Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  Jordan did get into the lineup in a big game that first year. Two of the team’s catchers couldn’t play when Neher’s undefeated team was facing another undefeated club sponsored by Mutual of Omaha. Jordan talked the coach into letting him catch, despite the fact that his throws from behind the plate could only reach second base on the hop. “Mike said, ‘Coach, I’ll catch.’ He was so little and skinny, but he had huge hands,” Neher recalled. “I said, ‘Come on, Rabbit, there ain’t no way. You can’t get the ball to second base. That’s 128 feet down to that bag.’ He said, ‘Coach, I’ll do it.’ That’s the kind of kid he was.”

  One of Neher’s assistant coaches suggested they teach Jordan how to “skip hop” the ball accurately to second base on the bounce. The assistant coach told Jordan to throw the ball tight, just over the pitcher’s head. Jordan picked up the technique right away. He delivered the ball low on the bounce, right where the second baseman could put a tag on a sliding runner.

  Neher recalled warm-ups before the big game that day: “We were taking infield, and the Mutual players were all standing by the fence watching. When they saw Jordan throw on the bounce, they started laughing. They went crazy and started razzing him, ‘Oh, look at that spaghetti arm. We’re gonna run on you tonight, Mr. Spaghetti Arm.’ Mike flipped up his catcher’s mask and looked at them. He grinned and said, ‘You run and I will gun.’ We all laughed. That was funny. In the second inning, they sent a man and Mike threw him out. They sent three or four. Mike threw ’em out, and they quit running. We laughed about that. After the game, Mike said, ‘I told you I could do it.’ ”

  Many years later, in Chicago, Jordan would confide to Bulls assistant coach Johnny Bach that the circumstances were difficult, that he felt a sense of isolation and pain as one of two black players on his youth baseball teams. In all of Neher’s thirty-seven years of coaching he had only three black players on his teams, including Jordan. “That’ll give you a feeling for how it was,” the coach said. “I got the NAACP on me because I didn’t have any blacks on my team. Generally, you’d go out there and see a twelve-man squad, and only one would be black. I told the NAACP it was hard if you got 250 kids trying out for the league and there are only three black kids among them.”

  For his first two years in the Babe Ruth League, Jordan had Terry Allen as his only black teammate. His last year in the league, his only black teammate was Clyde Simmons, who would go on to a career as an All-Pro defensive end for the Philadelphia Eagles. If anything, perhaps the numbers emphasized the Jordan family’s great pains to include their son in a game that was overwhelmingly white. When his teams traveled about the region playing games that required overnight stays, Jordan would be placed with local black families. The situation allowed him to meet people and make friends, but the circumstances were clearly awkward. The Jordans never expressed any negative feeling about the racial makeup of the teams. “There was never any resentment from Mike that I ever saw,” Neher said.

  The coach recalled the team practicing one evening on a field in a rough neighborhood. During the practice two men went into the dugout and started rummaging through the team’s cooler. Neher asked the men to stop, and they responded with threats and curses. Someone from the team went to phone the police, and while the players waited, Jordan used the “N” word in referring to the two men, Neher recalled. The moment reflected the difficulty of the situation. Youth baseball, the largely white game, found itself in awkward circumstances, practicing on the only available fields in predominantly black neighborhoods in an era when racial animosity still ran high. It’s only logical that an adolescent Jordan might have trouble negotiating identity issues in that context.

  That winter, over several days in late January 1977, ABC aired the award-winning miniseries Roots, author Alex Haley’s saga about the African American experience and the inhumanity of slavery. Jordan was transfixed and profoundly moved by the story. “It was hundreds of years of pain that they put us through, and for the first time, I saw it from watching Roots,” he explained years later. “I was very ignorant about it initially, but I really opened my eyes about my ancestors and the things that they had to deal with.”

  He hadn’t had any overwhelming personal experience with racism, he would explain later. But the knowledge of America’s ugly past was so infuriating, it occupied his mind. Everywhere he turned there were things he hadn’t noticed before, things that only raised more questions about racism and injustice and how it affected his own family.

  The Hunt Club

  The boys from the whites-only Wallace Hunting Club would remember the face decades later, even those who had no idea he was the great-grandfather of a legend. Dawson Jordan, the hunt club cook, made that kind of impression. He was the old man with the crutch who walked with startling quickness, always teetering on the brink of disaster that never materialized, the master who somehow turned out sumptuous meals. And who could forget those biscuits? He wore overalls and an apron and always sported a gray stubble of beard on his deeply wrinkled face. But mostly it was the sadness in his tired, bloodshot eyes that struck them. The countenance suggested a hard life.

  “It was a rough-looking face,” remembered Mike Taylor, who came to the hunt club with his father each week. “Dawson Jordan was indeed a colorful man and beloved for his crusty character as well as his food by the members of the Wallace Hunting Club.”

  Ken Roberts, who also spent his boyhood there, was first struck by Dawson’s kindness. One of the first times they met, Roberts asked how he should address the older gentleman. “He told me just to call him Dawson,” Roberts recalled.

  The club was little more than a rundown barracks that sat on a vast parcel of rented land above the Northeast Cape Fear River in Pender County. Later it would be torn down and replaced with another structure and then abandoned altogether. “The clubhouse would be considered a ramshackle, filthy place by today’s standards,” explained Mike Taylor. “I remember a long, one-story clapboard structure, rather low-slung and hardly off the ground, in need of painting, with a porch that ran the length on the front. Inside were common sleeping areas filled with bunks and metal single beds, with a dining room featuring a long table. I think Dawson cooked on a woodstove.”

  It was the kind of place where even the screen doors needed repair. That fact sticks out because one of the hunting dogs that always seemed to be lying about the yard went through the torn screen one Saturday and stole a hog’s head from the kitchen that Dawson was planning on cooking and turning into one of his mysterious delights.

  The primary figure in the operation of the hunt club was Robert Carr, known as “Mr. Robert” to all those who dealt with him. He was a presence in Pender County, where he owned an oil distributorship and served as chairman of the North Carolina Game and Wildlife Commission. Carr could be overbearing, but he held a fierce affection for Dawson Jordan. Their relationship was just one of those paradoxes left over from an earlier time.

  “Mr. Dawson was real good to Mr. Robert, and Mr. Robert was real good to Mr. Dawson,” explained Ken Roberts, adding that Carr’s respect for Jordan set the tone for the rest of the members of the club. “Everybody respected Mr. Dawson. Didn’t nobody mess with him because Robert Carr would have had their ass.”

  Roberts recalled, “Mr. Robert would pick him up and carry him down to the hunt club every Wednesday. Even when it wasn’t deer season they’d go down each Wednesday. They just enjoyed getting away.”

  The two men would ride out North Carolina Highway 50 to the club, where they’d prepare for the usual gathering, a good ol’ boy funfest of eating, drinking, telling tales, and even doing a little hunting and fishing every now and then.

  Jordan’s legendary meals were highlights of the experience. “The breakfast was traditional Southern fare with country ham, biscuits, gravy, eggs, grits, and other dishes full of salt, butter, and fatback for seasoning,” Mike Taylor recalled. “I’m sure the lunch was equally as delicious and unhealthy. There was coffee, but men also brought
their own liquor, which was freely consumed as well.”

  The boys at the hunt club, much like Dawson’s own family, wondered at all the work he did while hobbling around the club’s kitchen and dining room. “I recall being concerned how he could possibly prepare that meal, clean the dishes, and do all that work,” Taylor remembered. “I think I asked my dad if he had any help, and he replied they pitched in to get the food to the table. It was served family style, with big bowls and platters passed around the long table.”

  Ken Roberts, who was about ten at the time, also recalled being concerned about how much work the crippled old man had to do to cook for the gathering, so he made every attempt to help him with the chores, getting the jars of molasses on the table each morning and helping with the dishes.

  “I’d get up in the morning, it would be cold as hell,” Roberts remembered. “Mr. Dawson would be lighting the stove. He was a quiet man, but he kind of took to me because I was one of the youngest down there.”

  Roberts recalled one unforgettable day that brought “the first cusswords I ever heard.” Robert Carr was entertaining the other members of the state Game and Wildlife Commission at the hunt club. These were men of success and community standing from all across North Carolina, all seated at the long table waiting for Jordan to bring out one of his famous meals.

  “Every meal was biscuits,” Roberts said. “No matter what he was serving, there were biscuits.”

  Jordan was coming out of the kitchen with a steaming plate of biscuits fresh from the oven when he suddenly stumbled and spilled them all across the club’s well-trafficked hardwood floor. For a moment, the group sat in silence. “Then Mr. Robert said, ‘Dawson, put them biscuits on the table.’ This was a gathering of distinguished city guys,” Roberts explained. “Mr. Robert looked around the table and said, ‘These are Dawson’s biscuits. Anybody who doesn’t eat one is a son of a bitch.’ Those biscuits disappeared. They ate ’em all.”

  When he wasn’t cooking, Dawson Jordan retreated to an adjacent small building, what appeared to be a former tobacco pack house, where he slept. Roberts, who would sometimes visit with him there, said, “I can remember in that little room he had an old-style feather bed. There was a small oil lamp and a little stove. He was always sitting on his bed reading. He didn’t socialize with those folks at the hunt club a lot. He was just a nice fellow, but he probably wasn’t too keen on spending a lot of time with the white people there.”

  That late winter of 1977, three short weeks after Michael had watched the TV series Roots, his great-grandfather died in Teachey, just months short of his eighty-sixth birthday. From resting in his sweet mother’s arms as a baby in Holly Shelter to rafting logs on the great river, to struggling behind the plow and moving silently on a still Carolina night to deliver moonshine, to feeding the hungry folks at the Wallace Hunting Club, Dawson Jordan had survived much. In the process, he’d managed to build a family that would somehow find a way to endure the harshest blows that the dark recesses of human behavior could deliver, even in the context of great wealth and fame. His grandchildren and great-grandchildren would long treasure their time spent in his commanding presence, and Dawson Jordan had affected the people at the Wallace Hunting Club as well. Ken Roberts recalled his family being struck in 1977 by the news of Dawson’s passing. “I remember my granddaddy telling me that Dawson had died,” he said. “It was a big thing to him.”

  The Jordan family wept freely that day. His great-grandfather had been well aware of Michael’s exploits on the baseball field, but his fame in basketball had yet to unfold. That, in itself, would prove a thing of wonder for the members of the hunt club and the people of Pender County. “I remember when MJ made it big,” Ken Roberts said with a laugh. “My father-in-law said, ‘Ol’ Dawson would have loved to see that.’ ”

  The deep sadness the whole family felt at Dawson’s passing perhaps reinforced Michael’s newly discovered racial anger. He didn’t know every detail of his grandfather’s life, but he had only to look at the pain deep in the old man’s face to get an idea of how troubled his restless journey had been and of the many senseless barriers he had been forced to endure.

  Later that year, a girl at school called Michael a “nigger.”

  “I threw a soda at her,” he recalled. “It was a very tough year. I was really rebelling. I considered myself a racist at that time. Basically, I was against all white people.”

  Jordan was suspended for the incident. But rather than let him spend his days at home, his mother required that he sit in her car in the parking lot of the bank where she worked, so that she could keep an eye on him from the teller’s window. That way she could make sure he was doing his schoolwork and staying out of trouble. Michael was furious, and years later he would joke with her that the situation presented an obvious case of child abuse. Yet Deloris got her message across. Over the course of the following months, she talked time and again about the wasted energy of bitterness and racial anger, how destructive they could be to a young boy. It wasn’t about forgetting but about forgiving, she said.

  It would take more than a year for the message to sink in and the feelings to subside. “The education came from my parents,” Jordan recalled. “You have to be able to say, OK, that happened back then. Now let’s take it from here and see what happens. It would be very easy to hate people for the rest of your life, and some people have done that. You’ve got to deal with what’s happening now and try to make things better.”

  In shaping her son’s attitude, Deloris Jordan was drawing on her own experience coming of age on the Coastal Plain. But it was much more than that. She was so focused on the future, on the positive, on achieving, that she would let neither infuriating social injustice nor her daughter’s heartbreaking allegations of abuse stand in the way. She had no time for a single issue, no matter how grave, that didn’t involve betterment. Stopping for anything meant certain defeat to Deloris Jordan. Having tasted such disappointment early in her own life, she was not about to be defeated again.

  Here It Comes

  In March 1977, Jordan watched the University of North Carolina’s twisting run through the NCAA basketball tournament on TV but wouldn’t allow himself to be impressed. He would admit later that, as an NC State fan, he absolutely despised the Tar Heels.

  Still, it was a spellbinding moment for college basketball fans as network television discovered the potent chemistry of what would come to be known as March Madness. The attention certainly had something to do with the fact that the dunk returned to college ball that season after being outlawed for nine years, dating back to the Lew Alcindor era at UCLA. There was likely another instinctive reason young Michael disliked the Tar Heels. Just as dunking was set to electrify crowds again, Dean Smith and North Carolina made the four corners slowdown offense famous—or infamous.

  That tournament had the state of North Carolina smeared all over it, thicker than barbecue sauce. Upstart UNC–Charlotte, led by Cedric “Cornbread” Maxwell, upset Michigan in the Mideast Regionals, putting two teams from the same state in the Final Four. North Carolina eventually met Marquette for the national championship. The Tar Heels were led by point guard Phil Ford, who competed despite an injured elbow, but he couldn’t shoot and was no help against Marquette’s zone. Dean Smith was denied a championship yet again, having made it to the Final Four five times without winning the title. Jordan gleefully watched the game on TV with his family. “My mom liked Phil Ford, but I couldn’t stand him or any of them Carolina guys,” he recalled. “I rooted for Marquette in the ’77 championship game. My mom got mad.”

  That spring and summer, a fourteen-year-old Jordan started every game for Dick Neher’s Babe Ruth League baseball team, but the magic he had known as a twelve-year-old never returned. “I couldn’t play him at shortstop,” Neher recalled. “He couldn’t make the throws. Occasionally I’d put him at third base. I played him at first base. I’d play him left field. He would pitch. When he was fourteen, he was in the rotation to pitch.
He’d pitch every couple or three games.”

  However, his pitching was no longer dominant. And at the plate, his bat speed wasn’t quite there. “He hit .270, .275 that year,” Neher said. “That was the highest he ever had for me. Usually in a youth league, you’d see kids hit .380, .400, that kind of stuff. Mike could hit. He was dependable. He’d be probably one of your better .230 hitters. He was an integral part of what we did. But he was never the star in Babe Ruth that he was at Little League. He played for me for three years and he never made an all-star team.”

  In the fall of 1977, Jordan entered D. C. Virgo Middle School, where he quickly became an early morning fixture in the gymnasium. Staff member Dave Allen would open up the facility each day and soon noticed Jordan’s leaping ability and his tongue sticking out as he went to the basket. “Son, I’m afraid that you’re going to bite it off,” Allen told him. Sure enough, about a week later, a bloodied Jordan appeared in the principal’s office. Allen asked if it was the tongue. Jordan could only nod.

  One of his partners in these preseason sessions was Harvest Leroy Smith. At almost six feet seven, it was his height against Jordan’s quickness in their one-on-one battles. “He and I practiced every day together and he always had to win. If it was a game of Horse and you beat him, you would have to play another game until he won,” Smith recalled. “You didn’t go home until he had won.”

  Jordan, then just over five feet seven, found many ways to get to the basket. “You’d see him get a shot off, and you’d wonder how he did it, because he wasn’t that big,” Smith said, “but it was the quickness. The only question was how big he was going to be—and how far up he would take his skill level.”