Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  This listening made Smith realize that the freshman, despite all the concern about his strong personality and the woofing, was the lead candidate to replace Al Wood. “My greatest skill was being teachable,” Jordan later observed. “I was like a sponge. Even if I thought my coaches were wrong, I tried to listen and learn something.”

  This was something that the legion of imitators that would follow him in basketball would overlook. They believed their great skills and physical gifts elevated them above the game. That was never Jordan’s assumption. That attitude would find its first great test that freshman year.

  The Cover

  Jordan was slowed by injuries as the season neared but remained the obvious leading candidate to start. North Carolina entered the season as the top-ranked team in the polls, and Sports Illustrated wanted to pose the starting five on the cover of its college basketball preview issue. Word had continued to grow about Jordan, driven by the reports of his playground feats. He had done things in practice that fall, particularly once when he challenged a double-team by Worthy and Perkins, that made coaches and teammates alike step back in awe. With the bubbly Roy Williams on the staff, those types of things were always going to leak out. Having heard the talk, the Sports Illustrated photo editors wanted Jordan included in the cover shot, but Smith refused. There was no way he was going to allow someone who had never played a minute for North Carolina to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

  “He was not a factor in all the usual promotion and everything at the start of that season,” Billy Packer recalled. “Probably a lot of it done at Dean’s direction. Today freshmen have become very big in college basketball. But back then that wasn’t the case.”

  Appearing on the Sports Illustrated cover and being touted in the preseason media blitz would excite any young athlete. Jordan was deeply offended that he couldn’t join the others on the cover. It was his first real collision with the Smith approach.

  Yet as infuriated as Jordan could get about such things, he never allowed himself even a nanosecond of petulance. It was as if the slights were absorbed into the great black hole of his soul, to rest there as a mass of pure energy. No one would be more astounded by this than roommate Buzz Peterson. Since meeting at the summer camp, the two had become quite close. Peterson had wavered during his senior year in his plans to go to North Carolina. He appeared bent on signing with the University of Kentucky. Jordan phoned him and seemed deeply hurt that Peterson had forgotten their pact to room together as Tar Heels. Ultimately, Peterson gave in and signed with Carolina.

  As college roommates, the two continued to grow their friendship even though they were competing for the starting spot in Carolina’s lineup. Only over time would Peterson come to realize that despite their friendship, Jordan burned to prove the fallacy of Peterson’s selection as Mr. Basketball in North Carolina their senior year. Nor had Jordan forgotten what people in his hometown, even the teachers at Laney, had said about him sitting on the bench at Carolina. “A lot of my friends were putting me down for coming to Carolina,” he recalled. “They were telling me freshmen can’t play here. Even a couple of my teachers were on me about that, although they were State fans.”

  The entire fall had been about answering all those slights, real and imagined. In the process of proving that he belonged, Jordan soon won over the team’s veterans. “When you come to Carolina there are vicious running programs,” James Worthy explained. “There are three groups, A, B, and C. Usually A is for the quick guards, B is reserved for guys like Michael in that medium range, and then C is for the big guys. And you have certain times you have to make.” The shorter guards began teasing Jordan that he had it easier because midrange players had three more seconds to finish the run. “He asked Coach Smith to put him in A group and he just tore these guys up,” Worthy said. “So I saw it then.”

  Jordan didn’t want to be considered “just a freshman,” recalled Sam Perkins, a sophomore that year. “He caught on quickly. He was a freshman, and even though freshmen weren’t supposed to really play, this man out of Wilmington had to play.”

  While he missed two weeks of practice that fall with blood vessel issues in his ankle, he continued to hope. Smith agonized over the decision and waited until the very last moment to make known the fifth starter. The coach knew that competition was always good for team growth and involvement, so why end it early? The Tar Heels opened their season against Kansas in Charlotte, a game televised on a fledgling cable network named ESPN. Due to the time lost with his injury, Jordan had assumed he wouldn’t start. He counted on finding a role as a sixth or maybe even seventh man.

  “I was shocked when Coach Smith put my name on the blackboard to start our first game of the year,” he recalled.

  “Ten minutes before the game, one of the coaches came up and told us that Michael was going to start,” James Jordan said in an interview three years later. “We couldn’t believe it.”

  Jordan scored the first Carolina basket of the season—and of his college career—that day, a short jumper along the left baseline. ESPN’s Bucky Waters noted that the freshman starter for the Tar Heels had generated a buzz among fans, who compared him to both David Thompson and Walter Davis.

  Jordan would score in double figures for the first six games. He showed a steady jump shot right away and an uncanny knack for slipping into the gaps of the various zones that Carolina faced. Smith’s teams were known for moving the ball well, and the freshman showed he could hold his own in that regard. If there was any immediate criticism, it was that he seemed to pass up shots against the zones to try to push the ball inside. Yet that was the trademark of Smith’s teams, that they persisted in trying to get better shots, rather than settling for jumpers.

  As the nation’s top-ranked team, the Tar Heels were literally all over the map early that season. After the game in Charlotte and another against Southern Cal in Greensboro, they played two quick tune-ups in Carmichael Auditorium. Then it was off to New York for the holidays, playing Rutgers in Madison Square Garden the week before Christmas. There Jordan treated the crowd to two breakaway dunks among his 15 points. Two days after Christmas, the Tar Heels faced highly rated Kentucky in the Meadowlands. Once again, he seemed almost oblivious to the big-game pressure of a highly ranked opponent under the TV lights, as North Carolina took a confidence-building win. Afterward, they jetted to the West Coast, to play in the Cable Car Classic in Santa Clara, California, where they beat Penn State in overtime and pounded host Santa Clara.

  Determined to see every game, James and Deloris Jordan followed the dizzying whirlwind that was Carolina basketball. The travel expenses taxed their family finances severely, but they were transfixed by the unfolding fairy tale of their son’s life. They made sure, as always, to keep an appropriate distance. “Dean Smith really ran that ship as far as keeping control of the parents,” Art Chansky explained. “If any of the parents were getting out of line, Dean was great at controlling that. James Jordan was known as just a great guy, just real supportive of his son. He was always in the locker room after the games.”

  Some observers in and around the Carolina program did detect that James and Deloris weren’t always on the same page, but nobody articulated it because it wasn’t perceived as a problem. “Deloris, she was a rock,” Art Chansky explained. “Everybody said that from the first moment.” Just as everybody noted that James Jordan was no saint. Chansky observed, “Michael watched his father. He took that imprint. He took some of that edginess from James and for the most part he channeled it into becoming the most competitive player. You know, he was an assassin on the court.”

  The Jordans would see thirty-two of the thirty-four games he played that season, sometimes taking daughter Roslyn along. For home games, Larry would drive over from North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, where he was going to school.

  Despite the growing excitement in the voices of broadcasters of these early games, it was a relatively low-key introduction. Jordan was obviously precocious, but fears abou
t his abrasiveness had been laid to rest. His transition into the team proceeded smoothly as the trust of his coaches and teammates grew with each game. As Ralph Sampson would later contend, it had much to do with the context. “To come into a situation with veterans like James Worthy and Sam Perkins and Matt Doherty and Jimmy Black?” the Virginia center observed. “Those guys were very high-level players at that point. They were hungry to be really, really good. So you come in there as a freshman, and what are you going to do? You got to get on board and learn from those guys. You know I think he took a piece from everybody.”

  The team truly was ready-made, but the coaching staff had put together a roster that season that was surprisingly short of depth. They made up for this with a surfeit of good fortune. The season somehow rolled along without major injuries. In years past, with more talent on his roster, Smith had often been accused of over-substituting during games and killing his team’s momentum. This season, the depth would all but eliminate that question. The starters—Jordan, Perkins, Worthy, point guard Jimmy Black, and six-eight forward Matt Doherty—averaged between thirty-five and forty minutes per game. Perkins, another player destined to become an NBA first-round draft choice, was a willowy sophomore with an even temperament. Black was the efficient point guard, a low scorer but a glue man all the same. Doherty was the role player, good for defense and 9 points a game. All of them shot better than 50 percent from the floor.

  Jim Braddock, Buzz Peterson, and Cecil Exum contributed off the bench, but none averaged even 2 points per game. There was the traditional heavy focus on New York players in Black, Doherty, and Perkins. Worthy and Jordan were the native Carolinians in the lineup, but they hailed from the very different cultures at the opposite ends of the state.

  Worthy was an excellent team leader, steeped in all things Carolina. His respect for coaching and authority began with a devout mother and father from Gastonia, North Carolina, just past Charlotte. He had been coming to Smith’s summer camp since his early teens and had no inner conflict about the team’s purpose that season. At six feet nine, he offered rare quickness and open-court speed. No player his size in college basketball could stay with him. He was the kind of forward who could make a team dangerous in a half-court offense, or he could prove the perfect finisher in transition with his speed and hands. Smith’s systematic approach left room for his team to attack in transition, and the Tar Heels had the speed to get back and defend against almost any break.

  Most of all, basketball purists loved to watch Worthy work in the low post. There, it was usually over in a matter of seconds. “His first step is awesome,” observed Maurice Lucas, who would later guard him often in professional basketball.

  “He’ll give a guy two or three fakes, step through, then throw up the turnaround,” Lakers coach Pat Riley once explained. “It’s not planned.”

  Worthy and Perkins, the other frontcourt presence, drew much of the defensive attention in terms of zones and double-teams. Perkins was also six nine but with arms that seemed to extend forever, which allowed him to function exceptionally well as a college center. He was laconic, with a sleepy countenance that would earn him the nickname “Big Smooth” as a pro. Even at Carolina, he was plenty of that.

  Black and Doherty were role players. “For a team to be good you have to have people that aren’t trying to get their points,” Smith explained. “If Jimmy and Matt were thinking points we never would have been a great team. We would have been a good team, but wouldn’t have been a championship team. They knew their roles, and played them well. Everybody did.”

  Doherty, from Hicksville, New York, had been a big scorer in high school. Black was from the Bronx, where he played Catholic school ball and was all set to go to Iona to play for Jim Valvano in 1979 when he caught Bill Guthridge’s eye. The Carolina coaches could see that he couldn’t shoot too well, but they loved his ball handling, steady free-throw shooting, smarts, quickness, decision making, and ball-pressure abilities. Smith couldn’t hide his affection for Black. Time and again, the Carolina coaches offered the opinion that there would have been no magical 1982 season without their point guard.

  “I don’t know how integral I was,” Black would say later. “We all played well together, we enjoyed each other, we communicated well. I still go back to the total team effort.”

  As a sophomore, Black had lost his thirty-nine-year-old mother to heart failure. Then, just months later, he was injured in an auto crash that almost left him paralyzed. He battled through rehab to return for his junior year and opened practice that fall running in a neck brace. It was Black’s determination that carried them back to the brink of success as 1982 unfolded. It would be hard to imagine a Carolina player who enjoyed more respect.

  As for Jordan, his play was not quite explosive that season, but he showed considerable promise. He averaged 13.5 points a game and shot 53.4 percent from the field. Even so, Art Chansky pointed out that on that veteran team Jordan “was a complete role player. Look at who he played with.”

  “Many people don’t remember that even then Michael was inconsistent and had an up-and-down freshman year,” Smith recalled. The coaches constantly nudged Jordan to improve his passing and ball handling. They also offered pointers on his defense and tried to teach him to play without the ball in his hands, something he really hadn’t had to do very often in high school.

  Billy Packer didn’t see much of the expected pyrotechnics that first season. “In his freshman year, even up to the Final Four, you did not have any idea how good he was,” Packer remembered. “He did good things, but he didn’t control games. He didn’t explode offensively. He did what he was told to do within the system. He basically was a system player and I never saw him do the breakout things that we would see out of him later as a pro. I never saw him where you would say, ‘Holy mackerel.’ Obviously we now know he was going to be a good player. But when you started talking about Michael Jordan then, you never thought about him in the terms, ‘Yeah, he’s going to be an all-time player.’ Now that history’s gone by you say, ‘What? Are you nuts?’ But he played within the system, and when they attacked the zone, he did what he was supposed to do. When they ran the fast break, he went where he was supposed to go.”

  Of course, there were those “moments,” usually the result of a lesson learned. The Tar Heels returned from the West Coast after the holidays for a quick tune-up at home with William & Mary, then headed up to Maryland to open up the ACC schedule, which they did in savory fashion, beating Lefty Driesell’s team by 16. They returned home to entertain Ralph Sampson and Virginia, the nation’s second-ranked team. North Carolina came out aggressively that day, opening with a full-court press and hoping to push the pace. It backfired as Virginia’s young guards, Othell Wilson and Ricky Stokes, helped them prosper. Stepping on the court against Sampson for the first time, Jordan was astounded at the center’s size and performance that day, 30 points and 19 rebounds. Jordan missed his 3 shots from the field in the first half and grew timid, passing up open fifteen- and twenty-footers as Virginia sat back in zone. He managed to contribute 4 free throws in the first twenty minutes. However, Worthy took him aside as the teams were taking the floor after halftime and told him not to pass up the open shots he was getting against Virginia’s zone.

  “Early in the game, I kept looking for something better,” he explained to reporters afterward. “We wanted to get the ball inside more and maybe get Ralph Sampson to pick up some fouls.”

  Despite a sore shoulder, he followed Worthy’s advice in the second half and scored 12 points to give him 16 for the game. “I didn’t want him to force anything,” Worthy later told reporters. “But I noticed he passed up shots in the first half that he can make. We needed the offense.”

  Still, Virginia had seemed in command with an 8-point lead with a little over seven minutes left when Jimmy Black fouled out. Braddock came in and fired North Carolina’s comeback to a 65–60 win. The turnabout would resonate in a big way at the end of the season. Sampson, mea
nwhile, made no effort to hide his annoyance afterward. “I still think we’re the number one team in the country,” he said. “They just got the breaks down the stretch. They still have to come to our place, you know.”

  The Tar Heels next beat NC State by 20, then took on the weaker Duke in Durham, struggling until five minutes into the second half when Jordan hit three straight jumpers, then added another bucket on a tip-in. He scored 13 of his 19 points in the second half. But the next game he scored just 6 as North Carolina took the first loss of the season, at home no less, to Wake Forest.

  “We limited their touches,” Wake’s Anthony Teachey recalled in 2012. “I just tried to control the boards. We had to play Michael head up, because you had Worthy and Sam Perkins and those guys. We couldn’t just concentrate on him because of the lineup they had.” It was obviously a great, great team, Teachey offered.

  North Carolina won the next three, but then, as Sampson had anticipated, the Tar Heels had to ride up to Charlottesville to visit the Cavaliers. This time around, Smith chose mostly to avoid using his press. Rather than seek to force turnovers, the Tar Heels sat back in a zone and hoped for missed shots. There weren’t many. The Cavaliers shot 64 percent and whipped them soundly, 74–58. The scale of this second loss was unsettling. Upon their return to Chapel Hill, Jimmy Black called a team meeting, where he reminded them of their championship ambitions.

  Duly refocused, the team won its final eight regular-season games to head into the ACC tournament at the Greensboro Coliseum. By tradition, the tournament somehow mixed southern charm with heated rivalry for three intense days. But for 1982, it was all about the Cavaliers and Tar Heels. North Carolina easily dismissed Georgia Tech and NC State to meet Virginia for the championship.