“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 hi
s 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 dire
ction.
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.
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