Despite having watched several documentaries about Jordan, I still learned something new, including details about his strained family relationships, his Wizards years, and Phil Jackson’s Machiavellian side. The Bulls may have looked dominant in retrospect, but their championships were hard won.
Jordan was competitive, egotistical, and confident, and he backed his self belief with hard work. In his prime, he was also graceful and charismatic. I relate to his frustration when others care less than I do about things I want to do well. And I see the same competitive drive in my younger son. The challenge is to channel that competitiveness productively without damaging relationships.
P.S. An old post on Michael Jordan about aging, obsession, and glory.
Excerpts:
The “zone” of high performance that other athletes struggled to achieve was something that Jordan accessed on a regular basis. “Michael did have to find something to motivate himself into that state,” Mumford explained. “The more you have those moments in the zone, the more you want to have them. Most people can’t sustain it. His ability to find that state, his ability to concentrate, his ability to lock in were almost superhuman. He was coming from a different place, man.”
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The experience brought Jordan face to face with his own selfishness for the first time. It would be one of the dominant themes of his career, learning to channel the tremendous drive and ego of his competitive into a team game.
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“My greatest skill was being teachable,” Jordan later observed. “I was like a sponge. Even if I thought my coaches were wrong, I tried to listen and learn something.”
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Furious with his teammates, Jordan cursed them yet again at halftime, then sobbed in the back of the team bus afterward. “I was crying and steaming,” he recalled. “I was saying, ‘Hey, I’m out here busting my butt and nobody else is doing the same thing. These guys are kicking our butt, talking our heart, taking our pride.’ I made up my mind right then and there it would never happen again. That was the summer that I first started lifting weights. If I was going to take some of this beating, I was also going to start dishing out some of it. I got tired of them dominating me physically.”
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“I think Scottie was vulnerable because he was human,” Kerr explained. “It’s the reason everybody loved him. You know, he signed that long contract. He was clearly underpaid. It was tough for him to live with that. He felt like he wasn’t appreciated. All the feelings that are associated with almost every human being, that was Scottie, and that’s why we all really appreciated him, because we felt we were more like him, even though we weren’t physically. We were all more like him emotionally than like Michael. Michael didn’t even seem human, he was so confident and so strong.”
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“That was why Phil always used it’s the Us-Against-the Media approach, the Us-Against-the Organization approach, because if he did that, then he could be the leader of the pack.”…”Phil is the master of mind games,” Jordan had said of the coach on several occasions.
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“Obviously we all have weaknesses,” Kerr added and laughed. “Except for Michael. And what he does, he forces us to fight and be competitive, to fight through those weaknesses and not accept them, to work on them, and to improve ourselves.” Make no mistake, though, Kerr said, what Jordan did was pure challenge. “There was not a whole lot of encouragement.”
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“You seem to operate in a zone that seems to be reserved only for you,” Erving told him. “What’s it like when you’re there, Mike?” “It’s like every move, every step, every decision you make, it’s the right decision,” Jordan replied. Jordan was “in the moment,” as George Mumford described it. Every player could fall into a zone on occasion, but he now seemed to reside there.
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The season became the kind of farewell tour that Jordan had once vowed he would never do. When the Wizards visited Los Angeles for his final game against the Lakers, Kobe Bryant offered a parting gift. “Kobe just would up destroying him in the first quarter, like 40 points in the first half of that game,” J.A. Adande recalled. “That was like the true end and the passing of the torch. I mean it had to be humbling for him. I mean there was nothing he could do about it.”
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In conversation, it quickly became obvious that Jordan respected Bryant, without any hint of condescension. He respected any player who did the work, who had the mental toughness. Bryant passed both those tests, he said.
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A few years earlier, the Lakers’ coaching staff had concluded that Bryant and Jordan were much alike, almost eerily so, when it came to the alpha male qualities of their competitive natures. The two were ruthless when it came to winning, everyone agreed. And their skills were similar, although Jordan’s hands were larger.
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“Michael Jordan’s Hall of Fame talk was the Exxon Valdez of speeches,” wrote Rick Reilly in Sports Illustrated. “It was, by turns, rude, vindictive, and flammable. And that was just when he was trying to be funny. It was tactless, egotistical, and unbecoming. When it was done, nobody wanted to be like Mike.”
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