How to Be Like Mike (9 page)

When you have the challenge, you feel the hunger for the game, the love for the game, the attitude of coming in and working harder in practice.

—Michael Jordan

Sports columnist Mark Whicker said, “Michael’s energy level was just different. He couldn’t relax. Even his relaxation was strenuous.”

“He has a great sense of humor,” said former Bulls trainer Mark Pfeil. “And he has that big grin all the time.”

During his rookie season, when it’s customary for most players to wear down physically, Jordan would often scoff at the trainers’ concern for his fatigue level. Can you play this many minutes, the trainers would ask. Do you need a break?

Jordan would grin. “Watch me,” he’d say.

“Michael Jordan’s energy supply is what separates him from other people,” says Bulls assistant coach Bill Cartwright. “Nobody in the NBA has as much energy. I believe that enthusiasm finds the opportunities and energy makes the most of them.”

“In 1984, Michael played in the Olympics and then reported to the Bulls camp as a rookie,” said Jordan’s former teammate, Sidney Green. “All the vets thought he’d be tired and wouldn’t have any legs. He started camp by outrunning and outjumping all of us. Then, the second week, he ran even faster and jumped higher. By mid-season, he’d gone to an even higher level. He wanted to prove to everyone how special he was—and he was. He was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

I am known to those around me as a rather enthusiastic person—a notion that most would probably consider a vast understatement. Throughout the course of my career in the front office in both minor-league baseball and the NBA, my energy has led me to some rather odd precipices. Wrestling bears, for instance. Or overseeing the most disappointing trained pig act in the history of Philadelphia sports. Or donning a sweaty mascot’s suit. All for the sake of entertainment.

Some might call me crazy. I call it a surplus of joy. And I just happen to believe you should have enough of a surplus to fill aWal-Mart.

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be awake, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely awake.

—Henry Miller
WRITER

It’s something I learned from my mentor, a one-legged baseball executive named Bill Veeck, who earned a measure of fame for having the courage and ingenuity to let a midget bat during a major-league baseball game. Veeck was the sort of man who slept two hours a night, whose head exploded with ideas. He was flush with energy. He relished interaction, and he savored the small pleasures of his life in baseball. And of his life outside of baseball. When Bill died in 1986, sports columnist Thomas Boswell wrote:“Cause of death—life.”

Catfish Hunter stuffed twenty pounds of life into a five-pound sack. His life was a charm bracelet of good times.

—Steve Rushin
SPORTSWRITER

These are the people I admire, the ones who leave nothing ambiguous. Musicians like Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong exuded a spontaneous optimism on stage; Ted Williams was nicknamed “The Kid” for the way he bounced from the dugout each afternoon. Thomas Edison sacrificed fortunes for the sake of continuous time to invent; Charles Schulz drew his
Peanuts
comic strip until the months before his death because it was all he could imagine. Tina Turner still struts on stage, even now that she’s well past fifty—“When you’re around Tina,” said talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, “you say, ‘I want some of that energy that’s coming off her.” ’ John Madden has said he could broadcast pro football games for an eternity;one of my favorite public speakers is former Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, who could probably weave stories for an eternity; and Joe Paterno seems destined to coach college football at Penn State for an eternity. “I’ve never been bored,” Paterno said. “Maybe that’s part of the reason I stay in it.” Baltimore Ravens coach Brian Billick said it best: “Passion is the lubricant of success.”

In 1981, I played with MJ at the McDonald’s High School All-America game in Wichita. First practice, I was stunned. MJ got off the bus and without warming up, he was running and dunking all over the place.

—Chris Mullin
NBA
PLAYER

Not long ago, my wife Ruth and I were in Manhattan, preparing to perform another of our insane, enthusiastic stunts: running the NewYork City Marathon. The day before the race, we stopped into a Barnes and Noble bookstore where we had a chance to meet syndicated columnist George Will. We told him we were there to run the marathon.

He looked at us solemnly, his face blank and curious. He said, “Why?”

I’ve thought a great deal about that question. Why? I don’t know why. It’s uncontrollable. It’s an urge, a passion, something that blossoms from deep within and won’t let me stop.

It may be the most consequential advice we can pass along to our children: To find something they love, to chase after it and to savor its every twist. My son Bobby was scrawling major-league starting lineups on notepads when he was six; now he works as a coach in the Cincinnati Reds farm system. As a boy, A. J. Foyt was racing around the outside of his house in a child-size racing car. And Wayne Gretzky, at three years old, was watching hockey games while flopping around in stockinged feet on a linoleum floor. He would cry when the game ended, unable to comprehend the deprivation of this one exalted joy. On the day that forty-six-year-old Moses Malone was voted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, he was on his way to a Houston recreation center for a 1 P. M. pick-up game.

A magazine called
Nation’s Business
once surveyed its readers, attempting to extract the top ten businesspeople America had poured forth in its first two hundred years. The list included the names you’d expect: Edison, Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell. But what’s interesting is that while each of the ten choices was involved in highly competitive businesses— often cited as a cause of health problems—they lived ripely to an average age of eighty-seven.

MJ, I guess, had decided
he’d catch up on sleep some other time in his life.

—Matt Geiger
NBA
PLAYER

Another survey polled 241 executives on the traits that most helped workers to become a success. More than 80 percent listed “enthusiasm.” Second, at 63 percent, was a “can-do attitude.”

And enthusiasm does spread. If we project it, say, at a board meeting or in a presentation, it will carry through the room. Remember that groups aren’t naturally enthusiastic about doing anything. I’ve seen this in my flock of nineteen children (sixteen of whom were teenagers at the same time), whose primary pastime seems to be sitting on the couch complaining about the lack of things to do in life, because nothing in life is cool enough to do. It’s the same with a company. It’s the same with a team. We turn to leaders because they press us into action, because they make us feel that what we’re doing is healthy and intriguing and challenging. As long as that feeling is authentic, as long as it is not hidden from view, we can inspire entire groups.

MJ brought out the fire in everyone around him. He never missed a practice, no matter how many minutes he played the night before, no matter how many points he scored. That attitude, that pattern, spread to the rest of us.

—Scott Burrell
NBA
PLAYER

How many teams did Jordan improve just by being there? How many others’ games did he inspire? In his book, Halberstam makes mention of Steve Hale, another of Jordan’s teammates at Carolina, a player of marginal ability who subsisted mostly on hustle. Jordan did the same. Every loose ball Jordan rushed after, every extra effort he made during practice, only further endeared him to the teammates who weren’t blessed with his natural ability. And it only made them want what Jordan wanted that much more fervently.

I always told the musicians in my band to play with what they know, and then to play above that. Because anything can happen, and that’s where great art and music happens.

—Miles Davis
JAZZ MUSICIAN

Bill Russell believed, “Hustle is a talent.”

Former major-league baseball player Gene Woodling said, “You don’t tell me to hustle. That’s an insult. I never wanted to hear a ballplayer saying, ‘Nice hustling. ’You’re supposd to do that, and I did.”

“I Won’t Be a Bitter
Old Man”

You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

—John Irving
writer

B
ut let’s say something’s missing. Let’s say you don’t share this feeling. Let’s say you’re swept up in the modern malaise of our culture, the dour and cynical cult of people who, as sociologist Tony Campolo suggested, don’t dance, don’t sing and are “becoming emotionally dead.”

What then?

People don’t choose
careers. They’re engulfed by them.

—John Dos Passos
WRITER

The only intervention is to discover a passion in life. I cannot tell you where to find it. I can only tell you that it is absolutely crucial that you find it, wherever you have to go, whatever sacrifices you have to make, whatever risks you may incur. It’s the only way. Because I can guarantee that what you’re lacking is not intelligence, not education, not training. What you’re lacking is that fire, that certainty of action that branches forth from those early musings of energy and enthusiasm. What you’re crippled by is a lack of purpose.

Hockey’s Gordie Howe stated, “If you’re not in love with what you’re doing, just move over and make room for somebody who is.”

And why aren’t we engulfed by our careers? Why do we lack passion? Here, courtesy of author Greg Morris, are four possible maladies:

Routine
—We allow something precious to become familiar. This was Jordan in the aftermath of his father’s death, his senses dulled by basketball, his focus nosing elsewhere, eventually choosing baseball for a shake-up.

Acceptance and approval
—Passion both draws and repels people. Some are attracted to clarity of focus, and others are threatened by it. This means that there are times when we feel as if we have to protect ourselves from others’ skepticism, when our passion may seem misplaced. And so we mask it for the sake of consent.

If you are going to try to persuade others to go with you, it certainly doesn’t hurt that you’ve got very strong convictions about where you are going. Like Columbus did, for instance, to discover the New World. And if you’ve got passion and conviction, you’re more likely to be inspiring. If you’re inspired yourself and you’re passionate about something, you’re more likely to get others to come with you.

—Ted Turner
MEDIA EXECUTIVE

Apathy increases with age
—As we grow older, it is harder to contain our skepticism.

We have no purpose beyond ourselves
—We lose sight of possibility, of the impact we may have on others. And without those notions, we’re condemned to skepticism.

“You’re only bitter if you reach the end of your life and you’re filled with frustration because you feel you missed out on something,” Jordan said. “You’re bitter because you regret not accomplishing things you could have accomplished. I won’t be a bitter old man.”

“Michael has passion,” says his ex-teammate, B. J. Armstrong, “and you have to have that same passion, that same will, to beat him. He prepares himself in a way that no one will understand, because I don’t think too many people are willing to pay that price.”

Enjoy every minute of life. Never second-guess life.

—Michael Jordan

In 1984, before he joined the Bulls, before he began his glorious professional career, Jordan had one last amateur experience: the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. His coach was Bob Knight, and one of the first things Knight did when pulling his team together was to recognize Jordan’s leadership qualities, his overriding passion. Before the competition began, he pulled Jordan aside and told him he might make an example of him as a way to motivate some of the less driven players on the team.

The morning of the gold-medal game, Knight had prepared an elaborate pep talk, full of hyperbole and euphemisms. But when he walked into his office that day, someone had dropped a yellow piece of paper on his chair.

“Coach,” it said. “Don’t worry. We’ve put up with too much garbage to lose now.”

It was signed, “The Team.”

The Team, Knight understood, was Jordan. And so Knight never gave his speech. He never had to.

The USA led Spain by twenty-seven points at halftime, and Knight leaned over to Jordan and shouted at him, as a ploy to avoid a second-half slump, “When are you going to start setting some screens?”

Jordan smiled. “Coach,” he said, “didn’t I read some place where you said I was the quickest player you ever coached?”

“Yeah,” Knight said. “What’s that got to do with it?”

“Coach, I set those screens faster than you could see them.”

Michael Jordan is one of the greatest competitors I’ve ever seen in any sport. And he looks like he’s always enjoying it.

—JohnWooden
BASKETBALL COACH

Lesser players with lesser resolves and flagging spirits have slogged amid Knight’s prickly nature, disturbed by his constant ribbing. Not Jordan. In the grizzled eye of the beast, he made heady pronunciations and cracked bold one-liners, engulfed and shielded by his passion for the game.

CHAPTER THREE

THE HARD
WAY

JORDAN ON WORK:

Y
ou can’t turn it on and off like a faucet. I couldn’t dog it during practice and then, when I needed that extra push late in the game, expect it to be there. But that’s how a lot of people approach things. And that’s why a lot of people fail. They sound like they’re committed to being the best they can be. But when it comes right down to it, they’re looking for reasons instead of answers.