by Pat Williams
—Dr. Karl Menninger
It is important to emphasize the rarity of the relationship between Jordan and Phil Jackson. When the Bulls signed Jackson to a one-year contract extension in 1997 after Jordan declared that he would not come back if Jackson did not come back, it defied every norm in a league in which the players dictate so much, in which it is not uncommon for players to form a mutiny to get rid of their coach.
As the lines of tension between Bulls players and coaches and management grew taut, here was Jordan, the preeminent athlete of his time, taking a stand for his coach. Declaring, “I won’t play. I’ll retire. It is that simple. I won’t play for another coach. I will totally retire. That clears up every question. If management is saying that Phil is out, then this is my last year.”
When I was with the Spurs one night in Chicago, I was lighting up on Ron Harper pretty good. Harper couldn’t check me, so he started trashing me, trying to throw me off my game. I went back at him, too. Later, at the other end, MJ walked past me and slugged me right in the stomach. I mean, he really popped me. He was saying, in effect, “Don’t mess with my teammates. You mess with them, you deal with me, too.”
—MontyWilliams
NBA PLAYER
Say what you will about the egos involved, about the politics involved, about the intricacies of heated negotiations and contract talks between Jackson and Bulls general manager Jerry Krause and owner Jerry Reinsdorf. Jordan’s defiance stood for something more relevant than numbers; it was based on a sense of loyalty rooted in his childhood, a feeling toward his parents that led him to look in the stands before every game and locate where they were sitting.
“I’m a very loyal guy in a sense,” Jordan said. “I go to battle with very few people and I can’t see going into the trenches with someone who I haven’t gone through the whole process with.”
When we are debating an issue, loyalty means giving me your honest opinion, whether you think I’ll like it or not. Disagreement, at this stage, stimulates me. But once a decision has been made, the debate ends. From that point on, loyalty means executing the decision as if it were your own.
—General Colin Powell
Michael didn’t forget people. He didn’t lose his allegiances. He didn’t have to, but he took a stand for the players’ side during the NBA lockout. When he saw a few of his Barons teammates two years after they’d played together, on his way to the Bulls’ team bus after a game, he recognized them immediately. He asked about their families. He spent five minutes reminiscing with them. “Michael was so loyal,” said Chris Collins, the son of Jordan’s ex-coach, Doug Collins. “The day I signed to play college basketball at Duke (the archrival of Jordan’s alma mater, North Carolina), he gave me a big punch in the chest and said, ‘Now that you’re a rookie, I can’t talk to you anymore. ’ He was kidding, but he loved Carolina.”
“When Michael’s your friend, he’s your friend,” said major-league baseball player B. J. Surhoff. “He’s loyal beyond loyal.”
He still treats his college coach, Dean Smith, with the same reverence. Twenty years after Roy Williams first recruited him at North Carolina, Jordan still calls Williams “coach.” When one of his childhood heroes, David Thompson, would do pregame clinics for the Charlotte Hornets, Jordan would tell the kids, “David Thompson was the one I looked up to when I was your age.”
“I’m like a big brother to Michael,” said NBA Hall-of-Famer Julius Erving. “He treats all of us older guys with respect. He’s never forgotten that we’d paved the way for his generation.”
In my mind, loyalty is the greatest virtue. It’s the emotional glue that keeps organizations from crumbling; that keeps employees on board during tough times; that keeps customers on your side when competitors try to lure them away. It’s a virtue that reveals itself in small ways more often than it does in grand dramatic gestures.
—Mark McCormack
SPORTS EXECUTIVE
So here, then, is a more rounded portrait of the man. He could be stubborn and he could be forceful, but beneath the layers of fame and competitiveness and determination, there was humanity and there was dignity. If there wasn’t, this whole thingwouldn’t have worked. Jordan would have stumbled, would have been tripped up by the magnitude of his own fame. “Take away all of Michael Jordan’s glitz and glamour,” said Bob Costas, “and you’ll find that he is 100 percent genuine like no other athlete who has ever played any sport.”
Respect builds trust. Trust builds loyalty.
Michael understood the equation, that the sum of the equation was what yielded his own brand of social genius. He will be remembered most prominently for the grand brush strokes of a master on the basketball court. But it is in small ways, in moments of genuine compassion, of whimsy, of kindness, in moments between man and child, between man and man, that his legacy will continue to expand.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE RIGHT
CALL
JORDAN ON CHARACTER:
You find there is only one person who can define success in your life—and that’s you.
Character is not something you have; it is something that shows itself in what you do.
—Jim Henry
pastor and author
And so all that Michael Jordan has been taught, and all that Michael Jordan can teach us, can be brought together in a A single reflection of his character during a parking lot encounter on the campus of the University of North Carolina. One afternoon, long after he had become a star, Jordan was driving his Mercedes through the North Carolina campus, on his way to watch an exhibition basketball game. And the spots in the parking lot were full.
“Park over there,” said Jordan’s friend Fred Whitfield, who was in the car with him. He pointed to a handicapped space.
“No way,” Jordan said.
He gave two reasons why he wouldn’t. First, he said someone might need it. Second, Coach Smith would kill him if he found out.
“I wouldn’t be able to face him,” Jordan said.
This book offers a great many positive stories about Michael Jordan. But let’s make this clear: We are not proposing that Michael Jordan is without flaw, or that he is immune to failure. We are not saying that his every action is to be emulated, or that he should be deified in the way that America so often treats its heroes.
All we are saying is that Michael Jordan is a man who, despite those flaws, despite those failures, has earned his reputation. He’s a man who, in the face of extreme scrutiny, has formed a distinct character that is worth preserving. It is the product of upbringing, of Jordan’s parents, of his coaches, of the decisions he made to listen to and emulate those who came before him—those who set the type of example that breeds character. In turn, Jordan himself became a model. “He set the standard for superstar conduct, period,” wrote Rick Telander in ESPN magazine.
Cotton Fitzsimmons, the veteran NBA coach, once had breakfast with Jordan’s parents, and at one point Fitzsimmons said to Jordan’s mother, Deloris, “I hope he never changes.”
“As long as I am breathing,” Deloris Jordan replied, “he will not change.”
Bucky Waters, former college coach recalls a conversation he had with Deloris.
“Michael’s mother once told me that the summer he was twelve she said, ‘Michael, we’re packing a lunch every day and you’re going to the Y to play in their basketball program. ’ Michael protested vehemently and said, ‘Mother, I’m a baseball player. That’s my sport. I’m no good at basketball. ’ She said, ‘Well, this summer you’re a basketball player because you’re not going to be roaming around the city getting in to trouble. ’ ‘Four years later, ’ Deloris said, ‘we were getting calls from Dean Smith and others. We had no idea that this was going to happen with Michael. How could we have ever seen it coming?’”
Make your commitments to enduring values and institutions—honesty, integrity, trust, confidence, family and other matters of the heart. Go ahead and challenge the status quo, but you must also decide wh
at lasts, what really counts, what no one can take away from you. These are your values, and they will accompany you wherever you work and wherever you live.
—Jack Rehm
AUTHOR
“Michael’s dad had the same temperament as Michael,” said sports scientist Jonathan Neidnagel. “They were both highly reflective and intense men. They had all this stored-up energy that they saved to use on their passions. That’s why they were so competitive. They were here-and-now guys, not big-picture people. Michael’s mother was totally opposite. She was more outgoing and communicative, more creative and more structured—very personable, very gracious. Michael had the ideal blending of his parents’ characteristics. It was a perfect human design.”
“I concentrated on teaching him values—the values any family would teach their kid,” said Jordan’s late father, James. “Michael was a good learner. We tried to teach him to be himself. Always like people. Never put yourself above anybody, but never put yourself below anybody. Always look at people eye to eye.”
Values inform our conscience which influences our behavior. Our behaviors determine the quality of our lives and the meaningfulness of our personal contribution to others, to life and to history.
—Dr. Laura Schlessinger
AUTHOR
Character is the sum of a man’s parts. It is a product of balance in one’s life, of the self-discipline to choose the correct option even when it may be the less attractive option. It is a product of faith in a standard of morals and values that one adheres to no matter the circumstances. It is the sum of all the qualities we have explored up to this point.
We will take one more trip through now, with Jordan’s life and words as our guide.
Class and Values
Executives spend too much time drafting, wordsmithing and redrafting vision statements, mission statements, values statements, purpose statements, aspiration statements and so on. They spend nowhere near enough time trying to align their organizations with the values and visions already in place.
—Jim Collins
business writer
“I don’t believe in ‘if, ’” Jordan said. “I think there has always been a plan for my life and that I don’t have any control over it. Everything that happens was determined in advance. . . . I read the Bible a lot. I see that whatever happens, happens for a reason.”
You can tell the value of a man by the way he treats his wife, by the way he treats his subordinates and by the way he treats someone who can do nothing for him.
—Ken Babcock
SPEAKER
“If you were to create a media athlete and star for the age of TV sports, spectacular talent, mid size, well-spoken, attractive, accessible, old-time values, wholesome, clean, natural, not too good, with a little bit of devil in him, you’d come up with Michael Jordan,” said his agent, David Falk. “He’s a classic example in marketing of what we call ‘synergy. ’The whole is much bigger than the sum of the parts.”
Honesty and Integrity
“One man cannot do right in one department of life whilst he is occupied in doing wrong in any other department,” said Mahandas Mahatma Gandhi. “Life is one indivisible whole.” That’s what Zig Ziglar meant when he wrote, “Remember, your life is all connected.”
Guard your integrity as a sacred thing. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I could have easily lied,” said Jordan, discussing whether he’d actually eaten Wheaties before signing an endorsement contract with the cereal. “But I thought, why lie? So I told them the truth. I told them that I had never eaten Wheaties and that I didn’t know whether I’d even like Wheaties. I mean, we used to eat some kind of wheat puffs when I was growing up. They came in a huge bag. I don’t even know if they had a brand name. We had five kids in the family. We couldn’t afford Wheaties.”
When Jordan was at North Carolina, Doug Moe’s son David played at tiny Catawba College, also in North Carolina. The network of college basketball across the state was rife with rumor; if anybody at one of the big schools had a weakness of character, it trickled down to the other programs.
I always tell the truth the first time and do not need a good memory to remember that.
—Sam Rayburn
FORMER SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE
“David told me that MJ was as clean as whistle,” said Moe, a longtime NBA coach. “That was his reputation. I never forgot it.”
In 1993, the Bulls lost a triple-overtime NBA Finals game against Phoenix. Three times during that game, Jordan told referee Darrell Garretson that his elbow was tipped while he was taking a shot and that a foul should have been called. Garretson assured Jordan he was wrong.
It takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.
—Warren Buffett
Later, Garretson watched a tape of the game. He cued those three plays. On each one, Jordan’s elbow had been tipped.
“Michael,” Garretson said, “was the most honest player ever.”
He never asked to renegotiate a contract. For a large part of his career, he wasn’t even one of the league’s highest-paid players.
“I’ve taught my kids to be honest and keep their word,” Jordan said. “What kind of example would I be setting if I went back on mine?”
Glass, china and reputation are easily cracked, and never mended well.
—Benjamin Franklin
This was on a Sunday, during a nationally televised game between the Bulls and Magic. At the end of the first half, Jordan drove to the basket and was converged upon by two defenders; he landed in the first row of seats. The shot went in, and Jordan emerged from the mess with a gash on his forehead, but the veteran referee, Ed Rush, did not call a foul. Jordan was upset. Phil Jackson stormed onto the floor and Rush whistled him for a technical.
As the half ended, Jordan approached Rush and said, “Look at the tape. You’ll see the foul.”
Rush checked the tape. There was no foul. Jordan’s athleticism had allowed him to avoid the contact.
At the beginning of the second half, Rush gave Jordan a hard stare. “There was no foul on that play,” he said.
“You’re right,” Jordan said. “It was the right call.”
“Go tell that to Phil,” Rush said.
So Jordan went to Jackson and told him there was no foul.
“There has to be a sense of trust between the player and referee,” said Rush, “and Michael always had that.”
“Michael is a man of his word,” said former college coach George Raveling. “If he tells you he’ll meet you at 9 A. M. , you can set your watch by it.”
Sean Hill was fifteen years old during the 1986–87 season, and was working as a bus boy at Pinehurst Country Club, a renowned golf resort in North Carolina. He was also a Celtics fan, and so when Jordan came to play golf there one afternoon, Hill and his friend began to taunt Jordan, telling him he wouldn’t even score twenty points the next time he faced Boston. They wound up betting five dollars on it.
The next time MJ played Boston, he was hurt and only played half the game. He failed to score twenty. A week after the game, an envelope came for Hill, with no notes, no photos—nothing except a five-dollar check from Michael Jordan.
There are no minor lapses of integrity.
—Tom Peters
SPEAKER/AUTHOR
“My buddy still has it in a frame,” Hill said.
In 1995 Michael put together a company to install driving ranges in various cities to teach golf to inner city children. Orlando businessman Jim English and his friend Gary Sorensen invested $35, 000 a piece in two limited units. Two years later the venture failed and was sold. Michael agreed to consult with the acquiring company in order to get the price high enough to ensure that all investors would receive 100 percent of their money back. This included all the investors except Michael and another man who lost what they put up. Said Engl
ish, “Michael ranks up there with the best, a man of integrity.”
Maturity
Emotional maturity is one of the most important and respected qualities of leadership. It requires, first, that you are at peace with yourself and, second, that you remain calm in the face of adversity and difficulty.
—Brian Tracy
speaker and author
There was a time, not long ago, when sixteen of my children were teenagers at the same time. (Somehow, I am still here. ) Needless to say, the buzzword around our house at that time was maturity. As in, “Dad, I’ve been very mature lately. Can I borrow the car tonight?”
Or, “Dad, I’m so mature, I’d like to stay out late tonight.”
I’m still not sure exactly how to characterize maturity. But my close friend, Jay Strack, has come up with as good a definition as I’ve heard: “When the little boy or little girl has decided to sit down permanently, and the young man or young woman has decided to stand up permanently— that’s a pretty good sign that there’s some maturity taking place.”
Maturity begins to grow when you can sense your concern for others outweighing your concern for yourself.
—John MacNaughton
AUTHOR
I tell my son, “Grow up to be a man. It’s a waste of time and life to grow up to be a boy.”
—Leonard Pitts Jr.
NEWSPAPER COLUMNIST
Here are the six basic principles of maturity, courtesy of authors Mortimer J. Feinberg and John J. Tarrant:
1. Accept yourself
2. Accept others
3. Keep your sense of humor
4. Appreciate simple pleasures
5. Enjoy the present
6. Welcome work
“When I was at Maryland, I recruited MJ,” said NBA veteran BuckWilliams. “He had a lot of character, even at seventeen. He was really mature. He had a great idea of what he wanted to do with his life.”