How to Be Like Mike

by Pat Williams

  “Practice is what made Michael go,” said Jordan’s former coach in Chicago, Doug Collins. “Every day, he had this need to show he was the best. It became part of Michael. Some guys take nights off. Some guys take days off. He never did that. Throw away all the talent. The way he practiced put him on a level above everybody else.”

  We’re at the heart of Jordan now, poking at the purring engine that started him on the path to transcendence. Without the inclination, without the ceaseless work ethic, Jordan is merely another talented athlete gliding through an admirable career, but nothing historic. Without the work ethic, Jordan would have fizzled in his late twenties and flagged in his early thirties, when his natural gifts first began their slow fade, when he was no longer the league’s most spectacular athlete, outjumping and outdunking and outrunning everyone.

  When I stop working, the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m working.

  —Tennessee Williams

  AUTHOR

  But Jordan didn’t dissolve with age. Just the opposite. He once told Dean Smith that he didn’t become a “pure shooter” until his fourth season in the NBA, and Smith insists that at the final stages of his career, Jordan was as brilliant as he’d ever been, his skills exemplary; in some ways, they were superior to anything they’d ever been. “It frustrates me that his unstinting work ethic is overshadowed by his many other accomplishments,” Smith said. “His development was grounded in principles; it wasn’t otherworldly, much as he could make it look so.”

  “I never believed all the press clippings and I never found comfort in the spotlight,” Jordan said. “I don’t know how you can and not lose your work ethic. I listened. I was aware of my success, but I never stopped trying to get better.”

  It doesn’t come naturally. No one is born with the inclination toward work. We’re born ignorant, our abilities innately undeveloped, our lives lit by distractions. It’s easier to watch The Price Is Right, to sleep till noon, to procrastinate and postpone until the moment has passed altogether. That’s why those who work late, who work dutifully, who implement an intelligent plan, are so often more lauded than those with twice the talent.

  “When Michael was in high school, he’d arrive early at school and get the janitor to let him in the gym to shoot,” said Wilmington, North Carolina, sportswriter Chuck Caree. “The athletic director would have to run him out of the gym and tell him to go to class.”

  A study once tracked the careers of a group of elite violinists at the Music Academy of West Berlin. What it revealed is not surprising:By the time the students were eighteen, the best musicians had spent, on average, two thousand more hours in practice than their fellow students.

  There is value in repetition, as tedious as it may seem. It’s what makes the miraculous seem effortless, what gilds the reputation of our most remarkable athletes.

  “Great players never look in the mirror and think, ‘I’m a great basketball player,” ’ Jordan said. “You ask yourself, ‘Am I the best player I can be?”’

  Pete Maravich would practice his basketball skills for eight hours during the summers as a kid, shooting in steamy hundred-degree gyms, throwing five hundred behind-the-back passes each day, grimacing through quickness and speed drills. Ben Hogan, perhaps the most notoriously relentless worker in the history of golf, would, as a club pro in Pennsylvania, hit 150 balls, play six holes, then go back and hit a few hundred more. MuhammadAli would run until it hurt, and then keep running, pushing himself into a realm of strength and stamina that most of us never taste. “What counts in the ring,” he said, “is what you can do after you’re tired.” Ted Williams once said, “The key to hitting is just plain working at it. Work, that’s the real secret.”

  Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production and accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.

  —Thomas Edison

  We saw what a fatigued Jordan could do, saw it in the final minutes of games, his bald head shimmering with rivulets of sweat, hands tugging at the ends of his baggy shorts while awaiting a free throw. Dead, then alive, legs lifting off for one last jump shot, body exploding on one final drive toward the basket. That last burst of energy in the final minutes of games was not some divine gift, not an extra wrinkle of Jordan’s extraordinary athleticism. This was a premeditated moment, a product of every extended workout. Even when he played baseball, Jordan was the hardest-working player on his team, up at 6:30 A. M. during spring training, arriving in the predawn darkness with hitting coach Walt Hriniak, swinging a bat until his hands tore apart and bled, taping them up and swinging until he bled again.

  I believe you can accomplish more in forty-five minutes of practice if you work hard than you can in two hours if you don’t train properly.

  —Jesse Owens

  OLYMPIC GREAT

  “He’d hit early in the afternoon, then take regular batting practice, then hit in the cages before the game and then hit after the game,” said Birmingham Barons hitting coach Mike Barnett. “He was starved for information. By August, he’d made himself into a very good hitter.”

  “I’m not out there sweating for three hours every day,” Jordan said, “just to find out what it feels like to sweat.”

  “He plays as hard—or harder—in practice than he’s ever played in games,” Jordan’s Nike representative, Howard White, once said. “He wants to make the game easier than practice.”

  That’s the other thing about Jordan: Every moment of work led toward an objective. It wasn’t just blind labor. It was all part of a grander design.

  Michael once observed, “I enjoyed dunking, but I worked much harder on shooting and defense. Again, I know I helped increase the popularity of the dunk and playing above the rim, but I try to practice what I preach. One day I came home and my kids had lowered the basket to nine feet so they could dunk. I raised it back to ten and told them to learn how to shoot.”

  Jordan began his career with momentous talent. The evidence is in those tapes of him during that first true coming-out party, April 1986, when he poured sixty-three points, a play-off record, onto the Boston Celtics during a double-overtime loss. He took over that game. He split double-teams and floated past defenders, switching the ball from one hand to the other in mid-air. He made nineteen of twenty-one free throws, made twenty-two of forty-one shots from the field, and stunned a Celtics team that was still in the midst of its dynastic form. But look at him, at his narrow frame, twenty-five pounds lighter than it would become, devoid of the pockets of muscle that came to define him in later years. He missed a shot in overtime that would have won the game, a shot that he would not miss in later years. And in the end, despite his efforts, he lost the game, which continued to stand as his overwhelming memory of that night in Boston. He did all he could to prevent that from happening again, sharpening every aspect of his game to the point of treachery.

  Jordan began weight training and conditioning a couple of years after that Boston game, after he grew tired of his chief rivals at the time, the Detroit Pistons, constantly wearing him down during games. One summer after the Pistons had won a play-off series against the Bulls, Pistons guard Joe Dumars saw Jordan at a function.

  “How long have you been lifting weights?”Jordan said.

  “I don’t lift,” Dumars said. “I run and exercise, but I don’t lift.”

  “I’ve got to get stronger,” Jordan said. “You guys just beat me up too much.”

  The next season, during a game, Jordan posted up on Dumars down low. Before that, Dumars could have moved Jordan out of position without a problem. But this time, he wouldn’t budge.

  “He started early, gradually increased his commitment and expanded a program he himself was designing with my help,” said Jordan’s trainer, Tim Grover.

  Soon enough, Jordan had become inured in Grover’s regimen, strengthening his u
pper body while maintaining the elasticity in his legs. He worked on his ankles and his wrists and his shoulders and his knees, all the minute details that would balance his body against the threat of injury. The team would stumble into a hotel on the road at two or three in the morning and sometimes Jordan would want to work out then. Other days, when he had exhausted himself during afternoon practices, he would wake up early and be in the gym by 6 A. M. , four hours before the team began its regular workouts. (He’d nap briefly in the afternoon. )

  I do not know anyone who has got to the top without hard work. That is the recipe. It will not always get you to the top, but it should get you pretty near. pretty near.

  —Margaret Thatcher

  Jordan paid for Grover to travel with him. Eventually, he built a home gym, and during his final few years in the league, he would invite teammates Scottie Pippen and Ron Harper over to his house for pre-practice morning workouts. “The Breakfast Club,” they called it.

  Ron would say, “I’ll be there at seven.” Michael would say, “6:30.” It would always be thirty minutes before what Ron would say. That was MJ saying, “You’re going to work a lot harder than you think.”

  Jordan understood that he was getting older, that his talent alone would not guide him to longevity, that people had built certain expectations about him, that an entire league was laboring to bump him from prominence. So he analyzed himself like an opponent, surveying his own weaknesses, and developing an approach to alleviate them, which is a striking allegory for the mission of any successful life plan.

  The combination of Michael Jordan’s talent and work ethic has never come along.

  —Steve Kerr

  In seven seasons, with Grover as his trainer, Jordan missed only six games.

  “Michael told me the way he kept the crown was always by outworking everyone else,” said Seattle Mariners shortstop Alex Rodriguez, who has built a reputation as one of baseball’s most diligent young players. “You can always sneak up on people when you’re young.”

  “The challenge,” Jordan said late in his career, “is to still do at thirty-five what the young guys are doing at twenty-five or twenty-six.”

  So this is what happens when the chemicals converge: the talent, the work ethic, the concrete and foolproof plan commingling, their cells combining and multiplying, forming new elements and undiscovered compounds, birthing glorious figures like Jordan, like Pete Maravich and Ben Hogan, like all of those athletes who ranked a few notches below the top-ranked Jordan on ESPN’s list of the fifty greatest of the twentieth century.

  Failures are divided into two classes. Those who did and never thought, and those who thought and never did.

  —John Charles Salak

  WRITER

  Those of us immersed in the minutiae of the NBA have spent the past few seasons combing our ranks for the “new” Michael Jordan, for someone to replace the considerable void he left behind after leaving the game for good. And I can tell you that there is a new Michael Jordan, someone with his talent, with his mentality, with his tenacious practice habits. Even has the same apparel sponsor.

  It’s just, he plays golf.

  “Imagine what would happen if someone with fabulous talent, someone who can hit a golf ball farther than anyone, who has a swing other pros would kill to have, was also a grinder,” sports author John Feinstein recently wrote. “Imagine a player who could be the best in the world without working very hard, who works harder than anyone else.

  “That player exists. His name is Tiger Woods, and he is currently dominating golf in ways that seemed impossible before he came along.”

  “Michael Jordan has adopted Tiger Woods and influenced him greatly,” said Greg Boeck of USA Today. “As Tiger’s mentor, Michael has convinced him that if you want to be the greatest, you have to outwork the opposition every day. You can never let up.”

  If there is one characteristic that all great champions share, it’s an enormous sense of pride. That’s true in all walks of life. The people who excel are those who are driven to show the world . . . and prove to themselves . . . just how good they are.

  —Nancy Lopez

  PROFESSIONAL GOLFER

  Not long ago, former North Carolina assistant coach RoyWilliams played golf with Jordan. They talked about Woods, and Williams asked whether Tiger wouldn’t eventually tire of his own success.

  “No way, coach,” Jordan said. “He’s just like me.”

  Martina Navratilova observed, “At this level talent is a given. But, Tiger works harder than anyone out there, and that’s why he’s kicking butt. Every great shot you hit, you’ve already hit a bunch of times in practice.”

  Another member of the“grinders” school is baseball Iron Man Cal Ripken. In fact, Cal is the principal. “I’ve always liked the baseball term ‘gamer, ’” said Cal. “A gamer to me is someone who comes to the ballpark ready to meet the challenge of the day, every day.” Regarding Cal’s intense work ethic, his mother Vi said emphatically, “From day one, I’ve never understood all the hoopla. I mean, isn’t this what life is all about—you go out, do a job, come back tomorrow and do it again?”

  I have this belief that every soul has a calling, a talent, something that they were born to do, something that was instilled in them at birth. So let’s say you’ve found that talent, and that you work constantly to improve it, to hone its nuances.

  That’s it. That’s how genius is bred.

  Isn’t This Fun?

  It’s not by doing the things we like, but by liking the things we do that we can discover life’s blessings.

  —Goethe

  Of course, this all sounds like terrible drudgery, spending hours sweating profusely in a gym, or swinging a baseball bat until the skin on your fingers begins peeling like a gum wrapper, or—perhaps more realistically—working sixteen-hour days in a cubicle until the numbers begin to perform pirouettes in your cranium. But if this is your calling, your dream, then something happens in the midst of all this labor: Your mind relaxes. You begin to enjoy the routine. And the drudgery is no longer drudgery. And work becomes fun.

  Do you know why we’re so uptight in America?Because the Puritans came here and the really fun people all stayed behind.

  —Roseanne Barr

  Work? Fun?

  In America, in our tofu-flavored corporate settings, the previous paragraph has become an oxymoron.

  A few years ago my wife and I were in Boston, preparing to run in the Boston Marathon, and we went to see the Red Sox play the Baltimore Orioles. There we encountered a third-base coach named Wendell Kim, a stocky Korean man with chunky legs who would race from the dugout at the end of every half-inning, legs churning, and head bobbing, and scamper back to the dugout after the Red Sox had finished hitting. The Red Sox lost 11–1, and yet we stayed for all nine innings because there remained that fascinating kineticism to Wendell Kim, so anxious to get to his work that he couldn’t bear to walk.

  The appetite to create, is an unbelievable ambition.

  —Michael Jordan

  The Lakers’ Ron Harper said, “Shaquille O’Neal is one of those guys who just loves the game. He’s a kid and always will be a kid. He loves to play and to have fun. That’s what he’s about.”

  Football is game I grew up playing. It was my safe haven, and it was fun and it’s a game, and that’s the way it has to be. If it stops being fun, you’re not going to perform. You’re not going to see a bunch of kids out in the park playing if they’re not having fun. They’re going to do something else.

  —Mel Renfro

  FORMER NFL PLAYER

  I could waste this space citing a dozen studies that reinforce the health benefits of laughter, but I can say the same thing about spinach and you’re not going to run to the corner market and buy enough to cram your refrigerator. So let me recite this lesson directly, without histrionics or posturing:

  Give me a man who sings at his work.

  —Thomas Carlyle

  Successful people laug
h.

  Witness:At Southwest Airlines, the Saturday Night Live of commercial air travel, flight attendants sing and dance and rap and hide in baggage compartments and hold contests to find the customers with the largest holes in their socks. One of the company’s slogans:“We smile because we want to; not because we have to.”

  “You shouldn’t have to change your personality when you come to work,” said Southwest CEO Herb Kelleher. “At Southwest we have created an atmosphere where we hire good people, let them be themselves, and pay a great deal of attention to them and their personal lives.”

  Work can be more fun than fun.

  —Noel Coward

  WRITER

  Because of this, Southwest employees are known as the most loyal and productive in the airline industry, and Kelleher has been dubbed “America’s Best CEO” by such esteemed judges as the editors of Fortune magazine.

  Back at the University of North Carolina, at Jordan’s alma mater, Dean Smith would sometimes kneel in the middle of the huddle during crucial time-outs, cultivate a wry smile and say, “Isn’t this fun?”

  And this is another slice of Jordan’s allure, that each game was underlaid with an irreverent delight. The tongue dangling loosely from his mouth like an ornament from a rearview mirror. The sheepish grin and shrug of the shoulders captured in the midst of one key play-off game when Jordan seemingly couldn’t miss.

  “Michael Jordan made up his mind that he’s going to enjoy his time playing basketball,” said former Bulls assistant coach Tex Winter. “I think he made his mind up a long time ago.”

  And without the luxury of a single summer break.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE FIGHT

  JORDAN ON PERSEVERANCE:

  Obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up.

  Figure out how to climb it, go through it or work your way around it.