How to Be Like Mike (26 page)

He noticed. He was aware. He followed the league with a sharp eye so he could do little things like congratulate P. J. Brown on his new contract, so he could know each player by name and compliment them on their strengths. Was there gamesmanship involved, a sweetness to disguise the ruthlessness? Partly. But it wasn’t just that.

“MJ had a great sense of his own legacy,” said his Chicago teammate, Luc Longley.

“He could recognize people and read their character,” said NewYork Knicks announcer John Andariese. “He had a great understanding of human nature.”

When Ted Leonsis, Jordan’s business partner, introduced him to his receptionist, she was speechless. Then, as she took them on the elevator, she began to weep, and Jordan put his arm around her and comforted her.

He had a way of sensing the pulse of people, of knowing how to affect them. There was the Baskin-Robbins employee who, when she was told she was making a milkshake for Jordan after-hours one night, began to scream hysterically. A few minutes later, Leah Wilcox, an NBA employee who’d been sent for the shake, put her on the line to Jordan’s room, and she screamed louder.

Once, when I was playing for Phoenix, I asked Michael for his shoes right in the middle of a game. After the game, he signed them and gave them to me.

—Steve Nash
NBA
PLAYER

There was Rogelio Nunez, a young Dominican catcher in Birmingham whom Jordan took a liking to. Told him to read the dictionary and study his English. Told him he’d give him a hundred dollars for every word he learned to spell. Before each game, Jordan would gather the team in a circle and Nunez would spell. By the end of the summer, Jordan had given away twelve hundred dollars, and at the end of the year, Jordan took Nunez to his house and gave him shoes, gloves, equipment, sweats, all straight out of his closet.

Establish, through every possible means, the self-respect of workers, and make them feel like they’re part of the team, not just numbers on a time clock.

—C. Donald Dallas
BUSINESSMAN

“In spring training, the players were complaining about the bus we’d have to ride in all summer,” said Jordan’s minor-league baseball teammate, Scott Tedder. “When we got to Birmingham, there were four buses waiting outside the ballpark. We looked at all four, and then MJ bought the one we wanted. After the season, he let the Barons keep it.”

Tedder, Nunez’s roommate in Birmingham, was released by the White Sox after a game in mid August of 1994. He was upset. He was confused. “MJ sat with me,” Tedder said. “He talked to me. He explained why to me. He was really a friend.”

The next day, the Cubs signed Tedder to play for their minor-league team in Orlando. They were playing at Birmingham. Problem was, Tedder didn’t have any bats. He told the clubhouse boy to go tell Jordan. After batting practice, Tedder returned to his locker and found four of Jordan’s bats waiting for him.

“Certain people or things seemed to strike Michael,” said John Bach, the former Bulls assistant coach. “He had a charm about him, a special manner. He was never offended by people trying to get to him.”

Carmen Villafane was a familiar face at Bulls games, a woman with severe disabilities, an invalid confined to a wheelchair. One year, before a game, she gave Jordan a valentine. A few months later, Jordan saw her at an auto show and asked her why she hadn’t come to more games. She said she didn’t have tickets, so Michael told her to call his office and he’d see what he could do.

Villafane called. Jordan’s office mailed her tickets for the remainder of the season. The next season, Jordan sent her more tickets and a note that read, “I hope you enjoy the season ahead. I’m looking forward to seeing you at every game—Michael.” Her wheelchair was positioned behind the bench at every game. When Jordan came back to Chicago for a Bulls-Wizards exhibition game in 2000, he visited with Carmen. He looked at her worn wheelchair and said, “I don’t like this chair. We’ve got to get you a new one.”

The next day, Jordan ordered it.

“The ultimate wheelchair,” said Tim Floyd, who succeeded Phil Jackson as coach of the Bulls. “All the bells and whistles. Now she could ride in style.”

The most consistent lesson I’ve taught Shaq has been the value of respect. Always treat people as equals. The way you go up is the way you come down. When you come down, you come down a whole lot faster.

—Phillip Harrison
S
HAQUILLE
O’N
EAL’S FATHER

There were no limits. Jordan even paid respect to the two entities who prove the nemesis of so many otherwise exemplary athletes: the referees and the media.

One night, a drunk woman wandered into Michael Jordan’s hotel room to get his autograph while I was there. The woman acted like a bum. Michael treated her like she was Princess Diana.

—Lacy J. Banks
SPORTSWRITER

Joe Falls had been writing about sports for fifty years in Detroit. He was in his early seventies and he had never met Jordan before he played his final game in Detroit in 1993. When Falls got into the locker room, Jordan was the last one there.

“See this white hair?” Falls said. “You’ve got to talk to me.”

Jordan grinned.

“I wanted to thank you,” Falls said. “For all the times you talked to us after games. Whether you won or lost, you always had time to talk.”

They shook hands. Falls left. He hadn’t bothered to give his name.

A year later, Falls drove to the White Sox spring training camp to write a story on Jordan. A cluster of media had gathered at the front door of the clubhouse. Falls went around to the back to use the restroom. The door was open. When he walked in, the only other person in the room was Jordan.

“Joe Falls,” he called. “What are you doing in here? Get over here.”

Falls had never given his name. They had met only once. And yet that day Joe Falls got a private interview, slipped out the back door and went away.

“Can you believe that?” Falls said.

It’s not as unusual as you might think. From the beginning, Jordan appealed to the media. The first time Mark Heisler of the
Los Angeles Times
came across Jordan was after the sixty-three-point game against the Celtics in the 1986 play-offs.
What a magnetic guy
, Heisler thought. He was never so conscious of wanting to know someone, of sensing an aura.

Oh, sure, they had their moments, Jordan and the media, as any public figure does in the face of such scrutiny. But there was something rare between Jordan and the reporters who covered him: an understanding, a symbiosis, a realization that each relied on the other to do their jobs properly. It was respectful. It was smart.

Respect builds trust. Trust builds loyalty.

“The writers may have wanted to write bad about Michael,” said NBA player Tim Hardaway, “but they couldn’t because MJ would win them over.”

“I always feel like I have to pay my respect to you guys—stupid questions and all,” said Jordan, shortly after his last formal meeting with the press as a player. “I understood what dealing with the media was all about, and learning that was part of my education and maturity. I never wanted them to think of me as a rude type of guy.”

“I was with Michael at least a hundred times,” said columnist and author Terry Pluto. “He was never a jerk. He never blew me off. Was never rude. Didn’t curse. Dressed well. He was always classy. He understood that he stood for something and had to act professionally. He was always gracious. He’d joke with you.”

Sportswriters are not accustomed to being noticed by their subjects. And so when Jordan noticed Dallas writer David Moore leaving a Mexican restaurant and the next day asked him, “Did you enjoy dinner last night?” it made an impression. When Jay Mariotti wrote a pro-Jordan column in the
Chicago Sun-Times,
and the next day Jordan pulled him aside and said, “I appreciate that piece,” it made an impression.

“He didn’t have to do that,” Mariotti said.

No, he didn’t. He didn’t have to extend his press conferences until the questions had trailed off, until everyone was satisfied. He didn’t have to do the same interview with the same broadcaster, Mike O’Koren, twice in a row, after O’Koren’s tape recorder failed to work the first time. He didn’t have to answer each question thoughtfully, instead of resorting to pat responses and clichés. He didn’t have to grant an interview to a reporter for a small golf newspaper the night before a game. And he didn’t have to get dressed before the media was allowed in the locker room; it was a concession to the female reporters, of course, but also a dignified gesture from a man who is ever conscious of conducting himself properly.

A man who lies to himself and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulging in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves, in the end, like an animal, in satisfying his vices. It all comes from lying . . . lying to others and lying to yourself.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky
T
HE
B
ROTHERS
K
ARAMAZOV

“The first time I met Michael was at the 1986 All-Star Game in Dallas,” said NBA publicist Terry Lyons. “When he got to the hotel, there was a frenzy of interview requests. I told Michael what we needed. He said, ‘Let me go to my room, and I’ll be down in fifteen minutes. ’ I thought, ‘Yeah, sure. ’ But at the 14:59 mark, the elevator doors opened, and there was Michael, ready to go.

He shot me a look that said, ‘Did you think I’d be late?’”

The day Michael reported to me in Birmingham, I said, “Michael, we don’t know each other, but I’m really going to have to treat you like anyone else,” Michael said, “That’s fine with me.” That’s how our relationship started.

—Terry Francona
BIRMINGHAM MANAGER, 1994

None of us has to do these things. We face meetings with people each day, and we are afforded a choice. We can wall ourselves off, become like the athletes who avoid the media, who berate the officials, who ignore their coaches, who shroud themselves in contentiousness.

Or we can lift ourselves above it.

“Parents could look up to Michael,” Terry Pluto said, “because he wouldn’t let their kids down.”

Two things John Hefferon told me. It was 1996, and Hefferon was the Bulls team doctor, and the Bulls were getting ready for a play-off game against my Magic (by the way, Chicago swept the series, thank you very much).

I had asked Hefferon about Michael Jordan. His reply:“The most remarkable person I’ve ever known.”

“Why?” I asked.

Two things, he said. The first is that Jordan had no fear of success. Certain people, Hefferon said, are afraid to succeed because they know they’ll have to keep doing it, and this scares them. Not Jordan.

The second thing is that Jordan respects all people equally.

“When Michael was a young player, he would get on the refs,” said former NBA official Billy Oakes. “He started on me one night and I told him, ‘I have respect for you, and I expect it from you. ’ That changed our entire relationship.”

As Jordan matured, he learned what Oakes meant.

He was careful in his speech. His blowups were infrequent, and when they happened, they were usually tempered by some sort of apologetic gesture. During a play-off game against Philadelphia, Jordan drove hard to the basket, scored and turned to referee Wally Rooney, asking for the foul call. Rooney didn’t call it.

Jordan eyeballed him on his way downcourt, and Rooney told him to stop it; when Jordan didn’t, he called a technical foul.

After the game, Jordan was still livid. He passed Rooney on the way to a postgame interview and ripped him again. But when asked by the interviewer, Doug Collins, what he’d said, Jordan showed instant respect to Rooney and told Collins, “I was just apologizing for getting the technical.”

In the midst of a play-off series against Charlotte, NBA official Dick Bavetta—perhaps the league’s most respected referee—whistled Jordan for a technical after they got into it about a couple of traveling calls.

Jordan was quoted about the incident in the next day’s edition of the
Charlotte Observer.
He said that Bavetta was right, that he was wrong, that Bavetta was in charge of the game.

“That,” Bavetta said, “was the kind of respect that Michael Jordan showed for the refs.”

He cultivated relationships with the officials, as he did with the media. Once, after a Christmas day game, he saw referee Scott Foster walk past, and in the midst of a press conference, called out, “Hey, Scott, Merry Christmas.”

“I didn’t even know Michael Jordan knew my name,” Foster said.

Respect builds trust. Trust builds loyalty.

Eventually, Jordan developed playful relationships with the writers and referees he knew well, so he could walk down a hallway and say, “Hey, scrub,” to a reporter he knew, so he could tease the referees during a game, so he could speak to them honestly. Some would say that Jordan got away with things because of this. His penchant for avoiding traveling calls has been explored extensively. Said former official Jack Madden: “Michael got away with a lot of walking violations. I’d call it on him, but I was in the minority.

He hated to see me come referee.” And perhaps he did get away with more, and perhaps he didn’t. But if nothing else, he had a sense of humor about it.

One night in Chicago, Paul Mihalik was officiating when Jordan made a steal, dribbled downcourt, took off at around the free-throw line, did a 360-degree turn and finished with a slam dunk—except the ball ricocheted off the iron and flew into the stands.

Jordan ran back upcourt with a smirk on his face.

He turned to Mihalik and said, “Paul, why didn’t you call traveling?”

“We’ll Get You a Ring”