Despite their size and power, Gattison and Clyde Simmons were headed into their first varsity season as juniors that fall. “In New Hanover County, you didn’t play varsity sports in the tenth grade,” Gattison explained. “It didn’t matter who you were. When your JV season ended, if you were good enough, they allowed you to sit on the end of the varsity bench and watch.”
Thus this powerful New Hanover lineup would be getting its first experience playing against Jordan in his blue and gold Laney uniform. They already knew him well, due to their many battles against him in pickup ball on the city’s courts, particularly at Wilmington’s Empie Park.
“It was such a close-knit community that everybody knew everybody,” Gattison explained. “We always played. We played at the Boys Club. We played at Empie Park. Some of the classic games that we had were outside on asphalt at Empie Park. There was nobody there. He’d bring his guys. I’d bring my guys.”
Jordan’s “guys” were his regular crew of brother Larry, Adolph Shiver, Leroy Smith, and Mike Bragg. Gattison usually showed up with his New Hanover teammates—Boney, Jones, and Simmons—who had grown up together playing sports in the city’s various leagues.
“We had a good mix,” Gattison said of his teammates. “When it came down to sheer athleticism, Michael had the advantage at only one spot. We had the advantage at the other four. We had our battles. We’d play all day Saturday. You’d play each game to 11. Somehow at the end of those games, it seemed a lot of times that we’d be up 8–3, and then Michael would block every shot and score every point, and my team would end up losing 11–8. Whether we were playing outside at Empie Park or inside Brogden Hall with five thousand people watching, we both wanted to win.”
Hebron frowned on trash talking during high school ball. Even if the coach hadn’t taken that position, the New Hanover lineup was so imposing that it tended to quiet opposing teams by its mere presence. But during and after those pickup games at Empie Park the tenor could turn a bit chippy.
“Adolph talked more than Mike,” Gattison recalled. “A toothpick or a straw, he always had something in his mouth. Adolph was a guy who could talk but couldn’t play. When we played school ball, he’s the guy who did all the talking and woofing in the layup line, but when the game started he’d pass the ball to Michael and get out of the way.”
After the Five-Star camp in 1980, Jordan had returned to Empie Park with a new sense of confidence. “I’d never heard of Five-Star,” Gattison recalled. “Mike goes to Five-Star and he wins every trophy up there. As usual we meet up at the gym after he comes back, and Mike tells us, ‘Man, you gotta go to Five-Star.’ And he said, ‘We have no idea how good we are down here in Wilmington.’ He said it was because we were used to playing against each other. It was true. We really didn’t understand the level of talent we had on our high school teams. We could have combined those two teams and a whole lot of college teams would have had trouble matching up.”
At the time, Gattison was being recruited by dozens of major colleges as a football tight end. He might well have accepted a scholarship had he and his New Hanover teammates not taken Jordan’s advice the next summer. They attended a Five-Star session where Gattison attracted the attention that led to a basketball scholarship with Old Dominion and then a long NBA career.
“In that sense, I owe my career to Mike. He was right,” Gattison said. “We didn’t know how good we were.”
One thing that both he and Jordan did know was that they were headed to a major showdown that winter of 1980–81. In fact, since the close of the Five-Star camp Jordan had eagerly awaited the opening of basketball season. He would attend Laney football games and watch his friends under the Friday night lights, but he badly wanted basketball practice to start so that he could get going and show off the things he had learned over the summer.
Still, Ruby Sutton, who taught physical education at Laney, observed that the Jordan who returned that fall didn’t appear much affected by his sudden acclaim. He remained the same happy-go-lucky guy, always ready with a smile, she remembered. As the season neared, Jordan did acknowledge in an interview with the Wilmington Journal that he looked forward to getting a thrill from the crowd’s response to his slams, especially his theatrical sorties to the basket in the open court after a steal. “It inspires me to really play,” he said. His energy fed from their energy, he realized early on.
“I enjoyed it to the point that I started to do things other people couldn’t do,” he recalled some years later in a conversation with John Edgar Wideman. “And that intrigued me more… because of the excitement I get from the fans, from the people, and still having the ability to do things that other people can’t do but want to do and they can do only through you.… That drives me. I’m able to do something that no one else can do.”
His signing with Carolina drew fans from across the region to Laney games that winter, Chuck Carree recalled. “When word spread how good Jordan was, Laney had to turn fans away because the gymnasium was so small and it would have violated fire-marshal laws.” Many of them wanted to be able to say they saw Mike Jordan play in high school. There were long lines to get into the Laney gym on opening night November 26, 1980. Those who got in saw Jordan score 33 points and seize 14 rebounds in a win over Pender County. It was the first of six straight wins to open the season, propelling the Buccaneers to the top ranking in the state. In the midst of this streak, Dean Smith consecrated the Buccaneers with an appearance at a game in early December. The crowd broke the Laney gym record for rubbernecking that night, according to those in attendance. The sighting convinced some of the naysayers about Jordan’s suitability for North Carolina. More doubters were converted when he stacked up 9 assists to go with 26 points and 12 rebounds in a win over Kinston that same week. He also rejected 3 shots. “Jordan just hypnotized us,” Kinston coach Paul Jones allowed, pointing out that his players were so focused on Jordan that they left his teammates wide open.
The true highlight of the season came in late December when Laney won the Christmas tournament at New Hanover’s Brogden Hall. It proved to be a physical rematch with his playground foes, now dressed in New Hanover’s black and orange uniforms. Jordan was quickly snared in foul trouble that night and watched his teammates fall behind. With less than five minutes left, Herring sent him back into the game and watched as Jordan scored 15 points in a whirlwind. “All I remember is Mike taking every shot,” Gattison said. “I mean we were grabbing him, holding him, pulling his jersey, knocking him down. And he still made every shot.” The game came down to a final possession that found Jordan working the ball while looking to attack the basket. Then he took off.
“I remember that shot he made in the Christmas tournament to beat us at the buzzer,” Gattison said. “I had grabbed his shorts to pull him down and then his jersey and he still went up and made the shot.”
For the final season, Herring had cast aside all pretension and acknowledged that his main strategy was to get the ball to Jordan and encourage him to attack the rim. That approach mostly worked, because many nights Jordan was good enough to win games by himself. But by mid-January the Buccaneers had two losses and were tied for third place in the District II standings, hardly the circumstances to build confidence for a state title.
“Laney often appears not so much a team as a group of players waiting for Jordan to happen,” observed Wilmington Morning Star sportswriter Greg Stoda.
The theme would surface again and again over Jordan’s career. His displays of athleticism were so extraordinary, teammates and opponents alike would find themselves pausing just to watch him work. “We’re getting better about that, though,” Herring told Stoda, adding that the team seemed to play better at times when Jordan was on the bench. “But of course I want to get the ball to him whenever possible. He’s super.”
Jordan himself had initiated an effort to take things in another direction, one inspired by his hero. His vanity plates now read MAGIC on the back of his car and MAGIC MIKE on the front, evi
dence of his wanting to perfect Magic Johnson’s ability with the no-look pass. “It started one day in practice,” he told Chuck Carree, “when I started doing some freaky things like Johnson does. I made some passes looking away and one of my teammates started calling me ‘Magic Mike.’ He bought me the license tag on the back, and my girlfriend got me a T-shirt and front license tag with ‘Magic Mike’ on it.”
He routinely gave up the ball to teammates, an unselfishness documented by the 6 assists he averaged that senior season, yet it too often seemed that the ball was a hot potato for Laney, that his teammates were too eager to get it right back to him. “If they’re open, I’m going to pass them the ball,” Jordan explained to Greg Stoda. “Coach tells them to shoot and I tell them that. But I know they depend on me a lot.”
New Hanover’s Hebron understood the other players’ reaction. “Kids are awed by him,” the coach acknowledged. “They’re intimidated. Several coaches have told me that he’s the best high school player on the East Coast. I’ve seen him walk into a gym for a pickup game and everyone else stopped playing. This might sound weird, and a lot of people won’t understand, but some kids are just happy to be on the floor with him. He’ll go to Carolina and then maybe to the pros. Kids will be able to say that they played against him or on the same team as he did.”
“He was evolving right in front of our face,” Gattison explained. “It wasn’t about studying him, because he did something new and different every game. He found a new way to beat you every game. Athletically, he was doing things that nobody had seen. He’d jump and the rest of us would jump with him, but we’d come back down to earth. It didn’t take long to realize he was cut from a different piece of cloth than the rest of us.”
Jordan buttressed those observations by averaging 27.8 points and 12 rebounds in carrying Laney to a 19–4 record that season. The total included three different wins over New Hanover during the regular schedule. Each defeat had left Gattison and his teammates vowing not to lose again to Mike Jordan. They would have one last chance in their fourth meeting that season, in the district semifinals, the game that would determine which team went on to the state tournament. Played in Laney’s gym, this deciding game seemed well in hand for Jordan and his teammates, who were up 6 points with under a minute to go.
“We had been down as many as 10 or 11 points with a minute and forty seconds to go,” Gattison remembered. “There was no shot clock. All they had to do was dribble out the clock to close it out. Somehow we came back to win that game. To this day, I don’t remember what happened in the last two minutes. They could have dribbled the whole clock out. Somehow we created turnover after turnover. It involved trapping Mike in some kind of way.”
Gattison would later wonder how they could have pulled off all of the pressing and trapping without fouling more.
“On their home court?” he asked.
With seven seconds to go, the score was tied at 52 when Jordan made a move and launched a jumper. He was called for an offensive foul on the play, his fifth, which sent him to the bench, fouled out. The home crowd sat stunned. Gattison himself recalled being surprised at such a foul being called in the final seconds on Jordan’s home court.
New Hanover made the free throws to advance. The sudden turn of events left the crowd in a surly mood, not uncommon in high school basketball on the Coastal Plain. Just that season, New Hanover had won in Goldsboro, Gattison said. “I remember playing a game over in Goldsboro, where Anthony Teachey went to high school. You beat those guys on their court, we had to stay in the locker room until the police physically could come and get us out.”
The game at Laney involved far more familiarity and shouldn’t have been as threatening. “People knew each other,” Gattison explained. But Hebron was bumped by Laney fans walking off the floor. “When we won that game, we went in the locker room, and coach said, ‘Forget your showers. Get your stuff and let’s get out of here,’ ” Gattison said. “The referees were really who they were after, but there were no showers that night.”
As for Jordan, the unexpected end to his high school career was a profound disappointment. He had badly wanted to win a state championship. “He was really obviously dejected,” Gattison said. Equally disappointed, Herring likewise had little to say that night, except for this: “We reached for the moon and landed on the stars.”
In an interview almost thirty years later, Gattison’s memory of the final game was still laced with regret. Although they would encounter each other many times throughout their careers, Gattison explained in 2012 that he had never once mentioned that final game in Wilmington to Jordan, no matter how relaxed or informal the occasion. Even after Jordan had won many pro championships and it would seem that the pain had long eased, Gattison still considered the subject far too sensitive to broach. Likewise, Jordan would never mention it again either.
And the players from the two teams would never again gather at Empie Park to go at each other. It was as if the moment had poisoned the innocent competition of their youth. They all knew how much it mattered to Jordan.
“You got to understand what fuels that guy, what makes him great,” Gattison said. “He took the pain of that loss… for most people the pain of loss is temporary. He took that loss and held on to it. It’s a part of what made him. And it made me. He beat me three times, two of those were in my own gym. Then we win the fourth game and to this day I still feel bad about it.”
A few days after the loss to New Hanover, Herring boldly projected that North Carolina would win a national championship with Jordan in the lineup. But not many months afterward, the coach would begin his dark descent into mental illness.
“Pop went years with people trying to help him,” Gattison said of the bizarre reversal. “Everybody tried to do what they could. He just went years without the proper diagnosis, so he went years without the proper treatment. He just really spiraled down so fast. It was so debilitating mentally. The guy who was standing on the sidelines with all this fire in him, he became a ghost. Some years later, if you ran into Pop on the street, you didn’t know which Pop you were going to be talking to. It was very sad. Mental disease is such a traumatic thing.”
Even so, Gattison said that Herring’s legacy as a coach was Jordan’s career, not because he kept Jordan off the varsity as a sophomore, but because of the many thoughtful decisions he made on Jordan’s behalf. “Back then in high school ball it was almost an automatic. If you were six four, you were considered a big man,” Gattison said. “You were considered a center or a power forward and played close to the basket. But Pop had the wherewithal to really understand what Michael’s talents were and to put him out on top of the floor at the guard position.”
So many tall players in high school are never allowed to develop as guards, and they often become “tweeners” in basketball jargon. “A lot of tweeners at age seventeen are six five or six six, but they don’t grow any more,” he added. “Then going to college they try to play power forward. They might even have good college careers and average something like 20 points and 8 rebounds. But when they get to NBA camps, they’re expected to be off guards. And they’ve never played the position before so they can’t make the adjustment. They’re done.” Herring, however, had allowed Jordan to prepare for success at the next levels.
“Pop, he saw where Michael’s future was in basketball,” Gattison explained, “and he made it possible for him to get there.”
Big Mac
Jordan’s consolation that senior year was that he had been selected as one of Parade magazine’s top prep players in America, but he was stung after the season when Buzz Peterson edged him out in an Associated Press poll selecting North Carolina’s top high school player.
“We just played New Hanover too many times,” he told the Star-News three weeks after the season, when asked to sum up his disappointment. “When you play a good team that many times, it’s bound to catch up with you. It’s just hard to beat a good team four times. It was just their turn to wi
n.”
Next on his agenda was his senior baseball season, but that was complicated by an invitation to play in the prestigious McDonald’s All-American Game. A new rule required North Carolina high school players to forfeit their eligibility if they participated in such games, which set up an immediate choice for Jordan between baseball and McDonald’s. He took the team photo with the baseball team and appeared in the season opener, but it was a miserable, error-filled outing, which settled the issue. To his father’s great anguish, Jordan dropped baseball.
“I knew my mind wasn’t into it,” he told the Wilmington papers.
The first of the McDonald’s high school tournaments in 1981, in Landover, Maryland, pitted local stars against players from around the country. Ed Pinckney, a senior from New York, was one of the All-Americans who traveled down to Washington for the event. He hadn’t attended the Five-Star session with Jordan the previous summer, but other players from New York had been there, and had returned home with stories about a really good player from North Carolina. Pinckney couldn’t recall his name that March, but he didn’t have to go to more than one McDonald’s practice to figure out just whom they were talking about.
“He wasn’t talking a lot,” Pinckney recalled of seeing Jordan in that first practice. “He was just playing. It was like, ‘Holy Cow.’ When you’re from New York, the mind-set is that the best basketball is played in New York City. Well, the two practices we had completely changed my mind about who the best players were.”
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