Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  She was clearly proud of the effort with her brood. But Deloris Jordan’s sense that she and her husband had raised two families gained clarity in this period. Often at odds with her older daughter, Deloris had watched Sis’s life blow up in family conflict. And oldest son Ronnie had faced his own conflicts with James, which may well have played a role in his hurrying off to the Army. Maturing children have always sought escape from the watchful eye of their parents, but given the divisions in the Jordan household it seems no surprise that their children were looking to be elsewhere. The Jordans had brought abundance to the lives of their offspring, yet it was hard to avoid the fact that escape had become a theme in their lives.

  If there was any mystery in all of this, it was Deloris Jordan’s relationship with her own parents. She rarely mentioned her upbringing in her many interviews over the years, or even in her book, but her children readily acknowledged their mother’s awkwardness with her widowed father. James and Deloris usually drove right past his house in Pender County on their way to the many visits with Ms. Bell and Medward. When they did stop to visit with Edward Peoples, Sis remembered a cold and intimidating atmosphere in the house.

  Medward Jordan had his own brand of intimidation, but it was nothing like the apparent gulf between Deloris and Edward Peoples. It seems likely that she was dealing with her own history of fatherly disapproval. At the very least, the circumstances in the Peoples household had been difficult with her pregnancy and subsequent departure.

  However, there was no question that her discipline and high expectations for her younger children were drawn from her family background. The Peoples had employed this same singleness of purpose in grinding out their hard-won success in the unforgiving business of farming. Edward Peoples’s accomplishments perhaps seem trivial compared with the wealth his grandson would amass, but when considered in terms of degree of difficulty, his rise through the harsh challenges of sharecropping to own and manage his own land was an immense feat.

  Something in that process had led to a mysterious estrangement, and not just from her father. Over the coming years, as the Jordans were drawn into the magical world of their youngest son’s success, Sis observed that they seemed to harbor a growing embarrassment about the homespun nature of James’s parents as well, of all the older generation that had come up on the land. It was almost as if James and Deloris were trying to put the world of Teachey and Rocky Point behind them.

  James and Deloris Jordan were also being tugged in another direction, drawn into their son’s shared sports dream. This was a family that would go anywhere and do anything to pursue a sports opportunity for their children. Such behavior would become a prominent feature of family life at the end of the century, but the Jordans were well ahead of the curve. The games themselves would become a powerful drug, riveting the family’s attention with the anticipation, the thrill of competition, and the afterglow. They’d immediately be eager for the next game, for the whole thing to start all over again.

  They were perhaps the original helicopter parents.

  It became a happy addiction in those first months of the uptick. They’d been obsessively following their kids in sports for years, and now here was the sign of a big payoff. They’d been through the highs of Michael’s Little League baseball only to fall to reality with the Babe Ruth competition. But basketball seemed to be the real thing. Coaches from the University of North Carolina had come calling. Feedback like that allowed them to imagine the future. The Carolina coaches had invited Michael to their summer camp. It all smelled very good, except for one little matter.

  James Jordan’s priority as a parent that spring was to get his youngest son to accept the idea of work. He had badgered Michael about it relentlessly. It was an embarrassment for the entire family. Deloris fretted and worried about it, too, until she came up with the notion of asking H. L. “Whitey” Prevatte for some help. He was a nice man, a customer at the bank where she worked. He owned a hotel and restaurant. So she asked about a job for her son.

  “I can’t say enough about his mother,” Prevatte recalled. “She was a bank teller and we used to do business there. She called and asked if there was anything Michael could do here.”

  “I was a hotel maintenance man,” Jordan remembered. “I was cleaning out pools, painting rails, changing air-conditioner filters, and sweeping out the back room.” The job paid Michael minimum wage, $3.10 an hour. Who could have imagined that the one and only paycheck stub of his entire working career, a slip from Whitey’s for $119.76, would one day wind up in a display case at the Cape Fear Museum in Wilmington as part of its Jordan collection?

  “That thing has sent me a lot of business,” Prevatte would confide to a reporter years later. “I had people from Germany come in here one time asking about him because they saw the stub at the museum.”

  Prevatte remembered Jordan as a nice kid who carried himself well, but for several reasons, the job didn’t work, perhaps most importantly because it involved pool maintenance. Jordan simply didn’t do water, never having forgotten the drowning of his young friend as a child.

  “We were out wading and riding the waves coming in,” he would recall years later. “The current was so strong it took him under and he locked up on me. It’s called the death lock, when they know they’re in trouble and about to die. I almost had to break his hand. He was gonna take me with him.… He died.

  “I don’t go into the water anymore.… Everybody’s got a phobia for something. I do not mess with water.”

  It was also the sweeping and cleaning. Jordan admitted later to the shallowest of excuses, that he feared friends would see him and tease him.

  He wanted no part of it, making his parents, particularly James, furious. That didn’t matter. “He tried to change me,” Jordan recalled, “but it never worked.… I quit after a week…

  “I said, never again. I may be a wino first, but I will not have a nine-to-five job.”

  Here’s to You, Miss Robinson

  What Michael did have that spring was that jewel of teen expectation, the junior-senior prom. Laquetta Robinson did not attend Laney but lived in Goldsboro. How they met is one of the many tightly clasped secrets of the Jordan legend. It seems logical that he first stayed with her family on one of his many baseball trips. In those days before texting they corresponded by the US Postal Service. Jordan wrote her many letters, each of them dashed off on notebook paper, as he sat bored in one class or another. She kept them all, as teenage girls are known to do, and years later two of the letters would appear on the collectors’ market after allegedly being purloined by one of her relatives. One of them surfaced in 2011 and sold for five thousand dollars, but when Laquetta complained, it was returned by the auction house, although not before the content made swift rounds across the Internet.

  It revealed Jordan’s awkward, somewhat careless attempts at the emotional expression common to so many teenaged males. “I was really happy when you gave me my honest coin money that I won off the bet,” he wrote one day from his advanced chemistry class. “I want to thank you for letting me hold your annual. I show it to everyone at school. Everyone think you are a very pretty young lady and I had to agree because it is very true. Please don’t let this go to your head. (smile) I sorry to say that I can’t go to the game on my birthday because my father is taking the whole basketball team out to eat on my birthday. Please don’t be mad because I am trying get down there a week from Feb. 14. If I do get the chance to come, please have some activity for us to do together.”

  The young Jordan seemed quite ardent in expressing his love, yet like any young suitor he made sure to leave himself escape routes should it turn out that his feelings were unrequited. As soon as the letter appeared in 2011, Laquetta Robinson was interviewed by a variety of television crews. She was guarded in her comments, making it clear that she was appalled by the violation of her privacy. Police reports of the incident confirmed that it was not she who sought to profit from the letters. She did reveal that youn
g Mike would often compliment her, only to take it back moments later, telling her in the process, “Don’t let it go to your head.” And the revelation about their undisclosed bet and his excitement at extracting “coin money” from her afterward suggests that his gaming instincts evolved early in his life, right along with his competitiveness.

  Their prom photo is a highlight of their months together. They attended in all white, she in a proper dress that rose high and tight around her delicate neck, with three-quarter sleeves that allowed her to display proudly the white wrist corsage he had bought her. Most telling was the hair. She parted it simply, right down the middle, no frills, no stacks, no bouffant, revealing her bright eyes, splendidly high cheekbones, and the open, honest smile of a gentle soul. She looked completely relaxed, seated with her hands folded contentedly across her lap. She gave the appearance of someone utterly lacking in pretension, and this at an age when young people—including Jordan himself—tended to assume poses. He stood tall beside her in white tails, one hand resting on her shoulder, the other thrust in his pocket, his youthful attempt at sophistication. The evening tie, even the carnation in his lapel, were white, and the tux, the collar of his shirt, were both too big for him. His smile, meanwhile, if it was that, was restrained, as if to say the moment was okay, but he had much bigger plans for himself. This memory ultimately would be like so many others for Jordan, not a recollection of how much fun they’d had, but more a sense of marking time, that he was on his way to somewhere else. He didn’t know where just yet, but he very much wanted to know. He already had begun to acquire that sense of purpose where a lot of the common business of life was really just filling in gaps. Unless he was playing basketball. Or baseball.

  Michael played for Laney that spring and earned all-city honors as a right fielder on a team that was coached by Pop Herring. He had gained strength and confidence, but he was being evaluated differently, too, by a coach who understood his athleticism. He also pitched for Laney, although David Bridgers seemed to be the ace of the staff. Jordan would struggle some afternoons on the mound, but he had good stuff and triumphant moments to go with the losses. Beyond that, he had a bat, which he put to work right from the start.

  He went four for four and drove in three runs as Laney pounded Southern Wayne 9–2 to open the season. He pitched against Hoggard in the second game and got shelled as he struggled with control and gave up a number of walks. He suffered a similar fate two games later on the mound against New Hanover.

  “He didn’t have a lot of velocity and can throw harder than this,” Herring remarked after Jordan gave up six runs in a sixth inning that sank the Buccaneers. Laney then lost the next game to Jacksonville despite Jordan’s two-run double in the seventh inning.

  Against Southern Wayne he gave up seven hits before being pulled in the seventh inning of another loss. Laney finally got a win against Kinston as Jordan delivered an RBI single. Three days later at home against Kinston, Jordan scored the winning run and turned in a three-hit pitching performance that rewarded Herring’s patience. He moved to center field and earned another RBI in a narrow loss against New Bern, then returned to the mound against Goldsboro to deliver another three-hit victory, his second against four losses.

  That was followed by his third win, 6–1, against Jacksonville, as Jordan allowed no hits over five innings and struck out seven. Early in the game, he lost focus after disagreeing with the umpire’s calls. Herring removed him, let him sit a couple of innings to calm down, then put him back on the mound (allowed under high school rules) and watched him close out the win.

  He had two hits, including a solo homer, but he took a loss for the final game of the season in Goldsboro when he came on in relief and gave up the winning run. Laney finished 8–8 in Division II and 9–11 overall.

  The baseball season only confirmed what had become clear during varsity basketball that year. Herring, the coach who would harvest so much contempt for “the cut” over the coming years, was absolutely focused on his young star’s development.

  In late April, Chuck Carree had written a column in the Star-News Sunday sports section with a headline that read LANEY’S JORDAN: VERSATILE PREP STANDOUT. Herring talked extensively about Jordan: “I think he’s just an outstanding athlete, period. As a sophomore, he led the JV football team in interceptions. He chose not to play varsity football. It was a strictly family decision that he not play. Mike’s a great basketball player. He’s got to be one of the top five players in the state. In my book, Jordan’s a high school All-American. There aren’t enough words to describe him on the floor. I don’t think anybody can guard him one-on-one. When he’s had low-scoring games, it’s because it was a slow-tempo game.”

  Jordan had even found time to do a little jumping for the Laney track team that spring. “I love to jump,” he told Carree. “That’s what I do in track. I love baseball. It’s my number one sport. I want to play both baseball and basketball in college. I believe basketball would be my number one priority, though, in college. I’d go basketball first and then try to walk on in baseball if I didn’t get a scholarship in both. I plan to get advice from my parents and coaches.”

  At seventeen, he had a clear notion of what he wanted—and he wasn’t reluctant about expressing it publicly. “If I have an opportunity, I’d go pro as long as I get my education in college,” he offered. “My goal is to be a pro athlete. My other goal is to just make it in college.”

  Chapter 9

  THE FIVE-STAR

  DEAN SMITH AND his coaching staff got a better look at Michael Jordan early that summer of 1980 at their camp. They took a good look at his parents, too. James and Deloris visited the camp and met Smith and his assistants, allowing both parties to bask in an early mutual admiration. Even so, the recruiting of Wilmington’s undiscovered star left both parties unsure of what to make of each other.

  The room assignments at Dean Smith’s camp suggest that the coaches had a growing interest in Jordan, although the signals were mixed. Jordan and Leroy Smith, young black men from the Coastal Plain, were housed with Buzz Peterson and Randy Shepherd, white teammates from Asheville, in the mountains at the western end of the state. Peterson, who would be named North Carolina’s Mr. Basketball in his senior year, was already a prime recruiting target for the Tar Heels, as was Lynwood Robinson. Peterson was a veteran of Smith’s camps from previous years. He and Jordan began a friendship that first week that would grow over the coming months. But it was Shepherd who was placed in a group with Jordan for drills and competition. He was soon reporting to Peterson each evening about the Wilmington guard’s astounding feats. This was a type of player he’d never seen, Shepherd told Peterson. Each day his amazement grew, until by the fourth day he commented that surely Jordan had the kind of talent that would take him to the NBA.

  The Carolina coaches were seeing the same things. What Brick Oettinger saw only confirmed his impression of Jordan from the Laney game in February. “Lynwood Robinson was at that session,” Oettinger recalled. “Buzz Peterson was there, but Michael Jordan was clearly the best player there. He was out of sight.” Roy Williams reported to the coaching staff that Jordan was the best six-foot-four player he had ever seen. “Very few people knew about him at that time,” Williams later recalled. “Michael came and he just destroyed everybody in the camp.”

  Williams’s job at the camp was managing the ebb and flow of the various age groups during the brutal heat that week, so that each group was able to move off the outdoor courts and get some time on the big floor in air-conditioned Carmichael Auditorium, where the Heels played their games.

  After watching Jordan perform in some drills, Williams invited him back to play with the next group of older players coming through the gym. The coach would later recall that Jordan kept sneaking back into succeeding groups for more work that evening. The coaches saw that as proof that he loved to compete just as much as he liked the air conditioning.

  When the sessions ended each day, the four roommates found an eas
y time hanging out with each other. Jordan and Peterson, in particular, formed a friendship based on the fact that both players now realized they were being recruited by the Tar Heels. While Shepherd and Smith had come to the camp with some hope that Carolina might be interested in them, the week confirmed that their games were better suited for smaller schools. Indeed, Leroy Smith would end up playing college basketball at UNC–Charlotte and Shepherd at UNC–Asheville.

  Although Robinson and Peterson were high priorities for Dean Smith’s program, by the end of the camp it seemed that Jordan was moving much closer to the top of the coaching staff’s list. Dean Smith had taken the time to eat two separate meals with him at the camp, which, combined with Smith’s visit with Jordan’s parents, had given the coach more confidence that this kid from Wilmington was the kind of person who would fit in well in the structured basketball program.

  As excited as he was by the response, Jordan was not completely sold on North Carolina. An NC State fan, he had disliked UNC for so many years, and while he would eventually come to revere Dean Smith, there was something in the coach’s controlling approach that left both Jordan and Herring a bit wary.

  “He tried to keep me hidden,” Jordan recalled of Smith.

  At this critical juncture in the recruiting process, Herring stepped forward with a subtle move that would open up Jordan’s options. One evening at the Carolina camp, Herring mentioned to Roy Williams that he would like to get Jordan more exposure and was thinking of trying to get him into Howard Garfinkel’s Five-Star in Pittsburgh or Bill Cronauer’s B-C camp in Georgia, the two main destinations for top-flight talent in the days before the grading of high school talent became big business.