Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  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.