How to Be Like Mike (17 page)

“I’ve saved every tape of every game I’ve played against Michael,” said NBA veteran Dana Barros. “I’m saving them to show my kids.”

Jordan’s legacy in the athletic world is so immense that it transcends the boundaries of his sport, or even his gender; the fact is, by serving as an example, he subtly changed the attitude of many modern athletes. The list of those who cite Jordan as a role model is virtually endless.

“I don’t even know if he knows this or cares, but I have tried to emulate him on and off the field,” said Derek Jeter, the New York Yankees shortstop, who first met Jordan when they played together in the Arizona Fall Baseball League. “He carries himself in a classy, dignified manner, and I think a lot of athletes could learn from his examples as a player and entrepreneur.”

When you are in the presence of greatness, drop your pail in their well! You may never get a second opportunity. Greatness surrounds you like winds, every day. Your responsibility is to harness it, pull it toward you, and absorb it.

—Mike Murdock
AUTHOR

One night, my son Alan, then eleven, was watching the Bulls play the Magic. He leaned over to my wife and said, “Michael doesn’t have any tattoos, does he? I like that.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have worked so hard to present a positive image,” Jordan said. “But our thinking was always that people wanted to see a positive role model, someone who gets along with everyone.”

“I want to have a positive impact on the players of today and the future,” Jordan said, “but I worry some about money dominating the sport. I guess you can say that I’m part of it, but I have never let money affect the way I approached the game. It was far more important for me to know that I was going to be remembered for the way I played the game and not the commercials I made.”

A chapter in author Roland Lazenby’s book about the Bulls,
Blood on the Horns,
detailed Jordan’s tough persona with his teammates; the New York Knicks gave a copy of the book to all of their players, hoping it would rub off. “MJ was Bobby Knight in short pants,” Lazenby said.

It leads us back to Jordan’s tireless practice habits, to his relentless work ethic—another of his legacies to the league’s next generation. There was a time in 1993, Lazenby says, when the Bulls hit a lull in the schedule. They were tired of practice, tired of training, tired of each other. Coach Phil Jackson called for a practice, and the players sat in the training room and complained. Finally, Jordan said, “Let’s go, millionaires,” and on to practice they went. “He knew that, as a pro, that was your obligation,” Lazenby said.

“I was a freshman at North Carolina, and we heard Michael was coming to practice,” said NBA player Antawn Jamison. “Coach Smith let us play practice games that day. Everyone acted like it was a real game. MJ made everyone play at a higher level. Everyone elvated their game because no one wanted to disappoint him.”

“When your best player puts it on the line every day, the other guys can’t cut corners,” said longtime NBA coach George Karl. “It’s leading by example. They have to work at the same level as the top guy. That’s what Michael did in Chicago and that’s why the Bulls were so successful.”

In 1996, after the Bulls swept the Magic in the playoffs, Michael told me, “Hang in there and don’t get down. Your time is coming.” I never forgot that.

—Shaquille O’Neal

In April 2001, my wife Ruth and I flew to Boston for the Boston Marathon. Just prior to the flight, I began to experience flu-like symptoms. As hours passed and the race drew near, I was faced with the decision: Should I immediately return to Orlando, or should I “tough it out” and stay committed to the race?

It was more than my resolute, competitive nature that carried me to Hopkinton to participate in the race. During six of the most grueling, arduous hours of my life, it was the indelible image of Michael Jordan in the unforgettable “sick game” in the ’97 finals against Utah that inspired me to finish the race. My mantra:“If Michael can play sick, then I can, too!”

What mattered more than money to Michael was respect. And reputation. The first time the Bulls’ longtime broadcaster, Johnny “Red” Kerr, noticed this was in 1990, when Jordan refused to relent during a meaningless game against New Jersey. When it was over, Jordan told Kerr’s wife that every game mattered, and that no matter the size of the crowd, he was striving to play that unattainable“perfect game.” He figured he owed at least that much to the fans who adored him.

The Power of Michael

T
his was in 1992, in Barcelona, the NBA’s Dream Team on the cusp of the Olympics. Michael Jordan, Julius Erving, NBA coach Chuck Daly and television announcer Jim Gray were afforded the opportunity to play golf at a special course in the Pyrenees Mountains of Spain. Jordan, of course, has a strong affinity for golf. The only entry to this course was by helicopter, so the foursome left the hotel at 7:30 A. M. , flew for an hour and a half, and set down at this golf club nestled in the mountains. There was no sign of people as they teed off, barely even a sign of civilization, except for a couple of club members. By the third hole, however, a small crowd began to gather;by the sixth hole, there were thirty people. By the ninth hole, there were a hundred people, and more straggling in from the surrounding mountains. By the fifteenth hole, the entire course was mobbed, people watching from fairways and greens, trampling all over the course. By the eighteenth hole, the crowd was five and six deep, nearly fifteen hundred people fighting for a glimpse. By the time the helicopter took off to bring them back to Barcelona, the crowd was swarming, people grabbing hold, desperate for a second’s view.

“How did this happen?” Jim Gray said. “That’s the power of Michael.”

“To many, Michael Jordan is the prototype of a hero . . . the Sir Galahad riding to the rescue . . . and it has elevated him to such high proportions,” wrote the
Chicago Tribune’s
Sam Smith. “He’s a Prince Charming, a storybook character, one of those things people carry in their hearts and their hopes.”

Certainly, no athlete of his time has aroused as much passion from his fans as Jordan. Just ask the lady in Denver who lay down underneath the team bus and refused to leave until Jordan signed an autograph. Or ask Jordan himself, who has seen people nearly faint at the sight of him. They are rendered helpless and speechless, minds frozen in terror and wonderment, unable to convey a single coherent thought.

“People just seem to talk a little faster when they talk to me,” Jordan said. “They’ll stutter a little bit and they’ll be hurrying up what they say, like they have to say it very quickly, without pausing. I just try to listen the best I can. I don’t consider it any kind of power on my part. I really don’t. It’s them assuming something about me.”

My wife named a cat after Michael.

—Drew Goodman
D
ENVER
N
UGGETS’ BROADCASTER

And the way Jordan combated this fear was by being unassuming, by ingratiating himself to people even in the briefest of interchanges. He’d combat their nervousness by displaying a coolness of his own, something that touched hundreds of fans who were afforded the unique opportunity of meeting Jordan. Like Bill Holmes, whose son, on his first day as a ball boy for the Bulls, missed the train to Chicago Stadium. When he arrived, Jordan considered him, coolly. “Who are you?” he said.

“I’m a new ball boy.”

Jordan wrapped him in a playful headlock. “You’re fresh meat,” he joked. “But you’re at home here.”

He had an easy way with people, a power to connect with them. Sportswriter Jon Saraceno took his son to meet Jordan at a
Sports Illustrated
dinner. Jordan signed Sebastian Saraceno’s book, then asked him, “Are you going to be in school tomorrow?”

When Jordan left, Jon Saraceno looked down at his son and saw he was crying.

“You all right?” he asked.

“I just met Michael Jordan,” Sebastian said.

Jean Morse took her ten-year-old son to an IMAX theatre showing of Jordan’s movie, and the lights went down, and in walked Jordan. The crowd exploded, and amid the din, Jordan picked out Jean Morse’s son, bent down, looked him in the eye and asked, “Do you have all your homework done?”

“My son was awed,” Morse said.

When I was at Tennessee, we visited Michael at his office in Chicago. He made us feel right at home the whole time.

—Chamique Holdsclaw
W
ASHINGTON
M
YSTICS

So was mine. His name is Richie, and one spring he was a ball boy for a Bulls-Magic game, and I introduced him to Michael Jordan. As Richie stood in frozen reverence, Jordan passed on this advice:

1. “If you want to do something and you love doing it, then do it.”

2. “Whatever you choose to do, work hard at it.”

3. “You’ve got to get it done in the classroom to be successful.”

I think those mantras have been burned in Richie’s psyche ever since.

This was something Jordan did often, making an extra effort with children. He never let it overwhelm him. He understood his impact was phenomenal. He’d ask the autograph-seeking kids who would hang outside the arena door during morning practices, “Why aren’t you in school today?”When a road game forced him out of town on Halloween in his first year as a pro, he left a note for the children who knocked on his door:“Kids, sorry I missed you. If you still want to trick-or-treat, come back in three days.” When two young boys knocked on his front door, asking Jordan’s wife if he could come out and play, Jordan had just pulled into the driveway on his way home from the golf course. He got out and handed each of them a golf ball.

At his summer basketball camps, the kids often surveyed him with paralyzing awe. “But he makes people forget he’s Michael Jordan, and makes them feel like they’re the important person,” said Donna Biemiller, who’s worked at Jordan’s camps. “At camp, they’re so scared, but he allows the kids to relax with his sense of humor, and they have a memorable moment with him.”

“I see people getting so nervous to meet me, and I know that I’m just some person, so why should I be nervous?” Jordan said. “If they’re nervous meeting me, and I know that they have no reason to be, I have no reason to be nervous meeting anyone.”

Michael runs a summer fantasy camp in Las Vegas for executives who pay twenty-five thousand dollars to play with MJ and other celebrities. Jordan is totally hands-on from 7:30 A. M. one-on-one games to late-night card games. Everyone stands in line to get a photo with Michael, including the coaches, some of the biggest names in the business.

These were not obligatory efforts, either. It mattered to Jordan to make a difference. On numerous occasions Jordan met with dying children before an All-Star game or a play-off game. Often, sessions that were supposed to last ten minutes went on for half an hour or longer. Jordan would sign autographs, pose for photos, learn names and include them in the conversation. Sometimes he came away with tear-stained eyes.

Early in life, I decided that I would not be overcome by events. Life is not easy for any of us, but it is a continual challenge, and it is up to us to be cheerful and to be strong, so that those who depend on us may draw strength from our example.

—Rose Kennedy

In the mid-1980s, Jordan attended a Nike summer retreat in Southern California. The final night a banquet was held, a rather prim affair with a Roaring Twenties theme, people dressed up, tables decorated. There were, as part of the decorations, filled water pistols in the centerpiece of each table. Before dinner was even served, former Stetson University basketball coach Murray Arnold, sitting a couple of tables away from Jordan, felt a spray of water on the back of his neck. He ignored it. Then came another. When he turned around, Jordan was giggling. Then Jordan started shooting at others, including the late Jim Valvano, and within five minutes, the place had become a battleground. It went on for forty-five minutes. Dinner was never even served.

“It all started with Michael Jordan,” Arnold said. “Nobody else could get away with this. Michael’s charisma was such that it went over. Michael gave them all a night they’d never forget.”

Like Father . . .

T
here are not many Michael Jordans out there. Every kid wants to be, but they’re not going to be. That’s unrealistic. They have a better chance of being what their mother or father are; that’s reality.

—Charles Barkley

A
nd yet for all of Jordan’s universal impact, what mattered most was in front of him. His deepest influences were not Walter Davis or David Thompson or any of the other basketball stars of North Carolina. His deepest influences were his parents and his college coach, Dean Smith.

“He had taken from Carolina . . . a sense of right and wrong and how you were supposed to behave on a basketball court and away from it, as well,” wrote David Halberstam in his Jordan biography,
Playing for Keeps.
“He continued to clear many important decisions with his former coach, and certainly Dean Smith remained a living presence with him.”

Jordan’s greatest fear is of undoing his impact, of making a colossal mistake that would call into question all the positive energy he’s generated. He’s stumbled in the past, made small errors in judgment that have drawn sharp criticism, but he’s never failed greatly enough to unravel his own image. And the reason it matters to him to maintain such a carefully drawn public persona centers on the people in his immediate vicinity: his wife, his children, his mother and his late father. In the end, this is the influence that truly matters.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

—James Baldwin
AUTHOR

“I know people are concerned about the behavior of some young players, but it starts at home,” Jordan said. “I’ve always said that. I wish some of the other guys in the league could have had fathers at home just to see what it’s like; just to see how much better people they could be. . . . I want to have some influence on all my kids, but it’s hard. My heroes were my parents. I can’t see having anyone else as my heroes. When I talk to my kids sometimes, I can hear my own dad; the lessons he taught me. A smile comes to my face because you know what? I sound like him.”