This atmosphere sizzled until it finally exploded in February 1971, when a white-owned grocery store in a predominantly black neighborhood was fire-bombed. Ten people, nine black males and a white female, were later arrested in connection with the incident and received heavy prison sentences upon their conviction. Dubbed the Wilmington Ten by the news media, the group made appeals that would play in the headlines for years until the convictions were overturned by the federal courts.
This climate of conflict heightened Deloris Jordan’s concern as her children adjusted to new schools in the community.
The family had lived in one location briefly before moving into the Weaver Acres neighborhood on Gordon Road. They lived in one home there for a time, until they moved again, within the same neighborhood, to a large, split-level brick and clapboard house that James Jordan built in a stand of pines on a twelve-acre tract of land. It was convenient to the suburban schools of New Hanover County and to downtown. The ocean was just a few miles away, and James and Deloris sometimes escaped there on quiet summer evenings. Young Michael, however, soon developed an aversion to the water. At about age seven, he was swimming with a friend in the ocean when the friend panicked and grabbed onto Michael. Michael pushed away to keep the boy from dragging him under, and the child drowned. A few years later Michael himself got in trouble in a pool during a baseball trip and had to be pulled from the water. Years later, one of his college girlfriends drowned while she was home on break.
“I don’t mess with water,” Jordan was known to say thereafter.
Weaver Acres was a relatively new neighborhood, mostly black, but families of various races lived there in relative harmony. Both James and Deloris had always taught their children to be respectful of all people, instructing them that stereotypes were of little use. You had to treat people as people, regardless of their skin color, they explained. Indeed, a white family had lived near the Jordans back on Calico Bay Road, and the kids enjoyed the company of their playmates without incident. The family’s open-mindedness suggested that the Jordans were taking great pains to prepare their children for a brand-new world.
This attitude of tolerance proved to be a hallmark of Jordan’s early years in Wilmington. By the time he reached third grade, Michael had become fast friends with David Bridgers, a white schoolmate and neighbor. The two would remain close long after one of them became world-famous. They played baseball and rode bicycles together and explored the wooded areas and creek beds in and around Weaver Acres. Bridgers was the son of a taxi driver in a family that had recently moved from South Dakota. When his parents’ marriage broke up, Bridgers’s bond with Jordan grew even closer. They shared a love of baseball with Michael’s father, who welcomed David into the household. Bridgers and Jordan took turns pitching for a strong Little League team. The one who wasn’t pitching took up residence in center field.
“Before every pitch, I’d look at Mike in center, and he’d give me thumbs-up,” Bridgers once recalled. “With him on the mound, I’d do the same.”
One sizzling afternoon before Michael’s fear of swimming took hold, they snuck into a neighbor’s backyard to steal a dip in the pool while they thought the neighbors were away. The people caught the boys in the water and ordered them out, but in such a way that both kids could tell there was a racial motivation involved.
“They saw Mike and threw us out,” Bridgers said. “The rest of the bike ride he was very quiet. I asked him if he knew why they threw us out. He said yes. I asked if it bothered him. He said no. Then he just smiled. I’ll never forget it. He said, ‘I got cooled off enough. How about you?’ ”
Chapter 4
THE COMPETITOR
IT TOOK THE fewest of words to set him off, sometimes nothing more than the faintest trace of a smirk. He was also capable of making things up, conjuring up an affront out of thin air. That’s what they would all realize afterward. He would seize on apparently meaningless cracks or gestures and plunge them deep in his heart, until they glowed radioactively, the nuclear fuel rods of his great fire.
Only much later would the public come to understand just how incapable he was of letting go of even the tiniest details. Many observers mistakenly thought that these “affronts” were laughable things of Michael’s own manufacture, little devices to spur his competitive juices, and that he could jokingly toss them aside when he was done with them, after he had wrung another sweaty victory from the evening. But he could not let them go any more than he could shed his right arm. They were as organic to his being as his famous tongue. Many of the things that deeply offended Michael Jordan were hardly the stuff of stinging rebuke, except perhaps the very first one, which, as it later turned out, was the most important of all.
“Just go on in the house with the women.”
Of the millions of sentences that James Jordan uttered to his youngest son, this was the one that glowed neon-bright across the decades.
“My father is a mechanical person,” Jordan would recall later. “He always tried to save money by working on everybody’s cars. And my older brothers would go out and work with him. He would tell them to hand him a nine-sixteenths wrench and they’d do it. I’d get out there and he’d say give me a nine-sixteenths wrench and I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. He used to get irritated with me and say, ‘You don’t know what the hell you’re doing. Go on in there with the women.’ ”
His father’s words rang as a challenge to his adolescent masculinity. Even then, as the first hormonal surges were starting to thicken his features, he remained a cherubic figure, one that his siblings adored and his mother delighted in pulling into her embrace. But it was a disguise.
His father’s mean words had activated deep within him some errant strain of DNA, a mutation of competitive nature so strong as to almost seem titanium. They represented a contempt articulated almost daily in manner and attitude in the Jordan household throughout Michael’s tender years.
“Years later,” his sister Deloris recalled, “during the early days of his NBA career, he confessed that it was my father’s early treatment of him and Daddy’s declaration of his worthlessness that became the driving force that motivated him.… Each accomplishment that he achieved was his battle cry for defeating my father’s negative opinions of him.”
Michael himself would later reveal that as a child he was keenly aware of his father’s preference for brother Larry.
James Jordan had endured a similar treatment by his own father. Medward’s contempt for him would become a fixture in family lore. James himself confirmed it, and that contempt is what drove him to leave Teachey to prove himself in the Air Force. Medward was proud of his son, family members said, but he never seemed to find the means to express it to him face to face.
James paid him back again and again, by achieving so much in a life that his father could never hope to grasp.
This is what offspring of disapproving fathers often do. Without even realizing it, they lock in on an answer and deliver it over and over, confirming that they do not need to just go in the house. And they continue to confirm it even after the father has gone to dust, as if they are unconsciously yelling across time in an argument with the old man.
Around the time that he was telling Michael to take up life among the women, James Jordan put up a basketball hoop for his sons in the backyard of the family home. Up to that point, the family’s athletic focus had been on James in the backyard throwing pitches to his young sons, teaching them to hit and to love baseball. They had started at ages five and six playing T-ball. At seven and eight, the boys moved to a machine-pitch league. They faced their first live pitching at nine and ten, which was when the dichotomy emerged. Larry was all about hitting singles, while Michael would swing for the fences.
It was Larry, as the older brother, who first became infatuated with basketball. Michael was already on his way to success as a Little League player when the basketball court was laid out. Suddenly, things took off in another direction.
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p; Instinct had perhaps guided James, telling him that with Michael set to star in baseball, he should build the basketball hoop for Larry. The younger brother, however, was already quite taken with basketball himself. At age nine, Michael had watched intently on TV as the United States, led by a frenetic young guard named Doug Collins, battled its way to a showdown with the Russians in the 1972 Summer Olympics. When the Americans lost amidst great controversy, Michael retreated to the kitchen to tell his mother. “He said, ‘I’m going to be in the Olympics one day and I’m going to make sure we win,’ ” Deloris recalled later. “I smiled to myself and said, ‘Honey, that takes a lot to win the gold medal.’ ”
The plot, however, had been set in motion. From there, it was a matter of taking in all the basketball that broadcast TV had to offer, which wasn’t much. In those days, before cable and the constant presence of pro basketball on television, the once and future king of hoops wasn’t able to view NBA games. But the local affiliates brought him a weekly diet of Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) contests, which allowed Michael to follow the high-flying antics of David Thompson and the North Carolina State Wolfpack against the enemy, the University of North Carolina. NBC aired national games, featuring another of his favorite teams, the UCLA Bruins. Years later, former UCLA great Marques Johnson would be puzzled to see his poster on Jordan’s wall at the University of North Carolina, but it was because he had been a TV star in Jordan’s adolescence.
By the time Michael was eleven, James Jordan had purchased the family’s first basketball, and soon after he put the finishing touches on the court. The Jordans’ backyard soon attracted players from around the neighborhood, but the Jordan family rules applied. Homework had to be completed before anyone took to the court, and the eight o’clock bedtime remained strictly enforced. Still, the main event every day became Michael versus Larry in titanic games of one-on-one.
Though Jordan was nearly a year younger, he already stood above his stronger, older brother. Michael was mouthier, but they both talked trash, anything to get under the other’s skin. The contests quickly turned physical, then heated. When the yelling and arguing grew to a pitch, Deloris Jordan would step to the back door to enforce the peace. Some days she had to order them into the house. Day after day after day, they went at each other, with Larry able to use his strength to dominate his younger brother despite the height disadvantage.
The constant thumpings from his shorter brother hammered at Jordan’s young psyche. The pattern of defeat would stretch out for more than a year and a half.
“I think Michael got so good because Larry used to beat him all the time,” James Jordan would explain later. “He took it hard.”
“We grew up one-on-one,” Larry remembered.
“I always played hard,” Jordan said. “My brother and I would play every day until my mother had to call us in.… We never thought of brotherhood at all. Sometimes it would end in fighting.”
Michael was reed-thin and lacked strength, but he gradually learned how to take advantage of his height. For the longest time they became so evenly matched as to almost present mirror images of each other. “When you see me play, you see Larry play,” Jordan would later explain.
“I won most of them until he started to outgrow me,” said Larry, “and then that was the end of that.”
By the time Dick Neher, Jordan’s youth baseball coach, visited the Jordans’ backyard when Michael was a young teen, the rim was already beat up and tilted to one side, damage likely wrought by Larry’s dunks, a testament to the beating that Michael’s own psyche had suffered at the hands of his older brother.
These backyard battles would determine the nature of the two brothers’ adult relationship, a closeness tempered by sibling rivalry. They also established the manner in which Michael would relate to teammates throughout his playing career. James Worthy recalled Jordan as a new freshman on the University of North Carolina basketball team pestering him to play one-on-one: “His mission was to seek out the best player on the team and I was that guy my junior year. He was a bully and he bullied me.”
Even before that, it had become his modus operandi at Wilmington’s Empie Park, and at the Martin Luther King Community Center in the city. “It got to the point that I had to ask him not to come over and play,” recalled William Murphy, the center’s director.
“I didn’t want him to get hurt,” Murphy said. “I was afraid he would get cut off his feet. He used to be a challenge for everybody.” His attacking inspired that kind of visceral response.
It was the same everywhere he went, explained George Mumford, the psychologist who worked with Jordan as a pro player. Each opponent loomed as a Larry to be conquered. Much later, the mythology of the one-on-one games would bring his brother a certain status among Michael’s coterie, first in college and later in Chicago.
“Michael and Larry had obviously competed wildly as boys, and Larry loomed very large in his life,” explained David Hart, Michael’s roommate and the team manager at the University of North Carolina. “Michael really loved Larry and talked about him all the time—really revered him. But if Michael had gone far beyond Larry as an athlete, he never let it affect his feeling for his brother—his emotional connection and his respect for his brother were very strong. When his brother was around, he dropped all his mounting fame and his accomplishments and became nothing more than a loving, adoring younger brother.”
Later, in Chicago, Larry Jordan would join a pro basketball league that allowed no players taller than six feet four, but he soon injured his shoulder and dropped out, concerned that his family home was being exploited. “I never really felt overshadowed, because I was able to see his work ethic close up,” Larry said in a 2012 interview. “I played sports all my life, but I wasn’t as passionate about basketball as Michael was. I was more of a handyman, mechanical like my dad.”
“He was a stud athlete,” Doug Collins, who coached Michael in Chicago, once said of Larry. “I remember the first time I saw him—this rather short, incredibly muscled young man with a terrific body, about five seven, more a football body than a basketball body. The moment I saw him I understood where Michael’s drive came from.”
Pop Herring coached the brothers at Laney High School in Wilmington, where Michael became a star and Larry found limited playing time. “Larry,” Herring once said, “was so driven and so competitive an athlete that if he had been six two instead of five seven, I’m sure Michael would have been known as Larry’s brother instead of Larry always being known as Michael’s brother.”
Perhaps some of this praise is overstated, due in part to the warmth that family and friends felt for Larry Jordan. They often described him as genuine, low-key, gentlemanly, but something of a painful lesson in fate. He was so close to his brother in ability as an adolescent but lived eternally in Michael’s shadow. It was a circumstance that would trouble Deloris Jordan over the years. It would intrude on even the fun moments between the brothers as adults. After Michael became a star in the NBA, they reprised their old one-on-one matchup one day, during which Michael paused, looked down at Larry’s feet, and said, “Just remember whose name is on your shoes.”
Bill Billingsley recalls the two brothers taking their first steps together in organized basketball. It was in early 1975 in the ancient gym at Wilmington’s old Chestnut Street School, where the city held a youth basketball league. Billingsley, twenty-four at the time, was coaching against the team the Jordans played on. “If you saw them, you’d think Larry was the younger one,” he said. “Michael was so much taller. Even then Larry was not the player Michael was, and by a long shot.”
Larry recalled that it was actually their youth baseball coach who had gotten them involved in basketball. Dick Neher was helping to form a youth hoops team and phoned Ned Parrish, who had coached Michael in youth baseball. Parrish had immediately suggested the Jordan boys.
In a 2012 interview, Neher laughed at the memory of the younger Jordan on that basketball team. “He was a big-time gunne
r,” the coach recalled. “He had never played organized ball. His Little League baseball coach had put him on the team. He was a good dribbler. He could handle the ball. He was quick. But if you gave him the ball you’d never see it again. It was going up to the hoop. We laughed about it.”
Billingsley’s team played three games against those first basketball Jordanaires and won two of them mostly because Billingsley’s team played man-to-man while the rest of the teams in the league played the stiff and lazy zone defenses typical of youth basketball.
Billingsley assigned his star player, Reggie Williams—who later played some college ball—to guard Jordan. “Michael was their best player. To show you how smart he was even at that age, he posted up Reggie and hit a short jump shot in the lane,” the coach recalled. “Even at twelve years old he already had real basketball skills and smarts.” Billingsley believed that such a move was instinctive, that no youth coach could have had the time or inclination to teach something like that.
“When I was twelve years old, my brother Larry and I were the starting backcourt in Pee Wee League,” Jordan remembered of the experience. “He was the defensive guy, and I was the scorer. So I hit the winning basket, and as we were riding home, my father said, ‘Larry, that was great defense you played.’ I’m saying, ‘Damn, I stole the ball and scored the winning layup.’ In my mind I’m thinking that evidently my father didn’t see what I did, so I had to show him. It’s funny how you look at those situations and all the steps that led to your competitive attitude.”
In baseball, it had been the same, he recalled. He would go for a home run, Larry would aim for a base hit, and his father would always say, “Larry, that’s a great attitude to have, going for the base hit.”
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