"When I decided to come here, I said to myself that you probably are going to have to start from the bottom, same as rookie coming out of college," Kukoc says as he folds himself into a chair. "After playing nine years of basketball in Europe, it wasn't always easy to accept that whatever I did there was, like, Who cares? This is NBA. When Pip and MJ talk about things now, they say, This is your fourth year; you're almost a rookie. And I say, O.K., we count three years in Europe like one in NBA. I still have at least seven years." Kukoc wouldn't still be trying to convert Euroball into NBA hard currency, wouldn't still be calculating dog years, if he had been, say, some big kid from Duke. Trouble is, his reputation in Europe didn't so much precede him as hinder him. Jordan declined to look at tapes that Bulls general manager Jerry Krause supplied of the Croatian prodigy, whom the Bulls drafted 29th overall in 1990, and when Krause asked Jordan to call and encourage Kukoc to come to Chicago, Jordan was quoted as saying, "I don't speak no Yugoslavian." Jordan and Pippen finally faced Kukoc when he was playing for Croatia at the Barcelona Olympics in '92, and they not only had him for lunch but they also looked as if they were having a grand time playing with their food. Pippen in particular seemed offended by the extended courtship of Kukoc—not surprising when his own contract concerns had already been placed on the back burner. "This club went out of its way to find Toni, get Toni and pay him a lot of money," Jackson says. "At the same time [it] couldn't find a way to honor someone [Pippen] who had done the job [here] for years." This was business (Pippen's salary for 1996-97 was a paltry $2.375 million). So, apparently, was Pippen's refusal to play the last 1.8 seconds of regulation in a 1994 Eastern Conference semifinal playoff game against the New York Knicks after Jackson designed the last shot for Kukoc—a shot Kukoc sank to win the game. "No," says Kukoc, holding on to the consonant in the English that he has fought hard to master and pondering whether the resentment was mutual. "I like Scottie a lot. For me, he seems closest in personality to myself." Pippen denies he ever had a problem with Kukoc, saying, "Other than me trying to push him [to succeed] when he first came in, we have a great relationship. We have a lot of respect for each other." Jordan sees Kukoc differently. In Rick Telander's 1996 book, In the Year of the Bull, Kukoc is Jordan's biggest target. Jordan says matter-of-factly, "Toni likes to be admired. It's the fame he loves, but he doesn't like to work.... You have players who have the heart but not the talent. And players who have the talent but not the heart. I'm seeing it a lot more as I get older, and I get frustrated. And that frustration makes me just want to choke the s—- out of Toni." Kukoc shifts on the chair when Jordan's rebuke is repeated. "I like playing with Michael. I just can't get close to him as a person," says Kukoc, a cloud passing over his face. "I can be aggressive in a basketball way, but Michael wants me to be aggressive as a person. I don't know how to do that. MJ tells me, 'If you want to be mean and aggressive, eat red meat and a pepper.' MJ is always going to say I don't understand. I think I do understand. At this point, I think I do get it." Maybe. His coach occasionally wonders. The schoolyard is Jackson's equivalent of Jordan's red meat and a pepper. He has asked Kukoc to study playground basketball, the implication being that three guys named Charlie playing on a court with chain nets have a greater natural affinity for the NBA game than the most gifted European-trained player ever. Jackson doesn't consider the suggestion demeaning, merely instructive. He says, "I told Toni at some point early in his career that he does so many things that are incongruous in the context of basketball that I was going to have to be the one to rescue him by disciplining him before his teammates chewed him apart." In January 1996, Kukoc, feeling sufficiently masticated over his casual defense and one-armed rebounding, finally asked Jackson to back off a little. Jackson agreed to be less forceful, at least publicly. "Phil's not much of a yeller," Bulls guard Steve Kerr says, "but Toni's his guy." You try smiling—or hitting the three-pointer—when your own coaches are trash-talking you. "The only ones who can stop me," Kukoc proclaims, "are Phil and Tex [Winter, a Bulls assistant coach and defensive guru]." "I gave him that line," Jackson says proudly.   Kukoc walks into Dukan's office at the Bulls' practice center, quickly glancing to his right. There, on the wall, is a travel poster of Split, Croatia, their hometown. The poster is Kukoc's smile button. The sight of it bathes his face in a soft light, and years seem to melt off. The shot is an aerial view of Diocletian's palace, but it is the Adriatic in the background that draws the eye. Kukoc loves the sea. That shark tattoo on his left shoulder, so anomalous to his nature, is his reminder of the water. If Kukoc has changed, maybe it is because Split has changed. The city was mostly spared in 1991 during the civil war, when the Yugoslavia that Tito had knit together began to unravel. Kukoc was already playing for Benetton Treviso when two days of fighting erupted around Split. No one in his family was killed. Compared with the devastation of, say, Dubrovnik, nothing happened. But the war marked Split and its people. "Before the war people were always having fun, always laughing," says Kukoc, who returns home every summer. "They used to say it is a city that you can put a big plastic roof on, and it would be the biggest circus in the world. Since the war people are just trying to stay alive, exist. "Phil sometimes says I'm not aggressive, I'm not a fighter. I know this guy, a player back home I played on the national team with. I was always compared with this guy—the same kind of mentality. The first year of the war, I see this guy, and he is like commander of a thousand people. I talk to him, and he says he came to the point where it didn't matter to see people killed or to kill somebody. Like you just pulled the trigger. Once you hear those things, it's not human anymore." Maybe if you maintain your humanity, if you can choke back the bile in your throat, the other things—shooting threes and defense and being a warrior by Bulls standards—will sort themselves out. "I often talk to Toni about what's gone on there," Jackson says, "and the thing that strikes me the most is his despair about the future. That this thing won't be fixed in his lifetime." "I don't know how many guys on this team tried to put themselves in Toni's shoes—having to learn the language, having to come from where he has," Kerr says. "Maybe we should have. If it were the reverse situation, it would seem like a lot of pressure."   If this were a perfect world—and Toni Kukoc certainly recognizes that it isn't—he would be starting, playing 40 minutes, scoring 18 to 20 points per game, averaging seven assists and seven rebounds and "doing all kinds of things I used to over there." But this is the imperfect world of the World's Greatest Basketball Team. "I have a middle line," Kukoc says. "I am pretty much above that middle line, in between perfect and bottom." His play swings on both sides of that line. In December, Kukoc willed a 129-123 Chicago victory by scoring 23 points in the fourth quarter and overtime—one more in that span than the entire Los Angeles Lakers team. Then, a month later, he shot an invisible 1 for 10 in a 102-86 Bulls loss to the Houston Rockets. Kukoc followed that two nights later with a 3-for-9 stinker in an 88-87 home victory against the Knicks, a game in which Jackson chose to start two less-accomplished players, forward Jason Caffey and guard Randy Brown, but not Kukoc. As the lineups were announced, Kukoc turned to press row and shrugged. He was smiling. "Once, early in my NBA career, somebody asked me, 'When are you going to smile like you did in Europe?'" Kukoc says. "I said when I reached the point where I feel about my game in NBA like I felt in Europe, I'll smile all the time."