Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  Suddenly, the Jordan on the floor appeared a lot like the gums-bared, high-flying specter who had haunted Laney’s gym in high school, albeit with a more developed physique and a much more polished game. There was no hiding the athleticism now.

  Loughery made the year about Jordan finding his identity and his confidence as a player. The coach allowed Jordan to discover his game on his own, rather than trying to impose it on him. He recognized Jordan’s great hunger and realized that it was his job to feed it. Where Dean Smith’s system, and even Bobby Knight’s system, had confined his development, Loughery wanted to give Jordan the freedom he needed to explore it. It helped that Loughery’s base of power with the Bulls was GM Rod Thorn, who had been his assistant with the Nets and had full confidence in his coaching.

  Just as important was Loughery’s personal relationship with his young star. “I could relate with him as a friend,” Jordan explained. Loughery had been in the same position himself and understood the challenges the rookie would face, including his new teammates. Unlike the motivated young All-Americans at UNC, Jordan would now be working with an array of cynical castoffs and casualties, some of them deeply troubled by cocaine and alcohol abuse. Talented guard Quintin Dailey was in the midst of a very public breakdown in Chicago, which had begun well before Jordan arrived. “Q was a good friend,” recalled trainer Mark Pfeil. “I felt bad for him. We would try to threaten him, but how do you threaten somebody who came from nothing? He said, ‘I’m gonna end up on the street? I’ve been on the street. I survive on the street. You can’t threaten me with that.’ ”

  Also beginning his descent into alcohol and cocaine abuse was the team’s other immensely talented player, Orlando Woolridge, a second-year forward out of Notre Dame. Ultimately, both teammates were following a sad trail to an early grave. The roster was full of troubled souls. As Bulls PR man Tim Hallam explained, Jordan was much too competitive to pay mind to either drugs or alcohol. That would have meant exposing a weakness to an opponent, something Jordan would never do.

  Journeyman Rod Higgins, one of the few stable personalities on the team, was three years older than Jordan. Amidst the chaos that season, they formed a fast friendship, one that would last far beyond their playing days. Six years later, Jordan would look back and comment that of all his teammates, those on that first team were the most physically gifted and also the most clueless. “Looney Tunes,” he called them.

  The Bulls’ practice facilities at Angel Guardian Gym appeared no more conducive to success than Jordan’s troubling new teammates. “It was kind of a dark, gloomy gym with a real hard floor,” explained Tim Hallam. “There were no frills there. You parked your car in the grass in the back. They had one little sidewalk where the players were allowed to pull their car up on the sidewalk and then had to pull off in the grass. It had an antiquated locker room. There was no food. You know, there were no amenities at all, whatsoever.”

  And Angel Guardian was always filled with little ones, the Bulls’ longtime ticket manager Joe O’Neil recalled. “The team had to wait in line for the third graders to get off the court, literally, so the Bulls could practice. The players would be lined up and there would be a line of kids across the hall, going to the pool or going to the gym.”

  The place was also just plain cold, offering little respite from Chicago’s notorious weather, recalled former Bulls guard John Paxson. As he had in Venezuela during the Pan Am Games, Jordan placed absolutely no importance on the circumstances. Angel Guardian was every bit as good as the outdoor court at Empie Park or the many other places he had played growing up. So he simply shrugged and went to work.

  For those first weeks, the Bulls housed their new rookie at the Lincolnwood Hyatt House, not far from Angel Guardian. When Jordan had landed at O’Hare a few days before training camp, he was greeted by a twenty-nine-year-old limo driver named George Koehler, who had just missed one fare and was looking to pick up another. He had seen the skinny young rookie, mistakenly called him “Larry Jordan,” and offered to take him anywhere in the city for twenty-five bucks. “Do you know my brother?” Jordan had asked, tilting a confused eye at the driver. Nonetheless, it would be the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Koehler would become Jordan’s regular driver, then his personal assistant and lifelong friend.

  He remembered a Jordan that first day who was green and unsure of himself in the big city. “I looked in the rearview mirror and I couldn’t even see him because he was scrunched down like a little kid,” Koehler recalled. “I don’t know if he’d been in a stretch limo before; he didn’t know anyone in Chicago. I was a stranger and he was obviously a bit nervous that I could drop him off in an alley somewhere.”

  Jordan soon found his bearings. “He came to practice every day like it was Game 7 of the NBA Finals,” Joe O’Neil recalled with a laugh. “He would destroy you in practice. That’s what set the tone for our team.”

  Loughery had watched Jordan from afar, but the impact up close was far more dramatic. “When we started doing one-on-one drills,” the coach recalled, “we immediately seen that we had a star. I can’t say that we knew we had the best player ever in basketball. But we always felt that Michael could shoot the ball. A lot of people had questioned that. But Michael had played in a passing game system in college under Dean Smith and in the Olympics under Bobby Knight. So people never got the opportunity to see him handle the ball individually the way he could handle it. Then when we found out how supremely competitive he was, we knew we had a player who had it all. “

  Bill Blair, Loughery’s assistant, recalled that the coaches decided to have a scrimmage on the second day of practice to check out Jordan’s skills in the open court. “Michael took the ball off the rim at one end,” Blair said, “and went to the other end. From the top of the key, he soared in and dunked it, and Kevin says, ‘We don’t have to scrimmage anymore.’ ”

  “His anticipation was so great—he could see the floor—and his quickness, and then his strength,” Loughery recalled. “That’s another thing that was overlooked, how strong Michael was. He really had the whole package.”

  Yet from the start Jordan remained focused not on what he had, but on what he didn’t have. “There’s no doubt I’m playing a new, tougher level,” he said after his first pro practice. “I’ve got a lot to learn.”

  “You knew you had somebody special because Michael was always there at practice forty-five minutes early,” Blair recalled. “He wanted to work on his shooting. And after practice he’d make you help him. He’d keep working on his shooting. He didn’t care how long he was out there. The thing that I always loved about him, when you’d take him out in practice to give him a rest during a scrimmage, he was constantly back on you to get him back in. Michael loved to play the game.”

  Secretariat

  The media contingent covering Jordan’s first day of training camp consisted of exactly one newspaper reporter, one magazine writer, four photographers, and a TV crew. Sure, the Cubs were bringing a storybook season to a close that weekend, and the Bears faced Dallas at Soldier Field that Sunday, but the cold truth was that no one in Chicago cared much about the Bulls in September 1984, Michael Jordan or no Michael Jordan. “The Bulls were the poorest child in the town,” explained Jeff Davis, who in those days was a sports television producer in the Second City.

  It wasn’t just Chicago—the NBA didn’t much care either. The league had a new television contract with CBS Sports that season and hadn’t included a single Bulls appearance on the schedule. Even the local stations weren’t interested in shooting footage of the Bulls for their newscasts, Davis explained. “TV rarely came around in those days.” If a camera crew did show up at Angel Guardian, Loughery paid it no mind. There were no media restrictions involving the team’s practices. Jeff Davis would go just because he was a basketball fan, he recalled. “I’ll never forget seeing those practices early that year. Good grief, there was an intensity in Jordan that was unlike any other player who’d come along, because he was
so talented. You could see that he was such a hard worker and you knew he was going to do things. He’d take it to the rack with such ease, against everybody. He was demanding. He wanted defenders to stick to him. ‘Tighter. Come on, defend me. Damn you!’ He’d call out names. He was a trash-talking son of a gun, too.”

  “Michael would pick on somebody every day,” trainer Mark Pfeil remembered. “You saw this early on. Every day. Somebody was gonna be his goat. It would be anybody on the team, guys like Ennis Whatley and Ronnie Lester and Quintin Dailey. Michael would shoot, stick it in their faces time and time again. He used to get their goats to make them play harder, mainly because he was so competitive. There were times during his rookie year when practice was unworkable. Loughery would just toss up his hands and let Michael do his thing.”

  “It’s interesting when you have a rookie who comes in like Michael did,” Rod Higgins recalled in 2012. “Instantaneously he got respect from the veterans because of his competitiveness. When we started out in that training camp I noticed that this kid would embarrass you if you didn’t bring your level of play up. He didn’t really care who the veteran was that was guarding him either.”

  “Michael is like Secretariat,” assistant coach Fred Carter quipped early that year. “All the other horses know they have to run to keep up with him.”

  “In practice, Loughery used to put Michael with different teams, just to see what he could do,” Rod Thorn said. “Whatever team Kevin put him on, that team would win. Kevin told me, ‘I don’t know if our other guys are that bad, or he’s that good.’ ”

  “Kevin always had a thing in practice,” Pfeil recalled, “where he’d divide the roster into two teams, and the first team to 10 won. The team that lost ran 10 laps. Kevin called it 10 points or 10 laps. Michael never ran a lap the whole year. One time Michael’s team was up 8–0, and Kevin switched him to the other team. Michael was furious. He scored the first 9 points by himself, and his team won.”

  “Once I saw him in camp I changed my thinking about what we were going to do offensively,” Loughery recalled. “He dictated what type of offense we were going to need. We weren’t a very strong roster outside of Michael, so he was gonna have to do a lot of shooting. I immediately started thinking of ways to isolate him, of having him going one-on-one. It made sense to post him up because he was stronger than most guards. You had to gear your offense around him.”

  Jordan had hoped to play off guard with the idea that he could match up against smaller opponents. Loughery took this notion one step further, however, to the idea that this rookie could really create mismatches at the point. Actually, he could also play small forward. The versatility essentially meant that the Bulls had gotten an upgrade at three positions.

  The team headed out to play a quick run of exhibition games before the season. The era opened in Peoria at the Civic Center in front of 2,500 fans with Jordan on the bench. He came on to score a game-high 18. The schedule also took the Bulls to Glens Falls, New York, where Jordan dunked freely during warm-ups to the delight of the crowd, which cheered him right up until the moment it became clear that Jordan was going to defeat their Knicks that night.

  Tim Hallam first recognized something different about the fan connection to Jordan in an exhibition stop in upstate Indiana. He scored 40 points that night, and afterward a string of fans, many of them young boys, followed him down the hallway, like Jordan was their Pied Piper. This magnetism became more apparent with each passing day. In the future, it would become necessary to wall him off, to protect him from the unharnessed power of that affection. But constructing that wall would take months. In the early days of that season, his growing public was merely amusing.

  From the reaction of his coaches and teammates in that first training camp to the fan interest he generated during exhibition season, Jordan had reinforced the idea that he could turn the franchise around. “We saw his skills,” Loughery recalled, “but you’ve got to be around him every day to see the competitiveness of the guy. He was gonna try to take over every situation that was difficult. He was gonna put himself on the line. He enjoyed it.”

  The franchise needed all that their new rookie had to offer. The first time they attended a Bulls game in Chicago Stadium, James and Deloris Jordan were taken aback by the sparse attendance and the dead atmosphere. Compared to the intense basketball energy at the University of North Carolina, Bulls games seemed pathetic. The Jordans wondered how this team could afford to pay their son hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. This will get better, Deloris told her husband, but she was far from sure. The negativity began with the Stadium itself, the “Madhouse on Madison,” which sat in the middle of one of Chicago’s worst neighborhoods. The area had been hit hard during the Chicago riot of 1968 following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In the decade and a half since, conditions on much of the West Side had grown utterly bleak. For any fans brave enough to attend a Bulls game, parking their cars and finding their way to the gate often produced a heart-in-throat experience. “You had kids that would say, ‘Can I wash your car, mister?’ ” Jeff Davis recalled. “If you parked on the street and if you didn’t give them a little folding cash, you’d get your tires slashed. That was not uncommon. If you were with the media, you were told, ‘Do not park anywhere but in the team-sanctioned parking lots, and get out of there as fast as you can after the games.’ So, you had a mass exodus within a half hour, forty-five minutes from that place. People did not linger around the arena afterwards.”

  “The Bulls were struggling at that time and the Stadium was on the West Side,” explained Tim Hallam. “Back then it didn’t look the way it does now, with all the economic development. It was the second-oldest building in the league, behind the Boston Garden. You know, it was a great place when it was packed. It was loud. The noise was contained, because it would bounce off the roof and come back. There weren’t any acoustics, which was good for a loud crowd, but we weren’t drawing huge crowds at the time. So it was mostly dead.”

  “We still had a very small season ticket base,” Joe O’Neil admitted. “In the third quarter I could count the attendance. I’d just go out and count the fans.”

  Steve Schanwald, who would eventually become the Bulls’ VP, had come to Chicago in 1981 as a marketing executive for the White Sox. A University of Maryland grad, he had loved the enthusiasm of ACC basketball, and made a point to take in a few Bulls games. He’d been shocked as well. “The Stadium was a dead building for basketball,” Schanwald recalled. “I used to enjoy coming out because I could get a seat and stretch out. But it was really kind of an embarrassment to see. I couldn’t believe this was NBA basketball. It seemed more like the CBA, or worse. The Stadium itself was always great when it was filled with people. When it was devoid of people, it was kind of a depressing setting, like a tomb. There was no glitzy scoreboard. I am told that in the early days Bulls fans used to watch basketball games through the hockey Plexiglas. That’s how little respect the Bulls had.”

  That sparse atmosphere only multiplied Jordan’s difficulty on opening night. He was trying to juggle two female guests without them finding out about each other. He had been in the city for just a month—his mother living with him for much of that time no less—and yet on his guest list for opening night, he had included comp tickets for two women, and was scrambling just before game time to make sure they were seated in different sections of the arena. Best to have them in opposite corners so he could keep things straight, he reasoned. Of course, typical of a rookie, he undercut his own furtive efforts at manipulating the seating arrangement that night by tipping off a reporter. In time, he would become more mindful of what he said within earshot of the media.

  Still, he had obviously come a long way since the days in high school when he had struggled to find a date. After hitting the shot to beat Georgetown in 1982, he and roommate Buzz Peterson had soon discovered they had a skyrocketing popularity with the female population in Chapel Hill. Jordan had found an even larger a
nd more active social life in Chicago, one that had been pioneered by former Bull Reggie Theus, who had cut such a dashing party figure downtown that he had come to be called “Rush Street Reggie.” Theus’s departure in 1983 had left an opening for the rookie Jordan to fill as Chicago’s premier ladies’ man. Jordan was serious about basketball but not so serious as to pass up opportunity. At Carolina his fame had been the big appeal. Now, in Chicago, he was discovering that fortune was even more alluring.

  The Beginning

  At age twenty-one, Jordan was bursting with anticipation to play that first game on Friday, October 26, 1984, against the Washington Bullets in the creaky old Stadium. There were none of the laser shows that marked his pregame introductions later. Instead, he came onto the court that first time accompanied only by the strains of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” The 13,913 fans, about six thousand more than the Bulls’ opening night a year earlier, cheered loudly to greet him, and erupted each time he did something to change the flow of the game. It became clear that very first quarter that Bulls games would no longer be known as sleepy little affairs.

  Twenty-one seconds into the action he missed his first shot, an eighteen-footer. A minute later he stole the ball from Washington guard Frank Johnson to register his first steal. The game was only minutes old when he drew the crowd’s first gasp, after he took off from the left for a slam over the top of brawny Bullets center Jeff Ruland, who shrugged off the intrusion and knocked him to the floor. The Stadium grew quiet as Jordan lay motionless. Finally he got up and later complained of a sore neck and head. He and Ruland agreed afterward that the collision was inadvertent, but it would signal an early pattern—Jordan reaching through the trees to attack the rim and the trees having something to say about it.

  At the 7:27 mark of the opening period, he scored his first NBA bucket, a twelve-foot bank shot from the right side of the lane. From there, his nervousness made for an uneven shooting night. He made just five of sixteen shots from the floor, scored 16 points, and had 7 assists and 6 rebounds. He also had 5 turnovers to go with the 9 missed shots. Yet there had been much for fans to delight in.