The United Center was empty, with the exception of Michael Jordan, his chauffeur and confidant George Koehler, and his personal trainer Tim Grover. The trio was huddling, reflecting on what had just occurred: the Orlando Magic ruined a return that Jordan, in hindsight, would’ve been better off delaying. He had the heavier body of a baseball player and mixed too many pedestrian performances in with those flashes of brilliance after a 17-month lay-off. But this loss felt aberrant and abhorrent. Humiliating even.

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Jordan still held himself to the highest of standards as a basketball player and was furious that anyone — even the supposed future of the league in Shaquille O’Neal and Penny Hardaway — had gotten the better of him. Horace Grant was carried out on his teammates’ shoulders? In Jordan’s gym? Nick Anderson shamed him into ditching the No. 45 for that old familiar No. 23?

Losses of any kind didn’t sit well with Jordan and, in that late-night venting session, he was already plotting his payback. On the Magic. On the entire league. And especially on the detractors who had finally caught him slipping in the sport that he had left as the game’s undisputed best.

The conversation had reached its conclusion when Grover got up, knowing that it wouldn’t be long before Jordan wanted to get back to work. Grover told Jordan, “See you soon, Mike.”

“No,” Jordan told him. “See you tomorrow.”

Looking at the time, Grover realized that it was well past midnight. Tomorrow meant today.

The most successful seasons of Jordan’s career – the time in which he transitioned from being the high-flying, high-scoring corporate pitchman who couldn’t win to an iconic brand synonymous with winning – coincided with his decision to push back against the overly aggressive, clotheslines and body slams of the “Bad Boy” Detroit Pistons and develop the strength needed to administer his own punishment.

Grover read a quote from Jordan in 1989 after the Bulls had lost for the second straight year to Detroit and decided it was an opportunity for him to test his training methods on professional basketball players. A former basketball player from the University of Illinois-Chicago, Grover used a backwards way to reach Jordan – by offering his assistance as a personal trainer in letters addressed to the 14 other members of the Bulls, with the hope that at least one taker could lead him to the biggest star in town.

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The Bulls’ head athletic trainer and team physician contacted Grover, who was working at a local health club at the time, and held a series of interviews until informing him that a player on the team was indeed interested in meeting him. They gave Grover an address and a time – around 1:30 p.m. – to show up to make a presentation. “They didn’t tell me who it was,” Grover said. “This was back when Michael lived in what you would say is a modest house, where you could walk right up and ring the doorbell. I didn’t know who I was going to see. So, he opens up the door. It was Michael Jordan.”

Jordan led Grover to his basement. They spoke for nearly 30 minutes. “I said, ‘Give me 30 days,’ ” Grover said, “and 30 days turned into 15 years.”

Grover had never worked with a professional athlete before Jordan but that relationship led him to Scottie Pippen, Charles Barkley, Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade and many others. “Michael Jordan would’ve been the greatest basketball player ever with or without me,” Grover said. “I helped him stay there a little bit longer. Plain and simple. Nobody can take credit other than himself, or his parents. I helped him stay there. Helped him maintain his level of excellence.”

The common misconception surrounding Jordan is that he hit the gym after losing to the Pistons, bulked up and started winning. That’s not exactly how it worked. Grover earned Jordan’s trust because the initial strategy wasn’t about simply building up muscle mass, but rather addressing past problem areas –such as his ankle and groin – to give him a base for more explosiveness and speed. From there, Jordan would slowly reach his desired weight, which for Jordan, Grover said, got up to between 213 pounds and 218 pounds.

“You hear all of these athletes, ‘Yeah, they put on 15 pounds or 20 pounds during the offseason.’ Do you know how hard it is to put on 15 pounds of muscle? It’s almost physically impossible. Unless,” Grover said, laughing to himself, “you’re getting some help from an outside source. Plus, when you have an athlete, his game is so refined like Michael, you want him to gradually put on weight and gradually put on strength and let their body acclimate to what they’re doing. So what I did with him, every year or every season, we would put on five pounds. And I would say, ‘How do you feel after five pounds?’ And he would say, ‘I feel good.’ All right, so let’s go a little bit more.”

Jordan’s decision to retire from basketball after reaching the pinnacle of fame and success didn’t stun Grover, who witnessed the mental and physical toll that the Bulls’ first three-peat had taken on him. “That was more of a mental break, more than anything else,” Grover said. Turning that retirement into a pursuit of his chasing dreams of being a professional baseball player, however, did force Grover to take a step back. Grover found out about Jordan’s plans around the same time as the general public.

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“I said it’s going to be a completely different training methodology, a different regimen, and understand that one training is detrimental to the other,” Grover said. “And he said, ‘I’m all in.’ And I said, ‘All right.’ ”

Grover asked Jordan to give him a few weeks to do some research on the best plan to get him prepared for a sport that he hadn’t played since high school. After studying baseball games and allowing the Chicago White Sox organization — which was also run by Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf — to get Jordan acclimated to the basics, Grover formulated an individualized plan that would work for a player whose height made him average in basketball but uniquely tall for baseball.

“With basketball, you could see how he played. You had film from college. You had games from his early career in the NBA, so you could see how he likes to plant. This is how he pushes off, this is how he lunges, this is how he does something,” Grover said. “With baseball, there was no record of it. So every time they made adjustments, I had to make adjustments and he made the adjustment… It was a huge challenge. And everyone knows Michael, that’s what fuels him.”

Jordan needed about three months to get prepared to play baseball. Grover said that required him bulking up by 10 to 15 pounds and customizing his muscles in a way that was contradictory from everything he had previously done as a professional athlete: “The muscles used in throwing a baseball are different (and) the angles are completely different than the angles and muscles used in shooting a basketball. Shooting a basketball, you put some arc on it, so you can use as much circumference of the rim that you can. When you’re playing in the field, you can’t put an arc on the ball, because it’s going to take too long to get to the outfield back into the infield. The way you step into a jump shot is different than the way you step into a throw. The way you use your hips in swinging a bat, is completely different than the way you would use your hips in dribbling a basketball, playing defense, shooting a jump shot.”

Playing Double A baseball for the Birmingham Barons and riding buses to games, was a step down from his relatively pampered existence as the world’s most recognizable professional athlete. “But you know what, he was still the king,” Grover said, “because everybody was so enamored to see him. Everybody on the bus, on the team, they were like, ‘That’s Mike. That’s Mike.’ And you’d hear all of these whispers. At first they didn’t want to approach him and then after that, it was like, trash talking started and the ping pong games and all the other stuff. But the competitiveness on the baseball diamond was, that never stopped. All the conditioning drills and training stuff, he was the same way as he was if he was playing basketball. He was the first one there, the hardest worker and he had to deal with all the media and all the naysayers and the other stuff. It wasn’t the same, as much, but he was still under the light.“

At his heaviest, Grover said, Jordan was up to 233 pounds, which was fine, so long as baseball was being played. But Jordan’s hopes of reaching the majors was interrupted by an extended labor dispute that wiped out the end of the 1994 season and spilled over into 1995. Major League Baseball was preparing to play ball with replacement players but Jordan refused to cross the picket line and returned to Chicago in early March, preparing for his next “shock the world” moment.

“When we left Birmingham and we were headed back to Chicago, I didn’t know he was going to play basketball again,” Grover said. “I said, ‘Michael, in my estimation, there is not enough time to transition your body from a basketball to a baseball player back into the basketball player that Michael Jordan wants to be. Because I know he would only settle for excellence. Now are you still going to be better than 75 percent, 80 percent of the league? Maybe. Ninety percent? Yes. But I don’t feel like you’re going to be at the same level. Being away from it for 18 months, there’s a lot of things, not only from a training standpoint, from a timing standpoint. It’s not like, you’re going to go play basketball in the park, you’re playing against the best of the best again in the world.’”

The summer of 1995 was going to be unique, regardless of whether it was the only time Jordan had lost during the Bulls’ championship run. Jordan was also filming the movie “Space Jam” in Los Angeles, which Grover viewed as a blessing in disguise since it would place the itinerant Jordan in one location for a long time. Before shooting began, Jordan’s representatives David Falk and Curtis Polk had Grover assist the crew in letting them know what he would need to train during breaks in production. Grover flew out and was aghast by the initial plan of converting the parking lot into a court, with basketball hoops placed on each side and lines painted over the parking spots.

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“I said, ‘Michael Jordan is not playing basketball on a parking lot. It’s not going to happen,’ ” Grover said.

Grover convinced director Joe Pytka and the production team to build an indoor facility with air conditioning, a regulation hardwood floor with NBA baskets, a shower, dressing room, TV room and a putting green. Warner Bros. obliged and the Jordan Dome, as it was nicknamed, became the place for NBA players to congregate and get in a good run.

“Coming off a loss like that, if you want to get back to it in the summer, you need to play against the best competition. You don’t need to play with guys who played high school basketball. Guys that were former collegiate players. Guys that were in college. You wanted to play against the best of the best, because that was your measuring stick,” Grover said. “We had everybody. Dennis Rodman was up in there. Juwan Howard. Reggie Miller. The list goes on and on and on. Magic Johnson. And not only that, all of the movie stars, they were literally lined up. And I used to tell people, he’s the star of stars. Stars line up to meet him.”

The games helped sharpen Jordan, but they also gave him an edge, because he wasn’t trying to stay in shape. He was figuring out what he would have to do to dominate. “All the other guys thought they were just going out to play, but he was scouting everybody,” said B.J. Armstrong, one of the NBA players privileged enough to get an invite. “He would film all day and we would play these games at night. It was a massive scouting report for him. He knew what Barkley would do. Reggie Miller. He was using it. He knew he had to get the reps.”

Jordan also had to de-baseball his body, which required getting down to a more manageable weight for flights at the rim and re-triggering the muscle memory required to execute what his mind intended on the floor. Those 27 games from the previous season might have been able to deceive some that he was back, but Grover could see that it was really a baseball player in baggy shorts and high tops.

“People that know him very well, like David and myself, even though he was getting the 55 (points in New York) and those different things and he was scoring points, you could just see, there were small little nuances in the way he played that weren’t the same and to the average fan, or people you just wouldn’t notice those things,” Grover said. “But me, knowing how he jumped, the way he planted his feet, the way he cut, I could see those things were there, but they weren’t there the way they needed to be there, or the way Michael wanted them to be there.”

The determination that Jordan displayed that summer in getting back into basketball shape let Grover know that the league was about to be administered some pain. Back in the body of a baller, Jordan wasn’t going to let another opponent experience the upper hand. Grover compares what Jordan did in preparation to what he accomplished over the next three seasons – a 72-win regular season, a second three-peat, the destruction of whatever Orlando was going to be with O’Neal and Hardaway, a takedown of the flu, the denial of Karl Malone and John Stockton – to a heavy steel wrecking ball hanging from a crane.

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“That ball was already cocked back, ready to knock everything down,” Grover said.

(Top photo: Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images)

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