Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  “I really didn’t feel any pressure,” he said calmly. “It was just another jumper over the weak side of a zone.”

  Chapter 12

  SOMETHING NEW

  BILL BILLINGSLEY HAD been invited by a group of friends to ride to New Orleans for the Final Four. After the game, he was out, part of the raucous, elated throng jammed into the French Quarter, when he ran into Michael Jordan and two teammates quietly taking in the scene.

  Jordan recognized his old ninth-grade ball coach immediately. “Billingsley!” he said. “What are you doing here?” They exchanged small talk, and Billingsley happily offered up congratulations before moving on. Afterward, the coach was struck that Jordan could enjoy the moment without being instantly swarmed by celebrating fans. Neither perhaps realized it at the time, but they were experiencing the final moments of Jordan’s anonymity, and even that would be tested later that evening of March 29. Back in Chapel Hill, thirty thousand fans gathered on Franklin Street as soon as they heard UNC radio broadcaster Woody Durham announce, “The Tar Heels are going to win the national championship.”

  “As soon as the game was over I ran screaming out there onto Franklin Street,” recalled David Mann, a junior at Carolina at the time. “And of course everybody else did the same thing. There were thousands of people there just dazed. Dean Smith had never won, and it was just an unbelievable moment. Everybody was just crying and ecstatic.”

  “Pandemonium, hysteria, fireworks, and beer,” the Greensboro Daily News declared the next day. “This is the stuff national championships are made of.” The celebration ran until four o’clock in the morning and got going again a couple of days later as twenty thousand fans gathered to welcome the team back into town.

  It would take weeks for the celebration to calm, but the new parameters of his life would be revealed to Jordan over the coming months. “I was like a deer in the headlights,” he would say, looking back much later. “I didn’t realize the magnitude of what I’d done.” The moment had delighted millions—many with no previous connection to the University of North Carolina—and converted lots of them instantly into lifelong Tar Heels fans. The national championship struck a note of pride for blacks and whites alike across the state. The victory they shared erased doubts about Dean Smith and his program, and marked the coronation of young Michael as the prince of hoops. “It was like a young kid coming out of his shell,” Jordan observed. “My name was Mike. Everybody referred to me as Mike Jordan. After the shot, it was Michael Jordan.”

  If he had been a megawatt trashtalker before the shot, he became almost unbearable afterward. He and Ewing would remain lifelong friends from their shared experience. “I remember him hitting that shot,” Ewing said ruefully in 2010. “I don’t talk to him about that. He rubs it in enough, so I never bring it up.”

  Just months after enduring the taunts of local folks that he wouldn’t make an impact at UNC, he returned home to discover the rising walls of his newfound notoriety, a fame that would soon enough box him into an insular world. He had planned to go to the local courts in Wilmington for a spin of pickup games, like in the days before college. But he arrived to find a mob awaiting him. He couldn’t even get out of the car that day, according to a local official who witnessed the event. It was the first sign that his old way of living was soon to be gone forever.

  The city hosted a Michael Jordan appreciation banquet a couple of weeks later. He signed autographs for dozens of fans, including thrilled young basketballers who showed up in their uniforms. Jordan ate at the right of Dean Smith at the banquet table that evening. His coach sported a contented smile and made light conversation while the usually ebullient young star sat quietly, still obviously very much an adolescent, almost childlike, awkward in the face of so much attention.

  His parents were there, somehow managing to maintain decorum amid this wellspring of pride and excitement. “Wherever they went they always comported themselves nicely,” said Billy Packer, who ran into the Jordans often. He had enjoyed a laugh with them the night of the championship, which had come exactly a year after Mrs. Jordan’s angry disappointment at the McDonald’s game in Kansas. “You see some parents who have to be front and center. The Jordans never were that way. They were always polite and carried themselves extremely well. I was always impressed by that.” It had been a spring to remember for both of them. Deloris had returned home to find a display of Carolina Blue congratulations at the bank where she worked. One colleague greeted her with, “Hello, Mrs. Michael Jordan’s Mother.” She tried to sell the idea that they would have been just as proud of their son if he were a mere Carolina freshman who didn’t play basketball. She did admit to an interviewer that her maternal instinct had her clutching her stomach as the Tar Heels passed the ball back and forth like a hot potato on that last possession. When it finally landed in her son’s hands, her first thought was that she hoped he would pass it to someone else.

  For James, the arrival home brought a special “Welcome Home, Michael Jordan” meeting at the GE plant where he worked. It wasn’t just Michael’s life that would be changed forever by his big shot. His parents had also been swept up by the tide.

  Jordan’s youthful discomfort at the banquet that evening didn’t stop him from reveling in his newfound status. After all, most freshmen returned home after a year of independence at school only to find that their parents still viewed them as adolescents. His return home brought the first realization of the new status that would require huge adjustments in their family relationships. His personal stature would soon enough eclipse theirs and alter the nature of the family dynamic. Even now, at the end of his freshman year, they all sensed it. He wasn’t a pro yet, but he was going to be one.

  They tried not to focus on that vision of the future, especially Mrs. Jordan. If anything, she became more vigilant the more his dream gained texture in the wake of the championship. Be humble. Don’t place too much emphasis on yourself. Be sure to mention your teammates. It was as if she and Dean Smith were reading from the same script. Every time she talked to a reporter, she made sure to stress how proud she was of all her children. Michael just happened to be the one who received all the public attention, she explained.

  For Jordan, the immediate challenge that spring of 1982 was a search for a place where he could still enjoy the freedom of his former life. Somehow he scored a one-on-one contest with a local star in Pender County. That seemed at first as if it would be secluded enough, but even there a crowd of hundreds turned out to watch the combat, won by Jordan two games to one, according to local memory.

  Ultimately, he found safe harbor in Chapel Hill. Thanks to the family atmosphere that Dean Smith had built, many of the coach’s former players, including NBA stars like Walter Davis and Phil Ford, would show up in the summers for pickup games. That summer after the championship, they were all eager to size up against the young guy who had made “the shot.” The alums were fascinated by Jordan’s playground persona. Unlike Worthy, Al Wood had taken him on during those first months at Carolina and thought Jordan to be a bit timid. Wood had shot him an elbow in their first pickup meetings, but heading into his sophomore year, Jordan made a point of sending an elbow Wood’s way, letting him know he was no longer going to be intimidated. Eventually, the bonding with Wood evolved as they worked on dunks in and around the pickup games that summer. It was Wood who gave him the idea for the one-handed, cradle-rocking dunk he would eventually trot out against Maryland. Of course, there had been those, like Worthy, who thought his confidence as a freshman had been too much. But this second year they all began to grasp that Jordan’s belief in himself reflected a level of intensity no one had contemplated before.

  Granville Again

  Jordan and Buzz Peterson now lived on the first floor of Granville Towers on a short hallway that was locked off at both ends to protect the smattering of basketball players and regular students in residence there. Among the regular students living on the floor was David Mann, a senior who was majoring in radi
o, television, and motion pictures. Short, slightly built, and unassuming, Mann was afforded something of an inside view of Jordan’s life at age nineteen, just as his status was soaring.

  “He was very cocky even back in those days,” Mann recalled. “He was Mr. Confident and he was sure of himself.”

  Mann would see girls hanging outside the locked hallway doors, hoping for a chance to get inside. Like most of the “regular” students on the hall, Mann took note of just about everything he saw Jordan doing. He was surprised to see little evidence of a party animal.

  “He was a pretty serious guy,” Mann recalled. “There were some party guys on the hall, players and students, and he never really got into that.”

  Buzz Peterson, for example, could be seen, drink in hand, dancing in the hallways with his girlfriend, still obviously enjoying the fact that the Tar Heels had just won the national title a few months earlier.

  “Buzz was definitely not as dedicated to basketball as Michael was,” Mann observed. “Buzz was more of a party guy. He didn’t take things as seriously, near as seriously as Jordan did. He was kind of a goofball, to be honest.”

  Sports Illustrated published a photo that fall of Jordan, headphones on, dancing in his room under an umbrella, which angered Mann because it was so obviously staged. Peterson might dance around, but not Jordan, even though he had good reason to celebrate life a little.

  “That’s what was unique about him,” Mann observed. “He could have become totally self-absorbed and gotten into partying and all that fun stuff and the women and all these other things, but the impression I got was that he was so committed he wouldn’t allow himself to become sidetracked, even at that age. He knew he wanted to be the best and he knew the pitfall, and he wasn’t going to fall into it. He seemed very sure of himself, sure of what he wanted to do, and nothing was going to stop him.”

  Mann noticed that although Jordan was just a nineteen-year-old sophomore, he seemed to command things merely with his presence, even among the other basketball players rooming on the floor. “He wasn’t a loud guy. He didn’t dominate everything as far as verbally, but when he talked you definitely listened. He didn’t order the other players around or come across as a big shot or anything like that, but I sure think the other players respected him. I think they were intimidated by him a little bit. But he didn’t go around barking orders or anything like that.”

  Jordan soon discovered that Mann was studying media with a plan of working in the film industry in Hollywood. “Michael thought that was nuts,” Mann recalled, “and after that he would come up to me and say, ‘You know you ought to go speak to Dean Smith’s wife.’ Dean Smith’s wife was a psychiatrist and every time I would see Michael, he would say, ‘Have you seen Dean Smith’s wife yet? Have you talked to her?’ He thought it was funny that somebody like me would want to move out to Los Angeles and have any sort of chance working in the movie business.”

  This teasing went on for a couple of weeks, with Jordan mocking Mann’s Hollywood plans every time he saw him. It was then that Mann learned what every person who survived Jordan would have to learn—you had to stand up to him.

  “Finally I told him, ‘Michael, I mean this is my dream. I’ve always wanted to work in movies. Didn’t you ever have a dream?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I have a dream to play in the NBA.’ After that he never really bugged me about it anymore.”

  Jordan soon discovered that, as a media student, Mann had a video recorder in his room, a rare development since video technology was still relatively new and quite expensive. Mann was also a huge basketball fan and would tape the Carolina games. Jordan began dropping by to watch himself on replay.

  “This was so long ago that the remote was wired,” Mann recalled. “You had to tilt this twelve-foot-long wired remote. He would sit there and watch himself and back it up to watch himself again. I think he learned a lot from doing that. I don’t know how much the coaches did this kind of videotape work, but he definitely did it on my VCR a lot.”

  The player who would do so much to define the video age was getting the first opportunity to study himself.

  One of the first things Mann and Jordan watched together was the championship game versus Georgetown. During the broadcast, commentator Billy Packer remarked that Worthy was the fastest player on Carolina’s team.

  “That’s bullshit,” Jordan fussed. “I’m the fastest guy on the team.”

  When they came to Jordan’s big shot, Mann asked him about it. “He said when he hit that last shot he really wasn’t sure if that was where Coach Smith wanted him. He was thinking he had screwed up. He told me he was a little confused about where he was supposed to be on that play. He happened to be open and he took the shot and made it.”

  As the season went on, Jordan would stop in Mann’s room to study his game. “He was totally silent,” Mann recalled. “He didn’t say much of anything. He was totally concentrating on what he was thinking and what he was strategizing in his head. He didn’t say much when he watched, and I just sort of left him alone.”

  One day Jordan encountered Mann putting into a cup in the hallway. “He wants to do it too, and he wants to bet on putting the ball into the cup,” Mann recalled. “It was only like a quarter or a dime, but anyway we did this for like thirty minutes and I was beating him. I had to go to class, and he wouldn’t let me stop. So he’s making me stay there, but I didn’t want to lose so I kept putting it into the cup.”

  Finally, in exasperation, Jordan threw down the putter and walked off. “He ended up owing me about seventy-five cents,” Mann remembered, “and he never paid.”

  The Upgrade

  After the summer rounds of camps and appearances, and his pickup battles and individual work, it was an upgraded Jordan who had arrived in practice that fall. “Preseason, sophomore year,” Smith later recalled. “I couldn’t believe the improvement since the end of his freshman season. Every time he did a drill with the Blue Team, the Blues would win. Every time he did one with the White Team, the Whites would win. The staff started saying to one another, ‘What’s going on here?’ He hadn’t been on any preseason All-America teams, but he’d grown two inches, had worked hard over the summer to improve his ball handling and shooting, and he had so much confidence.”

  “Dean always said the biggest improvement that guys make is between their freshman and sophomore years,” Art Chansky offered. “He always told them after a year of basketball what they have to work on. If they go back and work on it, they get it because they’ve played a year of college basketball. They get bigger physically, and there’s this quantum leap in their games, if they work on it. Michael came back, and it was like, ‘Whoa. Holy shit.’ ”

  He was bigger, stronger, faster. His time in the forty-yard dash had fallen to 4.39 seconds, almost two-tenths of a second faster than his freshman year. All the arrows, it seemed, were pointing up. In his unguarded moments, Jordan acknowledged that his goal was to win more national championships, which suggested that he didn’t recognize how fortunate he’d been to win one. The odds on another title might have been better had Dean Smith been a bit more selfish and persuaded James Worthy to stay at North Carolina for his senior year.

  However, the coach continued to prize the success of his players above his own, even perhaps above the team’s. Another coach would have pointed out to Worthy that the Tar Heels were on the brink of winning back-to-back national championships. With Worthy, the school would be returning a team with four starters, a team that could make real history. Yet instead of exerting any sort of pressure to keep Worthy in school, Smith began researching Worthy’s prospects for the upcoming NBA draft.

  When he learned that Worthy was likely to be the top pick, he dutifully advised him to claim “hardship” status and enter the draft. The risk of injury and the loss of huge sums were too great for Worthy to continue to play amateur basketball. It was a remarkable display of integrity from Smith, another reason his players held him in such esteem. Five seasons earlier he ha
d done the same for point guard Phil Ford, had all but insisted that he turn professional after his junior season, Art Chansky recalled. Ford, however, declined to leave, explaining to Smith, “Who’s going to tell my mother?” He came back to Carolina and was player of the year that final season.

  Worthy’s family also prized education, but Smith emphasized that the prudent step was to enter the draft. Worthy was selected by the Los Angeles Lakers as the top overall pick. To replace him, Smith brought in the next round of high school All-Americans, including a sixteen-year-old seven-footer, Brad Daugherty, and an athletic six-five guard, Curtis Hunter, so there was a lot of reconfiguring in the lineup. Still, the Tar Heels entered the year as the top-ranked team in the polls, a status that changed almost immediately.

  There were several reasons the 1982–83 campaign would fall short of expectations. Six weeks before the season started, Jordan broke his left wrist. He practiced anyway, with a cast on. Buzz Peterson injured a knee midway through the season, which prompted Jordan to begin wearing his trademark wristband midway up the left forearm as a tribute to his roommate. Mostly, though, the Tar Heels felt Worthy’s absence. As Billy Packer had pointed out, he was a tremendous player who left an almost unfillable void.

  Dick Weiss went to Chapel Hill to visit with Jordan as the season was set to open. Jordan talked pridefully about the fact that he and his father were NASCAR fans. Weiss noted that this was a young man with an inclination not to play to any sort of stereotypes. He was a nice kid, Weiss remembered in 2011, adding that he saw absolutely nothing in Jordan or in Jordan’s game to give him the slightest clue that “this kid was the next savior of the NBA.” The sportswriter did come away believing that Georgetown and Carolina would meet again for the title that next spring.