At first, he was greeted with good fortune as an owner. He had hired Hall of Fame and fellow University of North Carolina alum Larry Brown as his coach. Jordan assumed the reins of the franchise in early 2010 and watched the Bobcats make the playoffs for the first time in its short history that spring, but then he had to peel off some of the team’s best players in a difficult cost-cutting move during the off-season. Observers noted that the loss of point guard Raymond Felton and center Tyson Chandler contributed to the Bobcats’ struggles in 2011. Which in turn meant that Jordan soon came to a bitter parting of the ways with Brown, who later went on The Dan Patrick Show and complained that people around Jordan “don’t have a clue,” that they are all “yes-men” who made him “sick” when he worked there, and that Jordan planted “spies” to check on the coaches.
To replace Brown, Jordan brought veteran coach Paul Silas out of retirement as his coach, but the team struggled and sank that spring. It was then that Jordan began to put on his gear and visit practice to test his players. “He’s very knowledgeable about the game,” Silas observed at the time. “He’s been there, he’s won championships, so he understands what it takes. A tough guy, he’s very respectful of the players, a players’ guy. But he’s also equally firm. He just wants everybody to carry the threat.”
Old friend Rod Higgins, the team’s top basketball executive, needed a center before that season and considered Kwame Brown, then a free agent. Brown represented an embarrassing chapter from Jordan’s Washington episode, and Higgins thought he’d best seek the owner’s approval before signing Brown, who had in his decade in the league established a record as a journeyman center who could defend and rebound.
“If you think he can help us win, sign him,” Jordan said.
Now, he found himself in practice once again facing Brown.
“Our relationship is the same,” Brown said that spring when asked about Jordan. “MJ’s MJ. It’s never been what everybody thought it was. It’s a boss-player relationship. And that’s how it is. It’s not always going to be peaches and cream when you’re not performing. But also as a person MJ is a great guy. He’s a great owner to play for, and that’s why I came here to play for him.”
Asked about a forty-eight-year-old Jordan in practice, Brown said, “He definitely went hard. He’s a little older now.… He can still get his shots off, though. He’s still holding his own. I don’t know about up and down, but half-court he’s still good.”
As for the infamous trash talk?
“That’s what he does,” Brown said, laughing now. “I mean, he’s MJ. Would we talk trash back to him? No, no, no. But what other team has an owner that comes into practice and can actually still play? He comes into practice, the level of play and the competition picks up. He’s talking noise, he’s joking. It’s good for him to be around because everybody wants to play hard.…
“You better play hard,” he said with another laugh.
As the Bobcats struggled that spring, Jordan continued to take immense heat as an executive. But he had agreed to bring on board Rich Cho, one of the league’s most talented young personnel evaluators, to run the basketball operations. It was a huge concession by Jordan, observers said. Trusting had never been easy for him, but it had finally become essential, many said.
“There’s definitely a method to the madness,” Jim Stack said of Jordan. “Michael is very, very, very bright. Very shrewd. Very knowledgeable. Nothing he does is by happenstance. He’s very calculating. Very measured. I think he ultimately has a lot of clairvoyance with where he is going, but sometimes it doesn’t work out the way it needs to. You clearly learn along the way. He’s a quick study. When something happens, he’ll make the necessary adjustments. But as an owner or a manager, it’s not a part-time gig. You gotta be there nonstop. Being that he’s Michael Jordan, the icon, it’s tough for him to be on the spot like he needs to be 24/7, in order to do justice to what he needs to be doing there. He’s realized his life is not conducive to that role. He’s agreed to step back a bit on being the final decision maker. His stubbornness as a youth might have kept him insisting that he was going to figure it out and do it on his terms. But he’s matured and understands he has to step back and not be on the front lines. I see that as a huge level of maturity in him as a person and a human being. He never would have done that back in the day. Never. His way was to go harder and stronger, and figure out a way to get it done, just like he did in getting past Detroit, in those challenges he had before he finally broke through.”
Jordan soon found that all the concessions had only guaranteed him more trouble than he ever imagined. He and his staff watched a brief revival of the team’s fortunes that spring of 2011 before deciding to pull the trigger on a trade of the team’s veteran leader and All-Star, Gerald Wallace, to Portland for draft picks and an odd assortment of role players. It was a move designed to rebuild the team, to take losses in order to gain younger players for the future, but instead the deal sent the Bobcats reeling into a losing streak. And Wallace, a family man and strong community figure in Charlotte, later told the media that he felt “betrayed” by Jordan. It’s a fair guess that some of the players in the Bobcats’ locker room felt the same way. Jordan clearly understood this. As a player, he had sat in locker rooms feeling confused and betrayed as Chicago Bulls management traded away his best friends and competitive brothers in moves aimed at building the franchise’s future. Now it was Jordan’s turn to be the bad guy. In the days after the trade, he offered the community little more than stony silence, which led some observers to conclude that Jordan was insensitive and uncaring about the harshness of the deal. In fact, the move was unpleasant for Jordan. A smart-ass might have pointed out to Jordan that the Wallace trade was the kind of deal that Krause would have had the brass to make.
For a time, Jordan employed his old friend Charles Oakley as a Bobcats assistant coach.
“He’s a good guy,” Oakley said of Jordan one night after another loss, adding that the modern NBA players were spoiled crybabies who didn’t understand what it meant to buckle down, to toughen up and work.
Jordan smiled at a bystander and quipped that if Oakley could just get 10 rebounds a night, then he himself could come back to the game and score big time. “If he can get 10, I can get 20,” Jordan said gamely.
If only that had been the case. Jordan knew well that he faced a long, narrow path to success with a small-market NBA team, a troubled road where respect was won one step at a time.
The next day he was up early and about the town, leading his players in public service projects for the local schools, where he had ponied up hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep middle school sports programs from being lost to budget cuts.
That summer, the league embarked on yet another player lockout, this one angrier in many ways than all the others. There had been a time when Jordan had entered the fray on the side of the players in their battle with the owners. Now, however, he was a majority partner with minority partners who had been hit hard by the team’s millions upon millions in losses. He entered the labor fray aggressively on the side of the owners. It was what he was supposed to do. He had a fiduciary responsibility to his partners to help strike the toughest, best deal available. To the public, however, he was still Air Jordan and now widely castigated as a traitor to the cause. He was the one majority black owner among the many faces of older white men.
It was a low, low time.
But the lockout ended that winter, and as bad as the times seemed in 2011, they would sit in his rearview as a shimmering oasis by the time he had absorbed the shellacking of 2012, when a young Charlotte team, stripped of its veteran leadership and talent, faced an unprecedented slaughter, one that would leave Jordan lampooned time and again as the Greatest Loser in the history of the sport.
The Loser
One bright spot emerged in that disaster of a season on a night that the Pistons visited Charlotte. Jordan was speaking with a writer when he learned that Joe Dumars, Detroit�
�s top basketball executive, had come down for the game. “Joe’s here?” Jordan said, his eyes wide. He turned immediately and walked down the hall to the Pistons’ locker room just as Dumars was emerging. He threw his arm around the shoulder of his old nemesis, who faced his own headaches in Detroit, and they walked arm in arm down the hallway. Jordan wanted him to meet Prieto, his fiancé, who seemed to have brought happiness and a sense of calm to basketball’s disappointed man.
By the time his forty-ninth birthday neared in February, print, Internet, and broadcast media had begun calling him the worst owner ever. The final touch of irony was that his team would close the season on a twenty-three-game losing streak for number 23. Many nights he had seemed like a lion caged in the building as the team collapsed. They finished the strike-shortened season at 7–59, a .106 winning percentage, the worst record ever posted in an NBA season. The previous record had been held by the 1973 Philadelphia 76ers at 9–73 (.110). With Rich Cho helping guide the strategy, Jordan’s club had traded away big contract stars and opted to go with an even younger, less-experienced roster that would net the team a high draft pick.
Jordan insisted that he and his staff had a vision for the team, and while they didn’t expect the team to be so bad, they were sticking to their plans. At the end of the regular season, he removed Paul Silas as coach, a decision Silas said he agreed with, and moved him into a front office position.
The prize in the draft lottery that year was Anthony Davis, the star of Kentucky’s national championship team, but even with the price of a terrible record, Jordan’s luck deserted him. New Orleans won the top pick in the lottery, and the Bobcats, picking second, took Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, another impressive young wing off of Kentucky’s team.
Jordan’s late tenure in Charlotte had been marked by rumors that he was throwing his hands up and selling the team, rumors that he vigorously denied. A generation of players who had come of age with him continued to look at him as their role model. Players like Eddie Pinckney and Anthony Teachey and many who had competed with and against him held out great hopes that he would turn things around. Others quietly said that if he couldn’t do a better job he should just sell the team.
Before he died in 2012, Lacy Banks expressed his disappointment in how Jordan’s life after basketball had turned out. Banks cited his experience covering Muhammad Ali and said that Jordan should find some means of giving back to humanity, of trying to be the lion that Ali had been. Unprompted, many others expressed the same desire. Sonny Vaccaro said it was time for Jordan to find some great thing to put his energies into, besides his own hedonism. He would be well served to follow his mother’s lead, Vaccaro offered.
Jordan was too self-focused to do such a thing, Jerry Krause said. “He thinks the world owes him.”
Yet it seemed that his time in Charlotte was being overlooked just as his time in Birmingham with the Barons had gone unappreciated. Later, following a documentary film on his baseball days, a variety of observers came forward to say that they hadn’t realized what a great thing he was doing by persisting in baseball, making himself into a player. Likewise, his efforts in Charlotte were critical to the region’s economic health and had begun to show signs of generating real growth, despite all of the frustration and challenges. That seemed to be indicated when President Barack Obama chose the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte as the site of the 2012 Democratic National Convention, the place where he would accept the nomination to run for his second term.
The overwhelming negativity of the 2012 season, however, produced yet a new round of rumors that Jordan was going to sell in the face of great losses and great disappointment. He rushed to counter them by stating publicly that he was invested in Charlotte for the long run, no matter how long it took to rebuild an NBA presence in the region.
He faced a coaching hire that summer, and there were reports he was considering either the tough old pro Jerry Sloan, now in his seventies, or a bright young face, Brian Shaw, who had been a player and an assistant with Phil Jackson on the Lakers. Jordan, however, went for a surprise choice, the virtually unknown Mike Dunlap, a coach with a reputation for tough practices and heavy conditioning. It was in practice that Jordan had made his stand as a player, and practice where he hoped to dig out of his hole as an owner.
His young team ran out to a surprising start that fall of 2012, winning more games in a few weeks than the previous team had won in an entire season, but inexperience soon caught up with them and they fell into an eighteen-game losing streak, although they continued to play so hard during the losing that hope somehow glowed through the grinding experience. In the midst of such challenge, some close observers noted that Jordan seemed happier now that he and Prieto were engaged. There were fewer golfing junkets, and he seemed more focused on the task at hand. The two would be married in 2013 in the wake of a huge media celebration of Jordan’s fiftieth birthday. Despite all the good feelings, the Bobcats again stumbled that spring. In the off-season, Jordan decided to change coaches yet again. He hired Lakers assistant coach Steve Clifford and watched as the Bobcats, still one of the youngest teams in the league, showed substantial improvement that fall. Over the summer, Jordan had procured the rights to the Hornets name. New Orleans would become the Pelicans, and for the 2014–15 season Jordan would preside over the Hornets back in Charlotte. Meanwhile, he spent much of the year attempting to sell his 56,000-square-foot mansion in Highland Park, north of Chicago, first for $29 million on the open market, then at auction for a reported $18 million, before dropping to a substantially lower asking price.
Toward the end of 2013, it was announced that the new Mrs. Jordan was expecting. (She would give birth to identical twin girls named Victoria and Ysabel in February 2014, just days before Michael’s fifty-first birthday, leading ESPN and other media outlets to joke that the father had just gotten “a new pair of Jordans.”) Slowly but persistently, he had built a new momentum in his life. He began working out more earnestly and making an effort to lose dozens of pounds, amid persistent rumors that he planned to return to the game to play briefly. It was something he had long hinted that he might do—come back at age fifty to compete again. Mostly it served as proof that his karma twisted on, taking his life from one indelible fantasy to another.
If what Jordan was encountering in Charlotte was a power play, then it was proving to be like any other, won only after a long, hard road and much suffering. During the dark nights in Birmingham, he had visited often with his departed father, so it wasn’t much of a leap to figure that on his bleakest nights in Charlotte, Jordan again likely sat alone in the darkness of his arena reviewing all that had unfolded with James Jordan, telling the old man of his dashed expectations and embarrassments.
It’s also not hard to imagine on those nights that Jordan’s thoughts veered toward fantasy, or at least visualization, settling on the best thing that he could ever hope to find as an owner. There, shimmering for him in the distance, is a grand season, a deep playoff run at another championship. In Jordan’s vision, it’s probably not hard to imagine that all of his family is there in spirit, even Dawson Jordan, there with Clementine, his sweetheart, on his arm. Medward and dear old Miss Bell, too. All the Jordans, in fact, and the Peoples. They’re all there. Deloris and Sis and Larry and Roz and all their cousins and kin, aglow with pregame expectations.
In the midst of this final fantasy, the buzzer sounds. It’s almost time for the tip-off, but the arena is suddenly astir. Michael is nowhere to be seen.
He’s in his office in the bowels of the arena, sitting and talking with James as he has his entire life. The son’s eyes are bright and wide and starting to fill to the point that he’s fighting to see his old man through the blur. He’s suddenly struck to ask the enduring question, “What do you think of me now, Pops? How about all of this? Do I still have to go back on in the house?”
One can also imagine Jordan pausing then, realizing what his closest friends and his many fans understood long ago, that he doesn’t
have to ask anymore. His long-raging debate can be put away forever now. The answer is right there in front of him, in front of all of us. Something he can clearly see.
PHOTOS
Jordan battled Wake Forest’s Anthony Teachey in both high school and college. (AP Images)
Going up against Houston’s Clyde Drexler (center) in the 1982 NCAA tournament. (AP Images)
Hitting the winning shot against Georgetown in the 1982 NCAA championship game. (AP Images)
With (left to right) Matt Doherty, Sam Perkins, and Dean Smith in the fall of 1982. (AP Images)
Jordan, with Dean Smith, as he ponders leaving North Carolina in 1984. (AP Images)
Jordan came to consider Coach Dean Smith a “second father.” (AP Images)
Playing against NBA players in an exhibition game for the 1984 U.S. Olympic team. (AP Images)
Jordan, shown here with Orlando Woolridge in Chicago in 1984, spent his career challenging teammates to one-on-on battles. (AP Images)
In his first NBA game. (AP Images)
Jordan’s acrobatic style created instant danger in the NBA. (AP Images)
Convalescing at UNC after he broke his foot during his second pro season. (AP Images)
Going for 63 against Boston in the 1986 playoffs. (Steve Lipofsky/basketballphoto.com)
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