How to Be Like Mike (12 page)

The appetite to create, is an unbelievable ambition.

—Michael Jordan

The Lakers’ Ron Harper said, “Shaquille O’Neal is one of those guys who just loves the game. He’s a kid and always will be a kid. He loves to play and to have fun. That’s what he’s about.”

Football is game I grew up playing. It was my safe haven, and it was fun and it’s a game, and that’s the way it has to be. If it stops being fun, you’re not going to perform. You’re not going to see a bunch of kids out in the park playing if they’re not having fun. They’re going to do something else.

—Mel Renfro
FORMER
NFL
PLAYER

I could waste this space citing a dozen studies that reinforce the health benefits of laughter, but I can say the same thing about spinach and you’re not going to run to the corner market and buy enough to cram your refrigerator. So let me recite this lesson directly, without histrionics or posturing:

Give me a man who sings at his work.

—Thomas Carlyle

Successful people laugh.

Witness:At Southwest Airlines, the
Saturday Night Live
of commercial air travel, flight attendants sing and dance and rap and hide in baggage compartments and hold contests to find the customers with the largest holes in their socks. One of the company’s slogans:“We smile because we want to; not because we have to.”

“You shouldn’t have to change your personality when you come to work,” said Southwest CEO Herb Kelleher. “At Southwest we have created an atmosphere where we hire good people, let them be themselves, and pay a great deal of attention to them and their personal lives.”

Work can be more fun than fun.

—Noel Coward
WRITER

Because of this, Southwest employees are known as the most loyal and productive in the airline industry, and Kelleher has been dubbed “America’s Best CEO” by such esteemed judges as the editors of
Fortune
magazine.

Back at the University of North Carolina, at Jordan’s alma mater, Dean Smith would sometimes kneel in the middle of the huddle during crucial time-outs, cultivate a wry smile and say, “Isn’t this fun?”

And this is another slice of Jordan’s allure, that each game was underlaid with an irreverent delight. The tongue dangling loosely from his mouth like an ornament from a rearview mirror. The sheepish grin and shrug of the shoulders captured in the midst of one key play-off game when Jordan seemingly couldn’t miss.

“Michael Jordan made up his mind that he’s going to enjoy his time playing basketball,” said former Bulls assistant coach Tex Winter. “I think he made his mind up a long time ago.”

And without the luxury of a single summer break.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE FIGHT

JORDAN ON PERSEVERANCE:

O
bstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up.

Figure out how to climb it, go through it or work your way around it.

O
n 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

T
here 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

T
o 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

H
ere’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 roommate, 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?