How to Be Like Mike

by Pat Williams

  The Bulls’ team doctor, John Hefferon, would often see Jordan’s father, and James Jordan would ask how his son was feeling, and Hefferon would say he wasn’t feeling well, that the flu was coming on, that his stomach was upset. “That mean’s Michael’s going to have a great game tonight,” James Jordan would say.

  And most of the time, he was right.

  This story comes from a man named Marty Dim. He and his fifteen-year-old son were playing golf at Briarwood Country Club in Chicago one afternoon, and when they reached the fourth tee, they caught up with Michael Jordan, who invited them to play the rest of the course with him. Dim’s son was so nervous he could barely speak.

  Do something every day that you don’t want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.

  —Mark Twain

  On the fifth hole, Jordan hit his drive into a bush. He hacked out, emerging with torn clothes and scratches on his arm, and made par.

  On the sixth green, Dim’s son was still a wreck. He lagged behind. He saw that the others were finished playing and told them to go ahead.

  Jordan was on the far side of the green. He charged across, stopped a few inches from the kid’s face, and said, “Are you quitting on me?” He repeated it, over and over. “Are you quitting on me? Are you quitting on me?”

  In the 1989 Chicago-Detroit play-offs, I saw a play that I think was the defining moment of Michael’s career. He drove down the middle and Rick Mahorn and Bill Laimbeer hammered him to the ground. Hard. He got up limping. The next game, he was still banged up. That was Michael tasting the NBA at its most bitter. After that, he realized he had to take over.

  —Mike Abdenour

  TRAINER, DETROIT PISTONS

  “Michael,” Marty Dim said, “just would not let him give up.”

  Which leads us back to Game Five of those 1997 NBA Finals, Jordan fighting a vengeful flu virus and taking intravenous fluids, his pallor so gray that one sportswriter said he literally “shook with fear” for him. And when Mike Wise of the New York Times surveyed Jordan’s gaunt figure late in the game, he leaned over press row and muttered to Michael Wilbon of the Washington Post, “It’s over.” Wise did what many print reporters fighting deadline had done. He wrote his story as if Utah had won the game. And while he was writing, Jordan—as if once again summoned by adversity—began to alter the course of Wise’s story single-handedly, to scrape through the debilitation and win this game virtually by himself. And to demonstrate, Wise said, “what perseverance really is.”

  But this perseverance was not merely a lone act of will. It was a build-up, the summation of years of training, of Jordan sharpening his own resolution. And eventually developing an impenetrable wall of discipline.

  Once you learn to quit it becomes a habit.

  —Vince Lombardi

  “His body wouldn’t let him down at the moment of truth because of the way he had trained it,” said Chicago Tribune columnist Bernie Lincicome. “It didn’t know how to quit.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE PROMISE

  JORDAN ON RESPONSIBILITY:

  The he game is my wife. It demands loyalty and responsibility, and it gives me back fulfillment and peace.

  The price of greatness is responsibility.

  —Winston Churchill

  I am what some would call an old-fashioned father. To my children, this means I’m mired in a black-and-white pre–Leave It to I Beaver utopia, in a mentality that is so removed from their own consciousness, they have trouble believing the human race existed back then. Mostly, my children think that I belong in the 1940s. Sometimes, if they are feeling generous, they will inform me that I have advanced to the 1950s, but still they consider me marooned in an Eisenhower-era dream world.

  I also know that most of the time, my children are correct. Take the trend of body piercing and permanent tattoos, something that I encounter every day as an NBA executive. Regarding tattoos, this is my rule with my children:As long as they are living under my roof, eating meals and wearing clothes that are paid for with my salary, they will get no tattoos, and they will not pierce anything that could not be exposed in church.

  Strict, perhaps. But I am not an ogre. I offer one exception to the rule. Each child is allowed one tattoo. The caveat is that I choose the location and the design of the tattoo. The location I would choose is the forehead. The design I would choose is a bold proclamation: “I AM IN CHARGE OF ME!” Not only will I pay for this procedure, but I will provide a substantial signing bonus. And yet, astoundingly, none of my children has taken me up on this.

  The offer still stands.

  Michael Jordan was looked at as a savior to lead 35 million African Americans out of the wilderness. That’s a huge responsibility. MJ takes a lot of abuse for what he hasn’t done socially, but don’t forget, he’s an athlete, not an activist. He’s done so much for people that we’ll never hear about. He takes a lot of flack, but he’s always there.

  —Spike Lee

  FILMMAKER

  This goes back to Game Six again, to Jordan’s magnum opus, his last shot against Utah in 1998. But it also goes back to every shot he took in the final minutes, every one of those times he took the weight of a game and a season and a franchise upon his shoulders. It got to the point where no one had a question who would take the shot, or who would accept the brunt of the responsibility for a defeat. Jordan depended on his teammates, but more than anything, he depended on himself, on his willingness to look past defeat in order to deliver victory the next time. “You must give the other guys an opportunity to shine,” he said of his teammates. “But at the same time, my philosophy has always been that if I’m going to go down, I want to go down shooting.”

  “In training camp in 1995, a bunch of us were in the training room after practice,” said former Bulls center Bill Wennington, “and Michael said to us, ‘You guys better jump on my back and hold on for your life, because if you fall off, you’re not going all the way. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, but I’m going to do it.” ’

  Facing it. Always facing it. That’s the way to get through. Face it.

  —Joseph Conrad

  AUTHOR

  This is a touchy subject we’ve delved into, that of responsibility. We live in a world of frivolous lawsuits, of immense deflection of liability. There is a void of culpability, of people willing to admit their mistakes in a public forum (See our former President, for one). Those who do wrong can now hide behind lawyers and publicists, and deflect blame to the circumstances or the media or their state of mind, to anything but themselves. We are a nation marred by childish acts. Not so with Michael Jordan

  “If you tell Michael, ‘Bad shot, ’ he says, ‘Yes, ’ and he doesn’t argue,” said Phil Jackson. “He’ll take a shot and say, ‘I messed up. I probably shouldn’t have taken that shot. ’”

  All of which leads me back to my own flock of children.

  See, despite being a man mired deep in the past, I like to consider myself a student of various aspects of human nature. One of these is the Art of the Excuse. I have a daughter—she shall go unnamed here—who virtually mutilated the eleventh grade at her Orlando high school. I believe the entire school is still undergoing therapy. In the midst of this, I tried futilely to deliver nightly sermons to my daughter about her poor school work, about the immense effect it could have upon her future. Finally, after she came home having done something so terrible that I can’t even remember it, I lost myself altogether. “That’s it,” I said to her. “I have to know what’s going on.”

  Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.

  —Edward R. Murrow

  “It’s not my fault that the teachers don’t know how to teach me right,” she said.

  I proceeded to implode, right there at the kitchen table.

  I had another daughter in the eighth grade who, according to reports, was a continual disruption in her classroom. So I demanded an explanation.

  “It’s not my f
ault that the teacher puts me next to a boy who makes me laugh,” she said.

  Another of my daughters, who had good grades in all of her classes except biology, once insisted that her biology teacher was bent on “messing up my grade-point average.”

  But I’m not finished. There is a footnote to the story from the Mexican restaurant I shared a couple of chapters ago, the story of my two boys and their dramatic tales of burnout. Even after my sonThomas announced that the schoolwork was too much for him, he continued to hide behind excuses. This is what he told me:

  “It’s not my fault that I’m writing papers that are over the professor’s head.”

  And with that, I nearly coughed up my taco.

  Some people spend their entire lives thinking they are where they are because of circumstances. You are not what you are because of where you were born or who your parents are.

  —Roger Dawson

  AUTHOR

  Jordan was drafted by one of the NBA’s lowliest franchises. The Chicago Bulls were a laughingstock when he joined them, a losing team playing in a crumbling stadium with virtually no tradition. He could have signed a short-term contract and skipped town when the team continued to struggle. Instead, he elevated the franchise to an unprecedented height. He changed everything. Now the Bulls are one of the NBA’s most recognizable franchises— even without Jordan— because Jordan felt an obligation to nurture the team that drafted him. “Part of the responsibility which went with your contract was to turn that team around and make it a winner— in fact, make it a champion,” said former Celtics coach Chris Ford. “That was an obligation, and it was deeply felt. I’m afraid not a lot of people feel that way today.”

  One of the annoying things about believing in free choice and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it’s remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver’s license.

  —P. J. O’Rourke

  WRITER

  It’s also why Jordan never left the Bulls to play elsewhere during their championship run, even when his relationship with the team’s management became strained, even when seemingly everything he could have achieved was behind him. “I was the nucleus of the franchise when I came here and we went through the process of going from bad to good,” Jordan said. “I have a certain responsibility to this franchise and to the city of Chicago.”

  Bill Guthridge inherited the North Carolina basketball program in 1997 after Jordan’s coach, Dean Smith, finally retired. And yet Smith’s aura still hung over the Carolina basketball office, in the spirit of the “Excuse Jar” on Guthridge’s desk, in which those who came to see him were expected to file their excuses before they began talking.

  When I played for Sacramento, I blocked Michael’s shot with eight seconds left and we won the game. After the game, Michael told the writers he had no excuses. He gave me credit for a good play. He said, “We didn’t get it done.” I never forgot that.

  —LaSalle Thompson

  FORMER NBA PLAYER

  So what are we responsible for in our everyday lives?

  Simple. We’re responsible for what we do, for what we say, for the way we carry ourselves, for the way we spend our time, for the way we think and act and associate with others. We are responsible for everything that encompasses us, and everything that belongs to us.

  Oprah Winfrey hit it on the head when she wrote, “We are each responsible for our own life—no other person is or ever can be.”

  Broccoli and Bookstores

  Mostly, we are responsible for ourselves, which is one of those blanket statements that carries only a vague definition on the surface. Because really, what does it mean to be responsible for ourselves?

  A balanced meal is not a Big Mac in both hands.

  —Ken Hussar

  HUMORIST

  It means we take care of ourselves. It means we strive to improve, both the mental definition and physical definition of self. It means we expand our minds at every opportunity and we take meticulous care of our body before it begins to malfunction. At its core, it means two things: our education and our health. Both are continuous processes. In fact, I’m still convinced that one of the best investments we can make in ourselves is a pair of running shoes, a comfortable T-shirt and pair of shorts, and, if you prefer, a headband. From there, you can take it any direction: Buy a used Stairmaster at a yard sale. Walk through the neighborhood each afternoon. It’s not like you have to undertake the Michael Jordan workout plan and attempt to melt away all of your body fat; it is a small commitment that pays immense dividends.

  Aerobic guru Dr. Ken Cooper makes it very simple: If you walk two miles in thirty minutes three times a week, or two miles in forty minutes five times a week, you will have a 58 percent reduction in death by heart attack, stroke or cancer and increase your life span up to six years. Marathoner Grete Waitz was right when she stated, “Life is movement. It’s the person who sits on the couch—they’re living dangerously.”

  One day during the 1997–98 season, Phil Jackson called off a practice. Michael said to Scottie Pippen, “We’re not playing well enough not to practice.” So they went to Phil and requested a practice. Turned out they practiced for three hours. Later, MJ said, “The best players have to be the caretakers.”

  —Michael Wilbon

  SPORTSWRITER

  It is the easiest of our responsibilities to understand, and yet, amid a nation laden with greasy burgers and double-chocolate fudge sundaes with extra whipped cream, it is the most ignored. So let me say this directly: if you subsist on Whoppers and Big Macs and the double-pepperoni special, and if you wind up with high cholesterol and blocked arteries, it is YOUR FAULT. If you smoke for thirty years and don’t make the effort to quit, and you wind up with lung cancer, it is YOUR FAULT.

  I don’t want to turn this into a Dr. Atkins book, but I know enough to tell you that small balanced meals are more effective than lumberjack breakfasts and large unwieldy dinners, that bright vegetables contain more vitamins than dark chocolates, and that Twinkies are not a food group.

  It’s a burden to be good every night. A lot of guys want to be good, but they don’t want the responsibility day-to-day.

  —Mike Thibault

  NBA ASSISTANT COACH

  I also know it does not take much. My mother is now in her late eighties, and has done absolutely nothing sensible about her health in her entire life. My sisters and I have developed this theory, then, that the only thing keeping her alive is the one healthy food she does eat: broccoli. Of course, she smothers the broccoli in mayonnaise, or in cheese sauce, but she does eats it, and as I write this, she’s still living well.

  We have already explored Jordan’s propensity for learning new things, for submitting to the tutelage of men like Dean Smith, like Kevin Loughery, like Phil Jackson. It is, obviously, a slightly different sort of learning than what typical humans—those of us with flat jump shots and a four-inch vertical leap—must submit ourselves to; and yet the learning process is the same. We pay attention; we study; we question what we don’t understand; we apply ourselves to the problem until we do understand. We accomplish everything that my college-aged sons seem determined to avoid. Our reward is esoteric, but it is also an immense compensation: greater recognition, greater comprehension, greater intelligence and a greater chance of approaching Jordan-esque levels of success.

  I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

  —Winston Churchill

  “The four laws of learning are explanation, demonstration, imitation and repetition,” said legendary college basketball coach John Wooden. “The goal is to create a correct habit that can be produced instinctively under great pressure. To make sure this goal was achieved, I created eight laws of learning—namely, explanation, demonstration, imitation, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition and repetition.”

  “I should never stop learning,” Jordan said. “I just want to k
eep learning about everything I can . . . about my life, about my family and about me. It can all end so quickly. You don’t know when. So you’ve got to give yourself every experience, because if you don’t, you may never get the chance.”

  Wizards co-owner Ted Leonsis said“Michael is a serious student in the high-tech world and is always learning how to use the latest gadgets. He’s a quick study.”

  Not long ago, I got a phone call from my son Bobby, who was in graduate school at the time, and has since begun his career as a coach in the Cincinnati Reds farm system. I’ve tried to impart whatever wisdom I might still have rattling around in my cranium (I’m an old man, remember). But you never know how successful you’ve been with your children. You’re never sure what they might have learned, which is why this phone call nearly gave me chills.

  On my epitaph I want it written, “He was curious to the end.”

  —Tom Peters

  SPEAKER AND AUTHOR

  “Dad,” Bobby said. “I’ve got a goal.”

  I asked him what it was.

  “Ten books,” he said. “I want to read ten books by Christmas.”

  “You mean you have to read ten books by Christmas,” I said, “for school.”

  “No,” he said. “I want to read ten books for Christmas—outside of school.”

  One of the first books I read after graduating from college altered the course of my life. Veeck: As in Wreck, the autobiography of a chain-smoking one-legged baseball owner named Bill Veeck, was intelligent and insightful and bold and hilarious and written in the wonderful cadence of a man who attacked life like none I’d known. I called Veeck soon after I read it, and I visited him at his home in Maryland, and eventually he became my mentor, guiding me through the early stages of my career as a minor-league baseball executive.

  I mention Veeck because I mention reading, and the first person I think of when I wander into a used bookstore, meandering through shelves crammed with volumes of poetry and biographies and heavy first editions of novels, is Veeck. He read four or five books a week. He read while soaking the stump of his amputated leg (he lost it in World War II) every morning. He read in every spare moment. I’ve tried to emulate it, to the point where my wife Ruth once accused me of reading too much.