by Pat Williams
On the average, I would say it takes 400 casts to catch an Atlantic salmon—400 to 600 casts per salmon. But on every cast you have the expectation that it’s going to happen.
—Ted Williams
fisherman
There would probably be no story here, no moral, no lesson, if Michael Jordan had succumbed to the worst day of his life. It T would have trailed off that morning in the tenth grade, when Jordan combed over the varsity cut list at Laney High School in Wilmington, North Carolina. Everyone at Laney had known for weeks the exact day and time that the list would be posted, with the names of those who’d made the roster posted on the wall. Jordan went with his friend Leroy Smith. It was an alphabetical list, and Leroy (who was six feet, eight inches) had made it, and Jordan scanned the Js once, twice. Nothing. He looked at the Ks, at the Hs, at the Is, almost as if he stared for long enough, his name would appear.
That afternoon, after suffering through school, Jordan went home, walked into his room, shut the door so no one could see or hear, and cried. His mother came home from work; he told her he’d been cut, and then cried again. “I told him to go back and discipline himself,” his mother recalled. “But I also told him that if he worked hard and still didn’t achieve his goal, it just wasn’t meant to be.”
Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
—Confucius
It was rare for a sophomore to make the varsity at Laney, and Jordan had at least made the junior varsity. Still, it became the sharpest disappointment of Jordan’s life. If he had let the sport go, let his aspirations go, none of this would exist. But there was something inside Jordan, something that wouldn’t let it be, something that every triumphant individual shares: the ability to look beyond defeat.
Sticktoitivity
To endure is greater than to dare. To tire out hostile fortune; to be daunted by no difficulty; to keep heart when all have lost it—who can say this is not greatness?
—William Makepeace Thackeray
author
Here’s what Jordan did after he was cut from the varsity: He played with a possessed aura, with a fire that no one on the jayvee team could contain. The coaches at Laney would say later that they merely cut Jordan from the varsity team because they wanted him to play more. But Jordan didn’t see it like that. He saw this as an affront, as a missive. He woke up at six in the morning to shoot around. He practiced in the evenings. Sometimes he scored forty points in jayvee games. The varsity began to show up early to watch him play.
Getting cut was good, because it made me know what disappointment felt like, and I knew that I never wanted to have that feeling, ever again . . . that taste in my mouth;that hole in my stomach.
—Michael Jordan
And Jordan wouldn’t let the memory of the cut list fade. He refused to be excluded. He volunteered to do anything for the varsity team, even to ride along on the bus to the district tournament. The coaches finally relented. They weren’t sure if he could go in the gym with them, so they made him carry the team’s uniforms. There was Jordan wending into a gym with a trail of sweatshirts and socks, a task that only made him smolder that much more.
Modern America has an obsession with biographies. We watch them on A&E and VH-1 and we browse through them in the expansive biography sections at our local bookstores. Our culture is engrossed with the path of other people’s lives, with the contours of their disappointments, their achievements, the moments that shaped them into the people they became. And there’s something startlingly similar about these biographies, one common theme, one shared image. There is always a moment in every one in which our hero could have quit, could have abandoned his passion, his drive, his yearning, and meandered on to something else.
And the catch, of course, is that if they had, there would be no biography.
During Michael’s sophomore year at UNC, they played against Virginia and Ralph Sampson. UNC trailed by twelve with three or four minutes to go when MJ took over. He made steals, hit big shots. It was like, “World look out, here I come.” George Brett once told me that when he was driving to hit . 400 one season the thing that pushed him was the fear that he was never going to get a hit again. I think MJ had some of that.
—Larry Donald
BASKETBALL WRITER
This next story is fitting, then, since we’ve already touched on the similarities between Jordan and Bill Russell, the way they approached basketball with the same sort of tireless perfectionism. Bill Russell, too, was cut from his high school basketball team, from the junior varsity. And Russell had the same emotions when he saw the cut list at McClymonds High School in Oakland, California, when he scanned it and couldn’t find his name. He stared for what seemed like an hour, thinking, like Jordan, that if he looked long enough, his name would appear. “That,” Russell said, “was one of the most devastating things that ever happened to me.”
So it is not coincidence that Jordan and Russell both developed that same prickly exterior, the same fierce ambition. For both, it began with the first letdown. With the cut. With the realization that failure could happen to them.
Study by a National Retail Association
48 percent of all salesmen make one call and stop.
25 percent of all salesmen make two calls and stop.
15 percent of all salesmen make three calls and stop.
12 percent of all salesmen go back continuously. These salesmen make 80 percent of all sales.
Sometimes, I found myself thinking that, if Michael hadn’t been cut from the team . . . if he hadn’t been sent away . . . he might never have become who he is.
—Bob Greene
COLUMNIST
It’s easy enough to give in. There are scientific studies that reveal the power of surrender—surveys of rats who have been held in hand so firmly that there is no possibility of escape, or put in a tank of water and mandated to swim to safety. Eventually they give in. They succumb to the virtual impossibility of the odds.
The numbers go like this, according to one university professor:Most businesspeople fail approximately 3. 8 times before they find success. And there are stories to perpetuate that claim, well-documented tales of successful humans’ dalliances with defeat.
Edison experimented with two thousand materials before discovering the correct type for a light-bulb filament. Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper for possessing a “lack of ideas.” (In researching a book I wrote about Disney, called Go for the Magic, I discovered that he’d formulated his own term for persistence. “Sticktoitivity,” Disney called it, and I figure that works as well as anything. ) Leo Tolstoy flunked out of college. Woody Allen flunked motion-picture production. Lucille Ball had a producer advise her to get out of acting, to “Try any other profession. Any other.” The Beatles were turned away from a record-label audition, Buddy Holly was fired from his label and Bob Dylan was booed from the stage of a high school talent show. Vince Lombardi didn’t become an NFL coach until he turned forty-seven. Chuck Daly had no head coaching success in the NBA until he was fifty-two.
History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.
—B. C. Forbes
AUTHOR
This comes from one of Jordan’s myriad shoe advertisements, but it seems to nestle nicely into this chapter:
“I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots in my career. I’ve lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed.”
“One day, MJ and I were set to play golf in Chicago,” said former NFL wide receiver Erick Martin. “We teed off at 9 A. M. , and it was raining. We ended up playing forty-five holes in the rain. MJ said, ‘If we start, we’re going to finish. ’”
“One day we played golf with Davis Love III,” said Jordan’s former college roo
mmate, Buzz Peterson. “Michael knew he couldn’t beat him, so his goal was to outdrive him on just one hole. I think we played forty-five holes. Michael never did do it, but he was not going to stop trying.”
“During those great series between the New York Knicks and Chicago, New York had the better team,” said former Knicks guard Mark Jackson. “We broke the Bulls’ will. But MJ single-handedly won the series for Chicago. He would not allow them to surrender.”
“Some people get frozen by a fear of failure,” Jordan said. “They get it from their peers or from just thinking about the possibility of negative results. They might be afraid of looking bad or being embarrassed. I realized that if I was going to achieve anything in life, I had to be aggressive. I had to get out there and go for it.”
There wouldn’t be any sneakers named after Michael Jordan if he had given up in high school.
—Derek Jeter
NewYork Yankees’ Shortstop
Some of the healthiest examples of persistence in our society come in the form of cartoon characters. Who among us can’t relate to the everlasting will of Charlie Brown, who for years attempted to kick the same football, to pitch the same baseball, to date the same little red-haired girl? Or to Wile E. Coyote, who continually endangers his physical well-being for the sake of capturing the same elusive Road Runner?
These characters became cultural icons because there are pieces of each in all of us, because there is no one who hasn’t failed, who hasn’t felt like everything they tried was colored in futility, that there was nothing to look forward to except continual frustration. But these are also characters born of hope, fueled by the value of persistence.
“He keeps trying, over and over and over,” said Wile E. Coyote creator Chuck Jones. “That trait is possibly the only thing that all creative people have in common. They don’t give up.”
“There is one thing I learned a long time ago,” said Peanuts and Charlie Brown creator Charles Schulz. “If you can hang on for a while longer, there is always something bright around the corner. The dark clouds will go away and there will be some sunshine again if you’re able to hold out. I think you just have to wait it out.”
The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful, is the man who will win.”
—Roger Bannister
FIRST TO RUN A MILE
IN LESS THAN FOUR MINUTES
It was no great secret what would happen in the fourth quarter of a taut game in Jordan’s realm. It was as if the rest of the court faded to black and white and Jordan remained, taking the ball, driving to the hoop, getting knocked down hard, drawing a foul, over and over and over again, until it became almost comical. The opposing team could try anything, could knock him down in brutal fashion, and he’d continue to rise and try it again. Eventually, they’d wear down. Jordan wouldn’t. He could be sick. He could be exhausted, clinging to his shorts, tongue draped from his mouth, and he’d keep driving, keep getting battered, keep shooting foul shots into eternity.
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unre-warded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
—Calvin Coolidge
“When I was with the Nuggets, we were up on the Bulls in Denver by twenty-six in the fourth quarter,” said former NBA player Danny Schayes. “We hung on to win by three. Michael got fifty-two. He was incredible. We were lucky to hang on. He never quit in the fourth quarter. No lead was safe with Michael in the game.”
“MJwould keep driving to the hole time after time,” said former NBA player Xavier McDaniel. “You hit him and knock him down;most guys would start to pull up and take jump shots. Not MJ. He’d never stop going to the rack, no matter how many times you knocked him down.”
“With Michael Jordan you could never let your guard down,” said former NBA guard Paul Pressey. “He was so relentless you couldn’t rest for a second because he was always on the attack, always dogging you. And he did it on the bench, too. He’d study everything and when he’d get back in the game he’d have picked something up to attack you more.”
Mark Randall, a former Bulls player, recalled:“One year in an exhibition game, we were losing badly late in the game. During a time-out, MJ yelled at all of us ‘Don’t ever think about quitting tonight. If they think you’re weak now, then later in the season they’ll kill you when it counts. ’”
Fight one more round. When your feet are so tired that you have to shuffle back to the center of the ring, fight one more round. When your arms are so tired that you can hardly lift your hands to come on guard, fight one more round. When your nose is bleeding and your eyes are black and you are so tired that you wish your opponent would crack you one on the jaw and put you to sleep, fight one more round—remember that the man who always fights one more round is never whipped.
—James J. Corbett
HEAVYWEIGHT BOXER
My adopted son David spent two weeks in college before deciding it wasn’t for him. The next day, I took him straight to the Marine recruiting station; let’s just say that he enrolled voluntarily, but if he wasn’t going to finish college, he didn’t have a whole lot of choice. He went through twelve weeks of basic training at Parris Island, South Carolina, with no contact from the outside world. The next time we saw him was at his graduation ceremony. Afterward, the Marines were released to their parents, who waited out on the tarmac.
When David saw me, he began to cry. He threw his arms around me and buried his head in my shoulder.
“I heard your voice the whole time, Dad,” he said. “I didn’t quit.”
There is obviously a pathway to persistence. It relates heavily to the Jordan we’ve already discussed, to the man who pushed himself harder than anyone in the game, who disciplined himself with almost alarming harshness.
The pathway to persistence lies in self-discipline.
The Soul of an Army
Being a professional, is doing all the things you love to do on the days you don’t feel like doing them.
—Julius Erving
It was at North Carolina that Jordan first honed his sense of discipline. Here again, it was Dean Smith who influenced him, who led him to the realization that nothing is accomplished without the ability to push through hardships, to deny small yearnings for the sake of the greater goal.
“I believe that the disciplined guy can do anything,” Smith said. “He can choose to stay up late or not. He can choose to smoke ten packs of cigarettes or not. Usually, the people coming into college basketball had to have some discipline, or they wouldn’t be that good. They’ve had to say no a lot of times to other things to go work on their basketball. And players still want to be disciplined. They feel loved when they’re disciplined.”
“One day at practice, Dean Smith read a ‘Thought of the Day’,” said former North Carolina trainer Mark Davis. “The quote was ‘Discipline makes you free. ’ MJ was there. He heard it. I think that quote captures him.”
Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable, procures success to the weak and esteem to all.
—George Washington
One of my all-time favorite movies is Lean on Me, a story about principal Joe Clark trying to resurrect an inner-city high school in Newark, New Jersey. Clark, played by Morgan Freeman, utters this classic line:“Discipline is not the enemy of enthusiasm.”
In 1975, Junko Tabei became the first female to climb Mount Everest. After her success she said, “Technique and ability alone do not get you to the top; it is the willpower that is the most important—it rises in your heart.”
There are those moments when no one is watching, those times when work becomes laborious, when we feel as if we’re going to sink underneath our desks, when we wish we could go home and sleep for months at a time. We live large portions of life like this, in that period athletes cal
l The Grind. And I have noticed that this is the period of life in which most people tend to throw up their arms and surrender. But this is when the victorious figures of our society have done the opposite. They’ve developed an immunity to The Grind. “The Grind,” said ex-tennis star Jimmy Connors, “is the stew of talent and determination that keeps certain players hammering on, even when the match score favors the opponent. The Grind is the sweat addiction that pulls some players out of bed in spite of aches and muscle strains. It’s the part of all this I enjoy the most.”
Jordan thrived in The Grind, in those times when his natural instincts wouldn’t have led him to a basketball court, when he had to fight his mind and his body, grit through pain and doubt just to make it onto the court. That ability to persevere, to grind even at his weakest, is a product of strength, of will, of preparation, most of it within the walls of his own psyche. It’s the product of Jordan continually pushing himself to untold limits.
Stacey King, one of Michael’s teammates in Chicago, offers a revealing insight:“MJ’s special strength was his ability to play through pain. He just blocked out the pain of a sprained ankle or foot injury and wouldn’t miss a game. Most guys would be out for two weeks, but not MJ. His focus and mental toughness were awesome. (Allen Iverson shows glimpses of that now, but he’s about the only one like Mike that way. )The result was that MJ forced his teammates to play up to his level because he came to every practice and game ready to go all out. People see the glitz and glamour of MJ’s life, but they didn’t see the hard work, preparation and pain he went through.”
He played in Phoenix with an infected foot. The Suns’ team doctor wanted him to go home. Jordan refused. Instead, he played every night on that road trip.
He played once with a broken cheekbone, with blood leaking into his sinus cavity. He never missed a game. He never even missed a practice. He never used a facemask.
“One day, Michael had back spasms in his lower back so bad, we had to carry him off the bus,” said Phil Jackson. “He got forty that night.”