How to Be Like Mike

by Pat Williams

FORMER NBA STAR

  And so Hank Aaron would pull his cap low over his eyes and peer out at troublesome pitchers through a vent in his hat. Broadcaster Ken Venturi insists that you could tell Jack Nicklaus his house was burning down while he stood on the first tee, and he’d shrug and tell you, “I’ll take care of it when I get in.” Cal Ripken won’t read on game days so as not to deplete his daily allocation of focus. Ben Hogan once sank a putt while a train whistle exploded in the distance, and when someone asked him about it, he asked, “What whistle?”

  And Michael Jordan became accustomed to the attention in the same ways. He merely factored it in. When team photographer Bill Smith needed to take pictures, Jordan allowed him ten; he’d count them all, and in each he’d give Smith the perfect shot—smiling broadly, eyes wide open and alive. When so many of his games were being broadcast by NBC, Jordan built the pregame interview with the network into his schedule. One day, when NBC decided not to interview him for variety’s sake, he approached broadcaster Marv Albert during warm-ups.

  “Why didn’t we do the interview today?” Jordan said. “You broke up my schedule.”

  Jordan also knew how to escape the attention. He knew how to hide. He would hole himself up in trainers’rooms and locker rooms before big games, shielding himself from the glare of the moment until it was time to play. Once, before a play-off game, referee Wally Rooney walked into the officials’ locker room and found Jordan sitting there. When Rooney asked him what he was doing there, Jordan said, “I had to get away.”

  In 1998, author Mark Vancil followed Jordan for an entire season while working on a book project. Vancil probed Jordan as thoroughly as he could about the way he handled himself in the midst of those last-second shots. “Don’t you feel fear?” Vancil asked. “Don’t you have negative thoughts?”

  To which Jordan replied, “Why would I think about missing a shot I haven’t taken yet?”

  “Michael had the ability to execute in the moment,” Vancil said. “He didn’t allow time to wash over itself. He moved through life in step with time, and that was what made him special, more than any physical gift he had. His focus was otherworldly.”

  There was a certain amount of fear I took into the games. Not physical fear, but the fear of being humiliated.

  —John Hannah

  FORMER NFL STAR

  “The main business,” said author Thomas Carlyle, “is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to see what lies clearly at hand.”

  Losing ourselves in the moment. This is focus. My son Stephen once kicked a game-winning goal for his soccer team, and as his teammates mobbed him, he looked confused, even a little stunned. Later, in the car, he admitted that he thought his team trailed 1–0, and that his goal had tied the game. “Talk about a lack of focus,” he muttered, without realizing that what he’d done was what few of us have the ability to do, to bury the circumstances, the outside influences, to hone our perspective to a narrow path. Stephen learned a life lesson that day: Everyone pays—either attention or dearly.

  “In all the years I coached against MJ, I tried to figure out how we could get to him. I never could find a way. You couldn’t get to his mind, his body or his spirit. You just couldn’t go at him in any way. He totally perplexed me. He was unattackable. He’d just break guys. I had a deep-seated respect for him,” said Pat Riley, head coach of the Miami Heat.

  First game of the 1997 NBA Finals at Utah. The Delta Center is tricked up like Barnum and Bailey’s Circus: light shows, fireworks, motorcycles, pulsating music, clouds of smoke billowing. The Bulls’ players stand in their pregame line, covering their ears, fighting to block out the noise and the colors and the kaleidoscope of distractions. And Utah general manager Scott Layden looked over and saw Jordan, his back to the court, his head bowed, lost in meditation.

  “It was chilling,” Layden said, “watching him get zoned in like that.”

  It is the thrust behind the Zen principles that Jordan’s coach, Phil Jackson, attempts to impart upon his players. But really, this was not Jackson’s influence.

  “What did you learn from Phil?”Vancil once asked Jordan.

  “I learned that all the Zen stuff Phil had been teaching me,” Jordan said, “I’d been doing all my life anyway.”

  “I never looked at the consequences of missing a big shot,” Jordan said. “Why? Because when you think about the consequences, you always think of a negative result. If I’m going to jump into a pool of water, even though I can’t swim, I’m thinking about being able to swim enough to survive. I’m not jumping in thinking to myself, ‘I think I can swim, but maybe I’ll drown.” ’

  “Focus enabled Michael to step up to another level every day,” said NBA coach Lenny Wilkens. “The great ones have this quality. Bird had it. Magic had it. But not at Michael’s level.”

  I have some idea of how exceptional focus in sports can be. Before I discovered my future was in the front office, I played baseball. In all my career, I think I experienced that heightened awareness three times. It was as if the ball appeared to be moving in slow motion, as if I could pick up the path of a curve ball as it left the pitcher’s hand, as if I could see the stitches twirl.

  I remember the time Michael was taping a Chevrolet commercial. The crew was preparing for a long session, a lot of takes. Michael did the whole shoot in one take.

  —Chet Coppock

  BROADCASTER

  Once it happened to me as a senior in high school, in back-to-back games. On a Friday afternoon, I got three hits, two of them home runs. In the next game, the opposing coach (who happened to be my uncle) walked me four times. Once it happened for a whole week in college, at Wake Forest, during a Florida trip my junior year. And once it happened in pro ball, in Miami, when I had four hits in a game at Tampa. I never felt it again in my career. Which explains, once more, why I’ve spent my career in the front office.

  Michael’s ability to nail a commercial spot on the first take was absolutely legendary.

  —Jeff Price

  NBA EXECUTIVE

  I once asked Philadelphia Phillies’ scout Art Parrack, what allowed certain talented players to rise above the others. “Their focus,” Parrack said. “Their ability to concentrate on every pitch, every game, every year.”

  You hear the great athletes speak of it in reverent tones: as if their game is linked to a remote control, slowed down in the midst of chaos, an almost heavenly vision of self-actualization. Bill Russell would talk about this phenomenon in almost spiritual terms.

  I have picked up this awful habit late in life of running marathons, a task that requires not only a large amount of self-hatred, but heavy doses of concentration to push through the times when the body begins to break into pieces. In 1998 I was running the Boston Marathon with my wife. We passed the seventeen-mile mark with our feet leaden and our heads dizzy. We passed a woman who held up a sign that shouted in capital letters: FOCUS!

  If there is any one secret of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.

  —Peter F. Drucker

  AUTHOR

  We both lifted our heads and plunged onward. We both finished as the words of Alexander Graham Bell became clear to me: “Concentrate all your thoughts on the task at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.”

  “One night I went into the Bulls’ locker room in Denver to talk with MJ. There were about ten writers around him. He said, ‘I’ve got to watch this video. ’ For the next ten or fifteen minutes, he sat and focused on the Nuggets’ last game. We waited. Then he turned to us and focused on our questions,” said sportswriter Clay Latimer.

  I passed one of our former players, Ben Wallace, in the Magic locker room before a game in 1999 against Golden State. I asked him if he was ready to play.

  His eyes bored through me. He was expressionless.

  “I’m always ready,” he said.

  When I met Clarence Weatherspoon, an NBA power forward
, I asked him if he had any stories about Jordan. He didn’t. Here’s why.

  “I don’t focus on anyone or anything,” he said, “except what I’m meant to be doing on the floor.”

  I thought Michael might appreciate that.

  May 17, 1993. Richfield, Ohio. Bulls versus Cavaliers. Almost four years earlier, in this same building, after the Cavs had taken the lead with three seconds to play, Jordan hit a game-winning shot with Craig Ehlo draped on him.

  This game is tied. Eighteen seconds left. Jordan: “The fans are booing. They hate me. They’re thinking, ‘He can’t do this to us again. ’This one fan under the basket is really getting ugly, but that’s only helping me to concentrate, because, you know, God doesn’t like ugly.”

  Jordan drifts across the foul lane and sinks a jump shot. The Bulls win, 103–101. Again. The Coliseum is awestruck, silenced. It is not the first time Jordan has cut through the din of an opposing audience with unwavering composure. It would not be the last.

  After the Georgetown– North Carolina title game in 1982 where Michael hit the winning shot. MJ said, “I could see myself hitting the shot. I could see it on the bus, on the way to the game.”

  —John Swofford

  FORMER NORTH CAROLINA

  ATHLETIC DIRECTOR

  Jordan had no tolerance for lapses—from teammates, from coaches, from anyone. He understood the detriment, even the danger, of divided focus.

  Once, during an early season blowout, veteran official Ed Rush’s mind began to flit. Jordan could sense it. During a time-out, he walked over and said, softly, “Ed, could you let us know when the game is over? Because we’re still playing.”

  “MJ was focused in the warm-up lines,” said NBA player Billy Owens. “You never saw him smiling in those lines. He was all business.”

  Jordan shot 84 percent from the foul line for his career. Before every one, he spun the ball in his hands. Then he dribbled until he felt comfortable, somewhere between three and five times. He spun the ball again. And he shot. “When I’m doing that,” he confessed, “I don’t see anyone.”

  If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.

  —Ancient Proverb

  Marv Levy, longtime college and NFL coach, tells a wonderful story about focusing on the moment:“I forget where I was, maybe Cal. I was walking up the tunnel, it was a beautiful day, it’s a beautiful location, and we were playing Stanford in the Big Game. And I sort of said to myself, ‘Man, where else would you rather be than right here, right now?’ I got to the sideline before the game and I had the team around, and I could see it in their faces that they felt the same way. And I said it. And from that point I have said it before every kickoff of every game. It’s the way I feel.”

  Karl Wallenda had been walking on high wires for years when he stretched a wire between a pair of buildings in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and attempted to tiptoe across. This was late in his career, and already, Wallenda had seen two relatives die when a seven-person family pyramid toppled. “All Karl thought about, for months, was not falling,” said his wife.

  It is no surprise, then, that Karl Wallenda fell to his death in San Juan.

  So how do we get there, to that place beyond the minutiae of daily life, beyond the noise and distractions of the workplace, beyond the weight of consequence?

  The truth is, focus begins with recognition. Of where you are. Of what can be controlled. Of the moments in which we live, and the moments that we can affect. It begins with today.

  That’s what author Barbara Sher meant when she wrote. “Now is the operative word. Everything you put in your way is just another method of putting off the hour when you could actually be doing your dream. You don’t need endless time and perfect conditions. Do it now. Do it today. Do it for twenty minutes and watch your heart start beating!”

  Past Performance

  Is No Guarantee of

  Future Success

  This is the best day in the history of the world, even though yesterday that seemed an impossibility.

  —Jack Kent Cooke

  sports mogul

  He shocked us more than once. He left basketball for baseball, enduring skepticism and doubt, and he returned to basketball with a decisive two-word press release—“I’m back.” He abandoned the game once again while still near his prime, and he left the placidity of retirement for the challenge of rebuilding a downtrodden Washington Wizards franchise. If there is a thread through Jordan’s expansive career, it’s that he does what he wants, when he wants, regardless of public perception. He exists in his own moments, carrying ahead into his own select challenges, dedicated toward maximizing life in the present tense.

  Phil Jackson was always preaching about being in the moment and living for the moment and enjoying each day for what it is.

  —Steve Kerr

  NBA PLAYER

  “Michael taught me to live in the moment. He never talked about the future. If it was the second quarter at Miami, Michael was in the second quarter. He was about right now. Next week’s game will take care of itself,” said B. J. Armstrong.

  Late in the summer of 1993, Jordan’s father, James, pulled his car into a rest stop near Lumberton, North Carolina, to take a respite from the road. Two young men came upon him, murdered him and stole his car.

  It had already been a pensive time for Michael Jordan. Earlier that year, he’d won his third consecutive NBA title, and he’d begun to realize nearly all of his goals in basketball. He’d always been driven by challenges, by the insinuation that he couldn’t accomplish something. At first, the media had written that an individual scoring champion couldn’t win a team championship. So he won three. Then he wanted to be better than Julius Erving, better than David Thompson, better than Walter Davis, better than Elgin Baylor. He had done it.

  But now, no one would deny him anything.

  At his father’s funeral, Jordan spoke for twenty minutes about relishing the positive aspects of his father’s life and avoiding the circumstances that surrounded his death. “We all walked away looking for the positive in this tragedy,” said Jordan’s friend, Fred Whitfield. “My respect for Michael went way up.”

  Meanwhile, Jordan took measure of the positives in his own life. The game had become less uplifting, less rewarding. The daily routine had become a chore, and the hubbub surrounding him—in his dealings with the media, in his spectacular array of endorsement contracts—began to wear on him. James Jordan’s death only accentuated these points.

  “When I did lose the appetite to prove myself again and again,” Michael said, “I started tricking myself. I had to create situations to stay on top.”

  Jordan needed something else. A newsituation. He’d hinted before at delving into baseball, his boyhood dream, the sport his father had once believed was his son’s best. That summer, he told his personal trainer to begin preparing him for a baseball career.

  Life is always walking up to us and saying, “Come on in; the living’s fine.” And what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

  —Russell Baker

  AUTHOR

  Baseball, it would seem, was a failure. Jordan never progressed past the Double-A level with the Chicago White Sox. He struggled to hit professional pitching. He barely managed to keep his average above the . 200 level in 1994. This was an athlete we were not accustomed to seeing fail, and being at the peak of his fame, in the wake of winning three NBA championships, it only meant the risk he took was that much bigger.

  “There was something quite admirable about what he set out to do, a player at the top of his game, a uniquely proud man—arguably the best ever—walking away from one sport and willing to begin at the lower rungs of another very demanding sport, willing to endure the possibility of failure,” wrote David Halberstam in his biography of Jordan, Playing for Keeps.

  BAG IT, MICHAEL, Sports Illustrated declared on its cover as Jordan was in the midst of his struggles in baseball. But what SI missed, and what all those who peered at Jordan with a jaundiced eye mis
sed, is that even in failure—even when the experiment came to an end and Jordan returned to basketball—he’d succeeded. He’d worked as hard as he could: arriving early for batting practice and staying late. He’d enjoy each moment, his interaction with the young players, the freshness of it, the shifting focus of a career that had otherwise grown stagnant.

  “The key is being mentally strong to deal with disappointments, day in and day out, and still having the energy to come back the next day and try to start fresh,” Jordan said of his baseball career. “It’s very easy to carry things over from game to game, but if you do, it’s just going to last a little bit longer.”

  Winston Churchill believed the key to success was going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. And this is the first step toward accentuating our present existence, toward making the most of today. It’s why the windshield of your car is ten times the size of the rearview mirror. That’s what Ralph Waldo Emerson meant when he wrote, “Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year. Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can; tomorrow is a new day.”

  There is a line on every mutual fund prospectus that reads: “Past performance is no guarantee of future success.” It is the story of so many lives, that people either wallow in recent failures or exult in past triumphs so readily that they begin to cloud their present with visions of the past. And they become complacent. They lose sight of the fact that yesterday already happened.

  This doesn’t mean we should disconnect ourselves entirely from our past. It should be used to help us shape the present that we want. That is, as long as we don’t mire ourselves in it.

  And so once we’ve come to terms with our past, there is only a future to confront. It lurks angrily before us, with no promise except uncertainty. It’s what Jordan faced in turning to baseball, in risking his reputation, his name, on a romantic risk. He could have hedged. He could have let it go, dismissed it as fantasy, as a pipe dream. But what he had to face couldn’t compare to what he might gain. So he dove in.