Bulls PR man Tim Hallam watched Jordan mature into a remarkably self-possessed public figure. Julius Erving had brought a grace to the role of pro basketball superstar that Jordan admired and emulated in his relations with the media. It also didn’t hurt that Deloris Jordan watched her son’s every move and was in his ear if something seemed amiss. Furthermore, his ability to listen meant that he understood reporters’ questions and routinely formulated engaging answers.
“I think he grew in every way,” Hallam observed. “If you look back to his early interviews, he wasn’t as articulate as four years, or eight years, or twelve years down the road. You know, everything changed about him. Everything he wore changed about him, too. It’s funny to go back in his first year and see what he was wearing and then go four years from there. He went from sweatpants to designer suits.”
As positive and profitable as the public spotlight was, it also hastened Jordan’s alienation, a process that Hallam began to notice by February of that rookie year. Some of it had to do with his mushrooming fame and some of it stemmed from the humiliation of the All-Star freeze-out. Sonny Vaccaro flew to Chicago to talk with him in the aftermath of the freeze-out to explain the reaction of the league’s biggest stars. “After the All-Star Game, no one at Nike knew what to do,” Vaccaro recalled. “Michael and I talked. I told him, ‘This shows you the depth that they’re going to go because you’re better than all of them, Michael.’ ” The talk did little to alleviate the disappointment. Magic Johnson had been his hero. As Jordan told reporters, the incident made him want to crawl in a hole and hide. He was already rapidly on his way to becoming a prisoner in his hotel room, unwilling to venture out into public outside of games and scheduled appearances. Only occasionally would he emerge from this isolation, Tim Hallam recalled. “It was like, ‘Wow, Michael’s out!’ You were happy for him. Meaning, it’s kind of like a lion getting out of the cage and walking free within the boundaries of the zoo for a while.”
Beyond the apparent rejection by the league’s stars, the pressure of such sudden stardom was overwhelming and a large part of Jordan’s new life that could not be avoided. Teams still flew commercially in those days, which meant that road life began early in the morning with five-o’clock wake-up calls and immediate exposure to a public that recognized him at every turn. People simply felt compelled to approach the sports world’s newest magician, and it usually wouldn’t take long before he was mobbed, Hallam explained. “I would say, ‘You know what, he’s got to just say, the hell with it, and go about what he wants to do.’ But then you find out when you see him come out like that, that he can’t. Because people would go so gaga over him, whether it be an adult or kid or whoever, they couldn’t hold themselves back. They’d lose their fucking minds. That’s how it was for him.”
The situation sent him looking for refuge. “Michael used to talk about going to a movie theater,” Joe O’Neil explained. “You go sit in a movie theater, you’re just like a regular person. Aside from that, restaurants, malls, the gas station, anywhere you go, people are going to be all over you.”
Nike and the NBA itself would ultimately bear some of the responsibility for the sacrificing of Jordan’s private life, observed George Gervin, who became Jordan’s teammate in 1985. “That’s where it changed everything, man. They made him bigger than life. That made it tough on him. They made him the most famous guy to ever play. But that’s a tough life where you have to have a guard with you everywhere you go. You can’t eat, you can’t sit down without somebody sitting around you. He had that Michael Jackson kind of life. That’s a tough life, man. That can drive you to an early death. And the game was changing. How ESPN and cable TV came in. He really had to isolate himself because they promoted him so hard. And Nike and all them promoted him so hard. It made it hard for him to be just a regular guy. You get robbed of your life.”
“Trying to deal with the public just got to be too much,” Tim Hallam recalled. “I think it was just a change in that the demands were pretty incredible. And you’ve got to remember, the demands were incredible just from the Bulls side of it, let alone his own ventures and commercials and Nike, and life in general. All of it together was chaotic, especially at that time in the NBA.”
Longtime Chicago radio reporter Bruce Levine perceived that Jordan came to feel objectified “much like a very beautiful woman who can’t get by the fact that people focus only on her exterior. Because people are so taken by what she is on the outside and what she is physically. He knew that people didn’t deal with him as a person but as an object.”
“He had a lot going on,” Hallam said. “I don’t think it really changed his personality, but it made him a different person because he had to be different. You can’t satisfy everybody. You may try for a while, but then you learn that, you know what, I can’t do this and it’s not worth my energy to try and do it. And so certain things are going to fall by the wayside and certain people are going to think that it’s because, you know, I have a huge ego or I’m big-headed now, or I have money or fame now. That simply was not the case. There’s only twenty-four hours in a day. I think that was the biggest thing that I saw that I felt bad for him, in that, no one could control that.
“And yet,” Hallam added, “he still went out and did what he was supposed to do.”
Caught in the Struggle
Strangely, Jordan found some relief around the regular reporters covering the team, people whom he had come to trust enough to chat with before games. He also continued to draw support from his family, with his mother and brothers making regular visits to Chicago to stay with him. His father visited, too, but that created its own problems, because of the growing conflict between his parents. Soon people involved with Jordan and the team in Chicago began to notice that they rarely saw his parents together. Sonny Vaccaro pointed out that after those initial meetings it seemed he almost never dealt with James and Deloris Jordan together. “At first it would be normal on the trips,” Vaccaro recalled. “They’d be together. When it first happened we had a meeting together. But then, after a time or two, the lines were drawn in the sand. I can’t honestly say that I remember more than a one-sentence conversation with them together after that.”
And the Nike staff members felt some relief at that. They could always rely on Mrs. Jordan to be professional.
“You trusted Deloris Jordan,” Vaccaro explained. “She was an impeccably dressed, very educated woman, whereas James was crude in a way.” Still, they were in business with his son, and Nike officials soon found themselves dealing with the father, a task that Vaccaro disliked. James Jordan was known to drink, he said, and time would show that he was unreliable in business, as shaky as Deloris Jordan was solid.
Sis, Michael’s older sister, pointed out that the parents had fallen into their own intense competition to influence their son. Her father was quiet and reserved while her mother moved into the spotlight, she explained. “Though his sudden popularity brought with it a resounding level of success, it also brought an avalanche of contention between my parents.”
As with their marital conflicts a decade earlier, this new conflict could erupt with surprising intensity outside of the public’s eye.
“Michael was split between his parents from day one,” Sonny Vaccaro explained. “I mean not to the public, but there was this contemptuous relationship.”
Mostly the parents had competing views of what Jordan should be and how he should conduct himself. The son loved both his parents, felt a loyalty to each, and somehow managed during his first few years to keep their conflict from reaching toxic levels. But as his career advanced, that became increasingly harder to do, Vaccaro said, an opinion shared by the family’s older daughter.
James Jordan’s own life was far from perfect during his son’s first season in Chicago. The father was going through the humiliating process of dealing with his criminal charges in North Carolina. And Sis had made it known to her parents she was exploring legal action against both of them in connect
ion with her sexual abuse allegations. She had checked herself in for psychiatric treatment at a Wilmington hospital. No wonder James found easy escape in the fantasy life his son was living, no matter how confining the circumstances.
Bulls employees and fans alike took notice of the closeness between father and son. James Jordan presented an amiable, low-key figure. The media and Bulls staff members enjoyed his constant good nature. And as he had done when Michael was in high school, James made it clear that he was not there to meddle with the team in any way, but only to help his son’s adjustment off the court.
“Michael adored him,” former Bulls assistant coach Johnny Bach recalled in 2012.
“They were like buds, you know,” Tim Hallam said of Jordan and his father. “I thought that was kind of nice. He was always with him. He always hung with him. I think it was good for Michael.”
Yet in many ways James’s companionship only served to intensify the tension with Deloris as they both sought to influence their son. Not everyone saw or felt that conflict. Joe O’Neil recalled spending time with the Jordans when the Bulls went on the road. “I remember sitting in the hotel lobbies with James and Deloris Jordan. Their attitude was, ‘We’ll get there someday. You know we will.’ They were always very, very positive and supportive. Mike’s dad was a funny, funny guy, a jokester. Deloris, she was like everybody’s mom. She looked over Michael like any mother would. She was as sweet and nice of a person as you could imagine. She never had any air about her that, ‘My son’s a superstar,’ or whatever. Michael’s parents were protective of him, very, very proud of him. Just like regular parents.”
Posse Time
A number of other people took up residence in Jordan’s young life, beginning with Nike executive Howard White, a former University of Maryland basketball player who also happened to be African American. “Howard was like his guy,” Vaccaro explained. “He was a basketball player. Howard was a good person. He was his companion on the road, too.”
The entourage expanded from there, Vaccaro explained. “That’s when Michael got the North Carolina group back up. Rod Higgins remained close. Michael started forming his own posse. All of that was starting to happen.” It was a revolving group, with an understood mission of keeping Jordan company on road trips, when his hotel room began to feel like a prison. The agenda included card games, golf, mixed drinks, pool, whatever it took to lighten the mood. This group soon came to include old friend and teammate Adolph Shiver and “the three Freds”: Fred Whitfield, who soon had jobs working with Nike and David Falk; Fred Glover, an insurance adjuster who had met Whitfield and Jordan at the basketball camp back in Buies Creek; and Fred Kearns, a Charlotte mortician who had often golfed with Jordan.
That first season James Jordan was alarmed to get a large bill for the expenses the entourage had run up while they stayed with Michael for an extended road trip. “I first thought it was a waste of money until I thought about it a little longer,” the father said at the time. “Then it occurred to me that it was in Michael’s best interest to keep close friends around him instead of strangers. These guys were good for Michael.”
Other regulars in the early days included Buzz Peterson and Gus Lett, a former security guard at Chicago Stadium who assumed some of those duties for Jordan. But it was George Koehler, Jordan’s driver and impromptu valet, who proved especially constant and reliable over the years, Joe O’Neil explained. “George has been the perfect kind of buffer for Michael. With a guy like Michael, you almost always need somebody with you. Somebody to run a little interference. To have another set of eyes out there for you. George is a great guy. He’s a Chicagoan. His and Michael’s relationship is very, very special. Michael didn’t have a big entourage. His closest friends were kind of regular guys—Rod Higgins, Adolph, the different Freds.”
Those in the entourage soon took to calling Michael “Black Cat,” perhaps because he could pounce as quickly in a social setting as he could in any game. Jordan seemed driven by an insistence on challenging those around him in even little ways. His verbal gamesmanship was conducted at a level that seemed worthy of anything he did on the court. “With his friends and people who are close to him, Jordan will see something and ride you and crack on you,” Rod Higgins once explained. “To deal with him, you have to go right back to him just to make the night not so long.”
He seemed to enjoy back and forth banter as much as he relished a good game of one-on-one, and he approached it with the same mentality. “He’s the kind of guy,” Tim Hallam explained, “if he comes at you, you’ve got to go right back at him.… You’ve got to be able to take his hits, his barbs, if you will, and come right back at him. Otherwise you’re a dead man. The best way to get him is if you throw it back at him and people around him are laughing. Then he kind of backs down a little bit, ’cause you’ve let him know, ‘I got some shit too, okay?’ ”
As Hallam explained, Jordan believed his team should go 82–0 each and every season. He carried a similar level of expectation into his social life, which didn’t make it easy to be around him. “If you make a mistake, he’ll let you know about it,” Buzz Peterson once pointed out.
Hallam added, “It’s kind of like you have to be competitive with him, too, at whatever, or one, you’re either discarded, or two, you’re no fun to compete against.”
Sometimes his companions had to make sure they weren’t too good at coming back at Jordan. “He hates to be embarrassed,” Whitfield once explained with a laugh. “He can’t take that. He can dish it out all the time, though.”
“If he’s gonna tease… you gotta volley,” Hallam said. “He likes to volley. But you have to do it in the right way. You can’t be bullshit and it’s gotta be good. Would we yell at each other? No. But, he’d say something like, ‘You know, I could get you fired.’ And I’d say, ‘Hey, don’t do me any favors. You think I’m enjoying this shit right now?’ ”
This hard edge was also tempered by the childlike nature that George Koehler first observed. Jordan displayed a vulnerability at times that contrasted with the fierceness of his competitive persona. Early on in his new life in Chicago, he showed much of the complexity that would come to define his personality. For starters, he wrestled with intense, and complicated, emotions about his family.
He prized trust, and when he found it, Jordan was capable of almost staggering displays of loyalty. “Once you are friends with him he really works at keeping that friendship and nursing that friendship,” Rod Higgins explained. Conversely, if that trust was violated, or he sensed some affront, his response could be just as intense, a factor that he had learned to channel into his competitiveness.
Perhaps the most important thing to all of his friends, the thing that kept them traveling back and forth at their own expense to hang out with him, was the uncommon loyalty. Jordan was able to communicate to all of them that he cared about them. “What people don’t understand,” said former teammate and longtime friend Charles Oakley, “is that he really is a good guy.”
And without doubt, there was the sheer joy and fascination of being an insider in Michael Jordan’s lofty world. The view from those heights was exhilarating for those around him. He was basketball’s Elvis. “He created this mythology for all of us,” Vaccaro explained. “Whether it was Nike, whether it was me personally, whether it was his friends, whoever it was with him, the small group of guys that he had with him that, the ones who have gone up and down with him, they were his friends. They were the only ones he could trust for eight or nine years.”
So they made themselves useful as friends, and then something more. For example, Adolph Shiver, Jordan’s oldest friend, filled a role as something of a mouthy social director and bartender for the gatherings. Mostly, Shiver brought the feel of home to the group, along with a sixth sense for the party atmosphere and a humor about Jordan’s limitations. “That boy don’t know how to make drinks,” Shiver once said of Jordan. “He just be throwing shit together.”
“The reality of it,” sai
d former Bulls psychologist George Mumford, “was that if he hadn’t created that cocoon, he probably wouldn’t have won those six championships.”
Juanita
By far the most important addition to Jordan’s private world was Juanita Vanoy, whom he met in December of his rookie season. They were introduced by a friend who set up a meeting at a Bennigan’s in Chicago. A few weeks later, the friend had a small party to give them a second opportunity to spend time together. Vanoy was a beauty, said to be one of Reggie Theus’s former flames. She was almost four years older than Jordan, and he immediately found that appealing. It challenged him to raise his own level of maturity. He found that he could talk to her, as he could with his mother.
This ability to talk led to something of a magical connection, and they began spending more time together. As Lacy Banks of the Chicago Sun-Times explained, Jordan’s existence had quickly become that of a young prince, so it probably helped that Vanoy had already dealt with a Chicago player who was popular with the ladies. By all accounts, she was classy, intelligent, and patient. She was self-confident and low-maintenance, both critical to managing a relationship with Jordan. “Both my wife, Pam, and I found Juanita to be a lovely person,” recalled Sonny Vaccaro, an assessment echoed by Jordan’s golf partner Richard Esquinas.
Michael Jordan Page 29