In a few short years, Gibbons would become known as one of the high priests of high school basketball talent, but at the time his publication had a small readership. Cremins’s raving about an unknown player, one who hadn’t even played a varsity game, piqued Gibbons’s interest, so he drove over to Appalachian State to take a look for himself.
“I saw a six-three player with explosive athletic ability,” Gibbons told writer Al Featherston. “But what impressed me was what Michael said when Bobby introduced him to me—‘Mr. Gibbons, what do I need to do better to be a better player?’ ”
Cremins and Gibbons weren’t the only surprised observers. Jordan’s own teammates would later recall witnessing a startling transformation. “He comes back for junior year, he’s a different guy, no longer skinny little Mike,” remembered Todd Parker, a Laney teammate. “He’s jumping out of the gym. I’m like, ‘What?’ ”
“I could see a real big difference,” agreed Mike Bragg, a senior on the Laney varsity at the time. “He was much more determined, and he had more ability.”
Gibbons didn’t know any background about this transformation, but he made note of Jordan’s potential in his next report, the scout recalled. “I wrote about what a good prospect he was, but I only had a couple of hundred readers and a small regional audience.”
“I certainly wasn’t the one people were talking about,” Jordan said of his time that summer at Appalachian State. “No one knew me that much.”
Pop Herring, though, took note of the interest in Jordan and was pleased. It confirmed his belief that he was about to coach someone very special. Herring was not given to braggadocio, but the record speaks remarkably well of his actions despite Jordan’s obsession with “the cut.” There is nothing to indicate that Herring thought about how he might exploit this singular talent, as coaches were often known to do. The record does show that Herring took every opportunity to expand the youthful Jordan’s options. In fact, the coach would deftly manage his player’s recruitment by colleges, which got off to a very slow start, then blew up almost overnight.
In the fall of 1979, before the storm, Herring sat down and composed a letter seeking interest in Jordan from the University of North Carolina coaching staff. Not every high school coach took an interest in the future of his players, and it was extremely rare for a coach to write such a letter before a player had even participated in a varsity game. But that’s what Herring did, along with rising early each weekday morning to pick up Jordan at six thirty to work on his game.
“He had a weakness with his left hand,” Herring once recalled. “I told him to improve with the left hand and work on shooting off the dribble.”
The early-morning sessions focused on those things and on getting up as many shots as possible. So much of Jordan’s later success was seeded in the extraordinary efforts of the young coach. From several accounts, Herring and Jordan would become quite close, but never close enough to allow Jordan to forget his rejection as a sophomore. Thinking back on all those early mornings in the Laney gym, Jordan would recall, “Whenever I was working out and got tired and figured I ought to stop, I’d close my eyes and see that list in the locker room without my name on it, and that usually got me going again.”
That fall, Herring called Jordan into his office to consult about a jersey number for the upcoming season. He gave the junior a choice of two numbers: James Beatty’s 23 or Dave McGhee’s 33, the team’s two all-district seniors who had graduated.
Apparently something of a numerologist, Jordan decided he’d like to wear Beatty’s 23. Years later he explained that he made the selection because 23 was close to half of 45, a number that his brother Larry had worn. Before he would be done, coaches across basketball would come to understand the number as a sign. Whether in AAU play or public school leagues or even a recreation contest for ten-year-olds, coaches began to figure that anyone bold enough to wear 23 must deserve extra defensive attention.
Likewise, future generations of the best young players would vie to wear the number 23 and take on the pressure and expectation that came with it. For Jordan, the number would soon enough become a signature that would brand everything from his line of boutiques to the sky-blue personal jet that he used to hop about the planet from one exclusive resort to another in search of the perfect golf round.
The first sizzling moment in his emergence that varsity season happened to come in a road game in Pender County, of all places. There, before a collection of family, friends, and distant cousins, he scored 35 points to carry Laney to an 81–79 overtime win in the first game of the season. His family, his teammates, his coaches, even Jordan himself—all were taken aback by the display.
From there, his pent-up emotion and frustration erupted game after game as he took off on a high-octane spin through everything he had dreamed about. The early ferocity just leapt at anyone watching. Time and again, as he attacked the basket, his mouth would fly open like the intake valve on a dragster, sucking in air along the way with enough g-force to pin his lips high on his gums, his exposed teeth flared vampire-like as if he were about to devour the rim itself. The tongue popped out for no other reason than to get out of the way of it all. He did this over and over while charging the basket. His visage alone was enough to give defenders pause. And when he took rebounds, he rose up and snatched the ball with the same ferocity. His quickness off the floor left teammates and opponents alike agape. He presented a physical challenge that quickly separated him from the boys around him. A select few took on the challenge of rising up with him, but many simply resorted to principle-of-verticality poses, throwing their arms straight up and hoping for the best.
Among the many who took notice was Mike Brown, the athletic director of New Hanover County schools. He had been wowed by Jordan’s opening salvos as a varsity player, so much so that he contacted Bill Guthridge, Dean Smith’s top assistant at the University of North Carolina, and told him there was an exceptional young guard in Wilmington that he needed to see. Like that, the seed was planted.
The Laney lineup also included Leroy Smith in the post and senior Mike Bragg at guard. Another guard/forward was senior Adolph Shiver, whom Jordan had gotten to know a few years earlier on the courts at Wilmington’s Empie Park. Shiver was a chippy sort, always talking trash with a toothpick hanging out of his mouth, Jordan recalled. While Shiver’s behavior frequently annoyed others, he seemed mostly to amuse Jordan with the constant chatter and trash talking, much as the court jester might entertain the king. One time, Jordan threw Shiver up against a wall after Shiver insulted David Bridgers’s sweetheart, but there was something in Shiver’s edginess that endeared him to Jordan. It also seems likely that Shiver’s presence and attitude brought Jordan some street cred in high school. In turn, Shiver fed off of Jordan’s vast energy, as did everyone on the Laney varsity, even the coaches.
The two began a friendship that carried far into adult life. The bond between them began with Jordan finding Shiver reliable as a teammate. Time would reveal Jordan to be steadfastly loyal to the tight circle of friends he accumulated in his life. Shiver was merely the first to pass the audition. Jordan would come to accept some questionable behavior from his friends, but not disloyalty. Trust was a precious commodity for Jordan, and he would establish a bond of trust with Shiver that first varsity season. By Jordan’s Chicago days, Shiver would be in the hotel suites on the nights before big games, dealing hands of tonk to help relax his old pal.
The Buccaneers got another win in their second game, with Jordan exploding for 29 points, this time at home, but then came the inevitable wake-up call. Southern Wayne had a team that featured two of Jordan’s future college teammates—big man Cecil Exum and point guard Lynwood Robinson—both considered blue-chip players at the time. Against Laney, Robinson scored 27 and Exum 24. Jordan’s 28 points raised yet more eyebrows, but his dazzling performance didn’t prevent the loss. Southern Wayne embarrassed the Buccaneers, 83–58.
Herring could only whistle afterward. “It’l
l help us playing somebody this good,” he said, trying to put a positive spin on the drubbing. “Jordan is just a junior, and we’ll all get better as the season goes on. We have to regroup. We got spanked tonight.”
Laney looked better three nights later, with Jordan and Leroy Smith ripping down rebounds and powering out on the fast break. Michael’s 24 points led Laney past crosstown rival Hoggard, with help from brother Larry, who came off the bench to score 6. The older Jordan would have his moments during the season, but he also spent a lot of time sitting and simply admiring the player his kid brother was becoming. “We played one year of varsity basketball together when I was a senior and Michael was a junior, and that’s when his play just went to another level,” Larry would recall later. “Even though there were five guys on the floor, he pretty much played all five positions. His level of play was just so much higher than the rest of us. People ask me all the time if it bothered me, but I can honestly say no, because I had the opportunity to see him grow. I knew how hard he worked.”
Despite the intensity of their earlier sibling rivalry, Larry proved to be another remarkable element in Michael’s good fortune. His fundamental decency and patience evidenced itself in the absence of drama on the Laney varsity. Not many high school seniors could tolerate sitting on the bench night after night watching a younger sibling rival grab the public’s attention.
In fact, all of the family would be caught off guard by Michael’s suddenly elevated status, even James and Deloris. “I remember going to Laney High on a Friday night, Michael’s junior year, and now he’d grown,” James’s younger brother, Gene Jordan, would later recall. “Before the game he’s telling me, ‘Watch me, I’m going to slam dunk three balls tonight. You’ll see. I’m going to slam three.’ And I’m there saying, ‘Boy, who you kiddin’? You can’t slam no ball.’ Well, he didn’t slam three, but he sure as hell slammed two. And I told my brother that night, ‘Hey, that boy is devastating.’ ”
A few other keen observers agreed. “Laney’s top player has been Mike Jordan,” Chuck Carree noted in the Wilmington paper on December 18. A night later Jordan scored 31 in a win over Kinston and earned his first headline: JORDAN PACES BUCS PAST KINSTON. With the early wins, Laney’s record stood at 4–1, and Herring grew even more optimistic.
“This is the best defensive team in my tenure here at Laney,” Herring declared. The defensive success depended partly on Jordan’s ability to get into the passing lanes and his attention to rebounding. He played wing on offense but played a mix of guard and forward on defense, thanks to his quickness and recovery speed. Like his idol Magic Johnson, he spent much time around the basket defensively, with the idea of collecting rebounds and quickly getting the ball back up the court.
Years later, he would look back with amusement on the explosion of his raw power in high school. The unbridled nature of the experience showed him the kinds of things he could do athletically, things about which even the best coaches had no earthly concept.
As basketball evolved, another theme began to emerge: The sport, more than any other, furthered the process of whites understanding and coming to terms with the rise of black athletes. This process had begun during the first years of integration, well before Jordan appeared on the scene. But in those first decades of racial collaboration in basketball, many white coaches had a limited understanding of the athletic style of play that had developed in black communities. The only way coaches could learn it was to witness it in action.
In high school and, later, at the University of San Francisco in the 1950s, coaches had cautioned Bill Russell not to leave his feet to block opponents’ shots. Russell tried it their way briefly, then followed what his instincts told him—to rise up and block shots like no one ever had.
“We were born to play like we do,” Jordan would later observe in a conversation with writer John Edgar Wideman. “Can’t teach it.”
Of all the coaches Jordan played for, only the first two were African American. Fred Lynch and Pop Herring were able to sit and watch Jordan explore the range of his special athleticism in those high school years. They did so without sounding excessive alarms about his violation of one or another of the game’s fundamentals. Lynch and Herring worked with him on basketball’s basics and helped him channel his unique athleticism. Herring would show him how to maximize his quickness in his first step, with a move that would later prompt college officials to call traveling violations on him at North Carolina, until Dean Smith was able to demonstrate that Jordan was not using an extra step.
The record shows that Herring spent much time talking to Jordan and his teammates about shot selection and the tempo at which they would play, just as he focused on their defensive unity. Jordan made such talks easy, assistant coach Ron Coley remembered. “Nobody ever had that kid’s drive, even in high school. He took pride in his defense. Mike was furious if his teammates didn’t play good defense in practice.”
As much as he praised his team, Herring was pointedly limited in his public commentary about Jordan in those early months. Nor did the coach talk about the letters he wrote or his work with the young player those early mornings in the gym. So many coaches viewed their teams and players in terms of their own professional resumes, but Herring kept his efforts to himself. They would become known only much later, mostly from Jordan’s recollections. Little did Herring know it at the time, but Jordan’s moment would be his own brief moment. The coach’s actions were not perfect, but in retrospect, they were clearly extraordinary. Herring was enthusiastic but restrained in most of his efforts with his inexperienced team that season.
Considering Jordan’s height and leaping ability, most coaches would have kept him inside, near the basket or working along the baseline. While Jordan worked all over the floor, Herring played him mostly at guard. “Pop gave him the opportunity to play the position he was going to play in college and the pros,” New Hanover coach Jim Hebron observed. “If Pop had played him inside or on the baseline, he might have won the state title.”
The Spreading Word
Two days after Christmas, Laney opened play in the Star-News–New Hanover Invitational, which Herring’s team had won the previous season. The event pitted local schools against talent from as far away as New York. Up first for Laney was Wadesboro-Bowman, a team that had traveled from south-central North Carolina. “We had heard about him,” Wadesboro coach Bill Thacker recalled in 2011. “Some of our kids thought they could play like Michael Jordan, but they weren’t up to the task.”
In particular, his team featured an athletic player named Tim Sterling, Thacker recalled. “He thought he could match MJ dunk for dunk. It was really a neat game, going up and down.”
The teams traded blows at a furious pace, driven by Laney’s pressing and trapping. With six minutes left and Laney leading 46–44, Herring called a time-out to give his players a breather and to remind them to focus on good shots down the stretch. The one thing that had worried him in their early wins was his team’s tendency to get out of control. The game tightened a bit and stood at 48 all with 3:47 to go. Having gained their poise, Jordan and his teammates once again turned up their defensive energy and shot off on an 18–2 run that closed it out, 66–50. “Our kids turned in a good defensive effort all night, and it was really good down the stretch,” Herring said afterward. Particularly Jordan.
“He had a lot of energy, a lot of energy,” Thacker recalled.
Those late-game expectations failed to pay off in the semifinals the next day against Holy Cross, a team that had driven fifteen hours from Flushing, New York. Laney was up by 6 midway through the fourth period and led 51–47 with two minutes to go. But Jordan missed two free throws with 45 seconds on the clock, which allowed Holy Cross to tie it. Jordan got an open look at the buzzer but again missed, and from there Holy Cross got control in overtime and won, 65–61.
Afterward, Herring was quite angry. “They’re supposed to do a job,” he complained to a reporter. “We had a meeting about it.”
Whatever his purpose, the move backfired on Herring. His team plummeted through five straight losses over the next three weeks, although the setbacks weren’t without highlights. Jordan scored 40 against powerful Goldsboro and Anthony Teachey, who would later star for Wake Forest. Teachey blocked 17 Laney shots that night, which left Herring shaking his head after the 72–64 loss.
“Teachey was just unbelievable,” he said. “Blocking 17 shots is unbelievable.”
Perhaps the backstory helps to explain Jordan’s 40-point outburst that night. At sixteen, he was dating a girl from Goldsboro, about two hours northwest of Wilmington, which meant overnight trips to visit her. The girlfriend, Laquetta Robinson, lived in Teachey’s neighborhood, so the Goldsboro star had encountered Jordan from time to time. “He was seeing a girl, a classmate of mine, so he knew people here in Goldsboro,” Teachey recalled in a 2012 interview. “He would come to Goldsboro a lot.”
Even then, Jordan had a certain air about him, Teachey remembered. “He kept things close. He carried that aura about him. He carried that with him on the court, too. If he didn’t know you, he was not going to hang out with you off the court. If he didn’t know you, he wasn’t going to hold a conversation with you.”
Michael Jordan Page 10