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 easy 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.
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 point 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
dream.
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.”
The circumstances left him musing about his options. If North Carolina was
this hot after him, why not look at other schools that really interested him? Larry
Brown had just coached UCLA into the national championship game. Jordan
loved what he saw in the Bruins that spring. “I always wanted to go to UCLA,”
he explained later. “That was my dream school. When I was growing up, they
were a great team. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton, John Wooden. But I
never got recruited by UCLA.”
Known as a coaching gypsy, Brown was already looking for his next job and
on his way out after just two years at UCLA; he would leave the school at the
end of the 1981 season. Plus, Brown had played for and coached with Dean
Smith. Jordan didn’t realize it at the time, but it was unlikely that Brown would
have stepped in to take away a prized local recruit from Smith.
Another option, one that wasn’t disclosed publicly at the time, was the
University of Virginia, where freshman sensation Ralph Sampson had just taken
the Wahoos to the championship of the National Invitation Tournament in New
York. Jordan could see himself fitting in well there. So he contacted the Virginia
coaches. “I also wanted to go to Virginia because I wanted to play with Ralph
Sampson for his last two years there.… I wrote to Virginia, but they just sent me
back an admission form. No one came and watched me.”
In a 2012 interview, Terry Holland, then the coach at Virginia, acknowledged
Jordan’s interest, adding that his coaching friend Dave Odom had been among
the talent evaluators looking at Jordan during Garfinkel’s camp. “I know that
Dave Odom was impressed by Michael at the Five-Star camp the summer prior
to his senior year,” Holland recalled. “Up until then, Michael was pretty much a
late bloomer. We had already committed scholarships to Tim Mullen and to
Chris Mullin at that position and were in pretty big battles for both with Notre
Dame, Duke, and St. John’s. But it looked good for getting both so we elected to
focus on them to protect the recruiting investment we had already made in them.
We got Tim but lost Chris to his hometown team after a huge battle. Michael has
told me that he liked our team and was hoping that we would come after him
hard, but he has never indicated that he would have chosen UVA over UNC.”
The Virginia coach couldn’t have known how unwise it would be to dismiss the
Wilmington player’s interest. Michael clearly kept the snub in mind for his
future meetings with the Cavaliers.
Virginia’s decision not to recruit Jordan would loom over the coming seasons
as North Carolina and Virginia battled for supremacy in the Atlantic Coast
Conference. In 1981, Virginia beat Carolina twice, and both teams met again in
the semifinals at the Final Four in Philadelphia, where the Tar Heels finally
prevailed.
Years later, Jordan would reveal to Sampson that he had been eager to play
alongside him. The seven-four center had spent four years in college trying to
win a national championship for Virginia. “It is what it is,” Sampson said
stoically when asked about the missed opportunity to have Jordan in a Virginia
uniform. “I appreciated the teammates that I had.”
Many years later, Howard Garfinkel would produce a book about his
memories of running the Five-Star camp, of which the greatest was the
discovery of Michael Jordan. Garfinkel had not visited with Jordan often since
those summer days in 1980, but he took the book to an NBA arena one night
where Jordan was playing with the plan of giving a copy to the star after the
game. Garfinkel had waited a half hour in the crowd outside the locker room and
was about to give up, he recalled. “All of a sudden a little kid comes running
down the hall and says, ‘Here he comes! Here he comes!’ Sure enough down the
hallway comes Michael Jordan. So I step out. I make my Jack Ruby move and I
step in front of his entourage. But two of the largest cops I’ve ever seen are in
front of him. Jordan’s in the middle, and two cops are escorting him down the
hallway. I step in front and the cop shoos me away. And he says, ‘Don’t touch
him please, no autographs, no autographs.’ So I step aside, and Jordan goes by.
But out of his peripheral vision he sees me and yells, ‘Stop! That’s Howard
Garfinkel! He’s the reason I’m here.’ That’s not true, of course. I’m not the
reason. But that’s what he said. Swear to God.”
 Chapter 10

THE MICHAEL

SO MANY COLLEGE campuses across the land offered the same basic mix of
musty old brick buildings with the fluted columns and tree-lined sidewalks,
filled with the graceful forms of coeds moving back and forth to classes. But he
saw that if you lingered in Chapel Hill, there were things to be treasured—the
way the fall sunlight dappled the yellow leaves of the oak trees in the quad, the
sight of students lazily stretched out on the library steps with books in their laps,
the thump of rubber basketballs filled with too much air beating rhythmically on
the asphalt of an outdoor court. It would be the small things that he treasured as
he clicked along on his bicycle at an unfettered pace in the hazy dream that was
undergraduate life.
Yes, other schools offered similar allure, but there was no place that seemed
to put these elements together quite like the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. He didn’t realize it at the time of his visits in the fall of 1980, but he
was selecting the place where he would spend the last days of his true freedom,
before success took possession of his life.
UNC would suit him well. At least that’s what he concluded after he visited
there in a loud, trash-talking appearance that brought chuckles to those who
remembered his skinny figure bouncing down the hallways of the athletic dorm.
Patrick Ewing, a seven-foot Jamaican from Boston, the most heralded recruit in
that year’s senior class, met Jordan for the first time that weekend in October
when they made their official visit to the Carolina campus. Years later, Ewing
smiled at the memory. “He was talking a lot of junk,” he recalled. “He was
talking how he was gonna dunk on me. He talked smack from that moment on.
He’s always had that swagger.”
“I remember Michael’s recruiting trip well,” agreed James Worthy, a Tar
Heel sophomore at the time. “You heard him before you saw him.” At least part
of that was his youthful fear, Jordan would admit. After all, he supposedly didn’t
belong at Chapel Hill, according to people back in Wilmington. He had
conquered Five-Star, but the fear still welled up in him as he walked into the
place.
His doubts about the Tar Heels had started to fade once they showed interest
in him. The bonding began with the care and concern shown by the coaches, and
deepened as he experienced the place itself during his visits. He inhaled that elite
air, and soaked in the great tide of soothing light blue UNC regalia that swirled
everywhere and infused the place with a certain joie de vivre. It all helped him
come to the conclusion that so many other top-flight athletes had reached over
the years: “I could get used to this.”
Patrick Ewing had thought the same thing after meeting Jordan on that first
visit to Chapel Hill. Years later, the center would reveal that he was seriously
considering playing for Dean Smith until he returned to his hotel that weekend
and saw a Klan demonstration nearby. That chilled any thought he had of going
to UNC. If not for that Klan moment, Ewing might have joined Jordan to create
an all-powerful Tar Heels team, one capable of claiming multiple national
championships.
Jordan may have seen the same demonstration that weekend, but if he did it
never registered. The wishes of his parents carried the true weight. “His family
loved North Carolina,” Bob Gibbons pointed out. Just a dozen years after
watching their son enter a segregated first-grade classroom in Wilmington, they
now saw the state’s prestigious university seeking his services. The grant-in-aid
offered to attend Chapel Hill resonated with meaning for James and Deloris.
“I told Deloris, if he were my son, I’d send him to Carolina,” Whitey Prevatte
remembered. “That Dean Smith always impressed me as a fine man and a fine
coach.”
As if the Jordans needed encouragement. Already bursting with pride, they
thought of their son in Carolina blue and became inflated like dirigibles for the
Macy’s parade. And when Dean Smith and his entourage came to their home for
a visit that fall, it was, as Tom Konchalski observed with a chuckle, “like Zeus
had come down from Mount Olympus.” Smith had a certain way of connecting
with families and parents. He was as sincere as any coach could be about
academics and priorities. The Jordans sat in their living room, with Michael
cross-legged on the floor, twirling a basketball. As they took in the message, he
spun the ball slowly. There would be no promises made, Smith said. Jordan
would have to earn it. “It was all about the education spiel at that point,”
explained the writer Art Chansky. “Dean knew James and Deloris were very
interested in that.”
 From the very first moments, the Jordan family saw the hallmark of Dean
Smith’s style as a coach, a thorough and uncommon involvement with his
players as people, even as he maintained the distance and objectivity that
coaching demanded.
“Developing a relationship with Coach Smith was probably the easiest
thing,” James Worthy observed, “because he was just that kind of brutally honest
kind of a guy, very conscious of everything. He really understood where you
came from. He spent a long time getting to know your parents and what they
would want for their son. And that’s how he related to players.… Honesty is the
best, and that’s why a lot of players are attracted to that in lieu of all the
recruitment and visits to college and stuff like that,” Worthy added. “It’s
something special about someone who kind of understands you.”
Despite the lack of interest from Virginia and UCLA, Jordan had entertained
the advances of several schools in the region. When he visited the University of
South Carolina, he accompanied coach Bill Foster to meet the governor’s family
and spent time shooting hoops with the governor’s young son. “They weren’t
worried,” Art Chansky said of the Carolina coaching staff, “but they kind of
laughed when Bill Foster, who was at South Carolina at the time, took him to the
governor’s mansion for dinner. So that was the kind of shit that was going on in
terms of the competition. I don’t think they ever really thought he was going
somewhere else.”
At the University of Maryland, Lefty Driesell badly wanted to steal Jordan
away from Dean Smith and tried to sell the Jordans on the idea that the new
Chesapeake Bay Bridge had shortened the drive to Maryland into just about the
same time from Wilmington as going to Chapel Hill. Jordan’s parents merely
rolled their eyes. Jim Valvano, the new coach at NC State, also made a pitch for
Jordan and even played the David Thompson card. Valvano encouraged Jordan
to think about channeling the high-flying days of his childhood hero.
Well before Jordan took his official visit to Chapel Hill, he had gone there on
his own to look over the place thoroughly. “The Jordans came to Carolina a lot,
a lot of unofficial visits,” Art Chansky recalled, adding that while graduate
assistant Roy Williams couldn’t go on the road recruiting he was free to
entertain the Jordans on campus. James Jordan and Williams became so close
that the father later built Williams a wood stove for his home in Chapel Hill. But
it was the official visit that finally settled things in Michael’s mind. Herring was
encouraging him to get the recruiting decision made before the season started, so
that he could concentrate on winning a state high school championship. Jordan’s
recruitment also had the potential to distract his teammates, if not the entire
Laney student body. “Valvano, Lefty Driesell… Roy Williams spent so much
time down here, we thought he was working at Laney,” teammate Todd Parker
remembered. “Then Dean Smith showed up, in this powder-blue suit, and it was
over. If Dean Smith shows up, Carolina really wants you.”
Jordan agreed with Herring. He wanted to get the decision out of the way.
“Carolina was the fourth school I visited,” he recalled, “and afterwards there was
no question in my mind. I committed within a week and canceled my visits to
Clemson and Duke.”
He made the official announcement at his home on November 1, 1980, before
just two microphones supplied by local TV stations. Lynwood Robinson chose
that same day to announce his own plans to attend UNC, so a lot of the attention
was diverted to him. Durham sportswriter Keith Drum said at the time that
Jordan would be much more important to the Tar Heels program, but the
assignment editors for the various media outlets must not have gotten the memo.
The Jordans sat on the couch in the living room with the two microphones set
on the coffee table in front of them, right there with the glass turtle and potted
plant. With his mother on his right and his father on his left, Jordan folded his
arms across his knees and leaned forward to confirm that, yes, it was Carolina
after all.
His mother, who had just turned thirty-nine a few weeks earlier, sat back, her
manicured hands folded where her stylish dark skirt crested her knee. She had
slimmed considerably in recent years and showed the first signs of maturing into
a person quite comfortable with the spotlight her son would bring. She took in
his announcement with a smile expressing absolute rapture and hinting at all the
effort that she had expended to get her laziest child to this moment. Seventeen-
year-old Michael, meanwhile, appeared almost sleepy-eyed, looking into the
klieg lights of the TV crews with a calm that would become his trademark in
thousands of future interviews. The slightest trace of smile, suggesting a
repressed sense of glee, fell across his face as he processed the questions and
formulated his answers.
His father likewise sat back on the sofa, as if to take care not to invade his
son’s spotlight. His immense pride was tinged with a solemnity that day. He was
obviously filled with an emotion that he made every effort to mask.
Pop Herring was there, too, standing well out of the way during the
announcement but equally full of pride. The young coach and Jordan mugged for
the cameras, leaning forward in tandem to measure their hands. And later, as
Jordan held a white and blue Carolina ball, the coach made as if to defend him, a
playfulness born of their morning workouts together in the Laney gym.
“He is like a father to us,” Jordan would say of Herring in an interview with
the Wilmington Journal. “We can go to him anytime and talk to him about
anything, things that you wouldn’t tell your own parents, because he’s so
understanding. I think that he can lead us into a championship.”
Mike Krzyzewski, Duke’s enterprising young coach, had hinged his hopes on
Deloris Jordan’s respect for the school’s academics and her infatuation with
former Duke star Gene Banks. Once Jordan’s intentions became clear,
Krzyzewski wrote Michael a letter, lamenting that he would not be joining the
Blue Devils and wishing him well. The letter would resurface some years later in
the Jordan room of Wilmington’s Cape Fear Museum, where it was said to be a
favorite display of Tar Heel fans.

Empie Park

With recruiting done, Jordan could turn his attention to his goal of winning a
state championship. Laney would first have to defeat a large and physical New
Hanover County team in District 1 of Southeast North Carolina’s 4A
classification. “He played in a league, the Mideastern Conference, that was
loaded with talent,” longtime Wilmington sportswriter Chuck Carree recalled.
New Hanover had long been Wilmington’s main white high school, with a
tradition of athletic success led by Hall of Fame coach Leon Brogden. It had a
particularly strong football legacy, having produced NFL quarterbacks Sonny
Jurgensen and Roman Gabriel. With the coming of integration, Williston, the
city’s longtime black high school, had been made into a junior high, a move so
resented by the black community that it supposedly helped spark the Wilmington
Ten incident.
Racial tensions had begun to ease by the time Laney was opened in 1976 and
Pop Herring was hired as the city’s first black head coach. No one made public
comment about Herring’s new status, but all eyes were watching his progress,
especially when it came to the meetings between Laney and New Hanover,
coached by Jim Hebron. Michael Jordan’s status as a star North Carolina recruit
only served to heighten the public awareness and increase the focus on Herring.
The two coaches, both in their early thirties, provided an interesting contrast
of styles. The New Hanover roster for 1980–81 featured Clyde Simmons, who
would later become an All-Pro defensive end for the Philadelphia Eagles of the
NFL, and big man Kenny Gattison, who would star at Old Dominion University,
then enjoy a solid career playing and coaching in the NBA. Gattison was a junior
in the fall of 1980 and approaching six eight and 240 pounds. Clyde Simmons
was almost six six, well muscled, and quick. New Hanover’s team included two
other exceptional athletes who never gained fame, although they should have,
Gattison recalled. “Rondro Boney was six three, 215 pounds, and ran the forty-
yard dash in 4.25 seconds. When he turned the corner as a running back in
football, he was gone. He had the same silhouette as Herschel Walker. Ronald
Jones was a six-four wide receiver, also with great speed. He was like Jerry
Rice. Those two guys should have played in the NBA or NFL.”
New Hanover enjoyed a ten-win football season in 1980 with those players,
who became even more intimidating when they donned basketball uniforms. By
contrast, Hebron was a compact man who incessantly worked a jump rope. He
loved Wilmington’s beach and surfing scene second only to his coaching duties
at New Hanover. His physical education classes at the school were known for
their laid-back atmosphere, but Hebron was in complete command of the team
he coached.
“He really was physically unimposing,” remembered Gattison. “He reminded
you of Dustin Hoffman. He had the most unassuming personality. He never
yelled, he never screamed. But you knew the guy had your back, so whatever he
asked we just did it.”
While the community found Hebron interesting enough, it was Herring, the
African American, who drew the quietly intense notice. “Like anything else, it
was a test to see if it could work,” Gattison remembered. New racial stereotypes
were being hastily drawn in those first decades of integration. For example,
black athletes were almost never chosen to play quarterback, a perception that
only began to change in 1986–87 when Doug Williams led the Washington
Redskins to a Super Bowl title. Head coaching jobs were also often reserved
largely for whites. But Herring had earned his position, and had shown plenty of
early promise as a head coach. His style on the sideline was animated, to say the
least. “If Jim Hebron was Dustin Hoffman, Pop Herring was Fred Sanford,”
Gattison recalled with a laugh. “Pop was a little more fiery than Jim Hebron, I
can tell you that. Those were two totally different coaching personalities. They’d
put those leisure suits on and go to work during games. Those were the good ol’
days, really.”
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, evidence 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 win.”
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.”
Jordan may not have been talking smack to Pinckney, but he was once again
to Patrick Ewing. “He was talking he was gonna dunk on me,” the center
recalled years later with a laugh. “He was dunking on me. He was just talking
trash. We were going back and forth.”
Surprisingly, Jordan was not in the starting lineup for that first McDonald’s
game. And Pinckney couldn’t even recall who was coaching (it was Mike Jarvis,
then Ewing’s high school coach at Cambridge Rindge & Latin). But it was clear
by the second half that the coach was determined to win.
“What happened, in the first half of the game, everybody gets a chance to
play,” he recalled. But in the second half, particularly down the stretch, the game
was turned over to the skinny kid from Carolina. “He got the ball and scored
literally every time we came down the court,” Pinckney said with a laugh. “So it
wasn’t an issue as to when or if we were going to win. It was just a matter of
where he was gonna get the ball and how many he was gonna score.”
For the record, Jordan scored 14 in that first game, and Buzz Peterson scored
10, a good enough performance to assure that the pair of North Carolina recruits
started together in the backcourt of the national McDonald’s game, played in
Wichita two weeks later.
It was the first big basketball trip for James and Deloris Jordan as well.
Among the activities was an address from John Wooden, the legendary UCLA
coach. Billy Packer, the former All-ACC guard at Wake Forest who had become
a broadcaster for CBS, also made the trip. Packer had been busy broadcasting
the Final Four in Philadelphia during the first McDonald’s game. Now that the
big event was over, he had come to Wichita, in particular to get a look at Jordan.
Packer also lived in North Carolina and was a broadcaster for ACC games, so
he was curious about any freshmen coming into the conference. He was
surprised at the strong level of talent in the game. The East roster included Milt
Wagner, Bill Wennington, Adrian Branch, Chris Mullin, and Jeff Adkins.
Aubrey Sherrod, who had been named MVP at the first McDonald’s game in
Washington, was a hometown hero in Wichita and a big drawing card for the
event.
“But Michael stole the show,” Packer said. Jordan scored 30 points, a
McDonald’s game record. Best of all, he delivered victory when he went to the
line facing a one-and-one with eleven seconds on the clock and his team down,
95–94. Jordan calmly canned both. He put up extraordinary stats, hitting 13 of
his 19 field goal attempts, making all 4 of his free throws, and adding 6 steals
and 4 assists.
Yet at game’s end, the three judges who had been selected to choose the
MVP—John Wooden, Philadelphia hoops legend Sonny Hill, and Morgan
Wootten, the great high school coach from Maryland—selected Branch and
Sherrod as the game’s MVPs, despite Jordan’s record-setting performance.
According to some reports, Wootten did not vote because he was Branch’s high
school coach. Branch was headed to the University of Maryland.
“We broadcast the game,” Billy Packer recalled, “and of course when they
announced that the most valuable player wasn’t Michael it was astonishing. It
turned out to be Sherrod and Adrian Branch, who had played high school for
Morgan Wootten. I know Morgan’s integrity and Coach Wooden’s as well. They
obviously saw something I didn’t particularly see in the game. But I don’t think
either one of them would have stooped to ‘I’m going to pick my player no matter
what.’ Adrian played fairly well, too, but not as well as Michael did.”
No one was more furious than Deloris Jordan. She dropped her normal
composure and let anyone within earshot know that her son had been robbed.
Bill Guthridge looked up after the announcement and saw an obviously angry
Mrs. Jordan headed for the floor with Buzz Peterson’s mother in tow. The
Carolina assistant headed them off and defused the situation.
“His mother was furious,” remembered Tom Konchalski.
“She was very upset,” Howard Garfinkel recalled. “I just explained to her
there’s only one list that counts, and that’s the night of the first pick of the NBA
draft.”
Later that evening, Packer encountered the Jordans outside the arena. “His
mom was still upset about it,” the broadcaster said. “I was kidding with her and
said to her, ‘Don’t be so upset about this game. Michael’s going to be an
outstanding player and he’s going to play for a great coach at North Carolina.
Some day you’ll forget this night he didn’t get the MVP.”
Soon Packer would realize that while Mrs. Jordan might forget the snub, her
son wasn’t about to. “Michael might have been playing tiddlywinks against
Adrian Branch, and Adrian might not even realize it,” Packer said with a laugh,
“but Michael would still have that image of that game in Wichita in his mind.
Nobody in the ACC would realize just how motivated he was by things like that.
But he never forgot anything.”
Michael and sister Roslyn graduated from Laney that spring of 1981 and
began preparations for their next round of challenges in Chapel Hill.
Laney’s yearbook, The Spinnaker, detailed Jordan’s curriculum vitae:
“Homeroom Rep 10, Spanish Club 11… New Hanover Hearing Board 12… Pep
Club 10.” The Spinnaker also included a passage acknowledging Jordan and
Leroy Smith: “Laney only hopes that you… expand your talents to make others
as proud of you as Laney has been. Always remember Laney as your world.”
Jordan’s world, of course, was about to expand exponentially. And every
single soul, especially Jordan himself, would be stunned at how swiftly that
happened.
 PART IV

TRUE BLUE
 Chapter 11

THE FRESHMAN

FANS AT OPPOSING schools around the ACC always seemed to fixate on what
they saw as Dean Smith’s large nose and beady eyes. To them, he was a
caricature, one that embodied an air of snarky superiority. This public image
proved a radical departure from how he was seen inside the Carolina program
itself, where he was held in uncommon esteem. In his players’ eyes, his self-
deprecation underscored his relentless emphasis on team play.
“One thing I’ll always remember is his honesty,” NBA great Bobby Jones
once told Sports Illustrated. “We all knew he had problems, just like everyone
else, but most coaches would never admit to them. He also admitted he didn’t
have all the answers.”
That honesty provided the foundation for the deep respect and love his
players so often expressed for Smith, particularly after they stopped playing for
him, when he ceased being their coach and worked hard at being their friend.
Michael Jordan would come to call Smith his second father, the sort of sentiment
echoed by just about everyone who ever played for him.
Sometimes, Smith’s efforts involved a major issue, such as James Worthy’s
arrest for solicitation of a prostitute during his days with the Los Angeles Lakers.
“Coach Smith was the second person to call me,” Worthy acknowledged, “and
he said, ‘We’re all human. I know you’re a great man. Just deal with it as a
man.’ ”
Smith got involved on less dramatic issues as well, such as problems in a
former player’s family or career. He had a prodigious memory, often recalling
the names of his players’ friends and relatives, people he had seen only once or
twice. Lakers general manager Mitch Kupchak, who played at Carolina, was
amazed once by a phone conversation in which Smith mentioned that Kupchak’s
sister Sandy had given birth to a boy. “He met my sister in the summer of 1972,”
Kupchak said. “How could he even remember her name?”
Pete Chilcutt, another of Smith’s players, observed that he frequently ran into
NBA players who spoke bitterly about their college coaches or programs. That
wasn’t the case with North Carolina, Chilcutt once explained. “One thing all Tar
Heels have in common is pride.” Which meant that Smith’s players frequently
returned to Chapel Hill during the summer, to play pick-up basketball or to
gather for the program’s annual golf outing. That family atmosphere paid off for
Smith in terms of connections and recruiting. His program set the standard in the
days when the ACC was viewed as the nation’s best college basketball
conference.
Outsiders, however, did not share that reverence. Smith was often reviled by
students and fans from other teams in the hotly contested conference. Part of
what drew this contempt was his use of the four corners, the spread offense that
became a signature of the North Carolina program. Ric Moore, a former high
school player and basketball fan in Virginia, recalled the extreme disgust he felt
as a teen watching Smith’s teams play on television. “There was no end to my
hatred of Dean Smith,” Moore said. “You have some of the greatest players in
the game on the floor, and he would have his team stalling out the clock. It was a
curse on the game.” Smith generally responded that the four corners gave his
team its best chance to win, but few basketball fans seemed to buy it. And
neither did the Atlantic Coast Conference, which pioneered the use of the shot
clock in college basketball largely in response to the four corners.
For his detractors, it went beyond team strategy. Opponents complained that
he was smug and self-righteous, a charge also leveled at UCLA’s John Wooden.
And like Wooden, Smith was viewed as excessively manipulative, working
every angle of the competitive environment. NC State’s Jim Valvano once joked
that if Dean was complimentary of an ACC referee, the rest of the league’s
coaches would quickly blackball the guy. Irked once by what he perceived as
Smith’s manipulation, Duke coach Bill Foster seethed, “I thought Naismith
invented the game, not Dean Smith.”
“There is a gap between the man and the image he tries to project,” Virginia
coach Terry Holland once explained. A common joke around Charlottesville
back in the 1980s was that Holland had a dog, a bitch, that he named Dean.
It sometimes came across as though Smith felt he was above the rules.
Holland recalled an incident: “He thought one of my players, Marc Iavaroni, was
roughing up Phil Ford, and at halftime when the teams came off the court at the
ACC tournament in 1977, he confronted Marc—physically touched him and said
things. That’s one area where I think Dean always had a problem. He felt he had
a right, in order to protect his players in his own mind, to confront other people’s
players. That’s extremely dangerous and way over the line.”
“We’ve all probably done things we’re not proud of, backing up one of our
players,” said Smith’s rival, Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski. “But I can’t think of
a time I’ve ever heard him blame or degrade one of his own players, and in
return, his kids are fiercely loyal to him. That kind of loyalty doesn’t just
happen. Things done on a day-to-day basis develop that kind of relationship.”
Billy Packer spent his share of afternoons observing Smith’s practices, which
were often eerily quiet as players hustled through the structured agenda. Every
drill and scrimmage was precisely timed and measured and observed, all with
the aim of sublimating individual prowess to the strength of the team.
“Even in scrimmages we’ve tried to apply that standard,” Smith once
explained. “If a player took a bad fadeaway jump shot and made it, I’d tell the
manager, ‘Score that a zero.’ If he got a layup, it would be plus three. We’d only
have to score it that way a few times before the guys would realize what we were
after.”
Detailed practice schedules were posted each day. As players ran through
drills, managers stood on the sideline holding up fingers to indicate how many
minutes were left in each period. The structure of Smith’s program made
possible all of the team success that Jordan later experienced in pro basketball,
explained Tex Winter, Phil Jackson’s longtime assistant coach with the Chicago
Bulls.
“If Michael hadn’t played for Dean Smith, he wouldn’t have been as good of
a team player as he was,” Winter said in a 2008 interview.
An overlooked factor in the Jordan legend is that Bill Guthridge, who worked
for decades as Smith’s top assistant, had played for Winter at Kansas State, then
served as Winter’s assistant. Winter, of course, had developed the complex
triangle offense, used by his Kansas State teams and later in the NBA by
Jordan’s Bulls. While the Tar Heels did not use Winter’s triangle offense, they
did employ what Winter liked to call “system basketball,” an approach based on
a core philosophy and fundamental principles. Winter explained that many
coaches used no such system, choosing instead to employ a freewheeling
amalgam of various plays and isolated, often disconnected, strategies.
In Smith’s program, “the system” was more important than individual talent.
Chemistry also superseded talent. “I think a very underrated part is the chemistry
of a team and their confidence in one another,” Smith once explained to Packer.
“And unselfishness in our game is huge. And, of course, they have to play hard.
We’ve always said, ‘Play hard, play smart, play together.’ And playing smart
means you have to work real hard in practice to repeat things so you’ll react
even when the circumstances are disorienting, when fans are yelling at you, yet
you still know what to do.”
“With Dean, there was no stone unturned on or off the floor,” Packer said.
“And when you take into consideration his total involvement as a coach, whether
you were the lowly manager or a player like Michael Jordan, that to me was the
greatest asset that he had.” Smith was controlling in game situations as well,
pointedly instructing his players not to engage in flashy plays that might show
up an opponent. When Jimmy Black once threw an alley-oop to James Worthy
for a resounding dunk late in a blowout win over Georgia Tech, Smith was
furious and punished the transgression in the next practice. Carolina players
simply did not contemplate such behavior.
Yet, he could just as easily offend others with his obsessiveness. “I’m doing a
game between NC State and Carolina, a big game,” Packer remembered. “I’m
talking about two teams in the top five and I’m ready to go out on the floor to
announce the starting lineups. The teams are at their respective benches and
Dean walks by me and says, ‘I don’t appreciate your tie.’ And I look down and I
have on a red tie. And it was the first time I realized I was wearing a red tie. I
thought, ‘That guy never stops. Here the teams are getting ready to go out and
play the game. How the hell could he be worried about what tie I had on?’ ”
Packer admitted to often becoming annoyed that Smith would craftily use his
postgame news conferences not for a frank discussion of the competitive
proceedings but to send messages to his players, even to the officials, and
sometimes to opposing coaches and their players. “I would always try to judge
what he would say about the game when it was over,” Packer recalled. “He used
to say things and I would say, ‘Gosh, that’s damn stupid. That wasn’t the key to
the game.’ It used to annoy me because it would be something that I hadn’t even
talked about on air during the game.” He would make statements that would
have underlying meanings. “You eventually realized how smart he was and how
dumb you were not to understand it.”
Thus Michael Jordan arrived on the North Carolina campus in the fall of
1981 to find that he was about to play for a very different kind of coach. Where
Pop Herring had been a blessing for his early development, the next stage of
Jordan’s journey brought a total immersion into the discipline of the sport.
“When you come out of high school, you have natural, raw ability,” Jordan once
explained. “No one coaches it. When I was coming out of high school, it was all
natural ability. The jumping, the quickness. When I went to North Carolina, it
was a different phase of my life. Knowledge of basketball from Naismith on…
rebounds, defense, free-throw shooting, techniques.”
Even as he was recruiting Jordan, Smith had put together one of his best
teams for 1981, featuring Worthy, guard Al Wood, and center Sam Perkins.
Virginia had beaten North Carolina twice that season, and the two teams met
again in the national semifinals in Philadelphia. Holland coached his team to go
against Carolina’s system. But Smith tricked the Cavaliers coach by
uncharacteristically turning the offensive spotlight over to the athletic Wood,
whose dynamic play helped win the day.
It was Smith’s sixth trip to the Final Four. From 1962 to 1981, his teams had
stacked up better than 460 wins, with nine ACC championships. The only
validation he lacked was a national championship. His 1981 team lost yet
another title game that first Monday night in April and had to watch Indiana
coach Bobby Knight and point guard Isiah Thomas take home the trophy,
extending North Carolina’s frustration another season. Afterward, his players
gathered and vowed that the next season would bring an end to the drought.
Michael Jordan watched the event on television, and for the first time in his life
felt a deep allegiance to Smith and the Tar Heels. He also felt a frustration that
he wasn’t able to help them against Indiana.
“I guess we can be like Penn State football,” Smith mused after the Indiana
loss. “Number 2 all the time.”
Comparing his program to that of Penn State’s legendary Joe Paterno was
Smith’s way of asking for more patience from North Carolina’s fans. Both
Paterno and Smith had well-established reputations for doing things the right
way, with an admirable balance between championship ambition and academic
achievement for the athletes.
“He expected you to go to class,” Worthy explained, “and if you were a
freshman you had to go to church unless you had permission from your parents
not to. He promised you that in your four years you would graduate. It was
simple, and his family philosophy was good.”
Yet it was hard to ignore the gnawing dissatisfaction among North Carolina’s
fans and the media covering the team. There was a sense that the balance that
Smith brought to the cynical business of college athletics was not enough, that
his insistence on doing everything the right way was preventing him from
winning “the big one.” Neither Smith nor his assistant coaches—not even the
players—talked about the growing derision aimed at North Carolina, but they
felt it more than ever after that sixth trip to the Final Four.
 In truth, Smith had built the nation’s best, most consistent basketball
program. It produced the best players, who also finished school with a much
clearer understanding of themselves as people. No one understood this better
than the players themselves.
“Coach Smith taught us to be able to get along with people,” Worthy
explained. “It helps you socially when there is a certain set of rules, when you
have to communicate with people, when you have to learn to agree to disagree,
when you have to submit to authority without losing your integrity. So it teaches
you to learn how to deal with people and then how to rely on and trust people.”
Smith’s structured “system” focused on the players doing all the little things
correctly for one another, sharing shots and setting picks for one another,
Worthy said, adding that you couldn’t overestimate the value of Smith’s elevated
treatment of team managers and practice players.
“All of those things playing the game, they transfer over to life,” he said. In
turn, the players’ allegiance to Smith and his mentorship made the winning of a
championship vitally important to them all, Worthy explained.
Some longtime observers actually took hope from the loss in Philadelphia.
Smith had shown a willingness to open his system a bit to accommodate the
special talents of a player like Al Wood. It showed that the coach was willing to
adjust to a shifting landscape in the college game. Huge amounts of money and
much higher levels of public attention were ushering in great change. In another
few years, it might well have been impossible for a player of Jordan’s special
abilities to find his way into a system run as tightly as Dean Smith ran the
program at North Carolina.
Jordan, meanwhile, had liked much of what he had seen about the Carolina
program on TV during the Final Four. He liked the camaraderie and the spirit
and the talent. He figured that even though he was a freshman he would find a
way to come off the bench. If he managed to get in the games, Jordan believed
he’d find a way to help the Tar Heels.
Help, indeed. Thirty years later, on the eve of his own selection to the
Basketball Hall of Fame, Ralph Sampson reflected on Michael Jordan, this force
that had upset all of his best-laid plans and monumental expectations. No one
had seen him coming. Sampson pointed out that Jordan’s unprecedented rise all
began with a piece of remarkable fortune: Jordan had been able to walk into a
ready-made championship team at North Carolina, as if God himself had placed
the reservation for him.
“He was very fortunate to be in that situation,” Sampson pointed out.
 As a freshman in Dean Smith’s system, Jordan merely had to fall in line. In
all the years of Smith’s program, only three other players—Phil Ford, James
Worthy, and Mike O’Koren—had made the starting lineup as freshmen. Like
most programs in that day, Smith’s system was heavily weighted toward
seniority. He allowed his veteran players input into the rules of conduct off the
court. He scheduled games in or near their hometowns during their senior
seasons. He accorded them every conceivable honor and privilege, because it
was their four-year involvement and dedication that sustained the program.
Freshmen, meanwhile, were lower, supposedly, than even team managers and
training assistants. Freshmen carried team bags and equipment and performed
other menial chores. It was the freshmen, not team managers, who chased down
loose balls at practice each day. They had to earn a place in the program. Among
Jordan’s tasks that first year, for example, would be hauling the team’s heavy
film projection equipment around from venue to venue. Yet even that was part of
the blessing: as a freshman, he faced no great pressure or expectations.
Sampson, a tall, silent observer at seven feet four, watched it all happen, and
with no small dismay. Virginia’s 1981 battles with North Carolina had been the
prelude to what would become known as the Jordan Era in Chapel Hill. Sampson
had signed with Virginia, an ACC school in his home state with little basketball
tradition, in 1979, and had led the Cavaliers to the NIT title in 1980 as a
freshman. He was projected as basketball’s next great giant, compared often to
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and as such labored under tremendous media pressure
and fan expectations. The 1981 Final Four loss to the Tar Heels had been a huge
setback, but many in the national media projected that Sampson would carry the
Cavaliers to a national championship in 1982. The greatest single obstacle in his
way was the University of North Carolina, despite having lost talented senior Al
Wood.
The big question for Dean Smith that fall of 1981 was who would take
Wood’s place on the team. It was obvious that the six-nine Worthy was ready to
step in as the team’s top scorer, and Perkins, also six nine, made for quite a
weapon himself. Smith needed a wing to play heady ball, energize the defense,
and knock down open shots when zones collapsed around Worthy and Perkins.
Jim Braddock seemed the likely candidate early in the fall. He was a junior, a
fine shooter, and a decent defender. The other two candidates were freshmen
Peterson and Jordan. Peterson could run and jump and had speed. He wasn’t a
bad shooter either. Smith had been toying with certain thoughts since he watched
Jordan’s raw high school performances. But fans remembering the scenario
would long roll their eyes. How could the Carolina coach waste time looking
past the obvious? The answer was Jordan.
Smith, however, was very much a man of process, and he had much to
consider that fall. He had received early reports of Jordan from the pickup games
he was playing with his new teammates and others around campus. Jordan’s
internship in the games at Wilmington’s Empie Park had served him well, as had
his childhood battles with brother Larry. As Bulls team psychologist George
Mumford later pointed out, those heated verbal and physical exchanges with
Larry set the format for how Jordan would relate to just about all of his future
teammates. His game was rooted in the combat between brothers. Jordan’s new
teammates had no idea about the brother thing, although they quickly got a sense
of the combat. As Worthy explained, Jordan seemed eager to “bully” the older
players at North Carolina, and part of his bully game was talking trash.
“I saw it then,” Worthy said. “He had raw talent. And that was all he was. He
came in very confident and seeking out the best and trying to target who he’s
going to dismantle.”
The freshman began telling his new teammates he was going to dunk on
them. That irritated Worthy the most, it seemed. Others mostly laughed off his
talk, but the behavior triggered a concern among the team’s veteran players.
They had vowed to return to the Final Four in 1982 to win a title for their coach.
It was immensely important for them. The last thing they needed was a loud-
mouthed freshman hotshot to wreck the team’s prized chemistry. It wasn’t that
Jordan was oblivious to the team’s desire to win a national championship. He
felt a part of the North Carolina program, and recalled his frustration and
disappointment at watching the Tar Heels lose that spring. Still, he was a
freshman that fall of 1981, and his aggressiveness was met with mixed reviews.
“I remember that people thought that he was really cocky, or that he just
talked a lot,” Art Chansky recalled. “And he wanted to have the nickname
Magic. People in Wilmington had started calling him Magic. Dean said to him,
‘Why do you want to become Magic? Somebody else already has that name.’ If
you look in the 1982 Carolina brochure, he was Mike Jordan. ‘What would you
like to be called?’ ‘They call me Michael.’ Dean said, ‘Well, we’ll call you
Michael Jordan from now on.’ That was the smartest move they ever made
because he became just Michael. Calling him Magic was bullshit. Dean was
smart about that.”
Whatever his name, it soon enough became clear to the older players that
Jordan had a boiling spring deep inside him that fueled his need to dominate.
They saw that Jordan possessed a complex personality; in one sense the trash
talk seemed silly and innocent, but in another sense it showed that he really was
intent on challenging them. But his teammates soon began to realize that he was
using the trash to push himself. The more he talked, the more he had to back it
up. Jordan was not the first young player to do this. The difference was that he
had the ability to back up whatever he said. Thus Jordan immediately presented
himself as a figure who could turn the world of Carolina basketball upside down.
At least, that was how it seemed to Worthy.
The new guy targeted Worthy for a little one-on-one as a measuring-up
exercise. Worthy sensed that Jordan was making an immediate play for his status
and declined to be pulled into the freshman’s mind game. In many ways, they
were diametric opposites. Rather than mouthing off, Worthy tended to
internalize things. It would take him years to learn to express his raw feelings the
way that Jordan was already doing as an eighteen-year-old. So Jordan was a
challenge to the older player on many levels.
“Physically, he was a scrawny kid but strong and confident mentally,”
Worthy remembered. “He had already surpassed a lot of people older than him.
He had already reached that level of confidence.”
And it wasn’t just their personal confrontation that mattered. All basketball
teams are a hierarchy, Smith’s teams even more than most. Jordan’s youthful
challenge had the potential to mess with Carolina’s established team dynamics
before the varsity even played a single game.
“Oh come on, big fella,” Jordan would say to Worthy, trying to goad him into
playing.
It would take a while before he wore the junior down about the one-on-one.
“After he started to get better, he would pick on Sam Perkins and me,” Worthy,
with a slight smile, recalled in an interview thirty years later. “He’d say, ‘Let’s
play a little one-on-one.’ Finally I did. We played three games and I won two
that I know of.” The victory would confirm the program’s hierarchy, although it
clearly left Jordan unsatisfied, which was probably a good thing. Worthy mused
that it took Jordan almost thirty years to admit the losses, in an interview for an
HBO special on the Duke/North Carolina rivalry.
At the time, though, there were at least some who wondered if the brash
freshman wasn’t out of place in Chapel Hill. “He had a personality that you
wouldn’t think would fit a Carolina player, because as a Carolina player you’re
slow to speak and eager to listen,” Worthy explained. “And Michael came in and
was eager to talk and slow to listen. But he knew who Coach Smith was. He
knew about Phil Ford and Walter Davis, so he knew what he was getting into.”
“He was the obnoxious younger brother more than anything,” Art Chansky
recalled of Jordan the freshman. “At that time, nobody thought that Michael
Jordan was going to be the greatest anything.… Nobody really thought that he
was going to become king of the world. So he was like a pain in the ass to them
as a freshman.… But they liked the confidence, the moxie that he had as a
freshman. They liked that, and they wanted to make sure it was channeled in the
right way. So they didn’t discourage him. He talked a lot, but I think he talked
less as his career went on because the spotlight got brighter.”
Off the basketball court, Jordan seemed like any other freshman trying to find
his way. ESPN’s Stuart Scott, who was then in the Carolina football program,
recalled Jordan at that time as just a regular guy tooling around Chapel Hill on
his bike. One thing that kept Jordan grounded was the presence of his loving
younger sister on campus. Reserved and cautious, Roslyn made an effort to
ensure that her brother’s domestic life remained smooth. She wasn’t above
cleaning his room before it reached a toxic level. James and Deloris also made
numerous trips to Chapel Hill to check on their children. Roslyn was particularly
close to her mother, and Jordan was something of a momma’s boy himself. Once
the season started, he couldn’t seem to settle down to play unless he knew his
parents had arrived safely and were in the stands.
Clarence Gaines Jr., the son of Winston-Salem State’s Hall of Fame coach,
was a graduate student at UNC that year (he would later become a Chicago Bulls
scout) and lived in Granville Towers on campus, where a number of athletes
were housed. Gaines knew just about all of the Carolina players.
“I remember veteran players, specifically Jimmy Black, talking about this
cocky newcomer who was going to be a part of the program,” Gaines
remembered. “So I knew MJ before he was ‘MJ.’ ”
He recalled Jordan playing pickup ball on the outdoor courts near Granville
Towers. “MJ always had an aura about him,” Gaines said. “Some people just
have presence, and obviously he is in that category.”
Still, many wondered what would happen when the fiercely competitive
freshman collided with Smith’s system in practice. As it turned out, things went
surprisingly well. The unbridled athleticism on display in those fall pickup
games seemed to disappear almost overnight. Much later, after Jordan had
emerged as a pro star, the public began to realize just how deep his absorption
into the Carolina program had been, how much of his game had been masked
there. Yet it wasn’t just Dean Smith’s system reining him in. There were other
moderating forces coming into his life.

The Early Posse

In each of the two summers before he entered college, Jordan had made time to
attend the basketball camp at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North
Carolina. The camp had become a well-worn stop on the southern basketball
circuit, with top coaches and players often making appearances. Jordan played
and worked as a counselor at Campbell, an affiliation he would continue through
college. It was there that he met Fred Whitfield, who became a lifelong friend
and major influence. Whitfield, who was from Greensboro, was one of the all-
time leading scorers at Campbell. Upon graduation, he had gone to work at the
school as an assistant coach while pursuing his master’s in business
administration.
As a counselor then in his early twenties, Whitfield took an interest in Jordan
and Buzz Peterson, and their friendship grew. The counselor was bright and
friendly, someone Jordan could look up to. He had been through the ups and
downs of the college game, and was able to offer observations and opinions that
often made sense to Jordan.
Whitfield was both a mentor and a friend. “Michael actually came down to
our basketball school going into his senior year in high school,” Whitfield
recalled. “He happened to be in my group. We hit it off and became friends. I
was either playing there or coaching there at the time, and I was working at the
camp. When he went to North Carolina for college, I was an assistant coach at
Campbell. When we didn’t have games on the weekends I would go up to
Chapel Hill and go to his games and kind of hang out with him and Buzz
Peterson. Part of my job as an assistant coach was to bring in ACC players to
make appearances at our summer camp. Michael was a guy, while he was at
Carolina, that I’d get to come down for a day and speak to the kids. Our
friendship just continued to grow.
“I think for whatever reason he and I just connected down in Buies Creek,”
Whitfield said of his early relationship with Jordan, “but more than that we
formed a friendship and a trust and I think from that point it became as much
about encouraging each other to be as successful as both of us could be.”
Those weekend trips marked the early formation of Jordan’s first tight circle
of friends away from the team, what would later become his well-defined posse.
“It was in college that he developed this entourage of people like Fred Whitfield,
who was a really nice guy,” Art Chansky explained. “Michael aligned himself
only with people he could trust.” Besides Whitfield, Adolph Shiver was in
Chapel Hill. His friendship with Jordan helped Shiver land for a time on the Tar
Heel JV basketball team, coached by Roy Williams. Shiver would long chair the
entertainment division of MJ’s inner circle, while Whitfield was far more
grounded.
James and Deloris Jordan approved of Whitfield. He was a bright young man
with much on the ball. Whitfield’s influence certainly helped counter the
foolishness of Shiver, as well as other less-mature influences on a college
freshman. Shiver could “talk the lips off a chicken” but rarely said anything
other than what appealed to Jordan’s raw ego. Whitfield could talk as much junk
as anyone, but he was developing his own sophistication and served as
something of a bridge from Jordan’s adolescence to the larger world.
The relationship with Whitfield was another of the exceptional but little-
discussed factors in Jordan’s good fortune. Between his parents and siblings and
the Carolina coaching staff and roommate Buzz Peterson and Whitfield and, yes,
even Adolph Shiver, an impressive support system had formed around him as he
moved into big-time college athletics. It was almost as if this sizeable mass of
influences was necessary to nudge Jordan, a hypercharged eighteen-year-old
package of testosterone and ego, in the right direction.

The Listener

Easily the greatest reason Jordan was successful in those first months in Chapel
Hill was his ability to listen, a trait that moderated his powerful life force, and
that arose out of his relationship with his mother. From his earliest moments in
the spotlight, Deloris Jordan had guided her son around the many pitfalls she
saw, and he listened to her in a way that would prove critical to his success. It
was a gift that they developed together, mother and son, mostly because at one
of the pivotal moments in her youth, Deloris Jordan had failed to heed her
parents’ warnings and soon paid dearly for it. Even when it was difficult for
Michael, even when his many appetites and friends tugged him in another
direction, he mostly listened. It often took time for him to process what she said,
especially if he didn’t like what he heard. But he clearly understood from an
early age that she was his guide star.
“My personality and my laughter come from my father,” he once explained.
“My business and serious side come from my mother.”
 Deloris was his greatest critic but could deliver harsh messages in a manner
that allowed him to accept them. It was not easy for Jordan, as he matured, to set
aside his own instincts to listen to her. But it was this relationship with her that
made him receptive to coaching, which in turn set up so many of his great
successes. Years later, he would describe his mother as his “coach.”
This ability to listen was among his most precious gifts, James Worthy’s
allegations to the contrary. To his coaches his capacity to be coached was his
single most impressive attribute, beyond even the eighteen-year-old’s
spectacular physical gifts. Dean Smith asserted, “I had never seen a player listen
so closely to what the coaches said and then go and do it.”
Even so, Jordan’s approach was not perfect. At one point early in his tenure
there, Jordan’s occasionally casual effort had raised a red flag. When Roy
Williams challenged him on it, Jordan replied that he was working as hard as the
others, which prompted Williams to reply that if he wanted to accomplish great
things, he had to work that much harder than the others. Williams was struck
afterward by the fact that it took only one conversation with Jordan. No one
would ever outwork him again.
This listening made Smith realize that the freshman, despite all the concern
about his strong personality and the woofing, was the lead candidate to replace
Al Wood. “My greatest skill was being teachable,” Jordan later observed. “I was
like a sponge. Even if I thought my coaches were wrong, I tried to listen and
learn something.”
This was something that the legion of imitators that would follow him in
basketball would overlook. They believed their great skills and physical gifts
elevated them above the game. That was never Jordan’s assumption. That
attitude would find its first great test that freshman year.

The Cover

Jordan was slowed by injuries as the season neared but remained the obvious
leading candidate to start. North Carolina entered the season as the top-ranked
team in the polls, and Sports Illustrated wanted to pose the starting five on the
cover of its college basketball preview issue. Word had continued to grow about
Jordan, driven by the reports of his playground feats. He had done things in
practice that fall, particularly once when he challenged a double-team by Worthy
and Perkins, that made coaches and teammates alike step back in awe. With the
bubbly Roy Williams on the staff, those types of things were always going to
leak out. Having heard the talk, the Sports Illustrated photo editors wanted
Jordan included in the cover shot, but Smith refused. There was no way he was
going to allow someone who had never played a minute for North Carolina to be
on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
“He was not a factor in all the usual promotion and everything at the start of
that season,” Billy Packer recalled. “Probably a lot of it done at Dean’s direction.
Today freshmen have become very big in college basketball. But back then that
wasn’t the case.”
Appearing on the Sports Illustrated cover and being touted in the preseason
media blitz would excite any young athlete. Jordan was deeply offended that he
couldn’t join the others on the cover. It was his first real collision with the Smith
approach.
Yet as infuriated as Jordan could get about such things, he never allowed
himself even a nanosecond of petulance. It was as if the slights were absorbed
into the great black hole of his soul, to rest there as a mass of pure energy. No
one would be more astounded by this than roommate Buzz Peterson. Since
meeting at the summer camp, the two had become quite close. Peterson had
wavered during his senior year in his plans to go to North Carolina. He appeared
bent on signing with the University of Kentucky. Jordan phoned him and seemed
deeply hurt that Peterson had forgotten their pact to room together as Tar Heels.
Ultimately, Peterson gave in and signed with Carolina.
As college roommates, the two continued to grow their friendship even
though they were competing for the starting spot in Carolina’s lineup. Only over
time would Peterson come to realize that despite their friendship, Jordan burned
to prove the fallacy of Peterson’s selection as Mr. Basketball in North Carolina
their senior year. Nor had Jordan forgotten what people in his hometown, even
the teachers at Laney, had said about him sitting on the bench at Carolina. “A lot
of my friends were putting me down for coming to Carolina,” he recalled. “They
were telling me freshmen can’t play here. Even a couple of my teachers were on
me about that, although they were State fans.”
The entire fall had been about answering all those slights, real and imagined.
In the process of proving that he belonged, Jordan soon won over the team’s
veterans. “When you come to Carolina there are vicious running programs,”
James Worthy explained. “There are three groups, A, B, and C. Usually A is for
the quick guards, B is reserved for guys like Michael in that medium range, and
then C is for the big guys. And you have certain times you have to make.” The
shorter guards began teasing Jordan that he had it easier because midrange
players had three more seconds to finish the run. “He asked Coach Smith to put
him in A group and he just tore these guys up,” Worthy said. “So I saw it then.”
Jordan didn’t want to be considered “just a freshman,” recalled Sam Perkins,
a sophomore that year. “He caught on quickly. He was a freshman, and even
though freshmen weren’t supposed to really play, this man out of Wilmington
had to play.”
While he missed two weeks of practice that fall with blood vessel issues in
his ankle, he continued to hope. Smith agonized over the decision and waited
until the very last moment to make known the fifth starter. The coach knew that
competition was always good for team growth and involvement, so why end it
early? The Tar Heels opened their season against Kansas in Charlotte, a game
televised on a fledgling cable network named ESPN. Due to the time lost with
his injury, Jordan had assumed he wouldn’t start. He counted on finding a role as
a sixth or maybe even seventh man.
“I was shocked when Coach Smith put my name on the blackboard to start
our first game of the year,” he recalled.
“Ten minutes before the game, one of the coaches came up and told us that
Michael was going to start,” James Jordan said in an interview three years later.
“We couldn’t believe it.”
Jordan scored the first Carolina basket of the season—and of his college
career—that day, a short jumper along the left baseline. ESPN’s Bucky Waters
noted that the freshman starter for the Tar Heels had generated a buzz among
fans, who compared him to both David Thompson and Walter Davis.
Jordan would score in double figures for the first six games. He showed a
steady jump shot right away and an uncanny knack for slipping into the gaps of
the various zones that Carolina faced. Smith’s teams were known for moving the
ball well, and the freshman showed he could hold his own in that regard. If there
was any immediate criticism, it was that he seemed to pass up shots against the
zones to try to push the ball inside. Yet that was the trademark of Smith’s teams,
that they persisted in trying to get better shots, rather than settling for jumpers.
As the nation’s top-ranked team, the Tar Heels were literally all over the map
early that season. After the game in Charlotte and another against Southern Cal
in Greensboro, they played two quick tune-ups in Carmichael Auditorium. Then
it was off to New York for the holidays, playing Rutgers in Madison Square
Garden the week before Christmas. There Jordan treated the crowd to two
breakaway dunks among his 15 points. Two days after Christmas, the Tar Heels
faced highly rated Kentucky in the Meadowlands. Once again, he seemed almost
oblivious to the big-game pressure of a highly ranked opponent under the TV
lights, as North Carolina took a confidence-building win. Afterward, they jetted
to the West Coast, to play in the Cable Car Classic in Santa Clara, California,
where they beat Penn State in overtime and pounded host Santa Clara.
Determined to see every game, James and Deloris Jordan followed the
dizzying whirlwind that was Carolina basketball. The travel expenses taxed their
family finances severely, but they were transfixed by the unfolding fairy tale of
their son’s life. They made sure, as always, to keep an appropriate distance.
“Dean Smith really ran that ship as far as keeping control of the parents,” Art
Chansky explained. “If any of the parents were getting out of line, Dean was
great at controlling that. James Jordan was known as just a great guy, just real
supportive of his son. He was always in the locker room after the games.”
Some observers in and around the Carolina program did detect that James
and Deloris weren’t always on the same page, but nobody articulated it because
it wasn’t perceived as a problem. “Deloris, she was a rock,” Art Chansky
explained. “Everybody said that from the first moment.” Just as everybody noted
that James Jordan was no saint. Chansky observed, “Michael watched his father.
He took that imprint. He took some of that edginess from James and for the most
part he channeled it into becoming the most competitive player. You know, he
was an assassin on the court.”
The Jordans would see thirty-two of the thirty-four games he played that
season, sometimes taking daughter Roslyn along. For home games, Larry would
drive over from North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, where he was going to
school.
Despite the growing excitement in the voices of broadcasters of these early
games, it was a relatively low-key introduction. Jordan was obviously
precocious, but fears about his abrasiveness had been laid to rest. His transition
into the team proceeded smoothly as the trust of his coaches and teammates
grew with each game. As Ralph Sampson would later contend, it had much to do
with the context. “To come into a situation with veterans like James Worthy and
Sam Perkins and Matt Doherty and Jimmy Black?” the Virginia center observed.
“Those guys were very high-level players at that point. They were hungry to be
really, really good. So you come in there as a freshman, and what are you going
to do? You got to get on board and learn from those guys. You know I think he
took a piece from everybody.”
The team truly was ready-made, but the coaching staff had put together a
roster that season that was surprisingly short of depth. They made up for this
with a surfeit of good fortune. The season somehow rolled along without major
injuries. In years past, with more talent on his roster, Smith had often been
accused of over-substituting during games and killing his team’s momentum.
This season, the depth would all but eliminate that question. The starters—
Jordan, Perkins, Worthy, point guard Jimmy Black, and six-eight forward Matt
Doherty—averaged between thirty-five and forty minutes per game. Perkins,
another player destined to become an NBA first-round draft choice, was a
willowy sophomore with an even temperament. Black was the efficient point
guard, a low scorer but a glue man all the same. Doherty was the role player,
good for defense and 9 points a game. All of them shot better than 50 percent
from the floor.
Jim Braddock, Buzz Peterson, and Cecil Exum contributed off the bench, but
none averaged even 2 points per game. There was the traditional heavy focus on
New York players in Black, Doherty, and Perkins. Worthy and Jordan were the
native Carolinians in the lineup, but they hailed from the very different cultures
at the opposite ends of the state.
Worthy was an excellent team leader, steeped in all things Carolina. His
respect for coaching and authority began with a devout mother and father from
Gastonia, North Carolina, just past Charlotte. He had been coming to Smith’s
summer camp since his early teens and had no inner conflict about the team’s
purpose that season. At six feet nine, he offered rare quickness and open-court
speed. No player his size in college basketball could stay with him. He was the
kind of forward who could make a team dangerous in a half-court offense, or he
could prove the perfect finisher in transition with his speed and hands. Smith’s
systematic approach left room for his team to attack in transition, and the Tar
Heels had the speed to get back and defend against almost any break.
Most of all, basketball purists loved to watch Worthy work in the low post.
There, it was usually over in a matter of seconds. “His first step is awesome,”
observed Maurice Lucas, who would later guard him often in professional
basketball.
“He’ll give a guy two or three fakes, step through, then throw up the
turnaround,” Lakers coach Pat Riley once explained. “It’s not planned.”
Worthy and Perkins, the other frontcourt presence, drew much of the
defensive attention in terms of zones and double-teams. Perkins was also six
nine but with arms that seemed to extend forever, which allowed him to function
exceptionally well as a college center. He was laconic, with a sleepy
countenance that would earn him the nickname “Big Smooth” as a pro. Even at
Carolina, he was plenty of that.
Black and Doherty were role players. “For a team to be good you have to
have people that aren’t trying to get their points,” Smith explained. “If Jimmy
and Matt were thinking points we never would have been a great team. We
would have been a good team, but wouldn’t have been a championship team.
They knew their roles, and played them well. Everybody did.”
Doherty, from Hicksville, New York, had been a big scorer in high school.
Black was from the Bronx, where he played Catholic school ball and was all set
to go to Iona to play for Jim Valvano in 1979 when he caught Bill Guthridge’s
eye. The Carolina coaches could see that he couldn’t shoot too well, but they
loved his ball handling, steady free-throw shooting, smarts, quickness, decision
making, and ball-pressure abilities. Smith couldn’t hide his affection for Black.
Time and again, the Carolina coaches offered the opinion that there would have
been no magical 1982 season without their point guard.
“I don’t know how integral I was,” Black would say later. “We all played
well together, we enjoyed each other, we communicated well. I still go back to
the total team effort.”
As a sophomore, Black had lost his thirty-nine-year-old mother to heart
failure. Then, just months later, he was injured in an auto crash that almost left
him paralyzed. He battled through rehab to return for his junior year and opened
practice that fall running in a neck brace. It was Black’s determination that
carried them back to the brink of success as 1982 unfolded. It would be hard to
imagine a Carolina player who enjoyed more respect.
As for Jordan, his play was not quite explosive that season, but he showed
considerable promise. He averaged 13.5 points a game and shot 53.4 percent
from the field. Even so, Art Chansky pointed out that on that veteran team
Jordan “was a complete role player. Look at who he played with.”
“Many people don’t remember that even then Michael was inconsistent and
had an up-and-down freshman year,” Smith recalled. The coaches constantly
nudged Jordan to improve his passing and ball handling. They also offered
pointers on his defense and tried to teach him to play without the ball in his
hands, something he really hadn’t had to do very often in high school.
Billy Packer didn’t see much of the expected pyrotechnics that first season.
“In his freshman year, even up to the Final Four, you did not have any idea how
good he was,” Packer remembered. “He did good things, but he didn’t control
games. He didn’t explode offensively. He did what he was told to do within the
system. He basically was a system player and I never saw him do the breakout
things that we would see out of him later as a pro. I never saw him where you
would say, ‘Holy mackerel.’ Obviously we now know he was going to be a good
player. But when you started talking about Michael Jordan then, you never
thought about him in the terms, ‘Yeah, he’s going to be an all-time player.’ Now
that history’s gone by you say, ‘What? Are you nuts?’ But he played within the
system, and when they attacked the zone, he did what he was supposed to do.
When they ran the fast break, he went where he was supposed to go.”
Of course, there were those “moments,” usually the result of a lesson learned.
The Tar Heels returned from the West Coast after the holidays for a quick tune-
up at home with William & Mary, then headed up to Maryland to open up the
ACC schedule, which they did in savory fashion, beating Lefty Driesell’s team
by 16. They returned home to entertain Ralph Sampson and Virginia, the
nation’s second-ranked team. North Carolina came out aggressively that day,
opening with a full-court press and hoping to push the pace. It backfired as
Virginia’s young guards, Othell Wilson and Ricky Stokes, helped them prosper.
Stepping on the court against Sampson for the first time, Jordan was astounded
at the center’s size and performance that day, 30 points and 19 rebounds. Jordan
missed his 3 shots from the field in the first half and grew timid, passing up open
fifteen-and twenty-footers as Virginia sat back in zone. He managed to
contribute 4 free throws in the first twenty minutes. However, Worthy took him
aside as the teams were taking the floor after halftime and told him not to pass
up the open shots he was getting against Virginia’s zone.
“Early in the game, I kept looking for something better,” he explained to
reporters afterward. “We wanted to get the ball inside more and maybe get Ralph
Sampson to pick up some fouls.”
Despite a sore shoulder, he followed Worthy’s advice in the second half and
scored 12 points to give him 16 for the game. “I didn’t want him to force
anything,” Worthy later told reporters. “But I noticed he passed up shots in the
first half that he can make. We needed the offense.”
Still, Virginia had seemed in command with an 8-point lead with a little over
seven minutes left when Jimmy Black fouled out. Braddock came in and fired
North Carolina’s comeback to a 65–60 win. The turnabout would resonate in a
big way at the end of the season. Sampson, meanwhile, made no effort to hide
his annoyance afterward. “I still think we’re the number one team in the
country,” he said. “They just got the breaks down the stretch. They still have to
come to our place, you know.”
The Tar Heels next beat NC State by 20, then took on the weaker Duke in
Durham, struggling until five minutes into the second half when Jordan hit three
straight jumpers, then added another bucket on a tip-in. He scored 13 of his 19
points in the second half. But the next game he scored just 6 as North Carolina
took the first loss of the season, at home no less, to Wake Forest.
“We limited their touches,” Wake’s Anthony Teachey recalled in 2012. “I
just tried to control the boards. We had to play Michael head up, because you
had Worthy and Sam Perkins and those guys. We couldn’t just concentrate on
him because of the lineup they had.” It was obviously a great, great team,
Teachey offered.
North Carolina won the next three, but then, as Sampson had anticipated, the
Tar Heels had to ride up to Charlottesville to visit the Cavaliers. This time
around, Smith chose mostly to avoid using his press. Rather than seek to force
turnovers, the Tar Heels sat back in a zone and hoped for missed shots. There
weren’t many. The Cavaliers shot 64 percent and whipped them soundly, 74–58.
The scale of this second loss was unsettling. Upon their return to Chapel Hill,
Jimmy Black called a team meeting, where he reminded them of their
championship ambitions.
Duly refocused, the team won its final eight regular-season games to head
into the ACC tournament at the Greensboro Coliseum. By tradition, the
tournament somehow mixed southern charm with heated rivalry for three intense
days. But for 1982, it was all about the Cavaliers and Tar Heels. North Carolina
easily dismissed Georgia Tech and NC State to meet Virginia for the
championship.
Terry Holland’s team had faced one battle after another heading down the
backstretch of the schedule, including tight victories against Clemson and Wake
Forest in the tournament that sidelined starting guard Othell Wilson. Both
coaches knew that the winner of the conference tournament would receive the
top seed in the NCAA tournament’s east regional. The loser would have to travel
to another region, usually a losing proposition.
These were two splendid college teams, and well matched. Both had finished
12–2 in the ACC. Carolina surprisingly controlled the opening tip over
Sampson, which resulted in a slam dunk for Worthy. From there, the Tar Heels
vaulted to an 8–0 lead, then 24–12. In an early time-out, Smith told his players
that Virginia would rebound from the deficit and to be ready for their run. On
cue, the Cavaliers cut the lead and gained further advantage when Jordan picked
up his third foul with less than three minutes left in the first half. North Carolina
managed to hold a 3-point edge at the intermission, but Virginia scored the first
six buckets of the second half and forced Smith to take an early time-out as he
expected Holland to drop his players into a tight zone.
The Cavaliers had the lead and were surging. It was in that stretch, as the
pressure soared, that Jordan stepped up to make four straight jump shots to seize
back the momentum. His first shot out of the left corner cut the deficit to one.
Holland took a time-out, but his team missed its first shot of the second half,
which allowed Jordan to work from the right for another eighteen-footer. With a
1-point lead, Smith signaled for a spread floor in an effort to pull Virginia out of
its zone. Holland, though, declined. Instead, he had his guards loosely defend the
perimeter, just enough to avoid a ten-second call. The game then crawled
through three minutes of Carolina’s spread stall until finally Jordan came off two
screens at the key and hit his third jumper.
Sampson then scored to trim Carolina’s lead back to one, but Smith called for
a repeat of the previous play, with Jordan popping off the screens to hit his
fourth straight shot for a 44–41 lead. “Michael made some unbelievably clutch
shots against Virginia in the ACC championship game,” Art Chansky recalled.
“If he hadn’t made those shots, gutsy, ballsy shots from the elbow, where
Sampson wouldn’t come out… that’s as close to the basket as you could get. If
he didn’t make those shots, they wouldn’t have won that game. That was where
you could see he was starting to get assertive.”
“He had that penchant for making big shots even back then,” agreed veteran
basketball writer Dick Weiss.
There remained almost nine minutes on the clock. Carolina went into a tight
zone, and Virginia’s Jeff Lamp answered with a twenty-footer that cut the lead
back to one.
Without hesitation, Smith put up his four fingers and sent his team into the
four corners, a move that enraged quite a broad array of spectators, media, and
even league officials. But it worked. Virginia would not take another shot in the
half until the very end, after the Tar Heels had drained the clock. Holland
declined to foul Carolina until twenty-eight seconds remained. Doherty made
one of two free throws, but Virginia couldn’t capitalize. Jimmy Black made two
late free throws, and Sampson slammed a final bucket at the buzzer. It didn’t
matter. Carolina took the top seed in the East, 45–43.
Broadcast on NBC nationwide, the game stirred wide protest among media
and fans. It is viewed as the contest that drove officials to adopt a shot clock,
which the ACC added, along with a three-point shot, on an experimental basis
the next season.
 Lost in the ruckus was a coronation of sorts. James Worthy saw it, however.
“Michael Jordan emerged from the ACC tournament that year,” the forward
recalled. “To watch him say, ‘This is my ball, this is my court’ was amazing.”
Jordan’s confidence had grown over the close of the schedule. Secure in the
context of the veteran team, he was now free to dream about bigger things.
The Tar Heels entered the NCAA tournament ranked number one and
maintained that status despite a close call or two. It didn’t hurt that every game
of the regional would be played in their home state. The Heels struggled in their
first game in Charlotte, against Virginia’s little James Madison University, but
Carolina fought to a 52–50 victory. In the regional semifinals in Raleigh,
Alabama served Smith’s team its next round of troubles before succumbing, 74–
69. The regional final brought Rollie Massimino’s Villanova with Ed Pinckney.
Carolina again proved too strong that day, but a throwaway moment in the
contest proved revealing. The Tar Heels forced a turnover, then threw the ball
ahead to a streaking Jordan. Villanova’s big center John Pinone had retreated to
protect the basket.
“Our coach always taught us if you’re in a bad way, wrap a guy up and don’t
let him get an easy layup,” Pinckney explained. “I knew John was going to foul
him. So he jumps, and John, whose nickname was ‘The Bear’—he was a pretty
strong guy—grabs him. In midair, Jordan like spins out of his arms and the ref
calls the foul. It was like an impossible play to make but he did it anyway.… We
were losing to them. And we all shook our heads like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding
me.’ He couldn’t dunk because Pinone grabbed him with two arms around his
waist. He literally had to lift up a 240-pound guy and dunk. To us Pinone was
like the strongest guy ever. But he spun out of his arms. Jordan should have
fallen on the ground. He shouldn’t have been able to maintain his balance and
get free to complete a shot. It was like a freakish, freakish play.”
Having cut his teeth against Kenny Gattison, Clyde Simmons, and Anthony
Teachey back on the Coastal Plain, Jordan had no hesitation, no fear, in
attacking the rim, regardless of who was guarding it.
After a 10-point win over Villanova in the regional finals, the Heels began to
sense that they were about to give Smith his much-wanted prize. Held at the
Superdome in New Orleans, the Final Four offered a fascinating field. North
Carolina. Georgetown. Louisville (with four starters off its 1980 championship
team). And Houston. All dominant teams of the decade, with eleven Final Four
appearances between them, and rosters studded with some of the modern game’s
best players: Michael Jordan. James Worthy. Hakeem Olajuwon. Patrick Ewing.
Sam Perkins. Clyde Drexler.
The assembled media were ready with a big question for Smith: How did it
feel to make six Final Fours and never win? “I’ve handled it well,” he replied. “I
don’t feel the emptiness.”
In the semifinals, North Carolina faced Houston. By 1983, the Cougars
would become known as Phi Slama Jama, the dunking fraternity. For 1982,
however, they were just another Cinderella.
Undaunted by the noise or the crowd of the cavernous Superdome, Jordan
scored the first two baskets for his team against Houston. From there, Perkins
took charge for the Heels with 25 points and 10 rebounds, while the Carolina
defense held Houston’s Rob Williams scoreless from the floor. North Carolina
never trailed, and advanced to the championship round, 68–63. “I remember
what a great game Sam Perkins had in the semifinals against Hakeem
Olajuwon,” Bill Guthridge recalled on the game’s twentieth anniversary. “If Sam
doesn’t play that way against Houston, there’s a chance we wouldn’t have gotten
to the championship game.”
The Georgetown Hoyas, with freshman center Patrick Ewing and All-
American guard Eric “Sleepy” Floyd, had defeated twentieth-ranked Louisville,
50–46, in the other semifinal, setting up a sportswriter’s dream for the finals:
Dean Smith versus John Thompson. Two friends and America’s Olympic
coaches from 1976 facing each other for the championship both wanted dearly.
Both Smith and Thompson played down their involvement. They weren’t
playing, they said, their teams were. Regardless, North Carolina’s contest with
Georgetown in the 1982 NCAA finals is considered by many to be the most
dramatic ever. Veteran broadcaster Curt Gowdy thought it was the game, more
than any other, to lift the Final Four to the entertainment level of the World
Series and Super Bowl. The Louisiana Superdome crowd shattered college
basketball’s attendance record with 61,612 spectators. Another 17 million
watched on television.
“I had mixed emotions about playing against Dean because I have a great
deal of respect and affection for him,” Thompson later said. Then he admitted,
“Because it was Dean, it caused me to be even more fired up.” As close friends,
they were aware of each other’s tricks. The media seized the drama and
squeezed, though there were other plums in the story line. For instance, Worthy
and Georgetown’s Floyd were both All-Americans, both from little Gastonia,
North Carolina, both the stalwarts of their teams. The pregame tension was thick
despite the vast open space. “Choke, Dean, choke,” the Georgetown student
section chanted.
The nineteen-year-old Ewing opened the game by swatting away four
Carolina shots, two of them by Worthy. All four were ruled goaltending, as was
a fifth Ewing block later in the first half. The Heels scored their first 8 points
without putting the ball through the hoop.
“Patrick was an excellent shot-blocker,” Thompson told Packer in an
interview five years later. “We wanted to establish ourselves inside as much as
we possibly could. I still question some of the goaltending calls.”
Some coaches might have worried that the blocked shots would flatten
Worthy’s confidence, but not Smith. “I knew that didn’t bother James in the
least,” the Carolina coach said. “Some guys hate to see their shots blocked, but
James was so sky-high.”
From there, the game settled into the coaches’ cat-and-mouse. The Hoyas
grabbed a lead, then Carolina evened it at 18. Worthy came alive with 18 first-
half points. The lead became a pendulum. Georgetown held it at the half, 32–31.
“Georgetown was relentless,” Worthy recalled. “They were intent to make us
crack with their defense, and they nearly did. There was a point they had gone
up three or four, and back then that was a big number. So Jimmy Black misses a
layup and Michael flies in and tips it back in—an ‘Ice’ Gervin finger-roll tip-in
over Ewing.” The swinging momentum continued throughout the final twenty
minutes. At the six-minute mark, Carolina eased ahead, 57–56, on a pair of
Worthy free throws. The pace became agony after that.
Jordan, of course, would become best known for “the shot” at the end, but for
the Carolina coaches, the key moment came on another Jordan left-handed
basket with 3:26 left in the game. “One of the best shots of the game,” Bill
Guthridge recalled, “was a driving layup a few minutes earlier when he laid it
almost off the top of the backboard to get it over Ewing.”
“I thought it was a great drive,” Smith said on the game’s twentieth
anniversary, “and then I saw Patrick come in and it flashed through my mind
that it was going to be blocked. That was a sensational shot.”
“I don’t know why I threw a left-handed layup,” Jordan told Tar Heel
Monthly in 2002. “I hate using my left hand. My left hand is the weakest part of
my game. But I used it that one particular time. Couldn’t believe it. It turned it
around. Threw a shot that was totally unbelievable, almost hit the top of the
backboard and went in, over Ewing.”
The basket gave North Carolina a 61–58 lead, but the Hoyas pushed back.
With 2:37 left, Georgetown pulled to 61–60 when Ewing lofted a thirteen-foot
shot. When Carolina missed a key free throw on its next possession, the young
Georgetown center rebounded. Sleepy Floyd scored on a short jumper, and the
Hoyas had the lead, 62–61, with less than a minute left.
With thirty-two seconds left, Smith called a time-out to set up a play to
counter Georgetown’s anticipated move back to a zone. “Usually, I don’t like to
take a time-out there,” Smith said. “We should know what to do. But I expected
Georgetown to come back to the zone and jam it in. I said, ‘Doherty, take a look
for James or Sam, and, Jimmy, the cross-court pass will be there to Michael.’ As
it turned out, Michael’s whole side of the court was wide open because they
were chasing James. If Michael had missed, Sam would’ve been the hero
because he’d have had the rebound.”
Smith was at his best in that huddle, so calming that assistant Roy Williams
recalled glancing at the scoreboard, thinking surely he must have misread it. The
way Smith was talking, Carolina must have the lead, Williams remembered
thinking. As the team broke from the huddle, Smith gave Jordan a pat and said,
“Knock it in, Michael.”
Thirty years later, Packer, who called the game courtside for CBS, still
expressed doubt about the circumstances as described by the Carolina
contingent. “I always felt a shot like that couldn’t have been designed by Dean
Smith, although he says to this day that it was designed to go over there,” the
broadcaster offered. “You’ve got Worthy and Perkins and you’ve got them
inside. What are we talking about? We’re going to rotate the ball to Michael?
Now everybody these days says, ‘Sure you would.’ But back then you wouldn’t.
You’d get the ball to Worthy first, Perkins second, and then maybe a penetration
and then kick it over there. I’m not going to question Dean’s basketball
knowledge. Certainly when I was broadcasting that game, that wasn’t an option I
had in mind for one, two, or three.”
Carolina worked for a good shot, and, with 15 seconds to go, Black passed to
Jordan for a sixteen-foot jumper from near the left sideline.
“It was an open shot, relatively speaking,” Packer said. “But the thing now
that you look back, I don’t care who was planning on getting the ball, Michael
wanted the ball and Michael knew he would make the shot. That was the
beginning of one of the great things in our lifetime. Certain guys get open shots,
they can’t make them. Certain guys get open shots, they don’t want to take them.
Michael wanted the shot, and that you saw. There was no hesitation, no extra
faking. It was, ‘Hey, give me the ball and I’m going to put this in the basket.’
That’s that level of competitive nature that he had.”
 Most players run from such moments, but a select few run toward them,
Packer said. “He wasn’t hiding in the corner. He was wanting that ball over
there.” Jordan would later reveal that he had visualized just such a moment on
the team bus ride over to the event.
At the far end of the court, the figures on the Georgetown bench twisted in
agony. Just feet away as Jordan elevated for the shot, the Carolina coaching staff
all sat stoically. Smith merely pursed his lips and flinched his eyebrows into the
slightest grimace. Such Final Four moments of the past had rendered no good for
him.
Jordan rose up, his tongue instinctively sampling the Superdome air. At the
apex, the ball graced his right fingertips as he pulled his left away and let fly.
The swish blew a heavenly light blue breeze across Tar Heel Land and stirred
a thunderous roar in the building.
“There we were in the Superdome, and Michael hit that shot,” Deloris Jordan
recalled. She looked around for her husband and daughter Roslyn, but they had
already bolted for the floor. “I could only think, ‘No, not a freshman.’ ”
Dick Weiss recalled in a 2011 interview that he was stunned by the move, by
the fact that Dean Smith would trust the last shot to a freshman. “That was the
biggest game of Dean’s career to that point,” Weiss marveled.
“It was predestined,” Jordan said in 2002. “It was destiny. Ever since I made
that shot, everything has just fallen into place for me. If that shot hadn’t gone in I
don’t think I would be where I am today.”
Actually, one final, unforgettable sequence remained to seal that fate. Down
63–62 with adequate time, Georgetown attacked immediately with guard Fred
Brown working the ball at the edge of the Carolina defense. He thought he saw
Sleepy Floyd out of the corner of his eye, but the shadowy form in white was
Carolina’s Worthy. Worthy was stunned when Brown mistakenly passed him the
ball. The Carolina forward grabbed it and streaked downcourt, where he was
fouled.
Thompson drew criticism immediately for not having taken a time-out before
the possession. But Smith agreed with Thompson’s approach. “John was wise
not to take the time-out,” he said, pointing out that Jordan’s defense had made
Brown decide to reverse the ball. “Michael makes a heck of a play to cover
Floyd, and James goes for a steal and doesn’t get back in. To this day, I think
that if Georgetown had been in their white uniforms that they had worn all
during the tournament instead of wearing their dark uniforms, Brown would not
have thrown the ball to James. James had gone for a steal on a fake moments
earlier and was out of position. He shouldn’t have been where he was on the
court, and it fooled Brown.”
Thompson saw the pass as a reflex action by Brown. Attempting to make a
steal, Worthy had run out of the defense and was out of position. “We were
playing five against four,” Thompson said. “Worthy was coming from the
direction an offensive player normally would come from, and I think Freddie
reacted reflexively. It was like the old playground thing where the defensive
player stands out where the offensive player should be and calls for the ball. But
Worthy didn’t call for it, he was just coming from the other side and by reflex
Freddie threw him the ball.”
Worthy missed both free throws with two seconds left, but it didn’t matter.
The Tar Heels had their blue nirvana, 63–62. There was much more to
Carolina’s victory than Jordan’s shot, Thompson said. “We thought that Worthy
hurt us more than anybody. You hear a lot about Michael Jordan’s shot. That
certainly broke our backs, but we were having a lot of difficulty with Worthy.
He was quick enough to create problems for our big people and strong enough to
create problems for our little people.”
The usually impassive Worthy, named the tournament’s outstanding player,
dropped his stoic countenance to celebrate deliriously. Smith and Carolina had
reached the top.
“I’m especially happy for coach,” Jimmy Black said afterward. “Now I won’t
have to read any more articles from you sportswriters about how he chokes in
the big games.”
“I don’t think I’m a better coach now that we’ve won the national
championship,” Smith told the reporters who crowded around him in the
interview room. “I’m still the same coach.”
Afterward, Jordan shed his shoes and sat quietly in front of his dressing
space, answering questions from a single NBC reporter. James Jordan, in a
three-piece suit, sat beside him and leaned slightly into the klieg lights as his son
tightened his lips and waited for the reporter to form a question about the
moment.
“I really didn’t feel any pressure,” he said calmly. “It was just another jumper
over the weak side of a zone.”
 Chapter 12

SOMETHING NEW

BILL BILLINGSLEY HAD been invited by a group of friends to ride to New Orleans
for the Final Four. After the game, he was out, part of the raucous, elated throng
jammed into the French Quarter, when he ran into Michael Jordan and two
teammates quietly taking in the scene.
Jordan recognized his old ninth-grade ball coach immediately. “Billingsley!”
he said. “What are you doing here?” They exchanged small talk, and Billingsley
happily offered up congratulations before moving on. Afterward, the coach was
struck that Jordan could enjoy the moment without being instantly swarmed by
celebrating fans. Neither perhaps realized it at the time, but they were
experiencing the final moments of Jordan’s anonymity, and even that would be
tested later that evening of March 29. Back in Chapel Hill, thirty thousand fans
gathered on Franklin Street as soon as they heard UNC radio broadcaster Woody
Durham announce, “The Tar Heels are going to win the national championship.”
“As soon as the game was over I ran screaming out there onto Franklin
Street,” recalled David Mann, a junior at Carolina at the time. “And of course
everybody else did the same thing. There were thousands of people there just
dazed. Dean Smith had never won, and it was just an unbelievable moment.
Everybody was just crying and ecstatic.”
“Pandemonium, hysteria, fireworks, and beer,” the Greensboro Daily News
declared the next day. “This is the stuff national championships are made of.”
The celebration ran until four o’clock in the morning and got going again a
couple of days later as twenty thousand fans gathered to welcome the team back
into town.
It would take weeks for the celebration to calm, but the new parameters of his
life would be revealed to Jordan over the coming months. “I was like a deer in
the headlights,” he would say, looking back much later. “I didn’t realize the
magnitude of what I’d done.” The moment had delighted millions—many with
no previous connection to the University of North Carolina—and converted lots
of them instantly into lifelong Tar Heels fans. The national championship struck
a note of pride for blacks and whites alike across the state. The victory they
shared erased doubts about Dean Smith and his program, and marked the
coronation of young Michael as the prince of hoops. “It was like a young kid
coming out of his shell,” Jordan observed. “My name was Mike. Everybody
referred to me as Mike Jordan. After the shot, it was Michael Jordan.”
If he had been a megawatt trashtalker before the shot, he became almost
unbearable afterward. He and Ewing would remain lifelong friends from their
shared experience. “I remember him hitting that shot,” Ewing said ruefully in
2010. “I don’t talk to him about that. He rubs it in enough, so I never bring it
up.”
Just months after enduring the taunts of local folks that he wouldn’t make an
impact at UNC, he returned home to discover the rising walls of his newfound
notoriety, a fame that would soon enough box him into an insular world. He had
planned to go to the local courts in Wilmington for a spin of pickup games, like
in the days before college. But he arrived to find a mob awaiting him. He
couldn’t even get out of the car that day, according to a local official who
witnessed the event. It was the first sign that his old way of living was soon to be
gone forever.
The city hosted a Michael Jordan appreciation banquet a couple of weeks
later. He signed autographs for dozens of fans, including thrilled young
basketballers who showed up in their uniforms. Jordan ate at the right of Dean
Smith at the banquet table that evening. His coach sported a contented smile and
made light conversation while the usually ebullient young star sat quietly, still
obviously very much an adolescent, almost childlike, awkward in the face of so
much attention.
His parents were there, somehow managing to maintain decorum amid this
wellspring of pride and excitement. “Wherever they went they always
comported themselves nicely,” said Billy Packer, who ran into the Jordans often.
He had enjoyed a laugh with them the night of the championship, which had
come exactly a year after Mrs. Jordan’s angry disappointment at the McDonald’s
game in Kansas. “You see some parents who have to be front and center. The
Jordans never were that way. They were always polite and carried themselves
extremely well. I was always impressed by that.” It had been a spring to
remember for both of them. Deloris had returned home to find a display of
Carolina Blue congratulations at the bank where she worked. One colleague
greeted her with, “Hello, Mrs. Michael Jordan’s Mother.” She tried to sell the
idea that they would have been just as proud of their son if he were a mere
Carolina freshman who didn’t play basketball. She did admit to an interviewer
that her maternal instinct had her clutching her stomach as the Tar Heels passed
the ball back and forth like a hot potato on that last possession. When it finally
landed in her son’s hands, her first thought was that she hoped he would pass it
to someone else.
For James, the arrival home brought a special “Welcome Home, Michael
Jordan” meeting at the GE plant where he worked. It wasn’t just Michael’s life
that would be changed forever by his big shot. His parents had also been swept
up by the tide.
Jordan’s youthful discomfort at the banquet that evening didn’t stop him
from reveling in his newfound status. After all, most freshmen returned home
after a year of independence at school only to find that their parents still viewed
them as adolescents. His return home brought the first realization of the new
status that would require huge adjustments in their family relationships. His
personal stature would soon enough eclipse theirs and alter the nature of the
family dynamic. Even now, at the end of his freshman year, they all sensed it.
He wasn’t a pro yet, but he was going to be one.
They tried not to focus on that vision of the future, especially Mrs. Jordan. If
anything, she became more vigilant the more his dream gained texture in the
wake of the championship. Be humble. Don’t place too much emphasis on
yourself. Be sure to mention your teammates. It was as if she and Dean Smith
were reading from the same script. Every time she talked to a reporter, she made
sure to stress how proud she was of all her children. Michael just happened to be
the one who received all the public attention, she explained.
For Jordan, the immediate challenge that spring of 1982 was a search for a
place where he could still enjoy the freedom of his former life. Somehow he
scored a one-on-one contest with a local star in Pender County. That seemed at
first as if it would be secluded enough, but even there a crowd of hundreds
turned out to watch the combat, won by Jordan two games to one, according to
local memory.
Ultimately, he found safe harbor in Chapel Hill. Thanks to the family
atmosphere that Dean Smith had built, many of the coach’s former players,
including NBA stars like Walter Davis and Phil Ford, would show up in the
summers for pickup games. That summer after the championship, they were all
eager to size up against the young guy who had made “the shot.” The alums
were fascinated by Jordan’s playground persona. Unlike Worthy, Al Wood had
taken him on during those first months at Carolina and thought Jordan to be a bit
timid. Wood had shot him an elbow in their first pickup meetings, but heading
into his sophomore year, Jordan made a point of sending an elbow Wood’s way,
letting him know he was no longer going to be intimidated. Eventually, the
bonding with Wood evolved as they worked on dunks in and around the pickup
games that summer. It was Wood who gave him the idea for the one-handed,
cradle-rocking dunk he would eventually trot out against Maryland. Of course,
there had been those, like Worthy, who thought his confidence as a freshman
had been too much. But this second year they all began to grasp that Jordan’s
belief in himself reflected a level of intensity no one had contemplated before.

Granville Again

Jordan and Buzz Peterson now lived on the first floor of Granville Towers on a
short hallway that was locked off at both ends to protect the smattering of
basketball players and regular students in residence there. Among the regular
students living on the floor was David Mann, a senior who was majoring in
radio, television, and motion pictures. Short, slightly built, and unassuming,
Mann was afforded something of an inside view of Jordan’s life at age nineteen,
just as his status was soaring.
“He was very cocky even back in those days,” Mann recalled. “He was Mr.
Confident and he was sure of himself.”
Mann would see girls hanging outside the locked hallway doors, hoping for a
chance to get inside. Like most of the “regular” students on the hall, Mann took
note of just about everything he saw Jordan doing. He was surprised to see little
evidence of a party animal.
“He was a pretty serious guy,” Mann recalled. “There were some party guys
on the hall, players and students, and he never really got into that.”
Buzz Peterson, for example, could be seen, drink in hand, dancing in the
hallways with his girlfriend, still obviously enjoying the fact that the Tar Heels
had just won the national title a few months earlier.
“Buzz was definitely not as dedicated to basketball as Michael was,” Mann
observed. “Buzz was more of a party guy. He didn’t take things as seriously,
near as seriously as Jordan did. He was kind of a goofball, to be honest.”
Sports Illustrated published a photo that fall of Jordan, headphones on,
dancing in his room under an umbrella, which angered Mann because it was so
obviously staged. Peterson might dance around, but not Jordan, even though he
had good reason to celebrate life a little.
“That’s what was unique about him,” Mann observed. “He could have
become totally self-absorbed and gotten into partying and all that fun stuff and
the women and all these other things, but the impression I got was that he was so
committed he wouldn’t allow himself to become sidetracked, even at that age.
He knew he wanted to be the best and he knew the pitfall, and he wasn’t going to
fall into it. He seemed very sure of himself, sure of what he wanted to do, and
nothing was going to stop him.”
Mann noticed that although Jordan was just a nineteen-year-old sophomore,
he seemed to command things merely with his presence, even among the other
basketball players rooming on the floor. “He wasn’t a loud guy. He didn’t
dominate everything as far as verbally, but when he talked you definitely
listened. He didn’t order the other players around or come across as a big shot or
anything like that, but I sure think the other players respected him. I think they
were intimidated by him a little bit. But he didn’t go around barking orders or
anything like that.”
Jordan soon discovered that Mann was studying media with a plan of
working in the film industry in Hollywood. “Michael thought that was nuts,”
Mann recalled, “and after that he would come up to me and say, ‘You know you
ought to go speak to Dean Smith’s wife.’ Dean Smith’s wife was a psychiatrist
and every time I would see Michael, he would say, ‘Have you seen Dean
Smith’s wife yet? Have you talked to her?’ He thought it was funny that
somebody like me would want to move out to Los Angeles and have any sort of
chance working in the movie business.”
This teasing went on for a couple of weeks, with Jordan mocking Mann’s
Hollywood plans every time he saw him. It was then that Mann learned what
every person who survived Jordan would have to learn—you had to stand up to
him.
“Finally I told him, ‘Michael, I mean this is my dream. I’ve always wanted to
work in movies. Didn’t you ever have a dream?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I have a
dream to play in the NBA.’ After that he never really bugged me about it
anymore.”
Jordan soon discovered that, as a media student, Mann had a video recorder
in his room, a rare development since video technology was still relatively new
and quite expensive. Mann was also a huge basketball fan and would tape the
Carolina games. Jordan began dropping by to watch himself on replay.
“This was so long ago that the remote was wired,” Mann recalled. “You had
to tilt this twelve-foot-long wired remote. He would sit there and watch himself
and back it up to watch himself again. I think he learned a lot from doing that. I
don’t know how much the coaches did this kind of videotape work, but he
definitely did it on my VCR a lot.”
The player who would do so much to define the video age was getting the
first opportunity to study himself.
One of the first things Mann and Jordan watched together was the
championship game versus Georgetown. During the broadcast, commentator
Billy Packer remarked that Worthy was the fastest player on Carolina’s team.
“That’s bullshit,” Jordan fussed. “I’m the fastest guy on the team.”
When they came to Jordan’s big shot, Mann asked him about it. “He said
when he hit that last shot he really wasn’t sure if that was where Coach Smith
wanted him. He was thinking he had screwed up. He told me he was a little
confused about where he was supposed to be on that play. He happened to be
open and he took the shot and made it.”
As the season went on, Jordan would stop in Mann’s room to study his game.
“He was totally silent,” Mann recalled. “He didn’t say much of anything. He was
totally concentrating on what he was thinking and what he was strategizing in
his head. He didn’t say much when he watched, and I just sort of left him alone.”
One day Jordan encountered Mann putting into a cup in the hallway. “He
wants to do it too, and he wants to bet on putting the ball into the cup,” Mann
recalled. “It was only like a quarter or a dime, but anyway we did this for like
thirty minutes and I was beating him. I had to go to class, and he wouldn’t let me
stop. So he’s making me stay there, but I didn’t want to lose so I kept putting it
into the cup.”
Finally, in exasperation, Jordan threw down the putter and walked off. “He
ended up owing me about seventy-five cents,” Mann remembered, “and he never
paid.”

The Upgrade

After the summer rounds of camps and appearances, and his pickup battles and
individual work, it was an upgraded Jordan who had arrived in practice that fall.
“Preseason, sophomore year,” Smith later recalled. “I couldn’t believe the
improvement since the end of his freshman season. Every time he did a drill with
the Blue Team, the Blues would win. Every time he did one with the White
Team, the Whites would win. The staff started saying to one another, ‘What’s
going on here?’ He hadn’t been on any preseason All-America teams, but he’d
grown two inches, had worked hard over the summer to improve his ball
handling and shooting, and he had so much confidence.”
“Dean always said the biggest improvement that guys make is between their
freshman and sophomore years,” Art Chansky offered. “He always told them
after a year of basketball what they have to work on. If they go back and work
on it, they get it because they’ve played a year of college basketball. They get
bigger physically, and there’s this quantum leap in their games, if they work on
it. Michael came back, and it was like, ‘Whoa. Holy shit.’ ”
He was bigger, stronger, faster. His time in the forty-yard dash had fallen to
4.39 seconds, almost two-tenths of a second faster than his freshman year. All
the arrows, it seemed, were pointing up. In his unguarded moments, Jordan
acknowledged that his goal was to win more national championships, which
suggested that he didn’t recognize how fortunate he’d been to win one. The odds
on another title might have been better had Dean Smith been a bit more selfish
and persuaded James Worthy to stay at North Carolina for his senior year.
However, the coach continued to prize the success of his players above his
own, even perhaps above the team’s. Another coach would have pointed out to
Worthy that the Tar Heels were on the brink of winning back-to-back national
championships. With Worthy, the school would be returning a team with four
starters, a team that could make real history. Yet instead of exerting any sort of
pressure to keep Worthy in school, Smith began researching Worthy’s prospects
for the upcoming NBA draft.
When he learned that Worthy was likely to be the top pick, he dutifully
advised him to claim “hardship” status and enter the draft. The risk of injury and
the loss of huge sums were too great for Worthy to continue to play amateur
basketball. It was a remarkable display of integrity from Smith, another reason
his players held him in such esteem. Five seasons earlier he had done the same
for point guard Phil Ford, had all but insisted that he turn professional after his
junior season, Art Chansky recalled. Ford, however, declined to leave,
explaining to Smith, “Who’s going to tell my mother?” He came back to
Carolina and was player of the year that final season.
Worthy’s family also prized education, but Smith emphasized that the
prudent step was to enter the draft. Worthy was selected by the Los Angeles
Lakers as the top overall pick. To replace him, Smith brought in the next round
of high school All-Americans, including a sixteen-year-old seven-footer, Brad
Daugherty, and an athletic six-five guard, Curtis Hunter, so there was a lot of
reconfiguring in the lineup. Still, the Tar Heels entered the year as the top-
ranked team in the polls, a status that changed almost immediately.
There were several reasons the 1982–83 campaign would fall short of
expectations. Six weeks before the season started, Jordan broke his left wrist. He
practiced anyway, with a cast on. Buzz Peterson injured a knee midway through
the season, which prompted Jordan to begin wearing his trademark wristband
midway up the left forearm as a tribute to his roommate. Mostly, though, the Tar
Heels felt Worthy’s absence. As Billy Packer had pointed out, he was a
tremendous player who left an almost unfillable void.
Dick Weiss went to Chapel Hill to visit with Jordan as the season was set to
open. Jordan talked pridefully about the fact that he and his father were
NASCAR fans. Weiss noted that this was a young man with an inclination not to
play to any sort of stereotypes. He was a nice kid, Weiss remembered in 2011,
adding that he saw absolutely nothing in Jordan or in Jordan’s game to give him
the slightest clue that “this kid was the next savior of the NBA.” The
sportswriter did come away believing that Georgetown and Carolina would meet
again for the title that next spring.
It never happened.
Despite the cast on his wrist, Jordan scored 25 points to go with Perkins’s 22
in the season-opening overtime loss to Chris Mullin and a deep St. John’s team,
78–74. A week later they traveled to St. Louis for a physical confrontation with
Missouri. Again, they lost, 64–60, and it became clear there would be no
absence of drama this season. Not surprisingly, each team they played came at
them with maximum focus. Three days later, Tulane came to Chapel Hill with
their impressive center John “Hot Rod” Williams. The contest wasn’t too old
before the idea settled on the crowd that Carolina might just do the unthinkable
—lose three straight games to open the season. No North Carolina team had
done that since 1928–29.
The real trouble started when Perkins got his fifth foul at the 4:33 mark,
which allowed the six-nine Williams more freedom to work. Tulane took a 51–
49 lead. Jordan tied it with an offensive rebound and putback with thirty-six
seconds left. Carolina then sent Williams to the line with eight seconds left, and
he made both to put the Green Wave up two. Once again, Jordan found himself
with the ball in the closing seconds. He made his move to the basket but was
whistled for an offensive foul.
James Jordan sat between his two daughters watching the proceedings. “I
thought, ‘We have lost this one,’ ” he recalled in a 1984 interview. Roslyn
looked at him and said, “Daddy, you give up too fast.” The clock showed four
seconds when Jordan stole the inbounds pass and tossed in a thirty-five-foot shot
to tie the game at the buzzer. Carmichael erupted, but the tension was far from
over.
The contest was settled finally with just under two minutes to go in the third
overtime period when Jordan motored along the baseline, banked in a shot, and
drew the foul to extend Carolina’s lead to five, enough to give the Tar Heels
their first win of the year, 70–68.
“He started the season with a cast on his left wrist, and still he won a game
for us against Tulane,” Smith recalled.
The schedule afforded few breaks. Next they faced LSU in the New Jersey
Meadowlands, a game they won by four. They got their third win over Santa
Clara in Greensboro and a week later headed to Tulsa at the start of the
Christmas break in the Oil City Classic. The Golden Hurricane beat them by 10
in the first game. The Tar Heels were still adjusting to life without Worthy, who
had given them not just a post game but lots of activity down low. Three days
later they traveled to play UT–Chattanooga and found themselves down one
with just under four minutes left. Jordan produced one of those “MJ moments,”
scoring 11 of the team’s final 17 points to secure another win.
For the holidays, the Jordans packed up and followed the team to Honolulu
for the Rainbow Classic, where in addition to luaus they feasted on three wins,
including a 73–58 avenging of their earlier loss to Missouri. That sparked an
eighteen-game winning streak. The Tar Heels arrived home and immediately
took on Rutgers in Greensboro, then rode to Charlotte to measure their power
against Syracuse before wading into the ACC schedule. Syracuse assistant
Brendan Malone, Jordan’s coach at the Five-Star camp, had an opportunity to
assess his progress. The Orangemen figured they’d test him with a double-team.
“We trapped in the backcourt,” Malone recalled. “I was impressed by his poise
under pressure. He took the double-team, dribbled away from it, got low, looked
through the double-team, and made a perfect pass. He never panicked in that
kind of situation.”
As a reaction to Smith’s stall in the 1982 ACC title bout, the conference had
instituted a shot clock and a three-point shot on an experimental basis that
season. No longer could Smith spread the floor and play cat and mouse to
protect a thin lead. Nor could a team just sit mindlessly packed into a zone
defense. Teams now had to have better plans for guarding the perimeter.
Jordan scored just 2 points in the first half at Maryland, then came alive with
15 in the second half. His big play, however, came at the end when he blocked a
layup by Chuck Driesell, the son of Maryland coach Lefty Driesell, to save a 72–
71 win.
The Tar Heels had yet to face Ralph Sampson and Virginia, but that didn’t
mean the upcoming game wasn’t on their minds. Teammates Warren Martin,
Curtis Hunter, and Brad Daugherty also roomed on the first floor of Granville
Towers. “The day before the game the players were standing out in the hallway
talking about the game, and they were scared to death,” David Mann recalled. “I
mean people don’t realize how much Ralph Sampson was feared in those days.
He was like Godzilla in the basketball world back then. Brad Daugherty was a
freshman, and he didn’t want to have to go up against Sampson. So the guys are
standing in the hall talking about what they’re going to do and how nervous they
are. Michael’s sitting there and he’s not saying a word. And after a few minutes
of this, all of a sudden he jumps up, about forty inches straight up, and slams his
hand against the wall and screams out, ‘Fuck Sampson!’ ”
Startled, his teammates went silent.
“Everybody just sort of scattered after that,” Mann recalled with a laugh.
The teams’ first meeting the next day was broadcast on NBC from University
Hall. Virginia was ranked second and the Tar Heels held the eleventh spot in the
polls. The Cavaliers were also guarding a forty-two-game win streak on their
home floor during the Sampson era. It was the first Virginia home game in
almost six weeks, and the Tar Heel presence was enough to incite the nine
thousand fans to cheer each time Sampson approached the basket in warm-ups.
And they hooted when Smith stood by his bench, his NCAA championship ring
glittering in the television lights. They chanted, “Sit down, Dean. Sit down,
Dean.”
The Tar Heels immediately sandwiched Sampson in a zone and ran off a
string of three-point goals for a 12-point lead. By halftime the air in the small
arena was dead from disappointment. Smith put the seven-foot freshman Brad
Daugherty at one of Sampson’s shoulders and six-foot-nine Sam Perkins at the
other, with a wing player from either side also ready to collapse. The Tar Heels
effectively denied him the ball while keeping the other Virginia players from
establishing any offensive flow. Sampson hit only 2 of 8 field goal attempts in
the first twenty minutes. Meanwhile, Perkins gave one of the best offensive
performances of his career, scoring 25 points, including three three-point goals,
in the first half.
After intermission, the arena settled into near silence as Sampson was called
for his third and fourth fouls and North Carolina widened its lead to 23 points, at
85–62, with 9:41 remaining. Then, two minutes later, Sampson hit his first three-
pointer of the season, a nineteen-foot shot from the left baseline, and Virginia
began a comeback. Virginia’s Ricky Stokes, Jimmy Miller, Rick Carlisle, Tim
Mullen, and Othell Wilson each scored. Then Sampson again. And Carlisle
followed with a three-pointer. Within a five-minute span, the Wahoos had sliced
the lead from 23 to 6 points. With two minutes remaining, and Carolina holding
on, 96–90, Sampson rose up to the right of the lane for a short jumper. Jordan
simultaneously leaped from the other side of the lane and ferociously smacked
down the ball.
The play drew gasps along press row. Standing on the sideline, Virginia
coach Terry Holland caught himself applauding. “Michael and David
Thompson,” Holland recalled, “are the only two players that have made plays
against my own team that made me applaud in sheer amazement… before I
realized that I was cheering against my own team.
“I was also hollering at the referee that it ‘had to be goaltending’ at the same
time,” Holland said. “I think the referees were as stunned and amazed as I was
and could not figure out how he did it either. Technically, the block had to be
goaltending—it had to be heading down since Ralph released it from above the
rim. Looked like a Titan missile. Not sure why he would even think about going
after it.”
“That was back in my young days,” Jordan said fifteen years later, admitting
that he had no idea he could make the play. “I surprised myself. That was the
beauty of my game, and it has propelled me to my career to some degree. No one
could sit there and tell you what I could do. I couldn’t tell you what I couldn’t do
and what I could. And that was the beauty of everything.”
Playing in Smith’s system, Jordan had yet to discover anything close to the
full range of his abilities.
Fourteen seconds after the block, Othell Wilson hit a three-pointer, and
Virginia pulled within two with fifty seconds to play. But the Cavaliers were
forced to foul, and Jordan and Jimmy Braddock made their free throws for a
101–95 win. Sampson left University Hall that day without speaking to
reporters.
With the victory, Carolina moved to first place in the ACC. The Tar Heels
then beat NC State and Duke by large margins. With Worthy gone to the NBA,
Jordan began slipping down to the box, where he showed the first flashes of the
post-up game that would be a staple of his professional play. He ran the floor
well and often benefited from being the open man in Smith’s secondary break.
Even when he wasn’t open, Jordan could produce a shot with his quick first step
and elevation. He still drew occasional traveling calls for the move, but Smith
had sent a slow-motion videotape of the first step to the NCAA to confirm that
Jordan was not traveling. The Carolina offense also produced bunches of back
cuts and backdoor plays that helped an athletic player like Jordan fill out the stat
sheet.
“Jordan worked as hard as any player I’ve seen, especially an excellent
player,” said Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski after that January game. “He set the
tone for the game. He was as tough mentally as I’ve ever seen him play. He said,
‘I want it, give it to me. I’m going to work.’ He was just excellent. We wanted to
play defense on him. We diagrammed and said, ‘This is what he’s going to do.’
He still did it. I admire that. Even when he missed shots, he was working so hard
to get them. He never gave us a chance to get back into it.”
Jordan’s run continued against Georgia Tech the next week when he made 11
of 16 shots on his way to his career high in college, 39 points. His totals included
seven three-point attempts. He made six of them.
His efforts had impressed ESPN commentator and former coach Dick Vitale
as Virginia came to Carmichael Auditorium. The winning streak had driven the
Tar Heels to number one in the country, with Virginia number two in one poll.
The Virginia sports information people were irritated by Vitale, whom they
accused of conducting a one-man campaign against Sampson in the national
Player of the Year balloting. Vitale had extolled the talents of Jordan, but Terry
Holland and the Virginia PR staff felt that Vitale was not merely supporting
Jordan, but had been snidely attacking Sampson.
Vitale used the word “superstar” with a tinge of derision regarding Sampson,
they said. The broadcaster felt he was being misunderstood. He said that
Sampson, unlike some other great centers, had played with inferior talent at
Virginia. But Vitale remarked that at times during his final college season,
Sampson had lacked enthusiasm while Jordan, on the other hand, oozed it.
Thirty years later, Holland observed, “There’s no argument that Michael was
a legitimate candidate and that Dick had every right to vote for as well as
promote whomever he wished to promote. But our objection was to his
comments about why Michael should be the Player of the Year instead of Ralph.
That was just Dick being Dick as he tends to get carried away. But there seemed
little reason to criticize Ralph in order to promote his candidate.” Holland added
that Sampson was already a two-time college Player of the Year who had stayed
in school for four years.
The debate would be settled on Carmichael’s floor. The pregame noise from
the packed student section was so deafening, Virginia’s players could barely
hear their own names during the introductions. Nonetheless, they played
brilliantly and had stacked up a 16-point lead with nine minutes left in the
second half.
With 4:48 left, Virginia’s Jimmy Miller finished a three-point play, opening a
63–53 lead. The Cavaliers never scored again, but stumbled through a rash of
turnovers and steals. At 1:20, with his team still leading 63–60, Sampson missed
a foul shot. Then came the signature play, with 51 seconds on the clock, as
Jordan stripped the ball from Rick Carlisle at midcourt, sped to the rim, and
jammed in a 64–63 Carolina lead. Decades later, the play would still stir
testimonials from those who watched it happen. Virginia then whittled down the
last fifty seconds until Carlisle missed a long jumper with 0:05 remaining on the
clock.
Jordan outjumped Sampson to claim the key final rebound, which was
telling, Billy Packer recalled. “That particular year his highlights were not
offensive. His highlights showed me, number one, his incredible competitive
nature, but also his defensive skills. I learned more about him in ’83 in regard to
how well he could guard somebody. Obviously he was a good scorer, too, but
where he was phenomenal was defensively.”
Holland agreed. “Michael was a terrific all-around college player, but he was
most effective defensively,” he recalled in 2012. “And that is a lot more difficult
to prepare for than a great offensive player since you can’t double-cover a
defender or devise ways to keep the ball out of his hands.”
The Carolina crowd stood and cheered long after the game was over. “We
were back in the dorm later that night,” David Mann recalled, “and my voice
was totally gone. I screamed my voice out, and I was downstairs at the snack
machine and Michael comes down there. It’s just me and him, and I’m talking to
him about how great the game was and how awesome he was. He was like
matter-of-fact about it. ‘Yeah. Okay.’ And he started talking about class. He was
totally nonchalant about the whole thing, like nothing had even happened. He
wasn’t even interested in talking about the game.”
Three days later Villanova came to town for a rematch of the 1982 regional
finals. Eddie Pinckney had remained in touch with Sam Perkins, fellow New
Yorkers eager to get any inside info they could, it seems. Some of their talk
focused on the growing competition between conferences. Villanova belonged to
the Big East, which included Georgetown.
“We didn’t want to fraternize too much because they had the potential to
embarrass you if you let them,” Pinckney recalled of the Tar Heels. “What
Perkins would say is Jordan was the best player he’d ever seen. And, of course, I
would say it was Ewing. For us, just going down there and getting a chance to
play against Jordan and an ACC team that was ranked number one at the time is
something you never forget, because the ACC ruled at the time. They were the
premier conference and they had all the great players.
“They were ranked at the time as number one, and they had Jordan,”
Pinckney explained. “We didn’t really think we could deal with him. You just
knew this guy was a great player. You’re saying to yourself as a player, ‘I’ve
seen this guy play before. When’s it going to happen?’ ’Cause you knew what’s
coming. ‘When’s he going to take over the game?’ ”
It didn’t happen that day. Jordan didn’t play particularly well, and Villanova
defeated the number one team in the country, in their own building. “They were
supposed to just squash us, and we put up a pretty good fight,” Pinckney said.
“We played out of our minds.”
The loss sent the Tar Heels into a spiral. They traveled to Maryland three
days later and lost by 12, then lost again three days after that at NC State by 7
points, foreshadowing their loss to the Wolfpack later in the ACC tournament
semifinals that year. Jim Valvano’s players had fallen into a rhythm that would
carry them all the way to an improbable national championship against Houston.
The Heels, meanwhile, made their way to the NCAA regional final in
Syracuse, where they were snuffed by Georgia, 82–77. Jordan broke loose for
several flashy dunks but couldn’t deliver victory. Afterward, he told Roy
Williams he was burned out and was going to take a break from basketball. The
assistant understood the competitive burden that Jordan had assumed with
Worthy’s departure. Smith’s system helped to ease the circumstances, but
Jordan’s very best had been required each game for the Carolina basketball
machine to keep rolling forward. Williams told Jordan that taking a break made
sense, so he was understandably surprised the next day to find him back in the
gym, working on his game. Asked about his change in plans, Jordan just said
that he had to get better.
The Tar Heels had suffered a blow with the season’s end, but the Jordan
reputation had climbed several levels. He was now seen as “easily the best
defensive guard in the land,” according to Sports Illustrated, this a mere year
after striking the coaching staff as almost indifferent about defense as a
freshman. “Jordan always seems to know where the ball is and where it’s
going,” said Maryland forward Mark Fothergill. “He roams around like a
madman, playing the whole court and causing all kinds of confusion.”
With the ACC’s three-point shot experiment, Jordan had raised his average to
20.0 points a game (good enough to lead the ACC), along with 5.5 rebounds.
Still, he wasn’t pleased. He had shot 53.5 percent from the floor, but the outside
shot, critical with Carolina facing so many zones, wasn’t as strong as it was
during his freshman campaign. “I think the three-pointer altered my thinking,”
he decided. “I was pressing, trying to hit too many long ones.” Actually, he had
hit an impressive 44.7 percent on three-point shots, good enough to rank him
fourth among Carolina’s guards. “Plus, my arc got higher and higher,” he said.
“I think the winning shot in ’82 went to my head or something. I must have
watched it on film thirty times. That thing was a rainbow. Wow.”
As a freshman, he had never won the defensive award selected by the
Carolina coaches after each game, but he won it thirteen times as a sophomore.
He had slipped into the passing lanes for deflections and used his long arms for
back-tips, recording 78 steals on the season, just shy of Dudley Bradley’s
Carolina record. The defensive activity meant that he racked up 110 personal
fouls, fouling out of four games, all of which the Tar Heels lost.
Beyond the stats, there had been several startling displays. He had, in one
instance, jumped over the head of NC State guard Sidney Lowe. And Sports
Illustrated had named one of his slams against Georgia Tech a “demoralizer
dunk.” He had left the ground at the foul line, displayed a disconcerting hang
time, then redirected his slam to the side of the goal at the last moment. “I
thought I was watching Superman,” Georgia Tech’s Tim Harvey exclaimed
afterward.
The Jordan legend mushroomed again. He was named to the ACC’s first
team and to the AP All-America team, although he didn’t take the national
Player of the Year award away from Sampson. Jordan did finish second in the
AP national Player of the Year award, and the Sporting News named him its
College Player of the Year. “He soars through the air,” the sports weekly noted.
“He rebounds, he scores (more than 1,100 points in two years, a school record),
he guards two men at once, he vacuums up loose balls, he blocks shots, he
makes steals. Most important, he makes late plays that win games.”
Regardless, Jordan plunged into a deep funk at the abrupt end of the season.
“It left a bitter taste in my mouth,” he said later that year. “Maybe I got spoiled,
winning the NCAAs as a freshman.” He was also upset with certain teammates
who he felt lacked the necessary competitive drive. Such questioning of
teammates came to be a common theme in his life, which he often
acknowledged. “It was hard to deal with a guy who wasn’t competitive,” he later
explained. “I was always testing that aspect of my teammates’ character on and
off the court. You pick on them to see if they will stand up. If they don’t take it,
you know you can trust them to come through when the pressure is on in the
game.” He explained that he became better at dealing with these issues as a
professional, although many of his Bulls teammates would disagree.
David Mann remembered things turning quiet on the hallway in Granville
Towers with the disappointing end to the season. “Nobody spoke about it.”
Finally, Mann mustered the courage to ask Jordan how he felt about NC State
winning the national title. “He said, ‘You know, I’m mixed. I kind of like State,
but it should have been us.’ ”
It would later be reported that Jordan took up golf to soothe his raw emotions
in the wake of the Georgia loss, that he was taught the game by Buzz Peterson
and Davis Love III, who was then an All-American golfer for UNC. There was
some truth in the story, although it happened more gradually.
Peterson had played high school golf and knew Love, whose father had given
Dean Smith golf lessons. Peterson, Love, and Roy Williams spent many days on
the links, and Jordan didn’t like feeling left out. Love recalled that he began
tagging along. “He ended up coming out riding in the cart and eventually wanted
to play, so Buzz and I rounded up a set of clubs and some old balls and got him
started.… We kind of created a monster,” Love remembered. Brad Daugherty,
Matt Doherty, and several other players also joined the group from time to time.
Competitive as ever, Jordan and his teammates were drawn to the driving range
to work on their swings.
“A lot of the players would come down and play,” Love recalled. “One time
Coach Smith said, ‘All the players are down on the driving range. Could you
send them back up to the gym?’ ”
“It was fun to get to know him and watch him grow,” Love said years later.
“The best thing about golf for him is that it gives him something to do away
from the crowd, away from his celebrity status. I think that’s why he likes it so
much. It’s hard to do and it’s a challenge, but it’s also a release for him to get
away from basketball.”
There were other outlets besides golf, Art Chansky recalled. “They had the
campus championship softball team at Granville Towers with all the basketball
players, and Michael was a big star. I think he was the shortstop. That drew big
crowds to the campus intramural fields. But the guys were not like they are
today, where they can live in apartments. Back then they all lived in Granville
Towers and they all hung together. It was something. It was a different day. He
was on his way to being a star, although no one had any idea about what kind of
star he would become.”

Pan Am

Jordan may have needed a break from basketball, but the Pan American Games
in Caracas, Venezuela, soon called him back. He was more than eager to try out
for the US team after the NCAA disappointment. It would be important
international experience, but mostly, it was just basketball.
“I couldn’t wait for the next game,” he would remember.
The tryouts for the Pan Am squad brought together dozens of players from
two US amateur teams. Jack Hartman of Kansas State coached the team under
the watchful eye of Indiana coach Bobby Knight, who had been picked to lead
the USA in the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
Ed Pinckney remembers Jordan playing with a fury and talking trash like
Pinckney had never heard it talked, even in New York. “There must have been a
hundred guys trying out for this team,” Pinckney recalled, “and they split us all
up. I will never forget how he played during those tryouts. They split us up into
groups of four. I was on his team. Bobby Knight was on this scaffold in the
middle of the court and he would overlook all the courts. I think there were some
other coaches up there with him. With Michael on our team, we did not lose a
game. It was ridiculous. You played each game to seven. They had this clock
and you played until seven or until the clock sounded off.”
The process was designed to maximize competition, but Jordan actually
minimized it, Pinckney said with a laugh. “We’d go to one court, and we’d beat
a team seven to nothing. He’d score every basket. We’d go to the next court and
win seven to three and he’d scored five in a row. Maybe somebody else got a
layup or something. It was a joke. That’s when I said to myself, ‘He’s out of
control, he’s so good.’ ”
Pinckney and Jordan made the team with Chris Mullin, Leon Wood, Michael
Cage, Sam Perkins, Mark Price, Wayman Tisdale, Anthony Teachey, and
several others. Hartman took the team to Kansas to play two warm-up games
against a collection of NBA players, including Larry Drew and Eddie Johnson
from the Kansas City Kings.
 “Certain guys were talking about the NBA,” Pinckney recalled. “We all knew
Michael was going. There wasn’t any question if he was going. He knew he was
going to the NBA. But we all kind of wanted to see how we would match up. He
dominated those two games. He was stealing the ball. It was the first time I saw
him do his rock-cradle dunk. He had no problem playing against those guys at
all, at all. I mean he just stood out.”
The hotel featured a small par-three golf course, which immediately attracted
Jordan’s attention. “The only thing he wanted to do when we weren’t playing
basketball was play golf,” Pinckney remembered. “We practiced, and that guy
would come back and he’d spend his time there. That’s all he did. He’d go do
that and then we’d go practice. It was the same deal when we went away. He just
loved to play. I know he didn’t sleep much. He hung out with Leon Wood all the
time. Those guys went everywhere together.”
The team played an exhibition game in Puerto Rico, en route to Venezuela.
Teachey recalled that although the Puerto Rican players on the other team may
not have been able to understand Jordan, that didn’t stop him from trash talking.
“He always believed in letting those guys know that we pretty much invented the
game. He was very competitive when we traveled abroad. And he wasn’t shy
about it.”
From there, Team USA made its way to Venezuela for the August games,
and discovered that their dormitory was little more than a concrete shell. Lon
Kruger, who would go on to a career coaching in college and the NBA, was the
team manager for the event. “The village wasn’t completed,” Kruger recalled.
“The windows weren’t on. The doors weren’t on. We looked at each other like,
‘What’s going on?’ ”
Jordan took one look at the bare concrete, then pitched his travel bag on the
floor and said, “Let’s get to work.” Hartman was struck by the all-business
approach, no whining or complaining about the accommodations.
“Michael Jordan stepped up and said, ‘This is the Athletes’ Village. We’re
okay,’ ” Kruger remembered. “And when Michael said it, everyone else was
good with it.”
Wood, who would later become an NBA referee, remembered Jordan’s
attitude as “there’s nothing we can do about it now.”
“We’re here to get our medal,” Jordan told his teammates. “Let’s go about
our business.”
The Americans faced eight games over twelve days against international
teams. In the first game, the Americans fell behind Mexico, 20–4, and Jordan
aggravated the tendinitis in his right knee. He fought through it to help deliver a
win. He played with pain in the second game, against Brazil, and scored 27
points, including a dunk that secured Team USA’s come-from-behind victory.
Afterward, he sat with his leg encased in ice. “It’s a tendinitis injury from way
back,” he told a reporter. “It won’t be a problem. Besides, I wouldn’t miss
playing now for anything.”
Despite the injury, Jordan attacked each successive opponent, Pinckney
remembered. “He’s stealing the ball on defense, hitting post-up shots on offense.
If something didn’t go right he was pissed. He played with a fury. He was kind
of like the leader of the team, so when you were out on the court, you had to
bring it. Guys we were playing against were foreign pros and played ball
overseas in Europe and in South America. You’re talking about playing against
older guys. He’d get out there and he didn’t care. It was like, ‘Bring it or get
somebody else out on the court.’ ”
Jordan struggled at times with his outside shot during the event. It was
actually point guard Mark Price who came through, Billy Packer pointed out.
“Our guys didn’t play well. We played a lot of zone. We didn’t do a lot of
running, and the other teams were not intimidated by our kids. Mark Price was
probably the guy that pulled out more games than anybody. Michael was good
but he wasn’t great.”
Jack Hartman was plenty impressed, however. “This kid takes it to the hole
as hard as anybody ever has,” the coach said afterward. “Sometimes I felt
cheated coaching him. Michael created so many incredible moves I wanted to
see them all again on instant replay. But I couldn’t because I was there, live.”
Jordan led the team in scoring, averaging 17.3 points over the eight games.
He may have missed out on a second NCAA title, but he now had an
international gold medal.
No sooner had he returned home than Deloris Jordan took one look at her
exhausted son and told him to forget about going out in search of pickup games.
“Enough,” she said. “You’re going to stay home.”
To make sure of it, she took away his car keys and told him to do something
he never seemed to have the time or inclination to do. She demanded he get
some sleep.
 Chapter 13

SYSTEM FAILURE

ONCE RESTED, JORDAN headed back to Chapel Hill late that summer of 1983.
“The freshmen were already talking trash. I had to see what they had,” he said.
Dean Smith had pulled in two forwards from the Parade All-American team, Joe
Wolf and Dave Popson, but it was the point guard he had recruited from New
York who piqued Jordan’s interest. Kenny Smith had already earned a
nickname, “The Jet,” and he aced Jordan’s test for competitiveness. He had both
speed and quickness aplenty. He wasn’t above scoring but, like Jimmy Black, he
understood the game and the role of a true point guard. With Buzz Peterson back
from injury and sophomore Steve Hale having shown that he was capable of
playing big, Dean Smith had a good mix competing for the position.
“It’s the toughest position to adjust to here,” he explained to Sports
Illustrated. “We throw so much at them.”
The biggest thing the coach threw at them was Jordan himself, recently
immortalized by “The Jordan” sandwich on the menu at Chapel Hill’s Four
Corners restaurant—crab salad on a pita.
Jordan’s leadership relied on more than instilling the fear of a scolding in his
teammates. No one on the team, including freshmen, wanted to let him down. It
was not something Jordan articulated. As he often explained, he wasn’t much of
a rah-rah type. More, he played all out, and insisted on the same from his
teammates, as Pinckney had described on the Pan Am team. Often he could
motivate them with a mere frown. None of them wanted to be the target of his
furrowed gaze. Mostly, he presented a picture of efficiency. “Coming from New
York I’ve seen so many players with great talent waste it,” Matt Doherty, then a
senior, explained at the time. “Michael puts every ounce of talent to use.”
The veteran roster seemed focused on matching Jordan’s intensity. Brad
Daugherty was now a year older and much stronger. Perkins was already a two-
time All-American, and as Jordan had explained to a skeptical Jack Hartman,
“He’ll be there when you need him.” Carolina had admirable depth in the post
with junior Warren Martin. Doherty was the small forward, and Curtis Hunter
was back from a foot injury to provide depth on the wing.
Jordan, too, was very much a different player now, polished and determined.
Duke guard Johnny Dawkins had observed his growth. “Jordan goes all out,” he
said. “Not just physically, like he used to, but now he outthinks you. Back door
here. Lob to me here. Good defensive play there. Of all the players he’s the most
impressive.”
Which meant that North Carolina for 1983–84 was a very special college
basketball team, one of the top teams of all time, according to Billy Packer. “It
was amazing. That team was Dean Smith’s best team. You’ve got to figure, it
had the backcourt, the frontcourt, the explosive scoring, all the things, the size.
They had the experience. We’re talking about guys that could really play at the
highest of levels. You’ve got three starters who were on the national
championship team in terms of experience.” Brad Daugherty and Kenny Smith
would both enjoy excellent NBA careers with Jordan and Perkins, Packer
pointed out.
It was, the broadcaster said, looking back in a 2012 interview, a team for the
ages, better than Smith’s two teams that won national titles.
Kenny Smith was a talkative sort who would slip down to Jordan and
Peterson’s room in Granville Towers for late-night bull sessions. Smith’s
excellent court vision and passing ability bonded him quickly with Jordan on the
floor as well. Their alley-oop connection soon became a thrill button for
delighted Carolina fans.
The Tar Heels reeled off twenty-one straight wins (the first seventeen
victories were by an average margin of 17.4 points) to open the season before
suffering their first loss February 12 at Arkansas. The ACC had moved on from
its one-year experiment with the three-point shot, which meant that Jordan’s
shooting percentage rose to 55.1. His scoring dipped slightly to 19.6, but his
focus and energy brought raves from the media.
He surprised sportswriters in the midst of the winning streak one day in
January by showing up with his head nearly bald. “My dad’s bald, so I figured I
might be bald one day,” he told them. “I wanted to get an advanced look at it and
know how it feels.” They began laughing at his explanation, so he quickly
confessed, “Actually, it was just a matter of the barber cutting more than I told
him.”
His pate glistening, he produced highlights at almost every turn. But his close
to Carolina’s 74–62 victory at Maryland in January left Lefty Driesell stomping
and fussing. Dean Smith would tell people that the phrase “tomahawk dunk” was
coined that day. Others would call the shot a cradle-rocker. The ACC would
later use the footage in a promo. The play subtly seeded the idea that Jordan
could fly. And once again, it surprised Jordan himself.
“Before you know it,” he later recalled, “I’m cranking the ball back, rocking
it left to right, cuffing it before I put it down.… The breakaway after that seemed
like a chance to try something new.”
For Billy Packer, the dunk was a revelation. “I never saw him do that
spectacular thing until that dunk that the ACC used in a promotional tape where
he cupped the ball up in Maryland and threw it down in a wide open break,” the
broadcaster said. “Because at Carolina you just didn’t do that. If you had a fast
break opportunity, you went in and took a proper layup. You didn’t tomahawk
the ball and dunk it when you’re all alone. It was like, ‘Holy mackerel!’ That’s
the first time I ever saw the unbelievable athleticism and dexterity. That’s the
first time I saw it from him.”
Indeed, Dean Smith called Jordan into his office the very next day. He first
pointed out that Kenny Smith had been available for a throw-ahead on the play,
and then reminded Jordan that such displays were not the Carolina way.
“He never wanted to show up an opponent,” Jordan explained.
Art Chansky recalled that Smith refused to allow producers of his TV show
to air the footage of the dunk. “He told Woody Durham and his TV show
producers that he didn’t want that play in there because he thought that showed
up Maryland a little bit, on that breakaway. He was pissed at Michael about
that.”
Jordan accepted his coach’s correction, although he did later point out that
such displays were “part of who I was, a way of expressing myself.”
Anthony Teachey asserted that if you paid close attention, you could see that
Jordan wasn’t entirely happy with the situation either. “I think there were times
in college that it frustrated him, because he didn’t have the freedom to really
expose his talent like he wanted to,” Teachey said in a 2012 interview. “The
limitations frustrated him once he got in college because of the lack of freedom.
I could see it, because in high school he didn’t have Worthy or Perkins or those
guys on his team. The frustration came with the lack of freedom. He controlled it
very well.”
Teachey thought Jordan had displayed remarkable maturity in restraining his
considerable talent to play in Smith’s system. “I don’t think he could have
played for him in high school,” Teachey said. He observed that Jordan had
dramatically adjusted his game to fit in at North Carolina, and had never gotten
credit for having the character to make such an adjustment.
The good times rolled on for another month, until Jordan scored 29 in a win
over LSU, a game marked by an ugly “frustration foul” from the Tigers’ John
Tudor as Kenny Smith was going in for a breakaway score. Tudor swung hard
across Smith’s face, and the freshman guard tumbled on his arm under the
basket. Jordan rushed up and shoved Tudor before being pulled away by the
officials. Smith missed eight games with a broken wrist, and while backup Steve
Hale played very well in his absence, the injury was viewed as a factor in
breaking Carolina’s momentum. It always seemed there was one injury or
another that altered the course of the best seasons for Dean Smith’s teams.
Wearing a rubber cast, Kenny Smith returned not long after a loss at
Arkansas, and Jordan resumed his reel of highlights. He scored 24 against
Virginia on 11 of 15 shooting. He hammered down 32 in a 25-point win over NC
State. And there was always something about Maryland (thought by media
observers to be Adrian Branch’s MVP in the McDonald’s game) that inspired
Jordan’s best dunking displays. He went for 25 in his final game against Lefty
Driesell’s team, finishing with another dunk, this one high over center Ben
Coleman, who fouled him for a three-point play. He had an 18-point second half
in a win over Georgia Tech, and then came his last appearance in Carmichael.
Krzyzewski’s young Duke team pushed the Tar Heels to double overtime before
succumbing, 96–83. Jordan scored 25, but the game was a harbinger. A week
later, the two teams met again in the ACC tournament semifinals, and the Blue
Devils completed the upset, 77–75.
“What’s amazing about the ACC tournament,” Billy Packer observed of
Jordan, “in all of his career, that is the one place where he doesn’t stand out. He
doesn’t have a good ACC tournament record. Except, of course, for his brilliant
work as a freshman against Virginia to win the league championship.”
Once again, a loss in the ACC tourney would drain Carolina’s momentum for
the NCAA tournament. The Tar Heels took on Temple in Charlotte in the round
of thirty-two and were bothered by the speed of Terence Stansbury, who scored
18 points in the first half. Fighting to stay ahead, Dean Smith called for so many
alley-oops to Jordan that he grew exhausted and asked the unusual—to come out
of the game to catch his breath. Carolina had trouble with coach John Chaney’s
persistent zone, but the alley-oop, combined with Carolina’s size, proved too
much. The Tar Heels advanced to the Sweet Sixteen at the Omni in Atlanta, an
arena in which Jordan hadn’t played well. They were to face Bobby Knight’s
unranked Indiana Hoosiers, led by freshman Steve Alford, with a 22-8 record.
The night before the game, Billy Packer talked privately with Knight about
what the Hoosiers faced the next day. Knight asked if Packer thought the
Hoosiers could somehow beat Jordan and the Tar Heels, the broadcaster
recalled. “I said, ‘No, you can’t beat North Carolina.’ He said, ‘No, I don’t think
so either, but I’m going to do some things to them. They’re probably going to
beat us anyway, but they’re not going to get any of those backdoor cuts. I’m
going to let them take any kind of jump shot they want beyond eighteen feet.’ He
said, ‘If they can make those jump shots, we’re not going to be in the game. I
don’t think Michael can make those shots, and I don’t think they’ve got anybody
else who can either.’ ”
Knight also decided to defend Jordan with Dan Dakich, who had started only
five games all season. Dakich was tall and had some quickness. Knight planned
for Dakich to lay off Jordan to protect against the drive. If Jordan went up for the
jumper, Dakich would lunge in a closeout and hope to distract the shot, which is
exactly what he did. The Indiana coach waited until three hours before the game
to inform his big reserve guard of the assignment. “I went back up to my room
and threw up,” Dakich said later.
It helped Knight’s plan that the officials whistled Jordan for two early fouls
that day. Any time he had gotten two fouls in the first half in earlier games that
season, Smith had always brought him to the bench. He did the same in the
regional semifinal and would be criticized for it later. Jordan scored just 4 first-
half points.
“Everybody thought Coach Smith was at fault for keeping me on the
sidelines,” Jordan recalled for Mike Lopresti of USA Today years later. “But
with me not on the floor, we were still a strong basketball team.”
“Michael was on the bench during the time Indiana took control of the
game,” Packer recalled.
Packer questioned the decision to keep Jordan on the bench while the
Hoosiers remained packed back in the lane on defense. The pace of the game
was slow, the broadcaster pointed out. “Indiana’s playing that pull-back man-to-
man, almost like a zone. They’re not running. It’s going to be a shortened game
because of the style of play, so your chances of getting five fouls is somewhat
limited.” With Jordan on the bench, Indiana took a 32–28 halftime lead. Knight
didn’t vary from his approach for the final twenty minutes. “When I got back in
the second half, I felt like I was trying to cram forty minutes into twenty
minutes,” Jordan recalled. “I could never find any sync in my game.”
 “Michael didn’t take the shots,” Packer said, “and they were so packed in
North Carolina never got any of those backdoor cuts. But it wasn’t just that.
Indiana decided to do two things and Carolina never countered.”
Knight used the lightly regarded Dakich to keep Jordan in check, and it
worked. Packer and other reporters couldn’t believe what they were watching.
“Just put Michael on the wing and say, ‘OK, Michael, we’re going to get you the
ball. Take it every time.’ Packer observed. “How does Dakich ever stop him
from getting off a good shot?”
“I am not diminishing what he did. I think he did exactly what Coach Knight
wanted him to do,” Jordan said of Dakich. “But [the media] made it a one-on-
one proposition. Being the competitor that I am, and hearing the only one who
could ever stop you was Dan Dakich… when I look back at the shots I had, I lick
my chops. I just missed them.”
Smith never adjusted his offense to free up Jordan to attack. The spread went
to 12 points, but the Tar Heels had cut it to two at the end when they fouled
freshman Steve Alford. He made both, good for the upset, 72–68. Indiana had to
shoot almost 70 percent from the floor to make it happen. Alford finished with
27. Jordan fouled out, having scored 13 points on 6-for-14 shooting. In his three
years at North Carolina, he had never taken more than 24 shots in any game.
The North Carolina locker room was deeply emotional afterward. Jordan and
Perkins were especially downcast. “I felt like I let them down,” Kenny Smith
later recalled. Dean Smith never cared for talking a lot with his players after
games. On that day, he called the group together for the usual postgame prayer
and then went to the interview room, where he grew more emotional with each
question and answer. Finally, Smith ended the session early and walked out.
“I think it was a game where the system and the program got in the way of
winning,” Packer said in 2012. “Of all the games he ever coached, I’m sure
that’s one game he’d like to have back, just the fact that the system got the best
of him on that particular day. Indiana played good, but they didn’t play great.
They played great going down the stretch because they were able to protect the
ball and Alford was such a great free throw shooter. But you knew that going in.
You never want to be in a position where his free throw shooting and him
holding the ball is going to beat you in that game.”
“I thought we were the best team in the country,” Jordan said, looking back.
“But in one game, that can be swept away from you.”
“There were games at North Carolina that were sacrificed for the good of the
program,” Packer said. “That Indiana game may be one of them. But if you just
tell Michael to go out there and throw them up and attack and tell Sam Perkins to
get all the rebounds, then the game’s over. But Dean never would sacrifice the
program for an individual game.”
Art Chansky disagreed: “That’s like saying that he would rather preserve the
system and lose rather than break the system and win. I don’t think that. Dean
did believe that his way was the best way. He believed that Michael needed to sit
out the last eight minutes of the first half with two fouls because that would
allow him to play aggressively in the second half. Within the system, Bobby
Knight knew how to guard him, and he had the guy to guard him. Michael was
good, but he was terrible his last game. He got locked up by Dakich. Five white
guys beat Sam Perkins, Michael Jordan, Brad Daugherty? Come on. Get serious.
They couldn’t beat them without the shot clock. It was pass and release, pass and
release, and get them out of their rhythm. They shot 65 percent, too. It was the
only way they could have won that game, but they did it.”
Chansky acknowledged that Smith had to adjust his system later in the
decade after Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski followed Knight’s pattern and
stymied Smith’s passing-game system. Smith had to take chances with the kinds
of players who could go one-on-one and beat the defense off the dribble. “Later
on, in the late eighties, when Carolina lost the Jordan-caliber players, they
couldn’t get into their offense,” Chansky recalled. “Dean recognized that. He
realized they had to break down the first level of the defense.”
Jordan later said he would have felt better if Indiana had gone on to win the
national title, but in an immense irony, a Virginia team without Ralph Sampson
(he had graduated and been selected by Houston with the top overall pick in the
1983 NBA draft) defeated the Hoosiers two days later to reach the Final Four.
Virginia finished sixth in the ACC standings that year.
Jordan returned to Chapel Hill thoroughly depressed and contemplating his
future. He would win every major honor that college basketball had to offer that
spring, every Player of the Year award.
“The publicity has been fun, I have to admit,” Jordan said at the time. “It
wasn’t too hard to handle, and isn’t now. I guess it used to be a little more fun at
the beginning, though, because people are more and more after you now. All in
all, it’s better and more fun to be noticed.”
He had averaged just 17.7 points over his three seasons at North Carolina.
This, in turn, would spur a viral criticism, packaged in the form of a joke that
spread across basketball in the late 1980s: Who was the only person to hold
Michael Jordan under 20 points a game? The answer, of course, was Dean
Smith, although statisticians duly pointed out that Jordan actually averaged 20.0
points per game as a sophomore at UNC. Regardless, there may have been an
element of truth to the charge. But Jordan would always stand by the Carolina
coach, explaining that Smith showed him how to use his gifts to greater
efficiency. “I didn’t know the game. Coach taught me the game, when to apply
speed, how to use your quickness, when to use that first step, or how to apply
certain skills in certain situations. I gained all that knowledge so that when I got
to the pros, it was just a matter of applying the information. Dean Smith gave me
the knowledge to score 37 points a game, and that’s something that people just
don’t understand.”
“When he went to North Carolina he had the heart, he had the
competitiveness, he had the athletic ability,” Brendan Malone observed. “But
while at North Carolina he became a better shooter and more sound in
fundamentals. When he came out of North Carolina he was ready to be a star in
the NBA.”
Indeed, that time had come. Smith had known for some time that the junior
season would likely be Jordan’s last in Chapel Hill, and that spring informed him
it was time to discuss the future. The final decision to enter the 1984 NBA draft
had to be made by Saturday, May 5. On April 26, Smith and Jordan held a
preliminary news conference that only confused local reporters. Jordan informed
them he still didn’t know what he was going to do. “I’m planning on staying
here and I’m looking forward to my next year here,” he told them. “Coach has
always looked out for his players and wants what’s best for them.”
Jordan said he would also listen to his parents: “My folks know a lot more
than I do. And I’ll take their advice into consideration, too. My mother, she’s a
teacher, and I think I already have an idea of what she thinks. But my father’s a
clown. I really don’t know what he’s thinking about. I don’t know. I don’t want
to put any pressure on them.”
Deloris Jordan was firmly opposed to her son leaving. But after the press
conference that day, Dean Smith met with agent Donald Dell from the sports
management firm ProServ, which local reporters took as a bad sign. It appeared
to Jordan that if he left school, the worst he could do was go to the Philadelphia
76ers, who seemed likely to have between the fifth and the third pick in the
draft. That was a decent option, but Jordan had hopes of playing for the Lakers.
He didn’t want to leave Chapel Hill to be a professional with just any team.
Jordan met with his coach that Friday, May 4, and later that evening with his
parents and brother Larry. Then he went out to eat with Buzz Peterson and some
friends. His roommate pushed him about his decision. Did he really want to
leave behind the cinnamon biscuits at Hardee’s and the grape soda and honey
buns? What about all the good times in their room, talking late into the night,
with Kenny Smith always showing up to run his mouth? Jordan admitted he still
didn’t know.
It was the same the next morning when he arose to get ready for the eleven
o’clock news conference at Fetzer Gymnasium. “I knew what he was going
through,” Deloris Jordan recalled later that summer. “But I also knew it was
something he had to decide for himself. We talked to him about it several times.
Then Coach Smith called us on that Friday night before Michael was to make the
announcement the next day. We left and went up there then. We talked with
Michael and with Coach Smith. At ten thirty the next morning, he had a meeting
with the coach. They came just a couple of minutes before the press conference
was to start at eleven. Coach Smith squeezed my arm when they came out and I
knew.”
After the announcement, Jordan departed quickly and headed to the golf
course, where he spent the entire afternoon.
Thirty years later, former Bulls executive Jerry Krause offered a harsher take
on Jordan’s exit, based on his many years working around college basketball as
an NBA scout. “Dean told him to leave North Carolina,” Krause said. “He told
him to get out of there. He was getting bigger than the program. I don’t know if
Dean would ever admit that, but that’s what happened.” It wasn’t that Jordan did
anything wrong or openly challenged Smith in any way, Krause explained.
“Dean was great. He was very gracious. Guys didn’t leave his program. He told
them to leave. When they started getting bigger than the program, he told them it
was time to go.”
Packer disagreed with Krause: “Let me tell you something, if Dean Smith
wanted him out, no one would know it. Dean Smith never told you what he was
doing. To say to Michael, ‘It’s time to go,’ he did that for a lot of players.”
Bob McAdoo was one of the first Carolina players to get the nod from Smith,
back in 1972, after the coach had done his research on the player’s draft
prospects. “This was when it was actually illegal by NCAA standards to be
getting that information, talking to agents and teams and so forth,” Packer said.
“But Dean was a master at that. He’d be able to sit down with a player and
players would listen to him. He’d say, ‘I’ve talked to this team that’s got this
draft choice. Michael, you’re probably going number three.’ The only way Dean
would have wanted him out of the program was if it was the best thing for
Michael, not if it was the best or worst thing for Dean. That’s what made him a
special person.”
For Jordan to be bigger than the program, he would have had to be bigger
than Smith himself, and in North Carolina, nobody was bigger than the coach.
Kenny Smith offered the opinion that the coach, not Jordan, was the reason for
the competitive atmosphere because of “how he psychologically guided us to go
at each other.”
Carolina assistant Eddie Fogler got married in the evening on the day that
Jordan announced he was headed to the NBA. The ceremony was infused with a
sort of gallows humor, Art Chansky recalled. “Eddie was like, ‘Hey, I’m getting
married, but, hey, we just lost the best player in the country.’ There were a lot of
Carolina fans at the wedding.”
Among them was Jimmie Dempsey, an old friend of Dean Smith’s who was
an important supporter of the Tar Heels program, close enough to use his private
plane to ferry Smith on recruiting trips. “He and his wife were the godparents of
the basketball players,” Chansky recalled. “At the wedding that night, Jimmie
said he was pissed at Dean. He said, ‘His job is to put the best basketball team
on the floor for the University of North Carolina. That’s his job. His job is not to
send guys out to pros while there’s still eligibility.’ I laughed and said, ‘Go tell
Coach Smith that.’ He said, ‘I will. I’ll go over and tell him right now.’ He went
over there and told him and then came back. I said, ‘What did he say?’ He said,
‘Dean laughed.’ ”
While James Jordan was delighted that the coach was putting Michael’s
interests first, Deloris Jordan had long held to the dream of having her two
youngest children graduate from North Carolina on the same day. Jordan assured
his mother that he would return to school promptly to earn his degree, which he
did, making use of the summer school program in the next few years. Even as
his future rested in the balance that spring, Jordan had insisted on studying for
his exams and pressing ahead with academic issues. He was so earnest, in fact,
that Kenny Smith assumed Jordan was returning for a senior year. Why,
otherwise, would a guy headed for the NBA even bother taking a test?
“They made the announcement and it hit me,” Mrs. Jordan said. “The press
room was packed, and we had to answer all these questions. But then I finally
had to be alone. When we got home, we had to leave the house because the
phone wouldn’t stop ringing. It was hard for a while.” Reality would settle in for
the Jordans over the coming months. They had attended almost every game that
their son played. “Thank God for the General Electric credit union,” James
Jordan had said when people inquired about all the travel costs. But within
months he would plead guilty to a charge of accepting a kickback from a private
contractor. The matter was handled quietly, but it still made the newspapers in
Wilmington and across the state.
“It was a shock at the GE plant,” recalled Dick Neher in a 2012 interview.
“Nobody could believe it. All the women loved him. He was charming. I worked
with him about twenty-five years. We worked in different buildings, but I saw
him about every day.… James was a pretty sharp guy. He was very personable.
Everybody liked him.”
According to statements made by authorities at the time, Mr. Jordan had held
inventory control duties at the GE plant in Castle Hayne. During his son’s
sophomore season at North Carolina, James Jordan had written a phony purchase
order to buy thirty tons of hydraulic equipment from a company called
Hydratron, headed by a man named Dale Gierszewski. According to legal
accounts of the charges, General Electric then paid Gierszewski $11,560 for the
thirty-ton cylinders. James Jordan acknowledged in court that Gierszewski did
not deliver the cylinders, and instead paid Jordan a $7,000 kickback.
In March 1985, Gierszewski pleaded guilty to embezzlement. He was fined
$1,000 and given a suspended jail sentence. Three weeks later, James Jordan
entered his own guilty plea and was handed a similar suspended sentence and
fine.
“He shoulda went to prison for what he got involved in,” Dick Neher said in
2012. “Because of Mike, he got out of it.”
Each man could have gone to jail for ten years with the felony conviction.
The case effectively ended James Jordan’s employment at General Electric.
Neher, also a supervisor at the plant, said the situation was much more involved
than authorities revealed. “He was in charge of our company store,” Neher
explained. The company store served as a club for employees, where they could
purchase refrigerators, TVs, toasters, tools, and various items at discount. As
manager, James Jordan would reroute merchandise meant for the store, Neher
said. “He’d check it in and it would never make it to the store. He was stealing it.
I assume he was selling it. They charged him with stealing about $7,000. It was
much more widespread. Other people were doing it, too.”
Obviously the family’s determination to attend each of Michael’s games
around the country, even internationally, had put pressure on the father to pay
for it all. “Put all that aside, you’d never find a better guy,” Neher said, recalling
James Jordan’s good deeds in the community and his willingness to volunteer
his time in building a field for youth baseball.
It was around this time that their oldest daughter, Sis, began exploring her
options for filing charges and a lawsuit against her parents regarding her sexual
abuse claims. Her marriage had fallen apart, and for a time she had checked
herself into the mental health ward of a local hospital. An older male relative had
visited and informed her that her grandparents were deeply troubled by her
circumstances. Sis wrote in her book that she checked herself out and went to
visit with Medward and Rosabell Jordan.
“What is wrong with you, girl?” they asked.
Sis wrote that with Michael’s sudden rise in basketball, her parents hardly
found time for visiting with the elderly grandparents in Teachey. More and
more, Medward had taken to quietly passing time on the front porch of his house
on Calico Bay Road, and it was as if the Jordans were embarrassed by the
“country ways” of James’s parents, now that they were associating with the
Carolina basketball crowd, their older daughter said. It was a common scenario
for families to get caught up in the whirlwind surrounding prominent young
athletes as they advanced through the levels of their sport, and the Jordans had
found themselves in the brightest of spotlights. Everyone in basketball-crazy
North Carolina followed the Tar Heels as if they were the reality television of
the day.
The Jordans had endured three years of constant travel and competition, and
relentless media exposure. On game days, they had left Wilmington usually at
three in the afternoon to make a night game. They’d visit with their son briefly
after the game, then make it home in time to watch a videotape of the game.
They were usually too keyed up to sleep, Deloris Jordan explained. “We
videotaped all the games so that Michael could see them when he got home.
He’d sit there and say, ‘Did I really do that?’ See, when he’s playing, he’s so
into the game and what’s going on around him that he didn’t remember some of
those things.”
They formed bonds with the parents of the other Carolina players, and they’d
spend time together at the games and on the many road trips. One such night
during the 1982 regional playoffs the Jordans described as magical. “Sam
Perkins’s folks, the Elacquas, were there, and the Braddocks, the Petersons, the
Worthys, the Dohertys, and the coaches and their wives,” Deloris Jordan recalled
in 1984. “We had gone out and gotten a bunch of Chinese food and we ate that
all night.”
“About three or four a.m.,” her husband chimed in, “I’ll never forget it. We
were all in the street singing the Carolina song, acting like a bunch of kids, but
we really enjoyed every minute of it.”
The shock for them all in May 1984 was that it had passed so quickly.
“We don’t feel cheated one bit,” James Jordan said. “We’ve been to every
one of the games he’s played in. It’s not worth any amount of money anybody
can give you. These have been good years for Michael, and they have been good
years for the Jordan family.… I’m convinced that you couldn’t have taken a kid
and gone out and had a script written and gotten a producer and a director and
told him to ‘play this through your life,’ that you couldn’t have planned a more
perfect life than the one Michael’s had.”
 PART V

THE ROOKIE
 Chapter 14

GOLD RUSH

JORDAN SELECTED DONALD Dell of ProServ out of Washington, DC, as an agent

in July. Even before the official hiring, David Falk, who worked with Dell and
ProServ, had begun exploring Jordan’s options in the upcoming draft. Contrary
to what Jordan had expected, Philadelphia’s record improved a bit that spring,
while the Chicago Bulls suffered two late losses to the New York Knicks that
improved their draft status. Critics cracked that the Bulls were simply making
their way through yet another disastrous season, only to follow it up with equally
disastrous draft picks.
The architect of these failed draft selections was the team’s general manager,
Rod Thorn, a self-deprecating gentleman of the Southern Appalachians who
admitted freely the team’s longtime struggles in drafting and finding players. In
1979, the Bulls had a fifty-fifty chance of drafting Earvin “Magic” Johnson, who
had just led Michigan State to the NCAA title. They again had a terrible record
and had to flip a coin with the Los Angeles Lakers for the right to pick first. Rod
Thorn called heads, following a suggestion based on fan polling. Tails it was.
Thorn lost Magic Johnson to the coin flip, then overlooked Sidney Moncrief
in the draft itself to take David Greenwood out of UCLA. Although he was
troubled by injuries, Greenwood played six solid seasons for the Bulls. He
averaged about 14 points and 8 rebounds over his first five seasons with the
team. Those were good numbers for a power forward, but he simply could not
compare to Magic Johnson, who led the Lakers to five NBA championships, or
even Moncrief, for that matter. Of course, if the Bulls had taken Moncrief, they
might not have needed to draft another shooting guard in 1984. Regardless,
Greenwood’s selection by the Bulls would always be viewed as a failed draft
pick. The value of the Lakers during Magic Johnson’s dozen years with the team
jumped from about $30 million to $200 million, according to Forbes magazine.
At the time, Jonathan Kovler, part owner of the Bulls, had joked that it was a
“$25 million coin flip.”
 “It turned out to be a $200 million coin flip,” he said later.
It got worse in 1982, when Thorn drafted guard Quintin Dailey out of the
University of San Francisco, shortly before it was revealed that Dailey had
attacked a student nurse in a dorm at the school. When he arrived in Chicago,
Dailey declined to express remorse for his actions, and soon women were
gathering to protest at Bulls games. He and another talented Bull, Orlando
Woolridge, would also struggle very publicly with cocaine. Such disasters
helped bring the team perilously close to insolvency by the spring of 1984.
That February, Thorn had traded crowd favorite Reggie Theus to Kansas City
for Steve Johnson and a draft pick. Almost immediately, Chicago’s team got
worse and its luck got better. The Bulls finished the season at 27–55 and missed
the playoffs for the third straight year, fueling speculation that the team would be
sold and moved out of Chicago. With the miserable finish, Thorn again faced
another high draft pick.

“We didn’t win a lot of games that year,” recalled Bill Blair, a Bulls assistant
coach. “But Rod reminded us that there was a guy down at North Carolina who
was a great, great player. He just kept on and on about Michael Jordan. Rod was
always positive and sure that this guy was gonna be one of the great all-time
players. But a lot of people said, ‘Well, he can’t play guard. He can’t play small
forward.’ Even Bobby Knight had made a statement like that. But Rod said,
‘This kid has got something special.’ ”
“Nobody, including me, knew Jordan was going to turn out to be what he
became,” Thorn recalled. “We didn’t work him out before the draft, but we
interviewed him. He was confident. He felt he was gonna be good. It was
obvious that Michael believed in himself, but even he had no idea just how good
he was going to be.”
Once the regular season had concluded, Houston and Portland were tied for
the top pick, followed by Chicago. The Rockets planned to take Hakeem
Olajuwon, the athletic center from the University of Houston, while Portland
was considering taking Kentucky center Sam Bowie, who had been plagued by
injuries. “Houston had made it clear from the start that they were going to take
Olajuwon,” Thorn recalled. “About a month before the draft, I had a
conversation with Stu Inman, Portland’s general manager at the time. Stu told
me they wanted Sam Bowie. Their doctors had said Bowie’s health would be
fine, and they needed a big man and weren’t really considering anyone else.”
The Bulls held the third pick in the draft, while Houston won the top pick in a
coin flip with Portland. The Trail Blazers were left with the second pick. “We
could tell that we were going to get Jordan when Houston won the coin flip over
Portland,” explained Irwin Mandel, a longtime Bulls vice president. “If Portland
had won the flip, they would have taken Olajuwon, and Houston probably would
have taken Jordan. I remember how excited Rod was. He was thrilled, because in
his mind there was a major difference between Jordan and Bowie.”
Sure enough, on the day of the draft, Jordan was there for the Bulls with the
third pick. Heading into the draft, he had admitted that he’d like to play for the
Lakers, where James Worthy was on his way to becoming a star. But Chicago
would be fine, Jordan explained that fall, because the Lakers “are so stacked I
probably couldn’t have helped them anyway.”
“Jordan was available, and they had to take him,” recalled Jeff Davis, a TV
sports producer in Chicago. “They had no choice. Sure the guy was two-time
college Player of the Year and had led North Carolina to the title. But nobody
knew how good he really was.” Davis recalled that it was fortunate Portland had
drafted Bowie, because it looked as if Thorn would have taken the Kentucky
center if he got the chance.
“We wish Jordan were seven feet, but he isn’t,” Thorn told the Chicago
Tribune when asked about the selection. “There just wasn’t a center available.
What can you do? Jordan isn’t going to turn this franchise around. I wouldn’t
ask him to. He’s a very good offensive player, but not an overpowering
offensive player.”
It was an odd statement from the general manager of a team that was
supposedly trying to sell tickets. Portland’s mistake would go down as the
greatest blunder in draft history. Stu Inman later pointed out that he was making
a move supported by the opinions of his staff, including Hall of Fame coach Jack
Ramsay. Inman would later suggest that Dean Smith’s system at North Carolina
had kept Jordan’s talents hidden, a position echoed by Ramsay. However, the
Portland coaches and staff had seen Jordan during Olympic tryouts that spring
and still missed him. Rick Sund of the Dallas Mavericks had seen what Jordan
could do. Sund offered the Mavs’ hot young star Mark Aguirre in a deal for
Jordan.
Thorn declined. “Rod didn’t even waver,” Sund recalled. “He knew.”

The Knight Factor

With the draft settled, Jordan could now turn his full focus to the Olympic
tryouts and practices, which would stretch from before the draft right up until the
eve of the games in Los Angeles. Jordan was never in peril of not making the
Olympic team, but he didn’t have Knight’s full confidence after their teams met
in the Sweet Sixteen. “After that I think that Bob kind of thought that maybe
Michael can’t shoot the ball,” Billy Packer recalled. “And in the Olympic trials
he didn’t shoot that great.”
Knight was even more of a system coach than Dean Smith. “You go from a
guy who played for Dean Smith and accepted roles and responsibilities and the
system.” The broadcaster laughed. “He goes and plays in the summer for Bob
Knight, who is basically more rigid than Dean.”
Smith certainly could be crafty and manipulative, but he always conducted
himself with a degree of diplomacy. Knight had a raw, uneven temperament and
an ego the size of the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis. Plus, he was beyond crass.
To many, he was a profane bully. “Coach Smith is the master of the four corners
offense and Coach Knight is the master of the four-letter word,” Jordan quipped.
Knight let his Olympic charges know from the very first day that he was
focused on perfection. “I have told them I have no interest in who we’re playing
or what the score is,” Knight explained. “I’m interested in this team being the
best team it can possibly be, and I’ll push you any way I can to get to that end.”
The player and coach were well matched. Jordan herded his teammates with
his glowering countenance and determined clapping. Knight did the same with
his moods and intimidating histrionics. His spotty behavior in international play
made him a curious selection by the committee overseeing amateur basketball in
the US. Authorities in Puerto Rico had issued an arrest warrant for him after his
confrontation with a police officer there in 1979 at the Pan Am Games. He was
later convicted in absentia of aggravated assault.
Now, Knight was on a mission. He wanted to bring the hammer of American
basketball down on the international game. To that end, he compiled a staff of
twenty-two assistant coaches and conducted thorough tryouts involving better
than seventy players.
Charles Barkley, Sam Perkins, John Stockton, Karl Malone, Chris Mullin,
Chuck Person, and dozens of other fine players labored as Knight watched the
proceedings from a tower. Charging up and down the floor with brilliant
displays of athleticism and ball handling, Barkley was clearly the second-best
player in the trials behind Jordan, but he seemed more interested in impressing
the pro scouts than making a hit with Knight, who could see only the Auburn
forward’s 280 pounds of girth.
 Barkley, Stockton, and Malone were among the game’s greats who were cut
by Knight during the trials. An angry and confused Stockton told Barkley and
Malone he’d love to team up with them to take on the dozen that Knight had
picked.
The final twelve selected for Olympic play were Michael Jordan, Sam
Perkins, Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullin, Wayman Tisdale, Leon Wood, Alvin
Robertson, Joe Kleine, Jon Koncak, Jeff Turner, Vern Fleming, and Steve
Alford.
Rather than wear his traditional number 23, Jordan was assigned jersey
number 9 for Team USA.
The Indiana coach had the roster he felt he needed to embarrass the
international field. He told his friend Packer that he didn’t mind his Olympic
team scoring 90 points in a game so long as they held the opponent to 30. “He
had incredible focus,” Packer recalled. “Bob, as is the case with Michael, is an
incredible competitor. He was just so well prepared. People forget how he
selected that Olympic team. All the constituents of intercollegiate basketball he
pulled together from a coaching standpoint. He used the selection process to get
everybody to buy in. Obviously his players had to understand, ‘This is the way
we’re going to do it, how I expect you to play.’ So in those games, they were
dominant. He wasn’t looking and hoping to win a gold medal. He was looking to
dominate the world of basketball, and that they did.”
Actually it was the exhibition games before the Olympics, played against
NBA players, that afforded Packer an inside view of the emergence of Michael
Jordan. His many years of broadcasting and his friendship with Knight provided
Packer a courtside seat for the fascinating nine games before the Olympics in
Los Angeles, arranged by Larry Fleisher, the general counsel to the NBA.
“What happens sometimes when you get an exhibition game with NBA
guys,” Packer said, “is that they just show up that afternoon. They put on a
uniform and play a little bit. But this thing got to be a hell of a rivalry in a period
of three or four weeks.”
Driving the rising temper of the proceedings were Knight and Jordan. The
exhibition tour began in Providence, Rhode Island, at the end of June and made
stops in Minneapolis and Iowa City before coming to Indianapolis to play before
a huge crowd on July 9. “By the time we got to Indianapolis the Olympians had
won four games,” Packer recalled. “So the pros were going to put a stop to that,
that night. Larry Fleisher didn’t want to see the NBA lose to a bunch of college
kids.”
 Fleisher recruited Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Isiah Thomas, and several
other stars, making for an electric atmosphere in front of thousands of fans at the
Hoosier Dome. Pete Newell, Knight’s longtime mentor and one of the assistant
coaches for Team USA, had visited the Olympians’ locker room before the
game, then sought out Packer. “Man, I’ve never seen anyone fired up like this in
my life,” Newell confided to Packer about Knight. Despite the NBA’s loaded
lineup, the Olympians won again in Indy.
The real test came in Milwaukee, Packer recalled. “I never saw Michael have
one of those truly great offensive performances until that night in Milwaukee
against the NBA players. That was the first time I ever saw Michael Jordan play
at that level offensively. He got cut in the nose by Mike Dunleavy driving to the
basket. The game was an unbelievably brutal game. Oscar Robertson was
coaching the NBA guys. Bob Knight gets thrown out of the game on that play.
Michael’s bleeding from the nose. Meanwhile, the ball bounces over to Knight,
and he puts it behind his back and refuses to give it to the referees. So they threw
him out of the game. He and Oscar were really going at each other. There was a
no-foul-out rule in the game. So the NBA guys were clubbing the Olympic
kids.”
A time-out was called while the Olympic assistant coaches tried to get
organized in the wake of Knight’s departure, Packer recalled. “They went back
out on the floor, and Michael took over the game like the NBA guys were
standing still. It was unbelievable. That was the first time I ever saw Michael
Jordan, the truly great offensive player, even though I’d seen him play high
school and three years of college ball. I never saw that side of him where he
could just take over a game. Bobby’s not even on the bench, but Michael just
came out and he was saying, ‘I don’t care what the system is, I’m taking this
game over.’ And he did.”
The Olympians went to Phoenix for a final exhibition with eight victories
against no losses. “And this was against NBA teams,” Packer said. “This was not
ragtag NBA players. By the time the exhibition got to Phoenix, Bob and I had a
conversation. Michael had made a believer of him. He told me, ‘I’ll tell you
what about Michael Jordan. I had questions about him before, but he’s going to
be the greatest damn basketball player that ever lived.’ ”
Knight had said little publicly to reporters about any Olympic player, because
he didn’t want to upend the team’s balance with inflated egos. Even so, he
admitted to reporters after coaching the exhibition games, “Michael is a great,
great basketball player.”
 The Olympians claimed the last exhibition game in Phoenix, 84–72, with
Jordan’s 27 points including an open-court slam in which he accelerated past a
retreating Magic Johnson. On another sequence, he fed the ball to Ewing in the
post on the left block, then somehow managed to bolt to the right block to score
on a stick-back of the center’s missed shot.
Play after play, Jordan proved quite a spectacle. “The NBA guys would stand
around and watch him,” USA teammate Jon Koncak told a reporter.
Lakers coach Pat Riley, who was on the bench for the NBA stars that day,
said afterward, “He’s as gifted a player as I’ve ever seen play ball.”
Later, Jordan would observe that it was the physical challenge of the
exhibition games that prepared him to charge out of the gate for his rookie NBA
season. Packer pointed out that Knight’s roster had no true point guard, rather a
collection of versatile players, the most versatile of whom was Jordan, capable
of playing three positions—both guard spots as well as small forward.

1984

Olympic basketball play opened July 29 at the Great Western Forum in Los
Angeles, with the Soviet Union and Hungary both boycotting the games,
ostensibly in protest of the United States boycott of the 1980 games in Russia.
The US men’s team encountered no stiff opposition and won eight games by an
average of 32 points. Jordan led the team in scoring at 17.1 points per game. “It
became obvious what Michael could do and how he could do it as an all-around
player,” Packer pointed out. “But it’s not like Michael went out and scored 40 a
game in the Olympics. That’s not how that team played.”
Although Knight’s systematic offense gave him limited playing time and
scoring opportunities, Jordan thrilled crowds and teammates alike during
practices and games. “When Michael gets the ball on the break, only one thing’s
going to happen,” said Steve Alford. “Some kind of dunk.”
“Sometimes the players get into the habit of just watching Michael,” Alford
said, “because he’s usually going to do something you don’t want to miss.”
As the Americans raced past their opponents, one international journalist
showed Jordan a foreign magazine with his photo on the cover declaring him the
greatest player in the world. The journalist asked Jordan what he thought of it.
“So far,” he said frankly, “I haven’t come across anybody who can keep me
from doing what I want to do.”
From dominating the teams filled with NBA stars to humbling the best
international teams, he had experienced quite a rise that summer. The only real
drama came when the Americans blew a 22-point lead against West Germany as
Jordan committed six turnovers and hit just four of fourteen shots from the field.
Knight exploded in anger on the bench, but Team USA caught itself in the free
fall and preserved a 78–67 win. The coach’s nasty humor boiled over in the
locker room afterward when he ordered Jordan to apologize to his teammates.
“You should be embarrassed by the way you played,” he yelled at Jordan,
whose eyes were tearing up as he stood speechless and shocked in the midst of
his teammates.
Jordan was the team’s leader, the one whose fire had stirred them all. They
appreciated his talent and his drive, and were shocked to witness him being
berated, Sam Perkins would later reveal. “We didn’t think Michael played that
bad, really. But that was us. Coach Knight knew what was in store. And it
propelled Michael.”
Later, in his pro career, Jordan would be accused often of bullying his
teammates. Perhaps he had learned some of that in his short months with Bobby
Knight. “It’s not that I’m scared of him,” Jordan told reporters covering the
Olympic team. “But he’s the coach, and he’s been successful with this style of
coaching. And I’m not going to challenge that at all. Playing for him for four
years is something I don’t want to think about. But he’s straightforward. He says
what he means. Whatever words he uses, you don’t have any trouble
understanding.”
Having been humiliated by Knight, Jordan played with a fury down the
stretch, including 20 points in the final as Team USA doused Spain, 96–65, for
the gold. He embraced the smiling Knight in a long hug afterward and moments
later waved a small American flag on the medal stand. He kissed the medal, sang
the national anthem, and then bolted into the stands to present the gold medal to
his mother.
He reminded her of the vow he made as a disappointed nine-year-old after
the American loss to the Russians in 1972. He couldn’t have known then that the
price of a gold medal would be submitting to Knight’s bullying. Jordan was not
someone who took humiliation well. As sweet as the moment proved to be, it left
a bitter aftertaste.
Anthony Teachey hadn’t made the cut for the Olympic team, but had the
opportunity to observe Jordan sacrifice his talent to meet the demands of yet
another controlling coach. That struck Teachey as nothing short of remarkable.
“A lot of people have never seen it,” Teachey said in a 2012 interview. “If you
look at his style, he adjusted from high school to college, from college to
Olympics, from Olympics to pros, because he had the character to play for
coaches like Dean Smith or Bobby Knight or Phil Jackson.”
No one was more pleased and relieved by Jordan’s Olympic performance
than Rod Thorn. It confirmed that the Bulls general manager had gotten the draft
right. “Playing in the Olympics really gave Michael an impetus,” Thorn
explained in looking back. “He became a household name, because the
Olympics were in Los Angeles, because the games became a highlight film
every night of his dunks and flashy moves, even though he didn’t get to play that
much.”
Two weeks later, on September 12, 1984, the Bulls announced Jordan’s
signing to a seven-year, $6 million deal, the third highest in league history,
behind those given to Houston big men Hakeem Olajuwon and Ralph Sampson.
It was by far the greatest deal ever offered a guard. “It took some give and take,”
Bulls partner Jonathan Kovler quipped. “We gave, and they took.”
Within days, other NBA agents would voice the opposite view. Why would
an obvious star like Jordan sign a contract that could stretch out for seven years
at inferior money? “It doesn’t make sense,” George Andrews, the agent for
Magic Johnson and Isiah Thomas, told the Southtown Economist. Agent Lee
Fentress said such a deal would seemingly guarantee trouble down the road as
the value of player contracts had already begun to increase dramatically.
“I don’t want to play God,” David Falk had said in announcing the deal.
“Michael and his mom and dad made the decision themselves.”
One key element was a “Love of the Game” clause that Jordan had insisted
upon. The standard NBA contract called for the agreement to be voided if the
player was injured in some activity other than a team-sanctioned one. Jordan
wanted the freedom to compete wherever and whenever he wanted with
impunity, as defined by his love of the game. The team made the concession in
light of the favorable terms the Jordan family had approved.
“My attorneys had some problems with the contract, but I didn’t,” Jordan told
reporters in Chicago. “I’m happy the negotiations are over, and I’m anxious to
start fitting in with the Bulls. It won’t be the Michael Jordan show. I’ll just be
part of the team.”
 Chapter 15

BLACK POWER

THE FIRST TIME officials from Nike met with Sonny Vaccaro, they wondered if
he might be a mob figure. He certainly looked the part, with his name, his
accent, and his mannerisms, and there was an air about him that suggested he
knew secrets, things regular people didn’t know. The same impression struck
Michael Jordan when he initially sat down with the pudgy Italian with the
droopy eyes. “I’m not sure I want to get mixed up with this shady kind of
element,” Jordan later admitted thinking.
Vaccaro privately chuckled at the awkwardness of it all. His close friends
were fairly sure that there was nothing the least bit criminal about him. But
Vaccaro never did much to dispute the impression that he was a mafioso. He sort
of liked the idea that people thought he was connected. In the business world,
any edge helped.
Besides, Vaccaro was indeed connected to any number of made men in
gaudy suits. But they were basketball coaches, not gangsters. America’s top
college coaches couldn’t really be sure about him either. They just knew that the
fat checks Vaccaro wrote them cleared. In basketball in 1978, you could buy
your way into a hell of a lot of good graces. Sonny Vaccaro would transform
Nike into living proof of that axiom.
Just looking at Vaccaro in his rumpled warm-up suits with a day’s shadow of
fuzz on his face made Billy Packer laugh. “It would be another thing if he was a
Wall Street executive or a Madison Avenue hotshot,” Packer said. “But that’s
not what he was. He was a guy from the streets. Basketball wasn’t there to let
him into its inner circle. So he operated outside the circle and became incredibly
successful for himself and the company.”
Vaccaro revolutionized the sport without ever really attempting to cover up
what he was: that friendly guy from Pittsburgh. Well, at least for half of the year.
The other half of the year he was from Vegas. If his goombah aura by itself
didn’t rattle people, then his Vegas connection did the trick. For half of each
year you could find Vaccaro hanging out at the seedy sports books in
establishments like the Aladdin or the Barbary Coast, where you could get odds
on just about anything. There he made part of his living on “commissions”
earned from placing football bets for “clients.” Hearing Vaccaro explain it made
it seem all the sketchier. He was also rumored to do a little gambling of his own.
He was a Runyonesque figure who stood out even in Vegas, a place with an
abundance of Runyonesque figures. It was said there that the closer it got to
kickoff time, the more you heard his name being paged over the loudspeakers in
the sports books.
That a character like Sonny Vaccaro could ever wind up working for a
company like Nike is better explained by what Vaccaro did with the other half of
each year, back in Pittsburgh. He was just twenty-four years old in 1964 when he
and college roommate Pat DiCesare founded the Dapper Dan Roundball Classic,
one of basketball’s first high-profile tournaments for all-star high school players.
They had developed it as a charitable event in Pittsburgh, but in a relatively short
time, Vaccaro discovered that his tournament satisfied a huge need by providing
a showcase for high school players to be seen by college coaches. The Dapper
Dan was soon drawing top players each year and top coaches, everyone from
John Wooden to Dean Smith.
That was the key to his influence, Vaccaro would tell anybody who would
listen. It was all about relationships. “The Dapper Dan gave me entrée,” he said,
looking back in 2012.
The tournament itself never netted more than about $3,000 in any given year,
but it was a gold mine in terms of connections. Vaccaro got friendly with all the
top coaches. His power came to mirror that of Five-Star’s Howard Garfinkel,
except that Vaccaro’s vision involved basketball marketing, whereas Garfinkel
focused on evaluating talent.
Drawing the top basketball celebrities to an event also meant drawing the top
media. By 1970, Sports Illustrated was reporting on Vaccaro’s game. “It was
impossible to turn around in the William Penn Hotel without bumping into one
coach or another looking for high school players in lobbies, hallways, coffee
shops, elevators, and occasionally under a potted palm,” the magazine’s Curry
Kirkpatrick wrote of the scene. “The ubiquitous group had converged on
Pittsburgh to watch the Dapper Dan Roundball Classic, an annual high school
All-Star game that in the six years of its existence has emerged as the best event
of its kind.”
It was immensely entertaining just to watch Vaccaro work a hotel lobby,
according to talent evaluator Tom Konchalski. “He had conversations going with
about eight different people at the same time in different parts of the lobby. John
Thompson had just been hired at Georgetown, and Jerry Tarkanian was still at
Long Beach State. Sonny Vaccaro knew everyone there. It was like he was
juggling coaches. There would be like thirty coaches in the lobby. He was
showing respect toward them and keeping conversation afloat with all thirty.”
By 1977, Vaccaro had grown bold enough to pay a call to Nike’s offices in
Portland, Oregon, to pitch his idea for a new shoe. Nike wasn’t interested, but
Rob Strasser, one of the company’s top executives, was fascinated by Vaccaro’s
relationships with all those coaches. Other Nike bosses wanted to have the FBI
run a background check on Vaccaro, but Strasser would have none of it.
He hired Vaccaro at $500 a month, put $30,000 more in his bank account,
and told him to go sign coaches to Nike endorsement contracts. “You have to
remember,” Vaccaro said. “At the time, Nike was just a $25 million company.”
It was an easy play for Vaccaro. He’d sign the coaches to a simple Nike
contract, write them a check, and send them free shoes for their players to wear.
He began signing coaches in bunches, including John Thompson at Georgetown,
Jerry Tarkanian, who had just taken the job at UNLV, Jim Valvano at Iona, and
George Raveling at Washington State.
“You got to remember back in those days $5,000 was a lot of money to a
coach,” Packer recalled. “I just got glimpses of that stuff. Only Sonny knows
how much he paid coaches.”
To the coaches, it seemed almost too good to be true. “Let me get this
straight,” Jim Valvano supposedly said. “You’re going to give me free shoes and
pay me money? Is this legal?”
It was essentially basketball’s version of payola. It was legal, but the ethics of
it raised eyebrows. The main idea was simple enough, to get coaches to outfit
their amateur players in Nike shoes, sending a strong message to fans and
consumers. When Indiana State’s Larry Bird appeared on the cover of Sports
Illustrated in 1978 in a pair of Nikes, it was a huge boost to Vaccaro’s
credibility. He had snared the ultimate payoff for his new “client.”
The company’s sales soared, and soon Strasser was depositing another
$90,000 in Vaccaro’s bank account with a directive to sign more coaches. When
the Washington Post wrote an article questioning the ethics of Nike’s approach,
company executives braced for a blast of negative publicity. Instead, they mostly
received inquiries from coaches wanting a piece of the action. Vaccaro had
unleashed a tide of cash into American amateur basketball. Soon shoe companies
were not only underwriting college coaches and their teams, but they also moved
into youth basketball. “It has changed the game,” Tom Konchalski said of the
payola that Vaccaro pioneered. “Now kids twelve and under playing AAU
basketball, they think they’ve made it.”

The Vision

By 1982, Vaccaro was paying out millions in Nike money to college coaches.
He was a guest of John Thompson that year at the Final Four in New Orleans
when he was struck with his next great idea. He saw that while James Worthy
had been named the Most Outstanding Player, it was Michael Jordan who had
stolen the show. “Something happened,” Vaccaro said of Jordan’s shot to beat
Georgetown, “in front of the world.” A star had been born.
Vaccaro didn’t know Michael Jordan. Dean Smith was under contract to
endorse Converse shoes, which his Tar Heels wore in games. Jordan himself
loved all things Adidas. He especially liked the shoes because you could just pop
them out of the box and they were ready to wear. You didn’t have to break them
in. He wore Adidas shoes in practice, then dutifully donned Converse for games.
Vaccaro believed that Jordan’s charisma was going to make him a great force in
marketing. He wanted Nike to sign Jordan to a contract and build a product line
around him. Vaccaro made that known to Rob Strasser and other Nike officials
in a January 1984 meeting. At the time, Jordan was still a junior and had not yet
decided to skip his senior season.
Company executives had a $2.5 million budget for pro basketball shoe
endorsements and were thinking about spreading it among several young
players, including Auburn’s Charles Barkley, whose style of play and offbeat
charisma had brought him recognition, and Sam Bowie, who would be drafted
by Portland, so close that he was almost on Nike’s “campus” in Oregon. It made
sense to spread the Nike budget across the array of interesting young players in
the very deep 1984 draft. “Don’t do that,” Vaccaro told Strasser. “Give it all to
the kid. Give it all to Jordan.”
He went into something of a rant about Jordan’s appeal, how he was the
figure to drive athletic shoe marketing to a new level. Most important of all,
Vaccaro went on, Jordan was the best player he had ever seen.
Jordan could fly, Vaccaro told Strasser.
In that era, many pro basketball shoe endorsement contracts ran less than
$10,000. Only one player, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of the Los Angeles Lakers, was