How to Be Like Mike (25 page)

“You must forget about being cautious, because if you don’t, you’re licked before you start,” Vince Lombardi said. “There is nothing to be afraid of, as long as you are aggressive, and keep going. Keep going and you will win.”

Two more thoughts on boldness from successful football coaches. “Be right or wrong, but be decisive in your actions,” says Brian Billick. Chuck Knox adds: “Conservative coaches have one thing in common: they are all unemployed.”

7. Being a Servant

No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or to get all the credit for doing it.

—A
NDREW
C
ARNEGIE

“I remember Phil Jackson telling MJ that he had to trust his teammates,” said former Bulls forward Horace Grant. “Mike didn’t go overboard, but he’d invite guys to his room to play cards, just enough to let them know what he was about. To be a leader, everybody has to have respect for you on and off the court. You can’t just be a great player.”

I am reminded of a saying we have in the Army:“Officers eat last!” Taking care of your soldiers is an act of stewardship.

—General Colin Powell

There is a well-documented incident that took place during the 1987–88 season, when Doug Collins was coaching the Bulls. Jordan came to practice in a bad mood. He was talking back to Collins. During a scrimmage, after a dispute over the score, Jordan unleashed a tirade on Collins.

“Would you say that to Dean Smith?” Collins asked.

“I’m leaving,” Jordan said.

“We’re not through for the day yet,” Collins told him.

“I’m out of here,” Jordan said.

He picked up his bag and he stormed out of practice. On the way out, Collins muttered, “Nice leadership, Michael.”

It became a story for the media. It was reported and debated for a few days, until finally both men let it pass. But it was, Collins said, one of the first moments when Jordan recognized his impact, the magnitude of his stardom.

Later, Jordan came to Collins and assured him it would never happen again.

“I think this incident,” Collins said, “was a turning point in his career.”

Team players recognize the greater good. For Jordan, that meant adhering to a team dynamic, refusing to allow diversions and even controlling such unbridled personalities as Dennis Rodman. “Michael would not allow any diversions on that team,” said former Dallas Mavericks general manager Norm Sonju. “He’d police that all by himself.”

Sometimes, he even did it in the off-season. That summer in 1995, after Chicago lost to the Magic in the play-offs, the Bulls were gathering for informal practice sessions at ten in the morning every day. Some players would drift in later until, finally, Jordan grew tired of it and pulled his teammates into a huddle and said, “We’re all professionals. If we say we’re going to be here at ten, let’s be here at ten.” For the rest of the summer, that’s what they did.

He was everything to the Bulls—a policeman, a catalyst, a communicator, a visionary. He carried a team. He carried an entire league. And of course he was unique; and of course he was incomparable. But I’m convinced that there are others out there who are willing to step forward, who are willing to shoulder the burdens that great leaders must bear.

It’s up to us to find them. To develop them. And perhaps, to become them.

CHAPTER TEN

THE SOCIAL
GENIUS

JORDAN ON RESPECT,
TRUST AND LOYALTY:

I
just think you should respect the game. Be positive people. Certainly, you can act like gentlemen and professionals. You look at the great players and what they want to pass on as a legacy. They don’t take this game for granted. You don’t treat it like dirt. We’re being treated like doctors and lawyers because of the salaries we receive. So let’s act like sensible people.

O
nly those who respect others can be of real use to them.

—Albert Schweitzer

T
his is a story from Birmingham, from 1994, when Michael Jordan was nothing more than another minor-league baseball T player striving for an opportunity. It was a brilliant afternoon, warm and sunny, and he was on his way to the ballpark, cutting through a sprawling suburban neighborhood. He passed a boy, ten years old, playing basketball in his driveway, alone. The boy’s name is not important. It could be any boy.

What matters is what the man did next.

He stopped the car. He got out. The boy considered him. The boy knew who he was.

“Mind if I join you?” Jordan asked.

The boy nodded.

They played for twenty minutes, passing, rebounding, shooting, the world’s greatest basketball player and the boy, no one disturbing them. Then Jordan got in his car and drove away.

The boy’s parents weren’t home that afternoon. When he told them, they didn’t believe him. No one believed him. It was like something out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

“Finally,” said Birmingham Barons general manager Tony Ensor, “one of the neighbors verified his story.”

At all of his camps, Michael Jordan will physically touch every camper. A hug, a pat, something. They all feel his touch.

—Dick Versace
NBA
EXECUTIVE

Here is the Michael Jordan we don’t see. Here is what exists beyond the iconography. It is not a prepackaged smile, not a silhouetted T-shirt slogan, not a commercial spokesman, not a towering image on an IMAX screen.

No. Here is a man. And here is a child.

It could be any child. Say a nine-year-old with disfiguring burns. Or a teenager in a wheelchair who can move nothing except his eyes. Or a Make-A-Wish kid crippled by a rare and terminal disease. Or one of the perfectly healthy kids at his summer basketball camp. Or the son of an opposing coach. The point is, it does not matter.

What matters is what the man does next.

He hugs, he talks, he takes up twice the time allotted by the publicists and the agents for the Make-A-Wish children, until both of them are nearly in tears. (“This rips me up,” he says when he’s finished. ) The parents see it and say, “That’s the first time our child has smiled in three months.” He talks to the kids about getting good grades, about respecting their parents. The parents come back and say their children’s faces looked “like sunshine.”

A gentle word, a kind look, a good-natured smile, can work wonders and accomplish miracles.

—William Hazlitt
AUTHOR

“MJ says he’s going to give me his shoes tomorrow,” one of the children says.

“Right, sure,” thinks the parent, said an NBA assistant coach named T. R. Dunn.

The next day the parent is leaving the building and here’s Jordan, passing him, saying, “Don’t forget to get to the ball boy and get a pair of shoes for your son.”

While at North Carolina, circa 1983, he plays a game of HORSE with a six-year-old boy who goes on to become an announcer in Knoxville, Tennessee. When the boy’s mom comes to get him, she says, “Do you know who that was?”

“I had no idea I’d been playing with Michael Jordan,” Deck Hardee says today.

In 1992, in a Chicago suburb, Jordan tells his driver to stop in front of some children who have set up a lemonade stand. He rolls down his window, buys some lemonade, talks with them and leaves. The children are so excited that they bowl over their entire operation.

The man is determined to do things like this. To pull a kid bedecked in Air Jordan wear out of the crowd to caddie for him at a celebrity golf tournament in Hilton Head, South Carolina. To open the gates of his house on Halloween for trick-or-treaters. To prove that he is something more than a shadowy logo on a T-shirt, more than a waggling tongue and a pair of legs scissoring through the free-throw lane. He notices the children with disadvantages, the shy ones who can’t push their way up front, the kids in wheelchairs who can’t get close. He picks them out. He crouches on the frozen ground until a disabled boy’s father can take a photograph.

Michael Jordan was not good at saying no to people. He was known to stiff people, but they were always the powerful people. Michael always had an abundance of time for any person who was struggling, or who couldn’t possibly be of any personal benefit to him.

—Bob Greene
COLUMNIST

“My son still talks about it,” one parent says.

“I have three sons,” says NBA player Hersey Hawkins, “and every time MJ sees them, he remembers their names. That’s amazing to me. Sometimes I can’t even remember their names.”

He has that kind of memory for faces, for names. He sees a girl at his camp and winks and tells her, “You look much better now that your braces are off.” He sees the same kid sneaking back into a massive line at an autograph session and says, “Isn’t this your second time?” He meets Larry Johnson for the first time, when Johnson is a rookie forward in Charlotte, and asks him, “How’s your mother? How’s Dorothy?”

“I thought, ‘How does he know my mother’s name?’” Johnson said. “I thought about it the whole game.”

He sees another rookie, Antonio Daniels, in a restaurant, and not only acknowledges him, but invites him over to eat at his table. He sees a broadcaster, Jay Howard, who wore a line of Jordan’s sweaters once, and from then on refers to him as“my sweater guy.”

Without feelings of respect what is there to distinguish men from beasts?

—Confucius

He has a keen awareness for the dynamics of family—his own and others. A fan in Indianapolis sees him in a department store, his arms loaded with stuffed animals, and when the fan asks who they’re for, Jordan says, “Got to take care of my kids.” One day in Aspen, a boy asks him to sign his brand-new ski jacket and Jordan says, “Does your mother know I’m signing this jacket?”

He ships a signed jersey to be buried with a dying boy in Seattle. He donates thirty-five thousand dollars in auction proceeds to a foundation for a boy who died of brain cancer. He drives to a site near the old Chicago Stadium, in an inner-city neighborhood, where four boys wait on the corner to wave to him as he drives past. He nicknames one of them“Kool-Aid,” and every night, he leaves four tickets for “Kool-Aid” at will-call. Sometimes they’re seats upstairs, sometimes they’re near courtside. Jordan always pays for them himself.

“MJ was always so aware of other people’s feelings,” said sportswriter Rick Telander. “He is a social genius.”

One night in 1994, Birmingham plays a game at Nashville. The team bus is in centerfield, and Jordan is riding out to it on a golf cart, shrouded by security. A boy chases him. Security guards catch the boy and knock him down. This is not long after Monica Seles was stabbed during a tennis match, and no one is willing to take chances. The next day, the story comes out: The boy has a friend who died and who was a huge Jordan fan. The boy was sprinting out to invite Jordan to the funeral.

MJ taught me to respect what you do and do the right thing. Basketball is my profession, and Michael taught me to respect it.

—Derek Anderson
NBA
PLAYER

The man has to do something. And so he issues a statement:
I’m very sorry to hear of this tragic story. I wish I could be at the funeral, but my baseball schedule will not permit it. My thoughts and prayers will be with the family at this time.

“He always knew the right thing to say,” said Chris Pika, Birmingham’s publicist in 1994.

“Did You Think I’d
Be Late?”

“The sense of respect I get from the people—I get chill bumps,” Jordan said. “Sometimes, I’m misty-eyed, and it doesn’t have anything to do with whether it’s a big game or not. It just happens.”

It was respect that Jordan coveted. It is a simple equation: Respect between people leads to trust, and trust leads to loyalty, and it was my own mentor, Bill Veeck, who said, “For my dough, loyalty is the greatest virtue in the world.”

“Sometimes, we forget what former NBA players did to allow us to come along today and earn the type of money we’re making and gain the respect of fans and media,” Jordan said. “I never want to forget that. That’s the respect every athlete needs to pay back to the game.”

And so Jordan’s kindness was not just reserved for children. It was given over to the entire league, to statisticians and ticket managers and trainers and custodians. It was given to opponents and to future opponents, like Carlos Rogers, a young player who went to a camp of Jordan’s in Chicago before he came into the NBA. Rogers was swarmed by agents, talking to him, prodding him, and Jordan stepped in and screened them, told them they shouldn’t talk to him and jeopardize his career.

“I didn’t think a guy of that caliber would actually sit down with me in his office,” said Rogers, “and tell me how to handle things.”