Williams understood that Smith didn’t want word to get out about Jordan, but even as a young assistant he was aware of the need to establish trust with a high school player’s family. Williams agreed to help Herring, apparently without Smith’s approval, although others would later question that.
“He asked me what I thought,” Williams said of Herring. “I said, ‘I think he should go. I think it would be a great test of him. If I had my choice, I would go to the Five-Star camp.’ I thought that would be better for him because it was such a good teaching camp. It wasn’t just about playing games. It was teaching the fundamentals of the game of basketball.”
A few days later Williams mentioned Jordan to Tom Konchalski, who helped run the Five-Star camp. Konchalski, an erudite man with excellent recall who liked to quip that the most athletic thing he had ever done was jump to a conclusion, was establishing a reputation as one of the most thorough evaluators of high school basketball talent. Years later he was quite clear about his ride with Williams that day: “Roy said, ‘You know, there’s a kid from North Carolina who may be a great player. We’re not sure. He came to our team camp this summer, but we don’t have a lot of great players there and he didn’t play against a lot of great competition.’ ”
The two men discussed the fact that the first session of Five-Star camp, known as Pittsburgh 1, offered the stiffest collection of talent among Five-Star’s weeks. “Roy said, ‘I don’t know if he’s good enough for Pittsburgh 1,’ ” Konchalski recalled. Both Konchalski and Garfinkel clearly remembered that the Carolina coaches were not yet sold on Jordan. It was almost as if this kid from Wilmington was too good to be true. So Williams and Konchalski decided that Jordan would work best in Pittsburgh 2 and possibly Pittsburgh 3, the second and third sessions of the summer.
“I called Howard Garfinkel,” Williams would recall, “and told him that Michael was coming and he would really be pleased with him as a player. I told Garf, ‘He’s going to be good enough to be a waiter.’ You see, if you could wait tables, you could go two weeks for the price of one. So I did call Garf and talked about the opportunity.”
Garfinkel recalled slightly different circumstances. He remembered getting a highly unusual call from Williams asking him to make room at the last minute in one of his camps for a recruit that Carolina was considering. “He introduces himself,” Garfinkel said of his conversation with Williams. “We talk for a bit, and he says, ‘We have a player that we think is very good. He was at our camp; he won the MVP, killed everybody, but the competition wasn’t that good. So, we’re not one hundred percent sure. We’re like ninety-five percent sure. We want to be one hundred. Can you get him into your camp so he can play against the best players in the country?’ ”
Never in all his decades of running camps had Garfinkel ever gotten such an unusual request. After all, Williams was merely a graduate assistant at Carolina. At first, Garfinkel didn’t think he could fit Jordan in at the last minute, but Williams almost insisted that he get it done. This was Dean Smith’s program calling, so Garfinkel relented and moved things around to create a spot for Jordan in the second week of his Pittsburgh camp. He even worked it out so that Jordan could attend the camp at a reduced cost by working on the camp’s wait staff. Garfinkel later heard that Smith was upset about Jordan going to the camp, but the camp owner said he never bought that story. “I mean why would Roy Williams call me and push this so strong if Dean Smith didn’t want him to go?” While there was nothing wrong or illegal about it, apparently the Carolina coach didn’t want to be identified as the person making it happen.
If anything, the circumstances revealed the tortured thinking of college coaches when it came to recruiting. Dean Smith brought dozens of highly coveted players to his programs over the years, and did so with an unparalleled integrity. He had a reputation for never promising playing time to young athletes in order to get them to sign with the Tar Heels. In addition, Smith was very good at keeping at bay recruiting’s shadow game, in which rich university alumni provided recruits and their families with cash, cars, and other illegal inducements. Other coaches and other programs may have relied on such activity, but Smith had managed to succeed in the sport with few questions about his methods.
That didn’t mean, however, that Smith didn’t have his quirks, one of which was an obsession with the image of his program. In a later era, Carolina’s actions regarding Jordan might well have raised eyebrows at the NCAA, but they were clearly within the rules. Smith was, in fact, perturbed, according to Williams’s memory. Williams recalled that he had some explaining to do: “I said, ‘Coach, in my opinion, he was going to go and I was just trying to give him some guidance about what I thought would be best for him. And Michael’s family really appreciated it.’ ”
The result was that the unknown player from Wilmington, still something of a mystery to the Carolina coaches, was headed to Five-Star’s Pittsburgh 2 camp to see how he stacked up against other players from across the country, players who had actually made their varsity teams as freshmen and sophomores and distinguished themselves. The conventional wisdom was that the best young players had already been identified.
Jordan had been nervous heading into Carolina’s camp, but that was nothing compared to the tension he felt over the Five-Star camp, where he would be measured against elite talent. The players in the Pittsburgh 1 session were supposedly the best, but session 2 in Pittsburgh also included seventeen high school All-Americans. On that list was Wichita’s Aubrey Sherrod, whom many scouts considered the best wing guard in that class of rising high school seniors.
Jordan worried about competing against top players, but Pop Herring told him to relax, that he would be fine. Still, Jordan found it hard to relax when he first surveyed the busy scene at Pittsburgh’s Robert Morris College, where the Five-Star opened in late July. The place was packed with a throng of 150 coaches and scouts who were there with clipboards taking note of each player’s flaws and assets. From eight o’clock till eleven o’clock on Five-Star’s first night, the players were thrown into pickup teams to play informal games so that the coaches of the camp’s twelve teams could select players.
The camp’s top-level league was known as the NBA. As a newcomer, Jordan was far from guaranteed an NBA slot. It would all depend on how he played that night, on outdoor courts, his least favorite way to play the game.
“I was so nervous my hands were sweating,” he recalled. “I saw all these All-Americans, and I was just the lowest thing on the totem pole. Here I was, a country boy from Wilmington.”
Under the NCAA rules of the day, college coaches were allowed to participate in the All-Star camps as coaches and counselors. Brendan Malone, a smart, tough assistant at Syracuse University, had been working the Five-Star camp for several years. The previous summer, his team had included Aubrey Sherrod and a highly ranked center, Greg Dreiling, and they had won the camp championship.
Coaching the team to the camp title was an honor for the aggressive Malone, just the kind of distinction that an assistant coach needed to boost his career. For the 1980 camp, Malone again planned on drafting Dreiling and Sherrod, with his eye on another title. In particular, Malone held the first pick of wing players in the draft and knew Sherrod could provide his team the scoring it needed to win another title. But the day before the camp’s opening, Malone had to return home for a brief family emergency. So he asked Tom Konchalski, his good friend, to watch the opening-night tryouts and draft the team for him. Malone left strict instructions for Konchalski to select Dreiling and Sherrod.
Konchalski was prepared to follow Malone’s instructions that night—until he saw an unknown player from Wilmington. “What I remember is he had a great jump stop,” Konchalski recalled. “He could stop on a dime, could really elevate, go straight up, and get really great elevation on his jump shot. There was no three-point shot in the game then, so he didn’t have extended range. But he had a great midgame and a great jump stop. He would explode into his jump shot to the poin
t that players were defending his belly button. He just was so explosive athletically.”
Over the decades of Garfinkel’s Five-Star camp, there had come into being a phrase for the very best of the best, the sort of extremely rare talent that just leaps out at observers. “It was what we called ‘one-possession player,’ ” Garfinkel explained. “A one-possession player means that all you have to do is see them once.”
Garfinkel was sitting in his office watching the first games through a window when he first noticed Jordan. “He goes up for the jump shot, there’s three players guarding him. He goes up for a jump shot and there’s nobody in the air but him. He’s all alone. He’s up in the air. And like that, he’s spectacular.” My gosh, Garfinkel thought immediately, this is a one-possession player.
Jordan, too, could sense immediately that he had something the others didn’t. “The more I played, the more confident I became,” he remembered. “I thought to myself, ‘Maybe I can play with these guys.’ ”
Suddenly, Konchalski had a decision to make. Should he draft as Malone directed or should he take a player who was unlike any player he’d ever seen? Malone showed up early the next morning and went directly to Konchalski, who was having breakfast in the camp cafeteria. “He said, ‘Show me my team,’ ” Konchalski recalled. “I said, ‘I got number one.’ And he said, ‘You got Dreiling?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘You got Aubrey Sherrod?’ And I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘What do you mean?’ Aubrey Sherrod was considered the number one shooting guard in the rising senior class at that time. I said, ‘I took a kid from North Carolina.’ ”
Garfinkel laughed as he recalled the exchange. “Brendan says, ‘Who the hell is Mike Jordan?’ And he goes ballistic, only he didn’t say hell. He goes berserk. ‘What did you do to me? Who’s Mike Jordan?’ Tom told him, ‘Relax, relax, he’s a great player.’ Brendan’s all steamy. He walks away. He’s all pissed off.”
Malone didn’t remember the sequence just that way, but he did recall that it only took one look at Jordan to calm him down. “I remember the first time I saw Michael,” Malone said. “We were at an afternoon game that day. Michael was on an open court, asphalt, and he was moving, and the way he moved was like a thoroughbred, his stride, just the graceful way he ran and cut. He was a standout right away. You could look at him, look at how he moved and ran. It was apparent to even a person who didn’t have a sophisticated eye. It was apparent to you right away that Michael was superior to the other players in the camp or that were playing high school ball at that time.”
Legend has it that a few days into the camp, Jordan scored 40 points in one half of play, all of twenty minutes.
“What really got me is that he couldn’t be defended,” Konchalski recalled. “Because he jumped over people, and had a nice touch.… I mean he could get his shot anytime he wanted.”
Anthony Teachey from Goldsboro was also at the camp and recalled that it was Jordan’s competitive nature that pushed him so far above the others. “You got the top seventy-two players in the country at the time,” Teachey explained. “So everybody had their moments during that week.… He just happened to shoot up the charts that one summer.”
Garfinkel realized he should phone Dave Kreider, a friend who edited Street & Smith’s Yearbook, the major preseason publication in college basketball in that era. The magazine listed 650 high school seniors as top prospects. “Dave,” Garfinkel asked, “where do you have Mike Jordan on your list?”
Kreider supposedly checked the list and reported there was no Mike Jordan, only a Jim Jordan. Garfinkel then advised Kreider to add an extra Jordan somewhere high on the list. “I called Street & Smith’s to get him first or second team preseason All-American,” Garfinkel said.
Kreider replied that it was too late, the magazine had already gone to press. Garfinkel told Kreider he should do something because it would be embarrassing not to have a major player like this Jordan kid listed.
“In those days they’d print it weeks ahead of time,” Garfinkel recalled. “Dave told me, ‘You will not see Mike Jordan’s name in the top 650 players of the Street & Smith’s preseason magazine.’ ” Kreider later revealed that his North Carolina writer for the 1980–81 edition didn’t even include Jordan among the top twenty juniors in the state.
Everywhere Jordan went in the camp, Roy Williams was there, following him with a mix of anxiety and elation. “Every time we went to stations Roy Williams was at the stations watching,” Malone remembered. “It was apparent North Carolina had identified him as an outstanding player even though he only played one year of varsity ball in Wilmington, North Carolina. What I truly remembered about Michael is that during that week everybody was kind of awed at his driving the ball because that’s what he did best back then.”
He would scissor-kick on the way to the basket, hitting an extra stride to accelerate past defenders, Malone recalled. “He was going to the basket hard. Everybody was in the lane and packing it in, trying to stop him.”
Jordan led Malone’s team to the NBA title that first week. “The last seconds of the championship game, I called a time-out and told them the game was on the line. I said, ‘Michael, you have to take this game over.’ He was very receptive to coaching. And the next defensive sequence he put his hands on the ground like he was determined to stop the guy he was guarding.” That’s when Malone realized that Jordan’s competitiveness might be even greater than his abundant athleticism.
“He was the co-outstanding player of the week with a player named Mike Flowers from Indiana and he won the MVP of the All-Star Game, and he got several other awards,” Garfinkel remembered.
Jordan was injured for part of the second week in Pittsburgh and had to sit out a number of games. “What happened was he hurt his ankle and he only played half the games,” Konchalski recalled. “He ended up being the MVP of the All-Star Game for the second week in a row. He didn’t get the most outstanding player. That was Lester Rowe, a kid from Buffalo who later played for West Virginia. He was about six four, six five. He won because he played the entire week.”
“I got nine trophies,” Jordan proudly told the Wilmington Journal upon his return home.
Jerry Wainwright, who was then a high school coach, had witnessed the breakout performances. At the end of the second week, when the campers had just about all cleared out, Wainwright heard a bouncing ball in the gym and found Jordan there pushing himself through full-court shooting drills. Wainwright, who would later coach at UNC–Wilmington, asked Jordan what he was doing. Wainwright recalled his reply: “Coach, I’m only six four, and I’m probably going to play guard in college. I’ve got to get a better jump shot.”
The Five-Star camp had quickly opened a new chapter in the Jordan legend. “It was the turning point of my life,” Jordan reflected.
The experience served as another reminder of how rapidly fortunes change in athletics, a truth Jordan had first learned with Babe Ruth baseball. Early success was no guarantee of anything. “Coming into Pittsburgh 1,” said Tom Konchalski, “Lynwood Robinson was the guard that was North Carolina’s prime target, more so even than Michael Jordan. They thought he was going to be the next Phil Ford. But he would get injured in high school. He had surgery on his knee and he was never the same player. He never had the force he once had.” Dean Smith stuck by his scholarship offer for Robinson although the player never found success at that higher level. Robinson eventually transferred to Appalachian State where he played well, but never fulfilled the Phil Ford comparisons.
Jordan’s biggest trophy coming out of Five-Star was a newly hatched reputation. Even his own family now saw him differently. Up until the camps, James Jordan still imagined his son’s future as a baseball player. After the camps, those thoughts began to recede, Michael acknowledged to the Wilmington Journal. “My father really wanted me to play baseball, but now he wants me to pursue basketball.” Indeed, basketball was now pursuing him, something that baseball never did, no matter how tightly his father clung to that dr
eam.
Garfinkel began spreading the word that Jordan was one of the top ten national prospects in the high school class of 1981, which was led by a young center from Massachusetts named Patrick Ewing. Brick Oettinger ranked Jordan as the second-best rising senior behind Ewing. But analyst Bob Gibbons took it one step farther and rated Jordan the top player nationwide, even ahead of Ewing. “I had gone to several of his games during his junior year and I was there at Five-Star,” Gibbons recalled. “You can’t believe how I was ripped for ranking Jordan ahead of Ewing—everybody said I was taking care of a hometown boy.”
The dramatically upgraded rankings brought recruiting interest from hundreds of schools. And North Carolina just as suddenly found itself competing with a variety of programs for the affection of the Chosen One. Over the years Dean Smith had learned to be cautious with recruits, but now it seemed he was going to pay a price for that.
“To me, when you see something like Jordan’s talent, it stands out,” Brendan Malone observed. “I’m surprised that they had to make up their minds, was he worth a scholarship? I would have pounced on him right away the first time I saw him play.”
Malone later made a phone call to Wilmington in an effort to recruit Jordan for Syracuse. Despite his high regard for Malone and the experience at Five-Star, Jordan politely declined, saying his interest was elsewhere. Like many, Malone assumed that Jordan meant he was a lock for North Carolina. But Jordan’s thoughts had turned away from Carolina. Part of his hesitation was driven by doubt. Everywhere he went, he encountered people in Wilmington suggesting that his eyes were bigger than his talent, especially in regard to the Tar Heels program. “The people back home, stardom was the last thing they saw for me. People said I’d go there, sit on the bench, and never get to play. I kind of believed ’em myself.”
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