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 ju
nior 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.”
Michael Jordan Page 14