The year is 1966. The Chicago Bulls are an expansion franchise, fresh and unknown, filling rosters with players other teams didn't want. One of those players is a 24-year-old guard from McLeansboro, Illinois — a farm kid who grew up milking cows before dawn and baling hay after dark. His name is Jerry Sloan. He will become the first identity the franchise ever had.
He wasn't supposed to be a Bull. The Baltimore Bullets selected him fourth overall in 1965, but before he ever suited up for Baltimore, he was traded to Chicago. It was one of those forgettable transaction-era deals that seemed minor at the time. It turned out to define two decades of basketball in one of America's great cities.
The Original Bull
The Bulls' nickname wasn't accidental when it came to Sloan. He played with a kind of physical intensity that made offense seem like an afterthought. Fourteen points a game, seven rebounds — for a guard. The rebounds alone told the story. Sloan went after every ball like it owed him money. He set screens that moved full-grown men sideways. He defended with a ferocity that made opponents plan their routes specifically to avoid him.
Five times — five — he was named to the All-Defensive First Team. In an era when that recognition was harder to come by, Sloan earned it repeatedly by being exactly what you don't want to face: a player who takes the game personally.
"Jerry Sloan was the most competitive player I ever coached or played with. He treated every game like it was his last chance to prove he belonged. That never left him, even as a coach." — Phil Jackson, reflecting on the Bulls defensive culture that Sloan helped establish
He was an All-Star in 1967. He set a franchise record for steals that stood for decades. But statistics miss the point. Sloan's contribution to the Bulls was atmospheric: he created a standard of effort that everyone around him either met or suffered for not meeting. You don't let down a player like Jerry Sloan without hearing about it.
The Chicago Identity
Through the late 1960s and into the mid-1970s, Sloan and Bob Love (#10, also retired) formed the backbone of some of the most exciting Bulls teams in franchise history before the Jordan era. The Bulls went to the playoffs in seven of Sloan's ten seasons. They pushed Oscar Robertson and Kareem's Milwaukee Bucks to seven games in the 1974 playoffs. They were, for several years, the most dangerous team in the Midwest.
Sloan was the reason that defense was possible. Love scored. Norm Van Lier orchestrated. But Sloan defended. He defended the other team's best player, locked him down, made him think twice before driving baseline, and then crashed the boards when a shot went up anyway. In an era before analytics told coaches what mattered, Sloan understood intuitively that games are won by stops.
- 10 seasons as a Chicago Bull (1966-1976)
- 5x All-Defensive First Team
- 1x All-Star (1967)
- Career: 14.0 PPG, 7.4 RPG as a guard
- Never missed more than five games in any full season
After Chicago: Building a Dynasty as a Coach
The story of Jerry Sloan's #4 hanging in the United Center rafters isn't only about what he did as a player. It's about what he represented — and what he went on to prove.
When Sloan retired as a player in 1976, basketball hadn't finished with him. He spent a few years as an assistant, then landed the Utah Jazz head coaching job in 1988. He would hold it for 23 years. Twenty-three seasons of playoff basketball. Twenty-three seasons of the same standard he played by: effort, defense, execution, accountability.
His Utah teams — featuring John Stockton and Karl Malone, perhaps the greatest pick-and-roll partnership in basketball history — went to the NBA Finals in 1997 and 1998. Both times they faced Michael Jordan's Bulls. Both times Jordan was better. But the fact that those Jazz teams reached two consecutive Finals says everything about what Sloan's coaching philosophy could produce.
1,221 career coaching wins. That number places Sloan among the ten winningest coaches in NBA history. He achieved it in Utah, far from media glamour, by doing exactly what he did as a player in Chicago: outwork, out-compete, outlast.
Why #4 Deserved to Be the First
The Chicago Bulls retired Jerry Sloan's #4 in 1978 — before championships, before Jordan, before the franchise became a global phenomenon. They retired it because Sloan built the franchise's first identity out of nothing but willpower and a defensive IQ that no one had taught him. He came from a farm, played in a gym, and gave Chicago something to believe in before believing in the Bulls was easy.
He passed away on May 22, 2020, from complications of Parkinson's disease and Lewy body dementia. The basketball world mourned. The Bulls lowered their flag. And in the rafters of the United Center, #4 stayed exactly where it has been since 1978 — a reminder that championships aren't where legacies begin. They're where legacies are confirmed.
Jerry Sloan's legacy was confirmed long before that.
