Jordan answered that with an eye-opening ninth-grade basketball season for a team coached by Fred Lynch. Jordan soon piqued the interest of varsity coaches around the area. “I watched him at Virgo, right after he made his debut,” remembered Dick Neher, whose son Steve played basketball with Jordan. “Their team went down to Burgaw to play a junior high team. Mike dropped 44 points, and they didn’t play but six-minute quarters in junior high.”
Jordan scored 44 of his team’s 54 points that game, Neher recalled. “He got to where he started hitting shots, then he started going to the bucket.”
Jim Hebron, the varsity coach at nearby New Hanover High School, began watching Jordan closely. “I remember Jim Hebron told me when he was a ninth grader that he was going to be something special,” recalled Marshall Hamilton, then the coach at nearby Southern Wayne High School.
The buzz wasn’t loud, but without a doubt it began there in the ninth grade at D. C. Virgo. Jordan emerged at a time before basketball exploded in popularity. AAU competition would soon blanket the sport with an elaborate process that commodified young talent. “Now kids twelve and under playing AAU basketball think they’ve made it,” Tom Konchalski, a veteran basketball scout, observed in a 2011 interview.
In 1977–78, Jordan had only the short basketball schedule of the public school league to develop. The AAU competition that came later gave young players many hours of game experience, but the grind and the coddling of that talent machine likely would have robbed Jordan of his essence, Konchalski added. “I don’t think he would have had this all-consuming competitiveness. The thing that really set him apart is he had tremendous competitiveness, that XYY chromosome in terms of competitiveness. That’s maybe been his downfall in other areas of his life, but in basketball that defined him. That transcended his athleticism. He wouldn’t have had that because what happens with AAU is there’s always another game. You will play three games in a day. You can lose a game in disgrace and two hours later, there’s always the next game. So you’re not as focused on winning. Winning’s not a critical obsession, and that’s what set Michael Jordan apart from other players, that he was an obsessively competitive player. Had he grown up in an AAU culture, he would have lost his winning edge. He would have lost what his real thing is, and that’s his competitiveness.”
As fate would have it, Bill Billingsley, who had coached Jordan on the twelve-year-old all-star basketball team, was hired that spring as a substitute teacher at D. C. Virgo, and was assigned to coach the ninth-grade baseball team. He was well aware of Jordan’s frustration with the game.
“He was losing interest,” Billingsley said of Jordan’s relationship with baseball. “His body was changing, growing, and he had already had some success in basketball.”
In fact, many of the best memories of Billingsley’s ninth-grade baseball team at D. C. Virgo school involved basketball. Bud Blanton, a white kid, and Jordan were clearly the two best athletes on the baseball team. Billingsley would find them each afternoon engaged in heated battles of one-on-one in the school gym. “They’d go in there and they’d play basketball and you’d think it was World War III,” the coach remembered with a laugh. “They would really go at it.”
One day Jordan even coaxed Billingsley, who was in his twenties, into a game. “He wasn’t as hard on me as when he played Blanton,” the coach explained. “He’d stand all the way out at the top of the key and say, ‘Hey, coach, you gonna let me have this?’ ” Billingsley had sagged back into the lane to protect against Jordan’s quickness to the hoop, only to watch him drain three straight shots from outside in those days before the three-pointer was legal. He’s adding a little range, the coach thought.
The young Jordan was already spicing such moments with a taste of trash talk, Billingsley said. “When he was fourteen, he wasn’t exactly modest. He was a chatterbox. He loved the verbal gamesmanship.” Some didn’t take so well to the commentary. “He did have a scrap with one of the boys. Michael whacked him around a bit,” Billingsley said. “I think he got in some trouble for it and was taken to the principal’s office. Michael was a very respectful, well-behaved kid. But he wasn’t shy about defending his interests.”
Jordan did some pitching for Virgo that season, but mostly he caught. Bud Blanton was already displaying the talent that would earn him a scholarship to pitch in the Southeastern Conference at the University of Kentucky. Jordan’s act behind the plate mixed a little Mick Jagger with some Richard Pryor.
“He’d catch the ball and laugh and dance out from behind the plate. The whole place would be rocking,” Billingsley said of Virgo’s home games.
Blanton, the son of a local deputy who had passed away, was blessed with a mix of good stuff, speed as well as a doozy of a knuckleball, which gave Jordan a lot to work with. There was one game in particular against nearby Jacksonville, Billingsley remembered. “Blanton could throw hard, then change to that knuckleball. The hitters were baffled and seemed a little scared. What really baffled them was the guy behind the plate. ‘You can’t hit this ball,’ Michael would be telling them. Blanton would be winding up to deliver, and Jordan was there telling them, ‘Here it comes! Here it comes!’ ”
Billingsley sat behind the backstop, chuckling. “I can see it and hear it. With the knuckleball, those guys wouldn’t even swing. The hitters were so confused, and Jordan was back there just basting them. Instead of looking at the pitch, they were peeking back at Jordan. I was laughing so hard I almost fell out of the chair. Every time Bud Blanton threw, Jordan would be telling them, ‘Look out now. Here it comes.’ ”
That summer, Jordan played his final season of Babe Ruth ball. “At fifteen, he was supposed to be one of my main pitchers,” Dick Neher said. “That didn’t happen. I was able to put him in the outfield, and a little at first base.” Jordan didn’t hit as well as the previous year either. But he was still effective. “We played small ball, a lot of bunting, hitting, and running,” Neher explained. “Mike loved that. He could run. He didn’t run fast. He just had a long stride.”
Which was just enough to help his team win a championship. The telling moment came in a makeup game that went into extra innings, scoreless. “Mike walked, and he stole second,” Neher said. “I think we bunted him to third. So I put on a suicide squeeze. We had a thirteen-year-old who could really bunt. I put him in the lineup and told him to bunt and to protect Mike on third. But Mike was already halfway down the line when the pitcher let it go.” Neher looked over at the plate, and the batter had stepped out of the batter’s box.
His team looked to be headed for disaster, the coach recalled. “There was the catcher with the ball, sitting there looking at Mike about forty feet away. So he jumped up. And the third baseman was standing beside the bag with his legs crossed, chewing his fingernails. Mike just turned around and faked like he was going back to third. And the catcher threw the ball into left field, so Mike came charging on down the line with the catcher sitting three feet in front of home plate. Mike hurdled him and landed on the plate, jumped completely over him. Everybody was like, ‘Wow, did you see that?’ We won the ball game 1–0 on Mike’s play.”
But, Neher emphasized, it wasn’t just that he had the athleticism to make the play, he also knew the rules. “There was a rule that if you made contact and the catcher didn’t have the ball, they could throw you out. So Mike avoided the contact. He jumped clean over the catcher.”
That next fall, Jordan went out for the junior varsity football team at Laney High School. He was already taller than the rest of the men in his family, nearing five nine. But his mother tried to talk him out of it, pointing out his skinny arms and legs. He pleaded, she finally relented, and he found a spot in the defensive backfield, where he was soon leading the team in interceptions. Well into the schedule, Laney faced Brunswick County, a team that featured a big, bruising running back who broke through the line early in the contest. Skinny Mike Jordan gamely stepped in to fill the gap. Suddenly, he was on the ground writhing in pain and com
plaining about his shoulder.
“It’s broke, coach. It’s broke,” he yelled as coach Fred Lynch walked out to see what was wrong. Lynch, quite used to Jordan’s constant joking around, told him, “Get up, you’re holding up the game.” Then he realized it was no joke.
Deloris Jordan had arrived late and was just taking her seat when she saw that the action had stopped. A friend informed her that Michael was injured and that they were bringing an ambulance around to take him to the hospital. She recalled that her first instinct was to run down to see if he was all right, but she remembered that she had made a promise not to embarrass him. So she went back to her car and drove to the hospital to wait for him there.
The shoulder was separated, but by the time the team had its banquet several weeks later, it had mended. Before the banquet, Michael and Bud Blanton threw around a football for a time, then went to the backyard basketball goal for some one-on-one. After that, Jordan took a running start and tried to dunk. He couldn’t get it down, but it was close enough to encourage him to try again. Then again. And again. And again. Sweating and frowning, he spent much of the next hour taking the ball to the rim, tongue out. Finally, after about thirty tries, he got it over the cup and flushed. His smile said everything.
“He was excited,” Blanton remembered years later. “He was glad he had done it, but it was only a matter of time.”
PART III
EMERGENCE
Chapter 6
THE CUT
THE FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY who pinned his hopes on trying out for the Laney High School varsity basketball team in the fall of 1978 was a far cry from the supremely confident Michael Jordan the world would come to know. That young man was stalked by self-doubt. He wasn’t a bad student, mostly Bs and Cs, but there was no indication that he was headed for stardom in academics. And he hated working, making no effort to do anything to earn extra money. He was oblivious to the example of his brother Ronnie’s two jobs during high school, and it was clear to his father that Michael would do anything to avoid anything that resembled effort.
That’s the laziest boy I’ve ever seen, James Jordan would say time and again. “If he had to get a job in a factory punching a clock, he’d starve to death. He would give every last dime of his allowance to his brothers and sisters and even kids in the neighborhood to do his chores. He was always broke.”
Yet that laziness magically disintegrated when it came to sports. If it involved a ball in the air, a contest to be settled, the switch came on. In his adolescent mind, Michael figured maybe he could be a professional athlete. That was really about the only thing that interested him, which made him no different from millions of other daydreaming boys his age. He couldn’t see how to make that happen, but rarely is there a clear or even a sane path to a life in professional sports.
Time had narrowed his options. He had watched his advantages in baseball mostly disappear. And his mother was determined that he drop football entirely. His choices seemed so bleak that Deloris even suggested he begin taking home economics courses so that he could learn to sew and cook for himself. Chipping away at his self-esteem, she implied it might be wise to do so because he didn’t seem to be the kind of guy who could easily attract a mate. It was her way of saying, “Just go on in the house with the women.”
Rather than getting bent out of shape, Jordan took her suggestion and signed up for the courses—and found he liked them. “I remember he baked a cake in school that was so good we couldn’t believe it,” his mother said. “We had to call his teacher to verify it.”
Nonetheless, at age fifteen, Jordan was verging on the melancholy common to so many teens. Truth be known, he didn’t have a lot of friends. The single beacon, the one bright spot in his life, was basketball.
After that ninth grade year at Virgo, Jordan and his lanky friend Leroy Smith attended a basketball camp run by Pop Herring, Laney High School’s varsity coach. The school was just three years old, with a shiny new gym. Laney was a symbol of Wilmington’s hard-won victories in integration, with a student population that was about 40 percent black. The city still ached racially, in so many ways reflecting the Wilmington that had been rocked by the 1898 riot when blacks were ushered to the railroad station and told to leave. “For a lot of African Americans, the only way to get ahead still was to get out,” offered Bill Billingsley, who would go on to earn a PhD in history and write about the city’s racial struggles.
Laney High School, though, enjoyed relative tranquility during Jordan’s years there, due in part to black and white students joining forces on the playing fields. Beyond the important gains brought by integrated classrooms, athletic competition became the primary place where the races learned to coexist, on a footing of newly developing mutual respect. But only in retrospect would such things be important. In 1978, Jordan was just another kid trying to make the varsity.
Jordan clearly had been the best player on the ninth-grade team, and was just as impressive at Herring’s camp that summer. Afterward, he began visualizing the kinds of things he would do on the floor that winter for the Laney Buccaneers. He was pretty confident that he would make the varsity for the upcoming season. After all, even Leroy Smith and his other ninth-grade teammates readily agreed that Jordan was the team’s best player.
This, of course, is the moment at which the Jordan mythology intersects with the tragedy that became coach Pop Herring’s life, resulting in a misunderstanding that would multiply fitfully over the ensuing decades. The story has been told in an endless wash of magazine pieces, newspaper stories, TV segments, videos, and radio broadcasts, just about every way that someone could recount how superstar Michael Jordan had been cut from his high school team.
Buried under the avalanche of mythmaking was his coach, Pop Herring. He was a proud son of Wilmington who had attended New Hanover High School, where he played for a legend, coach Leon Brogden, who guided eight different teams to state championships. Herring had played for Brogden’s final team to win a title and then went off to play quarterback at North Carolina Central, where John McLendon had set up the coaching program in the 1930s. Herring probably could have played basketball, but in college he turned to football as the ticket to a degree. He returned to Wilmington afterward and went to work for a time as Brogden’s assistant. When Laney High opened in the mid seventies, Herring had the pedigree to be named the basketball coach. It was significant that he was an African American head coach, which was rare at the time. Herring was a smart and personable young educator with a bright future when Michael Jordan came into the Laney High School program in 1978. In fact, Herring lived near the Jordans and was soon in the habit of stopping by in the mornings to pick up Michael to take him to the school gym for early workouts. He went the extra mile for his players, to the point of helping them write letters to colleges about the possibility of playing after high school. As his handling of Jordan would later prove, winning wasn’t the most important thing in Pop Herring’s world. His players were.
Dick Neher, who made a practice of closely observing coaches, had a son on Herring’s team. “He was a great guy,” Neher recalled. “He had a mental breakdown. He was funny. He was good to the kids. He was a good coach. He was personable. But he really bottomed out.”
Sadly, within three years of Jordan’s graduation from Laney, Herring’s struggle with schizophrenia would end his career. When the mental disease surfaced, it brought about a sudden and swift disintegration of his personality. The once thoughtful, energetic young coach could be seen walking the city’s streets, transformed almost overnight into a disheveled zombie in pursuit of unseen demons, often talking to himself or to no one in particular. This proved terribly distressing to old friends. “How could this happen?” they asked time and again. “How could this bright, special human being be reduced to this?” Medication helped ease his condition somewhat, but his life descended into an increasingly familiar pattern of vicious mood and behavior swings, all accompanied by a plunging social status.
His
coaching friends tried to protect him the best they could, but even as his life came apart, the Jordan narrative was gaining a momentum of its own. In time, it would produce a storm of interest in one of the strangest mysteries in Jordan’s background. He was cut from his high school team? The logical question followed: What dummy did that?
The community in Wilmington over the years held tightly to the hard truth of Herring’s situation, coming to grips with it, even as the media returned to the story time and again in their accounts of Jordan. The first reporter to make a major breakthrough on the truth was Kevin Sherrington from Dallas. Much later, Sports Illustrated would delve into the situation with a beautifully written piece about Herring. These and other stories came to imply that Jordan’s claim itself had the trappings of a false narrative, that it was somehow a creation of the superstar’s intensely competitive nature.
But that doesn’t seem to be the exact truth either, although the perception, shaped by the Sports Illustrated story, came to be another talking point of Jordan’s mythology. The basic facts of the story stand out amidst all of the misunderstanding and well-intentioned revisionism. It’s the age-old truth of public school competition: Young athletes try out for a team. Some make it. Some don’t.
After years of answering questions about the Jordan story, the coaches began to imply that there weren’t really any serious tryouts that fall for the Laney varsity. That revision, of course, opens up its own questions. If there were no tryouts, then they certainly would not have posted a list with the names of the players who made the varsity. But late that fall, Herring posted the list, in alphabetical order, of those who had been selected. Jordan had anticipated the news for days and hours and then seconds. And when it was posted, he was there almost immediately to read it. Then to reread it. Certainly there must be a mistake, he first thought. Even a fifteen-year-old Jordan knew that he was the best player on the ninth-grade team, and it wasn’t even close. But the only sophomore on the list was his long, tall friend, Leroy Smith.
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