hard. He dislocated his finger and kept

playing. A guy with six rings? You'd think he'd sit down. But he

wants to win. No matter what it takes."

He wants to put it all behind him. Remember: This is what Pippen

does best. "Pip made some crazy comments, but he has just

brushed that to the side," says Stoudamire. "It's like tunnel

vision. I envy that. He doesn't ever let anything distract him."

Yes, Pippen knows he's made mistakes; looking back, he'll tell

you that no one is more to blame for the Houston debacle than

he. He should've known better, he says. He should never have

gone there in the first place. And the 1.8 seconds? The

inexplicable migraine? He'd take those back, too.

Go back further: Pippen was married once before, to a Central

Arkansas student named Karen McCollum, but they were finished in

1990 after two years and a son named Antron. Then came more

female trouble: In May 1995 Pippen's ex-fiancee Yvette

DeLeone--the mother of his daughter, Sierra--accused him of

grabbing her arm and pushing her. Pippen was arrested on a

domestic battery charge, which was dropped when DeLeone declined

to testify against him. Seven months later he settled a

paternity suit and admitted having fathered twins by model Sonya

Roby. One of the babies died nine days after birth. The

survivor, a boy named Taylor, has no relationship with Pippen

beyond the financial.

Breakfast is done. Pippen's new loaner is being brought around.

No, he says, it's not strange having kids out there, his blood

growing up somewhere without him. He sees Antron the most, maybe

for a month, all told, every year. "I really only deal with two

of my kids--Antron and Sierra," Pippen says, but Sierra "not a

lot." Taylor he doesn't see at all. "I don't have a relationship

with the mom," he says. "Never have. It was a big mistake I

made. I can't go back and undo it, but I have to move on."

The waiter drops the check, brings back the receipt. "Hey, it

was a pleasure waiting on you," he says to Pippen. "Take care,

good luck. You've got this town buzzing."

"Thanks, man," Pippen says. "I hope I can keep it that way."

New town, new team, new wife: Pippen has reached a good place.

He has been married for 2 1/2 years to Larsa, a former model who

hopes to break into acting. Pippen has named his boat My Larsa.

Friends say they have never seen him so devoted to a woman.

"She's going to tell me what's right and what's wrong, and when

the day is done, she's going to stand by my side," Pippen says,

and for him to admit this is remarkable. He doesn't let many

people get close.

"If he doesn't have a feel for you," says Ronnie Martin, "it's

like a door closing. But he's happier with himself than he ever

has been. Larsa opened his eyes to a lot of things he was never

exposed to, like just learning to trust somebody. He's trusting

her more than anybody. He really loves her, and he says it out

loud. He comes out and tells me every day, 'I love my wife,

Ronnie. I wouldn't know what to do without my wife.'"

Pippen steps outside, to the front of the hotel. He signs an

autograph for an older woman, for her son. He signs for another

woman, who says this will make her week. The valet rolls up in

the new Mercedes. "That's it," Pippen says. He opens the door of

the convertible, admires the leather. He folds himself in. Game

tonight against Denver. Nap time. He hits the gas and rolls away.

That afternoon Jordan appears on The Rosie O'Donnell Show,

pitching a new perfume. The last one, Jordan says, did $230

million in business.

That night, after the game, Larsa is standing in a Rose Garden

hallway with the other players' families. She is talking about

meeting Pippen four years ago. "I was hesitant because there's a

lot of bad that comes with the good, especially dating

basketball players," she says. "I never had--and I could have

had my choice--because of that. But he's very family-oriented,

loves his mom, loves his siblings, is a good person, religious,

and he's from the South. That makes a difference. I didn't see

it for the first week and a half, and I saw him every day. Then

I said, God, he's so different from everybody else. He's

genuine, he's real, hardworking."

Asked if it was odd to have married a man who already had some

children, Larsa looks puzzled. "Some kids?" she says. "Wait. He

has two."

The next night Pippen is in the Blazers' locker room, dressed

sharply, ready to go home. No, he says, he didn't see Jordan on

TV. They talk occasionally, but not lately. Both have been busy.

"Two hundred...and...thirty...million?" Pippen says. He tries to

bend his mind around the figure, then gives up. No, he says, he

has no interest in getting his own perfume.

"My next step is to retire," he says. "Enjoy life a little bit.

I've been working hard for quite some time, a lot harder than a

lot of superstars in this game. I've put in a lot of off-season

hours to continue to get better. It wasn't just, I was the star.

I've always had to work, and it has paid off."

The plan is to take some time off, maybe think about scouting or

buying a piece of a team. "I might just go sail the seas," he

says, and that is the classic Pippen scenario: Stock up, take

Larsa's hand and go. Leave the past behind. Move on. Move on,

and don't bother looking back.

B/W PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRIAN LANKER

COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRIAN LANKER Led by Pippen (with Grant), the Blazers are one of the NBA's Western powers, a talent-rich team playing stingy defense and unselfish, fluid offense, Scottie's kind of basketball. COLOR PHOTO: AL TIELEMANS "He may not be the greatest go-to guy in the world," Dunleavy says, "but he has the ability to make all your guys go-to guys. He makes everybody better. He's the best defender I've seen."

COLOR PHOTO: JOHN W. MCDONOUGH "I wouldn't give Charles Barkley an apology at gunpoint," Pippen said. "He can never expect one from me.... If anything, he owes me an apology for coming to play with his fat butt."

COLOR PHOTO: JOHN W. MCDONOUGH "Michael is a great leader," says Jackson. "He leads by example, by rebuke, by harsh words. Scottie's leadership is equally dominant, but it's a leadership of patting the back, support."

COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRIAN LANKER He has been saved from his worst impulses only by a remarkable incapacity to feel guilt. Each time he has said or done something dumb, he has come back to perform brilliantly.

COLOR PHOTO: AL TIELEMANS "He brought that star quality, that aura of winning, that demeanor," Stoudamire (right) says. "I look at him on the sly, see how he walks and what he does. Because he's been there."

COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRIAN LANKER "She's going to tell me what's right and what's wrong, and she's going to stand by my side," Scottie says of Larsa, and for him to admit this is remarkable. He doesn't let many people get close.