Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  It wasn’t that Jordan was rude. He was friendly enough, Teachey recalled. “He just didn’t trust a lot of people.”

  Jordan obviously wanted to make an impression against his girlfriend’s school. The best measure of an extra spark? The star of one team scored 40 points and the star of the other blocked 17 shots. Teachey couldn’t recall how many of the shots he swatted that night were Jordan’s but acknowledged, “He was attacking the goal quite a bit.”

  Goldsboro’s veteran coach, Norvell Lee, had already heard a lot from his contacts about Jordan that first varsity season, Teachey recalled with a laugh. “My high school coach said we needed to start checking him as soon as he got off the bus.… The offense that they had, he was pretty much it.”

  Teachey recalled Jordan talking trash that night but not directing any of it at him. “He already had the advantage as far as his talent,” Teachey explained. “I think he knew that. But then the talking game, to add that in? There wasn’t too much you could do because whatever he said, he did.”

  Jordan showed surprising polish for a first-year varsity player. “At that time I didn’t see any real weakness in his game,” Teachey remembered. “Somehow he had been able to open up his game at an early age. He wasn’t really doing a lot of dunking. He was showing his midrange. And he had range, too. It wasn’t one side or the other. It was all over the court. He could pull up or drive. He had the green light, too.”

  That would become more obvious with each succeeding game. Jordan rang up 26 two nights later in another loss, their second to rival New Hanover. Again, he was the only Laney player in double figures. Next, lowly Jacksonville beat them on a made free throw after time expired. Jordan scored 17 but made only 7 of 14 free throws on a night that the entire team shot 36 percent from the line.

  Bill Guthridge, whose keen eye for talent Dean Smith prized, went down to Wilmington in early 1980 to see what all the fuss was about, but by the time he could scout Jordan, the Laney Buccaneers had slipped into their losing streak and Jordan himself had gone a bit adrift. Guthridge watched him clang a number of long jumpers and reported back to Smith that this particular prospect had ample athleticism and superior quickness and had played very hard throughout the game, but that he had spent much of the time jacking up shots that reduced his efficiency. Guthridge told Smith that Jordan was “unmilked.” Still, it was decided that Jordan was obviously an ACC-level talent and that Carolina would need to see more of him. Smith never liked for his recruiting targets to become public knowledge, and that was true with Jordan as well, although the excitement of their apparent discovery did leak out.

  Art Chansky, who was covering Carolina for a local newspaper, was a close friend of assistant coach Eddie Fogler. “Even though I was a newspaper guy I kept things confidential that they told me,” Chansky recalled. “I knew that he was on their radar and that they thought he was a lot better than he thought he was. Michael was just hoping to get a scholarship somewhere. He was thinking about going into the Air Force. That’s what kind of late bloomer he was. He was just flying under the radar at Laney. When Carolina started to recruit guys, not only did everybody else start paying attention, but the kid’s ratings would start going up in all the recruiting ratings. Sometimes it would backfire on a kid because everybody thought he was great and he didn’t turn out to be that good.”

  Roy Williams, a Carolina graduate assistant, had first been assigned to scout Jordan but couldn’t do it due to a conflict. Apparently Williams tipped one source that the Tar Heels had some interest in Jordan. He phoned Brick Oettinger, a friend who covered recruiting for an ACC tip sheet.

  “Roy told me I had to keep the tip secret because Coach Smith didn’t want the media people talking about him,” Oettinger recalled many years later. “He told me ‘There’s this guy named Mike Jordan at Laney. Coach Guthridge has been to see him three times. He does 360-degree dunks like it’s nothing.’ ”

  Jordan wasn’t aware of the small buzz that had been generated among the recruiting writers. In fact, he hadn’t learned that North Carolina was scouting him until after Guthridge’s visit. Herring didn’t tell Jordan, most likely because he didn’t want to make his star player nervous. When Jordan did learn of the visit, he was both surprised and excited, and got a boost to his confidence, which had sagged a bit with his midseason shooting struggles.

  “I never thought I’d be able to play Division I ball,” he said of that period in his development. “I was really happy and enthusiastic that they were even interested. I was happy someone was interested.”

  Part of his difficulties on the court had come from the fact that opposing coaches had begun devising plans to contain him. As word spread, Jordan encountered far more defensive attention from opponents than he had earlier in the season. Jordan found himself facing ever-bigger challenges as opponents adjusted to his play. The answer to the question of his ability would lie in how well he adjusted to the adjustment, so to speak. As January became February in 1980, Jordan showed that he was adjusting quite well, that he could still produce big efforts in the face of additional defenders.

  He had just crossed the first big hurdle of his career. The use of videotape for scouting had yet to become prominent in basketball at any level, so the opposing coaches in the Coastal Plain’s Division II conference could work only from memory and play charts that first varsity season. Still, Jordan had given them and North Carolina’s coaches plenty to see. Later, as he advanced into college and professional basketball, his performances would send opponents more and more into the film room to study his game, to look for a means of containing him.

  The accounts vary between Dean Smith and Roy Williams as to exactly how the Carolina staff felt about Jordan after watching him that first time. “Bill Guthridge is an outstanding judge of talent,” Dean Smith later recalled. “And after seeing Michael the first time, he said he was an ACC player, but we weren’t sure we would go after him.” On one thing the various accounts agree—the Carolina coaches wanted to get him into Smith’s camp that summer to see just how good he might be.

  Jordan’s performance over the final weeks of the 1980 season gave them no reason for pause. With their seventh victory against five losses, Laney High headed out to visit Southern Wayne with Robinson and Exum. Jordan was ill and lay quietly in the back of the bus, which assistant coach Ron Coley would recall seventeen years later after Jordan fought off illness to lead the Bulls to a win over the Utah Jazz in an NBA Finals game. In 1980, he was just gaining the first sense of his tremendous ability to focus, and how certain setbacks, such as illness or some particular slight, could send that focus to even higher intensity.

  Herring went to a slow-down offense that night, which almost allowed the Buccaneers to pull off the upset before falling 36–34. Jordan scored just 7 points (including two at the end of the game on a meaningless heave) as most of the points came inside from Shiver and Smith.

  From there, Laney added a win over Hoggard, and then took on Kinston in a back-and-forth affair. With a minute to go and the score tied at 51, Herring called a time-out and put his team in the four corners offense to spread the floor. This time, however, there was something different. Larry Jordan was off the bench with the ball in his hands, and when he saw his opening he drove down the middle of the lane and scored on a layup. JORDAN BROTHERS DUMP KINSTON, read the headline the next morning in the Wilmington Star-News.

  “Larry Jordan came off the bench and did well,” Herring told sportswriter Chuck Carree. “Game experience has been his only problem.”

  Larry’s younger brother helped the cause with 29 points.

  Next, they lost at New Bern, then faced Goldsboro and Anthony Teachey again, this time in Wilmington. It didn’t matter. Jordan still struggled against his girlfriend’s hometown. He scored just 2 points in the first half. He recovered with 15 in the final two quarters, which drove their comeback from 15 down. The Buccaneers caught up but couldn’t close it out, which left Herring complaining afterward that he was ti
red of getting overwhelmed by Goldsboro. The loss dropped Laney’s record to 9–9 on the season and put in peril their hopes for a first-round home game in the playoffs.

  After that was their final showdown with rival New Hanover in Wilmington. New Hanover coach Jim Hebron had studied Jordan and set up his defense accordingly. Laney’s last four games of the season, though, would reveal just how much Herring’s team had grown. The coach rebalanced Laney’s attack. Jordan scored 21 as New Hanover’s lineup collapsed on him, but he had far more help, with Shiver adding 17 and Mike Bragg 16.

  “Pop deserves a lot of credit,” Hebron said after Laney got the win.

  Two nights later, Shiver scored 24 to go with Jordan’s 18, as Laney defeated Jacksonville in Wilmington. That was followed by a Valentine’s Day victory over Eastern Wayne in which Jordan discovered a rhythm that would become familiar to him over the years, what he would come to call “the math” of big games. He scored 15 of his team’s 22 points in the second period, then added 7 more in the third and 11 in the fourth to finish with a school-record 42 points. The performance had a little bit of everything—jumpers, transition baskets, a couple of dunks. Best of all, it hadn’t turned his teammates into spectators. Shiver, who was learning to find his scoring opportunities alongside his “horse,” finished with 14.

  Acting on Roy Williams’s tip, basketball writer Brick Oettinger went to see Laney’s big win over Eastern Wayne in February 1980. “Jordan was just fabulous,” Oettinger recalled. “He was out of sight. When you saw him play, it was like, ‘How could this guy not have even made the team the year before?” In fact, Oettinger turned to his friends that night and said, “The coach had to have been an idiot.” Oettinger was clearly excited: “I wrote in our next issue—February of 1980—that ‘You probably haven’t heard the name Mike Jordan, but he has the best combination of athleticism, basketball skills, and intangibles of any high school wing guard that I’ve ever seen.’ ”

  The victory allowed Laney to secure third place in the 4A Division II conference, the state’s highest classification. “Goldsboro and Southern Wayne are two of the best teams in the state, and there’s no disgrace finishing behind them,” Herring told the Star. For Laney, the finish meant a home game to open the district tournament. Jordan came out aggressively and quickly found foul trouble, so he watched as his teammates again demonstrated their balance. Shiver scored 17, Jordan 20, Leroy Smith 13, and Mike Bragg 9 to beat Hoggard.

  Laney then traveled to Dudley, to take on Southern Wayne, one of North Carolina’s top-ranked teams with a 21–2 record, in the District II semifinal. Southern Wayne would go on to win the state championship that year, and Lynwood Robinson would be named MVP of the tournament. The Buccaneers almost derailed Southern Wayne’s championship run that night by playing a tight 1-2-2 zone that allowed them to push the issue to overtime. Southern Wayne coach Marshall Hamilton threw a furious mix of defenses into the effort of stopping Jordan, using triangle and two, diamond and one, man-to-man, even a full-court press, anything to keep pressure on him. Jordan shook it all off in the first half to score 12 points, but the changing defenses began to take their toll over the second half and the overtime, when Jordan managed just 6 points. Hamilton’s strategy worked and his team survived the tense affair, 40–35. Laney’s season ended at 13–11. The final game, however, documented Jordan’s growing maturity.

  “We have so much trouble matching up with Jordan, but everybody does,” Hamilton observed afterward. “The thing that makes him so good is that he’s so patient. We could hurt someone like that if all he did was shoot because we could force him into bad shots. Jordan just doesn’t take any.”

  He had averaged 24.6 points and 11.9 rebounds on the season. “What more can I say about Michael?” Herring told the Star-News after the season. “He’s as good a player as I’ve seen through here since the New Hanover state championship year in 1968. I think he’s going to be great. He’s already a great shooter and scorer, and he doesn’t think the world revolves around Michael Jordan.”

  Better yet, the coach had started to gain a sense that he was helping Jordan build a future. “Coach Guthridge has watched him,” Herring pointed out, “so the big schools know he’s around.”

  Chapter 8

  THE TRANSFORMATION

  MICHAEL JORDAN HAD felt isolated his sophomore year, worried that he hadn’t made many real friends in the much larger school. He was an outgoing jokester, but inside he struggled with the uncertainty that so many fifteen-year-olds feel. His self-doubt had been compounded by his inability to make the varsity basketball team that first year at Laney. “You know how kids worry and think,” he said later, looking back on the fact that his sudden height also played a role in his self-image. Already thin, he had become almost bladelike with the growth. “I was really lanky, really tall, so I stood out. That can present problems when you’re a kid.”

  There was a sense then that even when people smiled or joked with him they were somehow laughing at him. Others saw it differently, however. “Laney seemed like a family back then,” Leroy Smith recalled. “It had about a 60-40 white-to-black ratio, but it was really cool. No tension or anything. It was a new school. For there to be no real ‘sides’—that was unusual. Mike being Mike, he was unusual, too. We all were searching for an identity. But Mike… it was like he’d already found his.”

  Nonetheless, Jordan seemed to think that he was hopeless socially. “I always thought I would be a bachelor,” he remembered. “I couldn’t get a date.… I kidded around too much. I always used to play around with women. I was a clown. I picked at people a lot. That was my way of breaking the ice with people who were very serious. I was good in school. I’d get As and Bs in my classes but I’d get Ns and Us in conduct because I was kidding around, talking all the time.”

  His older sister recalled a loving, upbeat Michael during this period. She was now married and somewhat distanced from the family. In those days, he was often the one who reached out to her. He looked up to her husband and enjoyed spending time with her family. She had two children, whom Michael adored. He had long had an easy way with children. Where other boys his age might have been indifferent to these delicate little creatures, he delighted in them almost from the very start, sweeping them up in his arms as they grew into toddlers. “He likes kids,” his father would explain later. “I guess because kids theoretically are active people. And Michael is pretty active. He has completely spoiled my daughter’s two kids to death.” Even the younger children in the neighborhood were attracted to him and would drop by just because Michael was a ready playmate, his father explained.

  In some ways, it wasn’t just that he loved children. He was eager to please and just wanted attention from anyone who would give it. It quickly became clear to him during and after that junior season that basketball could deliver attention like nothing else he had attempted. His rapid elevation as a varsity star meant that everywhere he went in Laney’s hallways he was now met with smiling faces and comments about his play. It transformed his status—from a life on the margins to big man on campus—in a way that most teens can only dream about. He would attribute it all to the strength of the group dynamics on the team.

  “Before I started playing basketball in high school, I didn’t have a lot of friends,” Jordan said that April, looking back on his first electric season. “It helped me to get to know people. I love my teammates. They have helped me and I have helped them.… Teamwork. That’s what counts. I’ve found that as you get better and better in athletics, you make friends or meet people that are better and better people. You make better friends.” He couldn’t have gotten better without the people around him, he said. “I would like to give my coaches and teammates credit for it.”

  Although he was only seventeen at the time, his off-the-cuff comments reflected a significant understanding of the impact of the things that were happening to him. Thirty years later, there would be many people who, upon hearing his harsh comments during his induction to t
he Hall of Fame, surely wished that he had remembered those words of wisdom as a teen. But so many challenges lay ahead, and to meet them, he would turn time and again to his talisman, the diamond-hard disappointment that he seemed to wear around his neck.

  His favorite subject in school was math, and it was in math class that this youthful change was most dramatic, according to Janice Hardy, who taught him first algebra and later trigonometry. “The first year I had him, he was scared to death. I liked that. The next year he wound up in the front row. He’d laugh at my jokes and muss my hair.”

  He had longed for popularity, and when it came, it seemed he couldn’t get enough of it, hurrying to fill the part of his life that wasn’t consumed by sports. “He could never be in his room by himself,” his mother remembered. “He always had to go out, spend the night with a friend, go camping.”

  Deloris Jordan greeted Michael’s success with quiet enthusiasm, although it wasn’t entirely clear whether her dominant emotion was relief or joy. Whatever the root, the product was a blossoming pride. Her youngest child, Roslyn, had turned to academics to earn parental approval. The younger daughter, who was close with her mother, had a secret plan to finish high school a year early so that she could graduate with Michael and head off to college at the same time. Not surprisingly, her efforts stirred Michael’s competitiveness, and while he couldn’t match Roslyn’s showing, the circumstances helped him register solid grades, which made him all the more appealing to the colleges that would soon vie to recruit him.

  Easily the biggest difference between Michael and his younger sister was that no newspaper reporters showed up to interview the family when Roslyn made the honor roll. Michael’s growing prowess would stir the media’s inquisitiveness about his upbringing over the coming years, and Deloris Jordan was ready to answer their questions. She would talk proudly about the record of her younger children. “They knew that they had to come straight home after school,” she told a Wilmington writer. “They could have no visitors in the house until their parents got home. They got off the bus, came in and got a sandwich, and did their homework.… Academics were always very important. But you’ve also got to be involved with your children. You can’t just bundle them up and send them off. You have to support them, go to the PTO meetings, and learn as much about them and what they’re doing as you can. All they’re searching for is love and attention. We kept together a lot. We knew where they were all the time and who they were associating with.”