How to Be Like Mike (8 page)

Remember what you can’t control: death, undeserved criticism, a job transfer, illness. And remember what you can control: your time, your effort, your thoughts, your tongue, your attitude, your choice of friends, your commitments, your response to failure.

You can always count on baseball players for pithy philosophies, if nothing else. Here, then, in that great Yogi Berra tradition, is former outfielder Mickey Rivers:

“Don’t worry about things you have no control over, because you have no control over them,” he says. “Don’t worry about the things that you have control over, because you have control over them.”

One of the measures of Jordan’s impact is that everyone who met him seems to carry away a story. For Mary Lou Retton, the Olympic gymnast, it came when she asked about the death of his father, about how he dealt with the pain and the loss.

Jordan shrugged. Said he did the best he could with it. Tried to take something positive away. “I had him for thirty-one years,” he said. “Some people don’t even have a father for two or three.”

There was nothing he could do. He couldn’t bring his father back. He couldn’t prevent the crime, couldn’t lash out anymore at the men who’d committed the crime. It was characteristic of Jordan’s acceptance of the random order of events, and his recognition of that which he couldn’t alter.

Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself, in your secret reveries, that you were born to control affairs.

—Andrew Carnegie
INDUSTRIALIST

Of course, the common reaction to unalterable courses of events—to delays, to market fluctuations, to trends, to the action of our competitors—is panic or rage or despair. We overreact, unspooling our emotions, unraveling our concentration. We lose our train of thought. We lose sight of our direction.

“My grandparents always used to say, ‘Think before you act, and be in control at all times, ’” Jordan said. “I always remembered that. You forget about the outcome. You know you are doing the right things, so you relax and perform. After that, you can’t control anything anyway. It’s out of your hands, so don’t worry about it.”

All it can do is shatter your focus. All it can do is cloud your dreams.

CHAPTER TWO

THE JOY

JORDAN ON PASSION:

A
lot of us in the NBA, we take it for granted that this is the only place we can play basketball, because we’ve made it to here. We forget about what it felt like when we were playing in high school, when it was so exciting just to put on that uniform and go onto the court for the game. Those days felt just as good as a lot of days in the NBA feel. Maybe better, because we didn’t take it for granted.

M
y advice to kids is to let them just enjoy the game. Develop a love for the game.

—Michael Jordan

T
he feeling first overcame him in the backyard, on the court his father built in Wilmington, North Carolina, in the midst T of brutal one-on-one games against his older brother, Larry. It was there that Michael Jordan fell in love with basketball. He delighted in his improvement, in his first victories against a sibling who once had overpowered him. He spent hours on that court, until he was good enough to make his high school team, until he blossomed into a star.

Those early glimpses of his potential were a revelation for Jordan. “He knew that he was going to get better,” says Buzz Peterson, who roomed with Jordan at a high school basketball camp and later played with him at North Carolina. “For the first time he had a sense of what the future might bring for him—and he was in love with it.”

Jordan kept those diligent habits as his notoriety grew, as the temptations to succumb to distraction swelled around him. Every practice was a source of enthusiasm; games were punctuated by a grin, by a helpless shrug of the shoulders as another three-point shot faded into the net. Didn’t matter if it was a tepid evening in January against the Clippers or the heightened tension of a finals game against Utah, Jordan was there every night, pushing, prodding, elevating the moment. He was a relentless talker, always dancing along the edges of cockiness, yet able to sharpen that edge by backing up his attitude.

A reporter once asked Luc Longley, Jordan’s teammate in Chicago, what it was that amplified Jordan’s game, what made him such a rarity. Longley was a rangy center for the Bulls, an Australian of moderate talent who was often the victim of Jordan’s consistent urgings. And to the reporter, Longley replied, in his rich Australian accent, “Michael Jordan is always up.”

When I was in college at Xavier, I saw an MJ quote in
Jet
magazine: “I play for the love of the game, not for the love of money.” I went and got a tattoo on my chest because of that. It says, “For the Love.”

—Michael Hawkins
NBA
PLAYER

For eighty years, a cellist named Pablo Casals began every morning with the same exacting routine. He’d walk to his piano, play two preludes and fugues of Bach, and let the music flood over him, a sort of benediction, a daily rediscovery, an ode to the brilliant hues of life.

I imagine that, with the same feeling coursing through him each morning, Jordan picked up a basketball, spun it in his fingers, set his feet, dribbled two or three times and took his first shot.

Meanwhile, amid joyous lives like Jordan’s, there are large portions of our society who toil in futility, long ago accepting of their own mediocrity. They accede to other’s wishes, barely twitching a finger to change things. They bury themselves in the boredom and monotony of the everyday with nothing but an ineffable vision of what might come next.

You’ve achieved success in your field when you don’t know whether what you’re doing is work or play.

—Warren Beatty
ACTOR

Perhaps we know people like this. Perhaps we
are
people like this:devoid of the passion and energy that carries us from one moment to the next, unable to combat the intangible force that sets roadblocks in our minds. And then one lonesome afternoon in a corner office, it floods us: the pain, the anguish, the irreversible regret for what we should have done and never did, because we followed the path to comfort instead of the path to our yearnings.

And we wind up lost, buried in our own remorse. But here’s the thing: It’s never too late for recovery.

The Glow of Enthusiasm

There is an energy that spills from the eyes of a joyous person, that emanates from their cheerful and exaggerated motion. But it’s more than just a surface energy that they’re revealing. What matters is what’s below, because the starriness of a person like this reveals so much about their potential for success. They are people doing what they want to do, living how they want to live, people who dictate their own actions, people who are immersed in their greatest pleasures: hitting a baseball, playing a trumpet, writing, drawing, painting, shooting a basketball.

This was when I was with the Philadelphia 76ers. I was sitting on the bench and MJ came dribbling past us at full speed. Then he shifted into another gear and went to the hoop. I’ll never forget that fire in his eyes, that look of determination. It scared me to see that look. I’ve never seen it before. I’ve never seen it since.

—Roy Hinson
FORMER
NBA
PLAYER

Historian David McCullough observed, “I would pay to do what I do. People say, ‘Take a vaction, ’ How could I have a better time than what I am doing?”

Author Laurence Sterne writes in
A Sentimental Journey
:“What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything.”

“You have to find something that you love enough to be able to take risks, jump over the hurdles and break through the brick walls that are always going to be placed in front of you,” said movie director George Lucas. “If you don’t have that kind of feeling for what it is you’re doing, you’ll stop at the first giant hurdle.”

Author Roger Kahn once called Willie Mays the most joyous ballplayer of his era, especially at the prime of his career, in 1954, his first year back from duty in the army, when the Giants won the pennant. Mays couldn’t wait to get to the ballpark. He had the same anxious feeling each day. “You got to love the game,” he said. “Else how you gonna play good?”

And some years later, Willie Mays observed Michael Jordan, his serpentine creative moves in traffic, his relentless bursts of vigor, his eponymous grin. “I look at Michael and I see a player who loves basketball,” Mays said. “He loves playing it the way I loved playing baseball. Intelligence, sure, but love is a big reason Michael can play basketball the way he does.”

Live with no time-out.

—Simone de Beauvoir
WRITER

Jordan is the only player I know of who had a“Love of the Game” clause inserted into his contract; it meant he could play in any basketball game at any time, whenever he wanted, without getting approval from the team.

I watched hours and hours of MJ on tape. He never relented for a second. He never took a play off. He was on all the time. Always wired up.

—Brendan Malone
NBA
ASSISTANT COACH

Again I take you back to Jordan in college at North Carolina, to his days under Dean Smith, who used to insist that both he and his assistant coaches maintain a vigorous demeanor throughout practice, and that his players do the same. This way, he figured, even if someone wasn’t charged that day, even if a player felt like someone had removed his batteries, they’d be so coerced into enthusiasm that they’d end up feeling it regardless.

Amid those practices, Jordan would dive for loose balls, would skin knees, would fight for every rebound. During one-on-one drills he’d spill with an almost boyish brashness, teasing his teammates as he’d drive by them, time after time, for easy dunks. Afterward, he’d write their names on a blackboard, with Roman numerals next to each name. The numerals signified how many times Jordan had dunked on them that afternoon.

He meant nothing personal by it. It was just a mischievous incarnation of Jordan’s ardor for the game.

Former teammate Ed Nealy said, “They should’ve charged admission for every Bulls practice, because you’d have seen more from Michael there than in the games. It didn’t matter if we’d played five games in eight days. MJ would practice like it was his last day in uniform.”

From the beginning of his NBA career, Jordan was the first to show up at practice and the last to leave. If there was a weakness in his game when he came to the NBA, it was that his jump shot was only slightly above average. So he’d work on his jump shot for hours with coach Kevin Loughery. They’d bet on games of HORSE, until Jordan could win back his money after Loughery tired out.

Wrote David Halberstam:“He was going to be a great player, Loughery thought, not just because of the talent and the uncommon physical aspects but because he loved the game. That love could not be coached or faked, and it was something he always had. He was joyous about practices, joyous about games, as if he could not wait for either.”

From the glow of enthusiasm, I let the melody escape. I pursue it. Breathless, I catch up with it. It flies again. It disappears; it plunges into a chaos of diverse emotions. I catch it again. I seize it. I embrace it with delight. . . . I multiply it by modulations and at last I triumph in the first theme. There is the whole symphony.

—Ludwig van Beethoven

“In 1992 at the Barcelona Olympics, we played cards until six in the morning,” said Magic Johnson.

“MJ got one hour of sleep, then played eighteen holes of golf. That night he scored twenty-eight points. After the game, we played cards all night. Then golf at eight in the morning. On the third night, MJ said, ‘We’re staying up all night playing cards. ’ I said, ‘MJ, I can’t do it. I can’t do what you do. I’ve got to get some sleep.” ’

There was so much joy that Jordan could manage to play extensive rounds of golf the day before a crucial playoff game and emerge from the locker room with the same energy level. He could subsist on two or three hours of sleep a night. In the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, as Magic Johnson said, Jordan played thirty-six holes each day, a game at night and then sometimes played cards until six in the morning. Finally, when the U. S. was due to face its toughest opponent, Russia, U. S. Coach Chuck Daly went to Jordan and said, “MJ, how about you play eighteen holes today?”

It is the greatest shot of adrenaline to be doing what you’ve wanted to do so badly. You almost feel like you could fly without the plane.

—Charles Lindbergh
AVIATOR

Jordan agreed. That night he locked down one of Russia’s best players, Sarunas Marciulionis. The U. S. won easily. Afterward, Jordan said to Daly, “I could have played another eighteen holes today.”