Wearing a rubber cast, Kenny Smith returned not long after a loss at Arkansas, and Jordan resumed his reel of highlights. He scored 24 against Virginia on 11 of 15 shooting. He hammered down 32 in a 25-point win over NC State. And there was always something about Maryland (thought by media observers to be Adrian Branch’s MVP in the McDonald’s game) that inspired Jordan’s best dunking displays. He went for 25 in his final game against Lefty Driesell’s team, finishing with another dunk, this one high over center Ben Coleman, who fouled him for a three-point play. He had an 18-point second half in a win over Georgia Tech, and then came his last appearance in Carmichael. Krzyzewski’s young Duke team pushed the Tar Heels to double overtime before succumbing, 96–83. Jordan scored 25, but the game was a harbinger. A week later, the two teams met again in the ACC tournament semifinals, and the Blue Devils completed the upset, 77–75.
“What’s amazing about the ACC tournament,” Billy Packer observed of Jordan, “in all of his career, that is the one place where he doesn’t stand out. He doesn’t have a good ACC tournament record. Except, of course, for his brilliant work as a freshman against Virginia to win the league championship.”
Once again, a loss in the ACC tourney would drain Carolina’s momentum for the NCAA tournament. The Tar Heels took on Temple in Charlotte in the round of thirty-two and were bothered by the speed of Terence Stansbury, who scored 18 points in the first half. Fighting to stay ahead, Dean Smith called for so many alley-oops to Jordan that he grew exhausted and asked the unusual—to come out of the game to catch his breath. Carolina had trouble with coach John Chaney’s persistent zone, but the alley-oop, combined with Carolina’s size, proved too much. The Tar Heels advanced to the Sweet Sixteen at the Omni in Atlanta, an arena in which Jordan hadn’t played well. They were to face Bobby Knight’s unranked Indiana Hoosiers, led by freshman Steve Alford, with a 22-8 record.
The night before the game, Billy Packer talked privately with Knight about what the Hoosiers faced the next day. Knight asked if Packer thought the Hoosiers could somehow beat Jordan and the Tar Heels, the broadcaster recalled. “I said, ‘No, you can’t beat North Carolina.’ He said, ‘No, I don’t think so either, but I’m going to do some things to them. They’re probably going to beat us anyway, but they’re not going to get any of those backdoor cuts. I’m going to let them take any kind of jump shot they want beyond eighteen feet.’ He said, ‘If they can make those jump shots, we’re not going to be in the game. I don’t think Michael can make those shots, and I don’t think they’ve got anybody else who can either.’ ”
Knight also decided to defend Jordan with Dan Dakich, who had started only five games all season. Dakich was tall and had some quickness. Knight planned for Dakich to lay off Jordan to protect against the drive. If Jordan went up for the jumper, Dakich would lunge in a closeout and hope to distract the shot, which is exactly what he did. The Indiana coach waited until three hours before the game to inform his big reserve guard of the assignment. “I went back up to my room and threw up,” Dakich said later.
It helped Knight’s plan that the officials whistled Jordan for two early fouls that day. Any time he had gotten two fouls in the first half in earlier games that season, Smith had always brought him to the bench. He did the same in the regional semifinal and would be criticized for it later. Jordan scored just 4 first-half points.
“Everybody thought Coach Smith was at fault for keeping me on the sidelines,” Jordan recalled for Mike Lopresti of USA Today years later. “But with me not on the floor, we were still a strong basketball team.”
“Michael was on the bench during the time Indiana took control of the game,” Packer recalled.
Packer questioned the decision to keep Jordan on the bench while the Hoosiers remained packed back in the lane on defense. The pace of the game was slow, the broadcaster pointed out. “Indiana’s playing that pull-back man-to-man, almost like a zone. They’re not running. It’s going to be a shortened game because of the style of play, so your chances of getting five fouls is somewhat limited.” With Jordan on the bench, Indiana took a 32–28 halftime lead. Knight didn’t vary from his approach for the final twenty minutes. “When I got back in the second half, I felt like I was trying to cram forty minutes into twenty minutes,” Jordan recalled. “I could never find any sync in my game.”
“Michael didn’t take the shots,” Packer said, “and they were so packed in North Carolina never got any of those backdoor cuts. But it wasn’t just that. Indiana decided to do two things and Carolina never countered.”
Knight used the lightly regarded Dakich to keep Jordan in check, and it worked. Packer and other reporters couldn’t believe what they were watching. “Just put Michael on the wing and say, ‘OK, Michael, we’re going to get you the ball. Take it every time.’ Packer observed. “How does Dakich ever stop him from getting off a good shot?”
“I am not diminishing what he did. I think he did exactly what Coach Knight wanted him to do,” Jordan said of Dakich. “But [the media] made it a one-on-one proposition. Being the competitor that I am, and hearing the only one who could ever stop you was Dan Dakich… when I look back at the shots I had, I lick my chops. I just missed them.”
Smith never adjusted his offense to free up Jordan to attack. The spread went to 12 points, but the Tar Heels had cut it to two at the end when they fouled freshman Steve Alford. He made both, good for the upset, 72–68. Indiana had to shoot almost 70 percent from the floor to make it happen. Alford finished with 27. Jordan fouled out, having scored 13 points on 6-for-14 shooting. In his three years at North Carolina, he had never taken more than 24 shots in any game.
The North Carolina locker room was deeply emotional afterward. Jordan and Perkins were especially downcast. “I felt like I let them down,” Kenny Smith later recalled. Dean Smith never cared for talking a lot with his players after games. On that day, he called the group together for the usual postgame prayer and then went to the interview room, where he grew more emotional with each question and answer. Finally, Smith ended the session early and walked out.
“I think it was a game where the system and the program got in the way of winning,” Packer said in 2012. “Of all the games he ever coached, I’m sure that’s one game he’d like to have back, just the fact that the system got the best of him on that particular day. Indiana played good, but they didn’t play great. They played great going down the stretch because they were able to protect the ball and Alford was such a great free throw shooter. But you knew that going in. You never want to be in a position where his free throw shooting and him holding the ball is going to beat you in that game.”
“I thought we were the best team in the country,” Jordan said, looking back. “But in one game, that can be swept away from you.”
“There were games at North Carolina that were sacrificed for the good of the program,” Packer said. “That Indiana game may be one of them. But if you just tell Michael to go out there and throw them up and attack and tell Sam Perkins to get all the rebounds, then the game’s over. But Dean never would sacrifice the program for an individual game.”
Art Chansky disagreed: “That’s like saying that he would rather preserve the system and lose rather than break the system and win. I don’t think that. Dean did believe that his way was the best way. He believed that Michael needed to sit out the last eight minutes of the first half with two fouls because that would allow him to play aggressively in the second half. Within the system, Bobby Knight knew how to guard him, and he had the guy to guard him. Michael was good, but he was terrible his last game. He got locked up by Dakich. Five white guys beat Sam Perkins, Michael Jordan, Brad Daugherty? Come on. Get serious. They couldn’t beat them without the shot clock. It was pass and release, pass and release, and get them out of their rhythm. They shot 65 percent, too. It was the only way they could have won that game, but they did it.”
Chansky acknowledged that Smith had to adjust his system later in the decade after Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski follow
ed Knight’s pattern and stymied Smith’s passing-game system. Smith had to take chances with the kinds of players who could go one-on-one and beat the defense off the dribble. “Later on, in the late eighties, when Carolina lost the Jordan-caliber players, they couldn’t get into their offense,” Chansky recalled. “Dean recognized that. He realized they had to break down the first level of the defense.”
Jordan later said he would have felt better if Indiana had gone on to win the national title, but in an immense irony, a Virginia team without Ralph Sampson (he had graduated and been selected by Houston with the top overall pick in the 1983 NBA draft) defeated the Hoosiers two days later to reach the Final Four. Virginia finished sixth in the ACC standings that year.
Jordan returned to Chapel Hill thoroughly depressed and contemplating his future. He would win every major honor that college basketball had to offer that spring, every Player of the Year award.
“The publicity has been fun, I have to admit,” Jordan said at the time. “It wasn’t too hard to handle, and isn’t now. I guess it used to be a little more fun at the beginning, though, because people are more and more after you now. All in all, it’s better and more fun to be noticed.”
He had averaged just 17.7 points over his three seasons at North Carolina. This, in turn, would spur a viral criticism, packaged in the form of a joke that spread across basketball in the late 1980s: Who was the only person to hold Michael Jordan under 20 points a game? The answer, of course, was Dean Smith, although statisticians duly pointed out that Jordan actually averaged 20.0 points per game as a sophomore at UNC. Regardless, there may have been an element of truth to the charge. But Jordan would always stand by the Carolina coach, explaining that Smith showed him how to use his gifts to greater efficiency. “I didn’t know the game. Coach taught me the game, when to apply speed, how to use your quickness, when to use that first step, or how to apply certain skills in certain situations. I gained all that knowledge so that when I got to the pros, it was just a matter of applying the information. Dean Smith gave me the knowledge to score 37 points a game, and that’s something that people just don’t understand.”
“When he went to North Carolina he had the heart, he had the competitiveness, he had the athletic ability,” Brendan Malone observed. “But while at North Carolina he became a better shooter and more sound in fundamentals. When he came out of North Carolina he was ready to be a star in the NBA.”
Indeed, that time had come. Smith had known for some time that the junior season would likely be Jordan’s last in Chapel Hill, and that spring informed him it was time to discuss the future. The final decision to enter the 1984 NBA draft had to be made by Saturday, May 5. On April 26, Smith and Jordan held a preliminary news conference that only confused local reporters. Jordan informed them he still didn’t know what he was going to do. “I’m planning on staying here and I’m looking forward to my next year here,” he told them. “Coach has always looked out for his players and wants what’s best for them.”
Jordan said he would also listen to his parents: “My folks know a lot more than I do. And I’ll take their advice into consideration, too. My mother, she’s a teacher, and I think I already have an idea of what she thinks. But my father’s a clown. I really don’t know what he’s thinking about. I don’t know. I don’t want to put any pressure on them.”
Deloris Jordan was firmly opposed to her son leaving. But after the press conference that day, Dean Smith met with agent Donald Dell from the sports management firm ProServ, which local reporters took as a bad sign. It appeared to Jordan that if he left school, the worst he could do was go to the Philadelphia 76ers, who seemed likely to have between the fifth and the third pick in the draft. That was a decent option, but Jordan had hopes of playing for the Lakers. He didn’t want to leave Chapel Hill to be a professional with just any team.
Jordan met with his coach that Friday, May 4, and later that evening with his parents and brother Larry. Then he went out to eat with Buzz Peterson and some friends. His roommate pushed him about his decision. Did he really want to leave behind the cinnamon biscuits at Hardee’s and the grape soda and honey buns? What about all the good times in their room, talking late into the night, with Kenny Smith always showing up to run his mouth? Jordan admitted he still didn’t know.
It was the same the next morning when he arose to get ready for the eleven o’clock news conference at Fetzer Gymnasium. “I knew what he was going through,” Deloris Jordan recalled later that summer. “But I also knew it was something he had to decide for himself. We talked to him about it several times. Then Coach Smith called us on that Friday night before Michael was to make the announcement the next day. We left and went up there then. We talked with Michael and with Coach Smith. At ten thirty the next morning, he had a meeting with the coach. They came just a couple of minutes before the press conference was to start at eleven. Coach Smith squeezed my arm when they came out and I knew.”
After the announcement, Jordan departed quickly and headed to the golf course, where he spent the entire afternoon.
Thirty years later, former Bulls executive Jerry Krause offered a harsher take on Jordan’s exit, based on his many years working around college basketball as an NBA scout. “Dean told him to leave North Carolina,” Krause said. “He told him to get out of there. He was getting bigger than the program. I don’t know if Dean would ever admit that, but that’s what happened.” It wasn’t that Jordan did anything wrong or openly challenged Smith in any way, Krause explained. “Dean was great. He was very gracious. Guys didn’t leave his program. He told them to leave. When they started getting bigger than the program, he told them it was time to go.”
Packer disagreed with Krause: “Let me tell you something, if Dean Smith wanted him out, no one would know it. Dean Smith never told you what he was doing. To say to Michael, ‘It’s time to go,’ he did that for a lot of players.”
Bob McAdoo was one of the first Carolina players to get the nod from Smith, back in 1972, after the coach had done his research on the player’s draft prospects. “This was when it was actually illegal by NCAA standards to be getting that information, talking to agents and teams and so forth,” Packer said. “But Dean was a master at that. He’d be able to sit down with a player and players would listen to him. He’d say, ‘I’ve talked to this team that’s got this draft choice. Michael, you’re probably going number three.’ The only way Dean would have wanted him out of the program was if it was the best thing for Michael, not if it was the best or worst thing for Dean. That’s what made him a special person.”
For Jordan to be bigger than the program, he would have had to be bigger than Smith himself, and in North Carolina, nobody was bigger than the coach. Kenny Smith offered the opinion that the coach, not Jordan, was the reason for the competitive atmosphere because of “how he psychologically guided us to go at each other.”
Carolina assistant Eddie Fogler got married in the evening on the day that Jordan announced he was headed to the NBA. The ceremony was infused with a sort of gallows humor, Art Chansky recalled. “Eddie was like, ‘Hey, I’m getting married, but, hey, we just lost the best player in the country.’ There were a lot of Carolina fans at the wedding.”
Among them was Jimmie Dempsey, an old friend of Dean Smith’s who was an important supporter of the Tar Heels program, close enough to use his private plane to ferry Smith on recruiting trips. “He and his wife were the godparents of the basketball players,” Chansky recalled. “At the wedding that night, Jimmie said he was pissed at Dean. He said, ‘His job is to put the best basketball team on the floor for the University of North Carolina. That’s his job. His job is not to send guys out to pros while there’s still eligibility.’ I laughed and said, ‘Go tell Coach Smith that.’ He said, ‘I will. I’ll go over and tell him right now.’ He went over there and told him and then came back. I said, ‘What did he say?’ He said, ‘Dean laughed.’ ”
While James Jordan was delighted that the coach was putting Michael’s intere
sts first, Deloris Jordan had long held to the dream of having her two youngest children graduate from North Carolina on the same day. Jordan assured his mother that he would return to school promptly to earn his degree, which he did, making use of the summer school program in the next few years. Even as his future rested in the balance that spring, Jordan had insisted on studying for his exams and pressing ahead with academic issues. He was so earnest, in fact, that Kenny Smith assumed Jordan was returning for a senior year. Why, otherwise, would a guy headed for the NBA even bother taking a test?
“They made the announcement and it hit me,” Mrs. Jordan said. “The press room was packed, and we had to answer all these questions. But then I finally had to be alone. When we got home, we had to leave the house because the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. It was hard for a while.” Reality would settle in for the Jordans over the coming months. They had attended almost every game that their son played. “Thank God for the General Electric credit union,” James Jordan had said when people inquired about all the travel costs. But within months he would plead guilty to a charge of accepting a kickback from a private contractor. The matter was handled quietly, but it still made the newspapers in Wilmington and across the state.
“It was a shock at the GE plant,” recalled Dick Neher in a 2012 interview. “Nobody could believe it. All the women loved him. He was charming. I worked with him about twenty-five years. We worked in different buildings, but I saw him about every day.… James was a pretty sharp guy. He was very personable. Everybody liked him.”
According to statements made by authorities at the time, Mr. Jordan had held inventory control duties at the GE plant in Castle Hayne. During his son’s sophomore season at North Carolina, James Jordan had written a phony purchase order to buy thirty tons of hydraulic equipment from a company called Hydratron, headed by a man named Dale Gierszewski. According to legal accounts of the charges, General Electric then paid Gierszewski $11,560 for the thirty-ton cylinders. James Jordan acknowledged in court that Gierszewski did not deliver the cylinders, and instead paid Jordan a $7,000 kickback.
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