Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  “This was a good start for my career,” he said afterward. “My main concern was to get everybody going tonight. First, I figure you keep hustling. Then you get the big guys going. Then, everything falls in place.” Certainly one thing would change. In that first game, the ball seemed to spend much of the night in the hands of his teammates.

  The coaching staff got another eyeful at the second game, in Milwaukee, assistant Bill Blair recalled. “When he started abusing Sidney Moncrief, who we considered one of the top five defensive guards in the league, we knew that we had a special person.”

  In his third game, also against the Bucks, he scored 37 points, including 22 in the fourth quarter, as 9,356 fans in the Stadium saw the Bulls claim a come-from-behind win over Milwaukee.

  As the games melted away, Jordan found the ball in his hands more and more. Eager not to disappoint, the rookie would race up and down the floor, tongue out tasting the air. He was blindingly quick to the ball, taking rebounds and breaking into the open court like a scatback heading to daylight. Because he could cross the ball over while going full speed upcourt, opponents learned to step up to cut off the crossover, only to find that he was ready with a buttery reverse pivot that he could likewise execute at full speed. Such moves were difficult even for “water bug” guards, but to have someone six-six doing them?

  If opponents hesitated about getting back on defense, he was gone. And if they did get back to protect the rim, Jordan presented a new sort of challenge. Time and again, he left the tarmac early and flew toward the goal, taking time to decide just how he was going to finish. Elgin Baylor had first shown the league hang time in the late 1950s, and Julius Erving later added a certain poetry. But this Jordan glide to the stuff proved spellbinding. There seemed to be a calm that settled on him as he closed in, tongue out, surveying the defensive landscape. Now he could cradle the ball and contemplate his moves without worrying about what his coach was thinking. With all his spectacular dunking, observers hardly mentioned his stupendous ability to measure the reverse. If the defender had position and went for the principle of verticality, Jordan simply floated around that and flipped the ball in from the backside.

  “Once Michael started playing, and playing well, the fans got interested,” Rod Thorn remembered. “At the start of the season, we were selling in the six thousand range. Then, all of a sudden, we were up over ten thousand. He was a show.” Consistent sellouts would take a while longer, but the business model for the Chicago Bulls had clearly gotten an upgrade.

  Now that Jordan had turned his youthful fire on opponents, conflicts arose with a variety of earthbound defenders. “In his early games, this guy was going to the basket every time he had the ball,” Thorn explained. “He was putting up dunks and whirligig shots. Players on other teams were knocking him down out of the air. We pretty soon realized he was going to get killed.” In his first game against the Pistons, Jordan was floating up for a dunk when Detroit center Bill Laimbeer slammed him to the floor, creating an uproar in the Stadium. He needed a protector on his team, yet none emerged immediately.

  Chicago’s early victories did get Quintin Daily and others to crowing about how they couldn’t wait for the early visit of the defending champion Boston Celtics. Jordan scored 27 against Larry Bird and company, but the Celtics won handily, having been fired up by reading aloud the Bulls’ boasting. Still, Bird was impressed. “I’ve never seen one player turn a team around like that,” he told Trib columnist Bob Verdi afterward. “All the Bulls have become better because of him.… Pretty soon this place will be packed every night.… They’ll pay just to watch Jordan. He’s the best. Even at this stage in his career, he’s doing more than I ever did. I couldn’t do what he does as a rookie. Heck, there was one drive tonight. He had the ball up in his right hand, then he took it down. Then he brought it back up. I got a hand on it, fouled him, and he still scored. All the while, he’s in the air.

  “You have to play this game to know how difficult that is. You see that and say, ‘Well, what the heck can you do?’ I’d seen a little of him before and wasn’t that impressed. I mean, I thought he’d be good, but not this good. Ain’t nothing he can’t do. That’s good for this franchise, good for the league.”

  “The scouting report said play me for the drive, that I couldn’t go left,” Jordan recalled. “They didn’t know about my first step or the moves or the jump. I knew I was taking everybody by surprise, including myself.”

  Having sensed this impending stardom, Loughery quickly set up an “all-Jordan, all the time” offense, Tim Hallam recalled. “Kevin was one of those coaches where, how do you describe it? It’s kind of like, if you’ve got a horse, he’s gonna ride it, you know. And that was certainly the case here with Michael.”

  That trust between the two built from game to game as Jordan grew comfortable with Loughery’s style, Hallam said. “Kevin was a good coach, a great situational coach. He was a tactician back then. Michael respected that.”

  Jordan’s presence, of course, seemed to answer just about all tactical questions. In just his ninth pro game, he scored 45 points against San Antonio. Six weeks later he burned Cleveland for another 45. Then came a 42-point performance against New York. And another 45 against Atlanta. The energy level was almost unnerving, recalled Doc Rivers, the Atlanta Hawks’ veteran point guard at the time. “I remember the first year saying to the guys in the locker room, ‘There’s no way that guy will be able to play with that energy for an entire season.’ ” Indeed, NBA rookies traditionally “hit the wall.” They would play twenty-five games or so, the length of a college season, and discover their legs gone, their bodies worn down. Not Jordan.

  “Two years later he was still doing the same thing,” Rivers marveled. “His intelligence always stood out, but with MJ his intensity always stood out even more. There are very few who have that. It’s rare to see a superstar with that level of intensity who can still do it every night, who is a target every night. It was amazing.”

  His first triple-double (35 points, 15 assists, and 14 rebounds) came against Denver. Then, just before the All-Star break, he zipped in 41 against defending champion Boston. Every time he played Bird he thought of the disrespect the Boston star had shown him during the Olympics exhibition tour. During warm-ups, Jordan’s ball had rolled down to the NBA players’ end of the floor, where Bird scooped it up. Instead of throwing it to a waiting Jordan, the Celtics star tossed it over his head. “Bird was showing me it was all business, and I was beneath him,” Jordan said of the incident. “I didn’t forget.”

  Celtics boss Red Auerbach knew a showman when he saw one. “You can see it in his eyes,” Auerbach told one interviewer. “He is happy when he sees a crowd out there and he can perform.”

  Boston’s legendary center Bill Russell agreed, saying, “He’s one of the few guys that I would pay to watch.”

  Banned

  As the rookie caught fire in early 1985, Nike released its first Air Jordan shoe, a red and black model that drew an immediate ban from the NBA. The league’s guidelines called for players to wear white shoes, and the NBA said Jordan would be fined five thousand dollars each time he wore the new shoe. Nike’s Rob Strasser and Peter Moore immediately phoned Sonny Vaccaro. “Both Rob and Peter said, ‘Fuck ’em.’ That’s exactly what they said,” Vaccaro recalled. “I said, ‘What do you mean? We’re going to do it without him wearing the shoe on the court?’ ”

  Strasser quickly decided that Nike was going to have Jordan wear the shoes anyway and that the company would pay his fines each night. Plus they were going to tell fans about the banned shoes through an ad campaign. The NBA couldn’t have handed the shoe manufacturer a better marketing platform. “When you tell the public that something is banned, what does the public always do?” Vaccaro recalled with a laugh. “Tell them you’re not allowed to do something and they’ll do it.”

  Nike moved quickly to take advantage of this gift horse, building the shoe’s popularity on the fact it was banned. “And then i
t happened,” Vaccaro recalled. Jordan’s early play, along with the ban and subsequent marketing, sent sales soaring. Nike would ring up an astounding $150 million in Air Jordan sales over the first three years, which in turn brought Jordan the first wave of profound personal wealth.

  For that first season, Nike pushed hard to make Air Jordan products available for the All-Star Game in Indianapolis, Vaccaro recalled. “We made red and black everything. Wrist bands, T-shirts, everything in the Bulls’ colors.”

  That All-Star Weekend of 1985 would long be remembered for the flashy rookie with the fancy new outfits—and for how some of the league’s veteran stars engaged in a freeze-out of Jordan during the main event. The alleged collusion was so subtle that at first even Jordan failed to recognize it. The story broke afterward, when Dr. Charles Tucker, an advisor to Magic Johnson, Isiah Thomas, and George Gervin, talked about it at the airport. Tucker told reporters, “The guys weren’t happy with his attitude up here. They decided to teach him a lesson. On defense, Magic and George gave him a hard time, and offensively, they just didn’t give him the ball.

  “That’s what they’re laughing about,” Tucker explained to the media as he stood near the stars waiting to fly out of the Indianapolis airport. “George asked Isiah, ‘You think we did a good enough job on him?’ ”

  Their reaction had apparently been triggered by the rookie wearing his new Air Jordan jumpsuit at the Slam Dunk Contest. Jordan, bedecked with gold necklaces during the event, lost in the finals to Atlanta’s Dominique Wilkins. Tucker revealed that the veterans also thought the rookie seemed arrogant and standoffish. Thomas had supposedly been offended when Jordan had little to say during an elevator ride to a player meeting the first night of the weekend. “I was very quiet when I went there,” Jordan later explained. “I didn’t want to go there like I was a big-shot rookie and you must respect me.”

  For the All-Star Game itself, Jordan had played only 22 minutes and taken just 9 of the team’s 120 shots.

  Agent David Falk explained that Jordan had been asked by Nike to wear the prototype of the Air Jordan clothing. “That makes me feel very small,” Jordan said of the snub. “I want to crawl in a hole and not come out.”

  Asked about the incident by reporters, Isiah Thomas denied any freeze-out of Jordan. “How could someone do anything like that?” the Detroit guard said. “It’s very childish.”

  Asked later for comment about the freeze-out, Bulls teammate Wes Matthews said, “He’s got gifts from God. He’s God’s kid; let him be God’s kid.”

  In retrospect, Vaccaro saw the incident as a backlash against Nike by athletes who earned comparatively little from Converse. “Nike was the enemy,” he explained. “It was Nike. We created this guy. It was Nike. It wasn’t so much he appeared in the dunk contest and was a fan favorite. Dr. J was a fan favorite. Nobody got mad at Dr. J. It was what we did with him.”

  Doctor, Doctor

  Few saw at the time the immense power that Jordan was acquiring as a result of his captivating play and his Nike contract. Jordan himself would acknowledge that the incident made him realize that the game’s established stars were against him. It planted the seeds of his dislike for both Isiah Thomas and Magic Johnson. The feelings against Thomas intensified with their two teams competing in the league’s Central Division. Jordan’s dislike for Johnson grew after word reached him that the Lakers guard had apparently encouraged team owner Jerry Buss to trade his old friend James Worthy after Los Angeles lost to Boston in the 1984 championship series.

  The incident was gasoline on the fire of Jordan’s competitiveness, explained Vaccaro, who had begun spending substantial time behind the scenes with Jordan. “That became his personal crutch,” Vaccaro recalled. “That’s why we watched this person turn into the killer on the court that he is. He took them all to task. He never forgot that day. He’s smiling today and he’s kissing with everybody and all that stuff, but he never forgot that. That was the first public snubbing of Michael Jordan. Do any of those guys today remember that? Does anybody admit that? When he got the snub from Isiah, who was a great player obviously, Michael took it and made it a thing he put in the back of his mind.”

  The Pistons were scheduled to play in Chicago Stadium the first game after the break, and Thomas chafed when reporters asked about his involvement in the freeze-out. “That never happened,” Thomas said. “I was very upset when I read that. That could affect a potential friendship between Michael and me.” Before the game, the Detroit star sent a message to Jordan that he needed to talk. Granted a brief meeting, Thomas apologized in person, a display that Jordan later termed “mostly show.” That night, Jordan scored 49 points with 15 rebounds to help the Bulls to a 139–126 overtime win. On one breakaway, Jordan clearly paused, giving Thomas just time enough to run into the picture before throwing down an emotional dunk, which the game’s broadcasters immediately identified as taunting. Afterward, Thomas again grew angry with reporters. “It’s over. It’s over,” he told them. Far from over, their personal confrontation would play out over the ensuing seasons as the Bulls battled to overtake the Pistons in the Eastern Conference.

  The heightened competitiveness was just one of many changes afoot. During the All-Star Game in Indianapolis the men who had owned the Bulls for more than a decade revealed their plans to sell the controlling interest in the team to Jerry Reinsdorf. Reinsdorf told the press that the transaction would be consummated about March 1, 1985.

  Jordan and his Bulls suffered through a twelve-game road losing streak down the stretch before closing out the season with thirty-five wins, an improvement of eight over the previous year and good enough to make the playoffs for the first time since 1981. But with their frontcourt thinned by injuries, the Bulls lost to Milwaukee, 3–1.

  “As the year went on and we made the playoffs, Michael just got bigger and bigger with the fans,” assistant coach Bill Blair recalled. “I remember the trip in Washington where we won to secure a playoff position. Two days later we played Philly, but Michael stayed in Washington and went with Senator Bill Bradley and made an appearance in Congress. Then he got on the plane and flew up to Philadelphia that night. He had the shootaround the next day and got 40 against Philly. So you knew Michael could handle all the other stuff outside of basketball and still get it done.”

  The loss in Philadelphia left Jordan winless in five attempts that first year against Julius Erving and the Sixers. Long known for his classy approach to the game, Erving had not been implicated in the All-Star freeze-out, even though he too endorsed Converse, but Sixers coach Matt Guokas wondered about the effect of the Jordan hoopla on the very proud Erving. First as a broadcaster, then as a Sixers assistant, and finally as head coach, Guokas had been able to observe Dr. J’s career up close for more than a decade. “I saw Doc from all those different perspectives,” Guokas, who had also played alongside Wilt Chamberlain on the Sixers’ great 1967 team, recalled in a 2012 interview. “Julius was mesmerizing as an individual, and the stature he gave our organization, the way he was looked up to, the way he treated people was just magnificent. He always seemed to have time for everybody, no matter who they were. And it was genuine. Julius was coming to the end of his career when Michael was just starting to blossom. But you know I think there was a mutual respect there between the two, and Michael was always very—I don’t want to say careful—but he always made sure that he recognized Julius for the star and the person he was, what he brought to the NBA before Michael, as somebody who brought the ‘wow’ factor to professional basketball. And I think Doc appreciated that. Michael, unfortunately, didn’t get a chance to play against Doc at his peak. But I’ll tell you what, there were a number of games I saw them play against each other. Doc more than held his own and on a number of occasions got the best of the situation. It was never a one-on-one matchup. It was always a team deal. But Doc would always stick his nose in there and have a little extra hop in his step every time we played Michael. Those great players, they didn’t want to be embar
rassed. They knew that if they went out there with just an ordinary effort, like it was just another of eighty-two games, Michael could make you look bad. Real bad. So they were always ready for the challenge.”

  Guokas admitted that he, too, had fallen under the sway of Jordan’s aura in those early seasons. The Sixers coach recalled that he was obsessing about Jordan in the locker room one night before a game at Chicago Stadium. “The locker room in the Stadium was stark and dank and just awful,” Guokas recalled, “but the arena was great. It was my favorite place to play and be in. I remember we were getting ready to play. It was in a back-to-back situation, and I was trying to make sure our guys were ready to go. I was going on and on about Michael. Doc kind of like had his head down and he was sort of fiddling with his sneakers or whatever. He finally looked up. He’d had enough of it. He said, ‘Hey, wait a minute. We can play, too, you know.’

  “I said, ‘You’re right.’ It was a good lesson to learn. Enough said. I didn’t need to be going on about how great he is,” Guokas recalled with a laugh. “He and Andrew Toney went out and beat the bejeebers out of Michael that night. Julius would invariably end up matched up against Michael at some point during those games. Doc kind of gave me that look after the game. He still had a little gas in the tank.”

  PART VI

  FLIGHT SCHOOL

  Chapter 17

  THE YOUNG PRISONER

  DEAN SMITH HAD suggested that Jordan take a communication course at North Carolina to help prepare him for interviews and public appearances. He had some awkward, hesitant moments during his NBA debut, but that was to be expected. He could get by on poise alone and would enjoy excellent relations with the media over the course of his career, even when they annoyed him. Almost overnight, local TV and radio stations that once had little interest in the Bulls began showing up to cover the city’s newest star. “He was so articulate,” former Chicago sports TV producer Jeff Davis explained, “and he photographed like a charm.” Jordan’s fame exploded quickly from there, starting as a splash of Nike commercials and highlight footage, which in turn fed enough word-of-mouth momentum to drive a craze.