Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  The realization of his defeat fell on him like a boulder that day. He walked home alone, avoiding anyone along the way. “I went to my room and I closed the door and I cried,” Jordan later recalled. “For a while I couldn’t stop. Even though there was no one else home at the time, I kept the door shut. It was important to me that no one hear me or see me.”

  The extenuating circumstance for Herring was the mix of his veteran team that fall. Eleven seniors and three juniors were returning to the varsity. Eight of them were guards. Leroy Smith gave the team much-needed size, although he played sparingly. Given time to absorb the decision, Jordan came to an inescapable conclusion—size mattered. “I was pissed,” he would tell writer John Edgar Wideman in 1990. “Because my best friend, he was about six six, he made the team. He wasn’t good, but he was six six, and that’s tall in high school. He made the team and I felt I was better.” Years later, Smith himself would emphasize his own surprise at his selection “because it certainly wasn’t based on talent.”

  “The debate,” recalled Ron Coley, Herring’s assistant coach, “was what do we do with Leroy Smith.” Coley, who later became a head coach in Pender County, claimed that he didn’t even remember Jordan trying out, but he also described the young Jordan as a “shy ballplayer.”

  The coaches admitted later that the situation could have been handled better. Herring may well have talked to the sophomore about his future, but if he did, Jordan didn’t comprehend it. And no one else recalled it. More likely, nothing was said because the situation was common and involved a long-valued principle of public-school athletics: Coaches coached and made their decisions. There was not a lot of discussion involved in the process. The searing element was the list itself, which apparently remained posted for much of that season. “It was there for a long, long time without my name on it,” Jordan recalled.

  Years later, reporters would travel to Wilmington to solve the mystery of the cut. Former coaches and teammates alike would tell them that it was for the best, that Jordan wasn’t ready, that he was too short, too thin, that he couldn’t possibly have beaten the older, stronger players on the varsity even in games of one-on-one. “I always felt he was confident,” recalled longtime Wilmington sportswriter Chuck Carree. “He just was short and could not do the things he eventually could until he had a growth spurt.”

  Perhaps that was true, although certainly it would be hard to argue against the results of the coming years. Those answers rang with clarity for just about all of the witnesses to the events of 1978—except, of course, for the most important one.

  Jordan’s heart was broken. He wanted to quit the sport and would later credit his mother with challenging him to fight through the immense disappointment. Fortunately, his spirit remained intact that winter.

  “We thought he’d be better off playing on the JV team,” said Fred Lynch, the coach of the younger team and an assistant on the varsity. “He didn’t sulk, he worked. We knew Michael was good, but we wanted him to play more.”

  Being on the varsity would have meant a substitute’s role, with little playing time, little development, Lynch explained. On the JV, he had room to rule. Still, the status of a junior varsity player came with the usual teen indignities. The players in the Laney program took note of the shape of his head and began calling him “Peanut” or “Shagnut.” From baseball, he had had enough of other people selecting his nicknames.

  “He never answered to it, though,” noted Michael Bragg, a junior on the Laney varsity at the time. “Michael judged his game by how he played against the upperclassmen, but he couldn’t beat any of them one-on-one until the end of his sophomore year.”

  Jordan’s response to the situation became clear on the floor each night the junior varsity played, and soon the members of the varsity made sure to gather to watch the spectacle, hanging on each detail of his performances until it came time for them to get ready for their own game. He scored points in furious bunches, twice even racking up more than 40, an absurd number in contests with six-minute quarters. He averaged 28 points on the season as a play-making guard.

  Jordan was only about five foot ten at the time, but one day Kevin Edwards, a senior reserve guard on the varsity, noticed Jordan’s hands and held his own up next to them. “His was twice as big as mine,” he recalled. Large hands make for players who can easily control the ball off the dribble, and that in turn allows for stupendous finishes, as Julius Erving was then demonstrating in professional basketball. Young Michael had begun taking note of the pro game on TV. Later, thanks to the rise of ESPN, the televising of NBA games became omnipresent, and Jordan’s own play would spawn a generation of young players attempting to imitate his game. He explained that he had done the same, finding rare and special instructors through television. First there was David Thompson, followed by the acrobatic Dr. J.

  “Final game of our sophomore year, we were playing down at Goldsboro. Mike stole the ball and had a breakaway, and he went in and dunked it—I mean he threw one down,” teammate Todd Parker once recalled. “I believe that was the first competitive dunk of his life. We were like, ‘Wow, where did that come from?’ ”

  Jordan would recall that his first in-game dunk had actually occurred at Virgo. “It was a baby dunk, just basic,” he remembered. “I didn’t even know I did it until after the fact. I surprised myself. Other kids had done it, but still it was spectacular for a junior-high kid to be dunking. I felt proud that I could do it.” Whether or not it was the first, Jordan’s late-season dunk as a sophomore came with the authority of a slam, at a time when the college sport had just made the emotional, spectacular play legal again.

  As baseball was fading for him, Jordan was finding the game that suited his startling athletic skills. At each step along his path, others would express amazement at how hard he competed. At every level, he was driven as if he were pursuing something that others couldn’t see. On the basketball court it was as if everything that he was had been wound into a fury. Combined with his evolving physical gifts, this fury became a spectacle that the many witnesses along the way would never forget.

  “The first time I ever saw him, I had no idea who Michael Jordan was. I was helping to coach the Laney varsity,” recalled Ron Coley in a 1999 newspaper interview. “We went over to Goldsboro, which was our big rival, and I entered the gym when the JV game was just ending up. There were nine players on the court just coasting, but there was one kid playing his heart out. The way he was playing I thought his team was down one point with two minutes to play. So I looked up at the clock and his team was down 20 points and there was only one minute to play. It was Michael, and I quickly learned he was always like that.”

  Salted Shoes

  Jordan was proving prone to the same vagaries of joy and confusion and sorrow that visited so many other adolescents. Despite their own profound troubles, the most important thing his mother and father did was to look beyond themselves. They may have been unwilling to deal with the family’s issues of abuse, but James and Deloris Jordan somehow managed to keep a focus on their children. Deloris, in particular, maintained her vigilance and steered her children clear of any possible pitfalls. And James, despite the pressures of work and owning a nightclub, made it to every single event even if he and his wife kept a distance between them.

  On a superficial level this parenting had long been apparent in the time and material gifts they had showered on their children. After the three youngest started school, the Jordans bought them small ponies. Once they reached adolescence, James gave Michael and Larry a small motorbike, an experiment that ended when the boys attempted a daredevil jump over a ramp together and crashed. Then there was the full effort made to support both Larry and Michael in Little League baseball as the parents traveled back and forth to practices and games, while still holding down demanding jobs.

  Beyond the gifts and involvement, the greatest impact of their parenting came in the constant shaping of the children’s attitudes. They preached a constant refrain: Wo
rk hard. Achieve. Set goals. Think ahead. Don’t be denied. Be considerate. Don’t dwell on race.

  “To grow, you have to work hard,” Deloris Jordan told them. “Discipline yourself and set goals.”

  Her words were perhaps never more important than when her youngest son failed to make the varsity roster as a sophomore. As he said of his career and development, “Timing was everything.” This comment was perhaps the closest he would ever come to acknowledging that what happened to him in the fall of 1978 was a mere stagger step that aided his progress. Perhaps the cut itself might not have wounded him so deeply if not for what happened next. It had been customary for high school coaches at the end of a season to bring the best JV players up to varsity for the district playoffs. Jordan expected that would happen for him. He knew from feedback that people had noticed his play. But Herring and his staff mysteriously said nothing to the sophomore. Apparently the thought occurred to none of the coaches.

  “Never even discussed it,” recalled Coley, Herring’s assistant.

  Jordan took deep offense. As fortune would have it, the team manager took ill as the playoffs were set to begin, which allowed Jordan to devise a plan to accompany the team to its games as a quasi manager and statistician. He would recall having to carry another player’s uniform into the building to avoid having to pay admission. He was so angry he would rather have spit than cheer for the Laney Buccaneers.

  “They went into the playoffs and I was sitting at the end of the bench, and I couldn’t cheer them on because I felt I should have been on that team,” he would recall.

  He had found it hard to cheer for the varsity during his JV season, but he had done it. By the district playoffs, it wasn’t possible. “This is the only time that I didn’t actually cheer for them,” he explained. “I wanted them to lose. Ironically, I wanted them to lose to prove to them that I could help them. This is what I was thinking at the time: You made a mistake by not putting me on the team and you’re going to see it because you’re going to lose.” The Buccaneers finished with fifteen wins and seven losses that spring. They did not make the state playoffs after losing three of their last four games.

  The experience brought Jordan face to face with his own selfishness for the first time. It would be one of the dominant themes of his career, learning to channel the tremendous drive and ego of his competitive nature into a team game.

  The other immediate effect of this sophomore setback was that he became obsessed with growing. If coaches could pick a taller player over a talented player for a team, well, then he was just going to have to get taller. He spent hours hanging from a bar in the backyard, hanging anywhere on anything that afforded a good grip, trying to make himself taller.

  His mother had witnessed everything that had unfolded and talked with him about his anxiety. They prayed together about it, and Jordan prayed alone at the end of each day, and when he woke up in the morning, and all during the day as well. Please, Lord, make me taller. Let me grow.

  The prospects for that seemed slight. At five ten, he already towered over the males in the family. His parents counseled him to think about growing in his heart and in his mind. But I want to be taller, he insisted, in almost the same discussion night after night. Finally, his mother told him, “Go put salt in your shoes and pray.”

  “He would tell me I was being silly, but I had to pacify him so I could finish dinner,” Mrs. Jordan remembered. “Then his dad would walk in and he’d tell him he wanted to be tall. We’d say, ‘You have it in your heart. The tallness is within you. You can be as tall as you want to be in your thinking.’ ”

  So, in addition to hanging from the bar, Jordan would put salt in his shoes before going to bed and praying again. Many nights his mother would bring the salt into his room before bedtime. She didn’t have the heart to tell him she had made it all up, that salt was, well, salt.

  Not long after, an older cousin came to stay with the Jordans, and he was six seven. Six seven! Suddenly hope was very much alive. The only concern was the constant pain in Michael’s knees. It hurt so much that he could hardly sleep some nights. His mother took him to the doctor about the pain and his desire to grow. The doctor took one look at the X-rays and saw the growth plates and told mother and son not to worry. Young Michael still had plenty of growing to do.

  Indeed. By summer he had shot to six three and was far from done. In fact, he would continue growing right into college and even a bit in the NBA until he was six six and towered a foot above everyone else in his family.

  “Mike was about five ten at the end of tenth grade, no more than five eleven. He always had talent,” Fred Lynch remembered. “He was our best ninth grader and our best tenth grader. He played with a lot of heart, he had guard skills, and he always had big, strong hands. By his junior year he shot up to six three, almost six four. All of a sudden you had size to go with that talent and drive.… He just blossomed.”

  Chapter 7

  NUMBER 23

  IN THE SPRING of 1979, Earvin “Magic” Johnson, a sophomore at Michigan State, had just led his Spartans to the NCAA championship over senior Larry Bird and the Indiana State Sycamores. Their meeting, featuring an emerging black star from the Big Ten Conference against an emerging white one from a little-known university in Indiana, had triggered the nation’s curiosity, measured by the largest television audience ever to watch an NCAA title game.

  Among that infatuated mass was young Mike Jordan of Wilmington, North Carolina. And he kept watching the next season as Bird joined the Boston Celtics and Johnson took his talents to the Los Angeles Lakers, two of pro basketball’s “storied” franchises. The following spring, when Johnson carried the Lakers to an NBA title with a magical display of talent, his spell over young Mike was complete. The teen in Wilmington was in love with the Lakers. They were his team, and Magic Johnson was his guy.

  That same year Jordan’s parents gave him his first automobile. Knowing just the way to his heart, Jordan’s girlfriend, Laquetta Robinson, bought him a vanity plate that he displayed proudly on the front bumper of his new ride: MAGIC MIKE.

  Certain basketball people, many of them coaches, would later smile ruefully at such a revelation. Bird and Johnson were both big men, six nine each, who handled the basketball beautifully and played in the open court with a verve that inspired millions of new NBA fans. Both were brilliant passers, particularly Johnson, but both could deliver the ball to teammates in ways that brought a rush of blood to the hearts of all who saw it. The sport had never seen someone like Johnson running the fast break.

  Over the summer and fall of 1979, as Magic Johnson was still basking in the joy of his NCCA tournament win and his selection by the Lakers, Michael Jordan was in Wilmington and about to ignite his own roiling legend. That fall Jordan would begin play for the Laney High School Buccaneers. While his skills were far from perfect, his effort in those first varsity games was something to behold. His prayers for more height had been answered. He had grown to six three and was already headed to six four. His hands were larger, his arms longer, his stride greater. He had new tools with which to expand his game. While he had been aggressive offensively as a sophomore point guard on the junior varsity squad, he was also mindful of distributing the ball to his teammates. As they watched his considerable talents unfold on the varsity, Laney coach Pop Herring and his assistants soon saw that Jordan was far too unselfish. He was so talented he needed to do more scoring to help the relatively inexperienced team rather than deferring to someone else, Herring concluded. Jordan listened closely to his coaches but was hesitant to change. He still believed that basketball was a team game, and he was going to look for his teammates.

  Finally, Pop Herring turned to James Jordan and asked for his help. The father was at first reluctant, explaining that he never cared much for the kind of father who didn’t leave the coaching to the coach. Getting involved would violate that principle. Ultimately, though, he relented and urged his son to do what his coaches asked.

  At this u
rging, Michael began to take on more individually, which in turn revealed even more of his gift. It was then that the pattern was established: the more he did, the more his coaches and his audience wanted him to do. And the more it began to please him to discover just what he was capable of doing. His game and his image then began to feed on themselves, still only subtly in those early days of his career. But it would soon enough become clear that everything about him was beginning to multiply. To those around him, including his parents, this development wasn’t troubling at first. But later it would grow obvious that his success was accompanied by a burden. The greater his success, the greater the weight, and it would never go away, no matter how leveraged the lifting.

  The Varsity

  Bobby Cremins, the thirty-one-year-old head coach at Appalachian State, was both happy and tired in 1979 as he went about the business of running his summer camps. A former point guard for Frank McGuire at the University of South Carolina, Cremins had spent four difficult years building the program at Appalachian, a gem of a public university in the Carolina mountains. That effort had just been rewarded in 1979 by his team’s first trip to the NCAA tournament, where his appropriately named Mountaineers promptly lost to LSU. The excitement had just begun to settle that June as Cremins opened his camp for high school teams. The camp allowed teams to get away to North Carolina’s cool upper elevations for some summer hoops, and at the same time it afforded a young coach like Cremins the opportunity to look at a range of players he might not otherwise get to scout.

  Cremins was watching the Laney High team from Wilmington when he noticed the player with the spindly legs, whose energy and athleticism sent a charge through the camp’s games and drills. The more Cremins watched, the more his amazement grew. Finally, Cremins dialed up Bob Gibbons, the editor of a local basketball talent “poop sheet,” and said excitedly in his thick New York accent, “Bob, there’s a kid up here you’re not going to believe.”