This first recreation league basketball experience came in an era before AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) basketball brought in players at a younger age. At the same time, baseball, a game played predominantly by whites, had more sophisticated support in Wilmington, Billingsley explained. The resources for youth basketball were scarce by comparison.
At the end of the season, Michael was named to the all-star team, even though he was one of the youngest players in the league. Because Billingsley’s team had won the league, he was named the all-star coach. He began preparing the group for a statewide tournament, and encountered James and Deloris Jordan for the first time.
“His parents saw every game he played,” the coach recalled. “You talk about devoted parents, their children were everything to them. Mr. Jordan, he was a quiet man. Mrs. Jordan, she was the dynamic personality in that relationship. Anybody who spent time around them had to be impressed by the strong will of Deloris Jordan. She was protective of her children. Some parents just dropped the kids off. Not them. They were there, but they were not meddlesome or trying to influence my decisions.” In fact, they never said a word to him about how he coached the team.
The Wilmington all-stars drove to Shelby, near Charlotte, for the state recreation tournament that spring of 1975. James Jordan was among a small group of parents who made the trip. Billingsley recalled that the team played in four games over two days, making it all the way to the tournament semifinals, where Wilmington lost to a team from Chapel Hill that had large, overpowering players in the frontcourt.
“The last night we were staying in our hotel,” the coach recalled. “The kids were in their rooms playing. A few of the dads and the coaches dealt up some cards. It was nothing serious, just fun. Somebody said, ‘Let’s get some beer.’ ”
Billingsley was impressed that James Jordan immediately pointed out that they were in a dry county, no alcohol.
“Mr. Jordan, he knew exactly where to get some beer. He drove over the state line and came back with two or three six-packs,” Billingsley remembered. “We stayed up late, just having a good time, not really gambling. Mr. Jordan was a really good guy.”
It was the first of so many basketball trips that father and son would take over the coming years. Whoever they met had the same overwhelming opinion of James Jordan. What a nice man, people would say time and again, a person with hands-on friendliness, who had a smile and a pat on the back, generous with his affection, extending warmth even to a man like Bulls executive Jerry Krause, who would have more than his share of conflict with Michael.
“He was just such a friendly guy,” Billingsley said.
Most importantly, people saw something else. Michael Jordan had thoroughly and completely secured his father’s affection. Clearly, on some level Jordan himself had gained that knowledge. But on another level, the one that mattered most, such information never registered on the impenetrable core of a competitor’s psyche. Michael Jordan’s immutable agenda had been set, and on the slightest trigger it could let loose a tide of passion that would stir others to wide-eyed wonder.
No one, of course, would become more surprised by these moments than Jordan himself. As they came to him time and again over the years, that same blinking surprise was always there. And always the same question, too: What will I do next?
The Darkness
Despite appearances, the union of James and Deloris Jordan teetered on the brink of self-destruction in the mid-1970s. They projected an image of happiness, but their marriage was plagued by a discord that lurched at times into violent arguments. In the worst of these conflicts, beginning on Calico Bay Road, James and Deloris would go at each other in front of the children, who would run across the street hoping to find a grandparent to break up the melee. The move to Wilmington had done nothing to break this pattern. They didn’t fight every day, but when they did, things got out of hand in a hurry. Daughter Sis recalled one set-to where her mother went after her father and he responded by knocking her out cold. The children feared she might be dead, but the next morning she appeared from the bedroom, ready to face another day. Another incident brought a frightening car chase down a road near their house, with the children in one of the cars. Such incidents fitfully interrupted a general peace that kept the family moving forward, but always with a lurking element of fear.
James’s job at General Electric allowed the family to live a comfortable life and provided opportunities for their children. All the kids were involved in activities outside of school, and the older ones even had part-time jobs. But even with James’s salary, they faced financial pressures. Once Roslyn, the youngest child, entered school, Deloris took a job on the assembly line at the local Corning plant. It was shift work with a rotating schedule that threw the family routine into turmoil until one day Deloris finally could take no more and abruptly quit. She hadn’t discussed it with James, but he took it in stride. Months later, she found work as a teller at a branch of United Carolina Bank.
As if managing all of this wasn’t enough, the couple decided to open a nightclub, Club Eleganza, which somehow seemed like a good idea at the time. They were both in their midthirties and had spent a good portion of their teen years and all of their adult lives raising children. Neither of them ever mentioned the club in any of their later interviews with reporters about Michael’s upbringing. It seems likely, however, that Club Eleganza played a role in their marital issues. Such ventures often drain time and money, and James and Deloris were already challenged by busy schedules with their children.
Sis implied that the unhappy home life may have prompted Ronnie’s shipping out for Army basic training just two days after he graduated from high school in 1975. Others suggested that he had dreamed of a life in the service for years, evidenced by his involvement in high school ROTC. Whatever the reason, Ronnie’s departure added to the family’s emotional strain. Deloris wept as the family saw him off at the bus station.
“It was like somebody in the house had died,” Deloris said of Ronnie’s departure. “I couldn’t go into his room for many, many years. He was the first to leave.”
Like many women facing the stresses and challenge of motherhood, she had also gained substantial weight. Although she would later lose the weight, the period proved to be a deeply emotional time for the mother of five. And, mindful of her own troubles as a teen, she had grown quite anxious over signs that daughter Sis was becoming sexually active. Never close, mother and daughter soon found themselves in what seemed like an almost daily series of ugly arguments. The two were engaged in just such a bout one summer morning in 1975 as Deloris was driving her daughter to her job. The exchange grew especially heated as they pulled up to Sis’s place of work, Gibson’s Discount Store. Deloris supposedly called her daughter a slut. “If I’m such a slut, why don’t you keep your husband out of my bed?” Sis retorted, as she would later detail in a book she independently published, In My Family’s Shadow.
Deloris’s jaw dropped. She was staggered by the comment, but before she could gather her thoughts to reply, her daughter jumped out of the car and ran into work. Deloris responded by leaning on the car horn in an attempt to bring her daughter back outside. Inside the store, Sis tried to ignore the blaring horn, but finally the store manager told her to go back outside and see what her mother wanted.
When Sis got back in the car, Deloris told her daughter to explain what she had just said. The mother listened silently as Sis told of a pattern of persistent abuse over eight years in which James Jordan would visit her late at night in the bed she shared with Roslyn, who was a preschooler when the alleged abuse began. Sis recounted how her father first explained that he was teaching her to kiss like an adult, how confused she was, how the abuse escalated over time.
What followed next was a harrowing scene, according to Sis’s account. They drove to Club Eleganza, where James was doing some maintenance work. His wife ordered him into the car, and they drove to a little-used road and pulled over, where Deloris told her daughter to r
epeat the allegations. As Sis delivered her account, Deloris told her husband that now certain things about the marriage made sense. James flew into a fury and began choking his daughter while screaming, “Are you going to believe this tramp over me?” Sis recalled being stunned at her father calling her a tramp. With Sis gasping, Deloris told him to stop or she would kill him.
Finally, then, the angry moment broke, Sis recalled in her book. They all calmed down and rode home, where the daughter retreated immediately to her bedroom. After about an hour, her mother came and told her that the circumstances made it impossible for the three of them to live together. Because Sis still had two years of high school left, she would have to leave the family to live in a girls’ home. She told her daughter that James had explained that he was “only trying to help her” and that she had terribly misunderstood his affection.
Under no circumstances, Deloris said, was Sis ever to mention her allegations to anyone else, inside or outside of the family. The daughter did not tell her mother that it was already too late; at age twelve she had confided to a cousin her same age. In turn, that cousin supposedly told her brother, but if word of the situation spread in the larger Jordan family, it was only in whispers. No one else, it seemed, was about to confront James Jordan, who was both admired and feared in the family.
The Jordans never acted on their threat of sending their daughter to a home for girls. The parents somehow managed to absorb the incident and move forward, all the while keeping a cheerful outward demeanor. James Jordan, in particular, would continue to earn praise and affection as the amiable father of a very special athlete.
Evaluating Sis’s allegations, once they became public decades later, in 2001, would prove nearly impossible because they had never been reported to authorities or investigated by social services or police at the time. Deloris Jordan had apparently considered her daughter’s claims and concluded that taking the matter to authorities would destroy the family and endanger the other children as well. Criminal charges against James would have likely resulted in the loss of his employment and the family’s primary means of support.
A decade after the disclosure to her mother, Sis contacted a Charlotte lawyer about the possibility of filing a lawsuit against her parents. She recalled in her book that the lawyer referred her to criminal authorities in Wilmington, who in turn told her that the statute of limitations had expired.
Michael was twelve at the time and unaware of the situation; he didn’t learn of his sister’s claims for many years. Sis left the family in 1977 to marry and begin a family of her own, although her life would be marked by depression and questionable behavior, which would later be used by some in the family to discount her allegations. Advocates for the victims of sexual abuse assert that such traits are often the symptoms experienced afterward by victims.
The allegations of abuse would prove to be an unarticulated seed of division in the family, twisting it in many difficult directions over time, no matter the efforts to push them beyond memory. Michael Jordan drew his competitive spirit from the same deep feelings of love and loyalty he felt toward his parents. His emotions regarding his family existed on a far deeper level than his public could ever fathom. For so many years his upbringing would be seen as the perfect story, a public view aided by his mother’s persistent message that her family was a normal middle-class unit.
As with the story of her teen pregnancy, there was an attempt to cover up a reality that was far from normal. Her defenders would say that her decision that day in 1975 reflected what she thought best to protect her family.
The real story may help explain why late in life, well into her seventies, Deloris continued to travel the world, speaking in dozens of countries about family issues. She was never forthcoming on the deepest conflicts that threatened her own family, yet she often talked about the thing she clearly knew best: survival.
Chapter 5
THE DIAMOND
IN THE MIDST of this family turmoil in 1975, Michael Jordan had an extraordinary year as a twelve-year-old Little Leaguer. He was named the state’s most valuable player while throwing two no-hitters in leading his team to a state championship. Later, in regional play in Georgia, Michael would show his hitting prowess by driving a ball out of the park in a key moment, a feat that kept his father smiling for years afterward.
“He used to talk about the time my Little League team was going for the World Series,” Jordan would remember, “and we were playing in Georgia, and there was an offer that if anyone hit a homer they’d get a free steak. I hadn’t had a steak in quite a while, and my father said, ‘If you hit a homer, I’ll buy you another steak.’ It was a big ball field, and in the fourth inning I hit that sucker over the center field fence with two on to tie the game, 3–3. We lost it anyway, 4–3, but I’ve never experienced anything in sports like hitting one out of the park.”
At the time, James Jordan began to entertain the thought that his son was headed toward the big leagues. William Henry Jordan, a cousin, saw it, too. “Michael pitched in an all-star game against my son when he was twelve years old,” he remembered. “You could only pitch four innings under the rules at that time. He struck out all twelve batters he faced, if I remember correctly. He was throwing so hard. He pitched for New Hanover and my son played for Pender County. We were sure that day when we watched him that MJ would be a pro player.”
Jordan wasn’t just a pitcher. “When he was twelve years old, he was an outstanding Little League player,” recalled Dick Neher, who later coached Jordan in Babe Ruth League. “He was lanky. He played shortstop, too. He’d go over behind third base to dig out a grounder, he’d backhand the ball. You’ve seen Derek Jeter do this. He’d jump up in the air and throw it over to first. He was named Mr. Baseball in North Carolina.”
With the award, Jordan was given a scholarship for two weeks that summer to Mickey Owen Baseball Camp in Missouri. It was a huge honor. The family proudly displayed his Little League trophies for years. “Michael hit a 265-foot home run in the elimination game in Georgia,” James would tell visitors. “From the very start in Little League he loved it and excelled in it.”
However, young Michael plummeted almost as swiftly as he had peaked. Neher had taken Jordan and four other thirteen-year-olds in the Babe Ruth League draft that spring. The Babe Ruth League included players thirteen to fifteen years old. “He was a superstar coming out of Little League, but I’d always tell the parents of my thirteen-year-olds, ‘Your son’s probably not going to get to play much this year,’ ” Neher recalled.
There was another reason that young Michael didn’t get to play at age thirteen. The diamond was larger in this league, with longer base paths and a greater distance from the mound to home plate. Jordan no longer had the arm to dominate. “When I got him, I couldn’t play him at shortstop,” Neher recalled of Jordan’s first year, 1976, in Babe Ruth League. “He couldn’t make the throws. Mike didn’t get into but about four games for me when he was thirteen. I don’t think he got to bat but four times that season.”
If the Jordans were infuriated by the circumstances, they never allowed Neher to see it. James Jordan even helped the coach build a baseball field during his time as a team parent. “Mike’s dad and mom, they had no problem with it,” the coach recalled in a 2012 interview. “They were good-natured people anyway.… James was not an interfering dad with me for three years, not at all. He was nothing but helpful.”
The thirteen-year-old Jordan never complained either, Neher said. “My experience with Mike for three years, he was a joy to coach, very cooperative. All the time I knew him, he just wanted to play.”
Bill Billingsley, who watched the team play, was struck that the thirteen-year-old Jordan often wound up standing on the sideline in a windbreaker, coaching first base. The opportunities were clearly limited for Jordan. Youth sports can be cruel like that, heaping glory on a young player at one stage of the game, then snatching it away at another.
Because he wasn’t playing much, Jor
dan turned to amusing himself and others. “He was a loosey-goosey guy,” Neher said. “He kept all the guys loose.” Always a joker, the young Jordan stepped up the pace of his antics, putting shaving cream in his teammates’ batting helmets, tapping people on the shoulder and hiding, or any other prank he could dream up. Jordan’s old friend David Bridgers was on the team as well. “He was Mike’s number one fan,” Neher recalled. “They called him the white Michael Jordan. He and Mike were the best of friends, but they’d get in a physical fight nearly every practice. They were both so competitive; they’d pick on each other. And Bridgers was a good athlete.”
Neher looked up one day at batting practice to find Bridgers on top of Jordan, whaling away. Jordan, who had been catching, began talking trash as Bridgers whiffed on some pitches. He told Bridgers that if he tried swinging at the ball with his big ears he might actually have a chance of getting a hit. “Mike was lying on the ground, with all his equipment on, and David was on top of him just pounding away on the mask,” Neher recalled. “Like hockey players. They used to get into it all the time.”
Neher separated the two. He recalled the tears rolling down Bridgers’s face. When the coach heard what had caused the brouhaha, he laughed and asked Jordan if he’d looked in a mirror lately. Jordan’s own unusual ears had been the subject of Larry’s taunts during their backyard battles. Neher had nicknames for all his players. So he nicknamed Jordan “Rabbit” in honor of the jug handles on the side of his head, and the anger was apparently diffused.
“The kids liked that,” the coach said. “We were messing around with Mike. Mike’s ears lay real close to his head, just like a rabbit. So we all were standing around one day trying to decide, ‘Why don’t we call him Rabbit?’ Those ears lay real close. Everybody laughed. Mike was fine with it. When they were in Chicago, James told the reporters that Mike was nicknamed Rabbit because he was so fast. That didn’t have nothing to do with it.”
Michael Jordan Page 6
