How to Be Like Mike (28 page)

—Dr. Laura Schlessinger
AUTHOR

Character is the sum of a man’s parts. It is a product of balance in one’s life, of the self-discipline to choose the correct option even when it may be the less attractive option. It is a product of faith in a standard of morals and values that one adheres to no matter the circumstances. It is the sum of all the qualities we have explored up to this point.

We will take one more trip through now, with Jordan’s life and words as our guide.

Class and Values

E
xecutives spend too much time drafting, wordsmithing and redrafting vision statements, mission statements, values statements, purpose statements, aspiration statements and so on. They spend nowhere near enough time trying to align their organizations with the values and visions already in place.

—Jim Collins
business writer

“I don’t believe in ‘if, ’” Jordan said. “I think there has always been a plan for my life and that I don’t have any control over it. Everything that happens was determined in advance. . . . I read the Bible a lot. I see that whatever happens, happens for a reason.”

You can tell the value of a man by the way he treats his wife, by the way he treats his subordinates and by the way he treats someone who can do nothing for him.

—Ken Babcock
SPEAKER

“If you were to create a media athlete and star for the age of TV sports, spectacular talent, mid size, well-spoken, attractive, accessible, old-time values, wholesome, clean, natural, not too good, with a little bit of devil in him, you’d come up with Michael Jordan,” said his agent, David Falk. “He’s a classic example in marketing of what we call ‘synergy. ’The whole is much bigger than the sum of the parts.”

Honesty and Integrity

“One man cannot do right in one department of life whilst he is occupied in doing wrong in any other department,” said Mahandas Mahatma Gandhi. “Life is one indivisible whole.” That’s what Zig Ziglar meant when he wrote, “Remember, your life is all connected.”

Guard your integrity as a sacred thing. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I could have easily lied,” said Jordan, discussing whether he’d actually eaten Wheaties before signing an endorsement contract with the cereal. “But I thought, why lie? So I told them the truth. I told them that I had never eaten Wheaties and that I didn’t know whether I’d even like Wheaties. I mean, we used to eat some kind of wheat puffs when I was growing up. They came in a huge bag. I don’t even know if they had a brand name. We had five kids in the family. We couldn’t afford Wheaties.”

When Jordan was at North Carolina, Doug Moe’s son David played at tiny Catawba College, also in North Carolina. The network of college basketball across the state was rife with rumor; if anybody at one of the big schools had a weakness of character, it trickled down to the other programs.

I always tell the truth the first time and do not need a good memory to remember that.

—Sam Rayburn
FORMER
S
PEAKER OF THE
H
OUSE

“David told me that MJ was as clean as whistle,” said Moe, a longtime NBA coach. “That was his reputation. I never forgot it.”

In 1993, the Bulls lost a triple-overtime NBA Finals game against Phoenix. Three times during that game, Jordan told referee Darrell Garretson that his elbow was tipped while he was taking a shot and that a foul should have been called. Garretson assured Jordan he was wrong.

It takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

—Warren Buffett

Later, Garretson watched a tape of the game. He cued those three plays. On each one, Jordan’s elbow had been tipped.

“Michael,” Garretson said, “was the most honest player ever.”

He never asked to renegotiate a contract. For a large part of his career, he wasn’t even one of the league’s highest-paid players.

“I’ve taught my kids to be honest and keep their word,” Jordan said. “What kind of example would I be setting if I went back on mine?”

Glass, china and reputation are easily cracked, and never mended well.

—Benjamin Franklin

This was on a Sunday, during a nationally televised game between the Bulls and Magic. At the end of the first half, Jordan drove to the basket and was converged upon by two defenders; he landed in the first row of seats. The shot went in, and Jordan emerged from the mess with a gash on his forehead, but the veteran referee, Ed Rush, did not call a foul. Jordan was upset. Phil Jackson stormed onto the floor and Rush whistled him for a technical.

As the half ended, Jordan approached Rush and said, “Look at the tape. You’ll see the foul.”

Rush checked the tape. There was no foul. Jordan’s athleticism had allowed him to avoid the contact.

At the beginning of the second half, Rush gave Jordan a hard stare. “There was no foul on that play,” he said.

“You’re right,” Jordan said. “It was the right call.”

“Go tell that to Phil,” Rush said.

So Jordan went to Jackson and told him there was no foul.

“There has to be a sense of trust between the player and referee,” said Rush, “and Michael always had that.”

“Michael is a man of his word,” said former college coach George Raveling. “If he tells you he’ll meet you at 9 A. M. , you can set your watch by it.”

Sean Hill was fifteen years old during the 1986–87 season, and was working as a bus boy at Pinehurst Country Club, a renowned golf resort in North Carolina. He was also a Celtics fan, and so when Jordan came to play golf there one afternoon, Hill and his friend began to taunt Jordan, telling him he wouldn’t even score twenty points the next time he faced Boston. They wound up betting five dollars on it.

The next time MJ played Boston, he was hurt and only played half the game. He failed to score twenty. A week after the game, an envelope came for Hill, with no notes, no photos—nothing except a five-dollar check from Michael Jordan.

There are no minor lapses of integrity.

—Tom Peters
SPEAKER/AUTHOR

“My buddy still has it in a frame,” Hill said.

In 1995 Michael put together a company to install driving ranges in various cities to teach golf to inner city children. Orlando businessman Jim English and his friend Gary Sorensen invested $35, 000 a piece in two limited units. Two years later the venture failed and was sold. Michael agreed to consult with the acquiring company in order to get the price high enough to ensure that all investors would receive 100 percent of their money back. This included all the investors except Michael and another man who lost what they put up. Said English, “Michael ranks up there with the best, a man of integrity.”

Maturity

E
motional maturity is one of the most important and respected qualities of leadership. It requires, first, that you are at peace with yourself and, second, that you remain calm in the face of adversity and difficulty.

—Brian Tracy
speaker and author

There was a time, not long ago, when sixteen of my children were teenagers at the same time. (Somehow, I am still here. ) Needless to say, the buzzword around our house at that time was maturity. As in, “Dad, I’ve been very mature lately. Can I borrow the car tonight?”

Or, “Dad, I’m so mature, I’d like to stay out late tonight.”

I’m still not sure exactly how to characterize maturity. But my close friend, Jay Strack, has come up with as good a definition as I’ve heard: “When the little boy or little girl has decided to sit down permanently, and the young man or young woman has decided to stand up permanently— that’s a pretty good sign that there’s some maturity taking place.”

Maturity begins to grow when you can sense your concern for others outweighing your concern for yourself.

—John MacNaughton
AUTHOR

I tell my son, “Grow up to be a man. It’s a waste of time and life to grow up to be a boy.”

—Leonard Pitts Jr.
NEWSPAPER COLUMNIST

Here are the six basic principles of maturity, courtesy of authors Mortimer J. Feinberg and John J. Tarrant:

1. Accept yourself

2. Accept others

3. Keep your sense of humor

4. Appreciate simple pleasures

5. Enjoy the present

6. Welcome work

“When I was at Maryland, I recruited MJ,” said NBA veteran BuckWilliams. “He had a lot of character, even at seventeen. He was really mature. He had a great idea of what he wanted to do with his life.”

A sign ofmaturity is accepting deferred gratification.

—Adlai Stevenson

“Michael looked like a champion and acted like one,” said Hall of Fame coach Red Auerbach. “He was always a model. He dressed like a winner. He always had control of himself. He always said the right thing.”

Mitch Albom, a Detroit sport columnist, saw an example of Jordan’s maturity and sportsmanship in 1991. “The Bulls swept the Pistons out of the play-offs in a 4–0 series, thus ending three straight years of frustrating losses to Detroit. As the fourth game in 1991 was ending, all of the Pistons left the floor and never even shook hands with the Bulls, except for Joe Dumars and John Salley. MJ never said a word about that—never commented. He just ignored the Pistons’ actions because he knew the Bulls had paid their dues and their time was coming. Michael refused to sink to the Pistons’ level of poor sportsmanship.”

Emotional maturity is a preface for a sense of values. The immature person exaggerates what is not important. Maturity begins when we’re content to feel we’re right about something without feeling the necessity to prove someone else wrong.

—Vince Lombardi

Patience

P
atience is the most necessary quality for business. Many a man would rather you heard his story than grant his request.

—Lord Chesterfield
author and statesman

During spring training 1994, Jordan was playing in an exhibition game with the White Sox. He’d gone zero for his last nineteen, and late in the game he chopped a ball down the third-base line and beat it out for a hit. The players had a small celebration for him after the game, and Frank Thomas came up to Jordan at his locker and said, “Are you proud of yourself?”

On the whole, it is patience which makes the final difference between those who succeed or fail in all things. All the greatest people have it in an infinite degree and, among the less, the patient, weak ones always conquer the impatient, strong.

—John Ruskin
BUSINESS EXPERT

“Yes,” Jordan said, “I am.”

This one’s about me. I flew from Orlando to Detroit to give a speech to Ford Motor Company a few years ago. A limo driver was supposed to meet me at the baggage area, but he never showed. It took about an hour, but I found another ride to the hotel, where a trainee at the front desk took his time checking me in. I paced. I sighed. I fidgeted.

And then the man in front of me in line exploded. He said I was impatient. He said I had a bad attitude. He was right, of course, and the only thing I could hope was that he wouldn’t be at my speech the next day.

Next morning, in the elevator on the way to my speech, there he was. Turned out he was employed by a company that improved hotel efficiency, and he was working on a way for guests to pick up a key and go right to their rooms without checking in.

I was thoroughly humbled.

Humility

K
eep in mind that there are laws independent of man’s consent, ruling over reality, over nature, over man, too, whether is willing to recognize them or not . . . to which we must bow, unless we think we can rule ourselves, independently of the rest of nature. Egoism, in other words, must be defeated in self. The egoist is never happy.

—Vince Lombardi

There is still debate whether this is a true event or a legend that took place in Atlantic City, New Jersey, but it’s one of my favorite Jordan stories. A woman broke away from a slot machine to take a bucketful of quarters to her room before returning for dinner. She called the elevator. On it were two men. Two black men. One was extraordinarily tall. The woman hesitated before getting on the elevator.

They’re going to rob me,
she thought.

Don’t be a bigot,
she told herself.

She got in and faced the elevator doors as they closed. She waited. The elevator didn’t move. Her palms were sweating. Her face was flushed.

“Hit the floor,” one of the men said.

The woman threw out her arms. The bucket of quarters soared into the air and rained down upon her as she sunk.

A few seconds passed.

“Ma’am,” said one of the men. “If you just tell us what floor you’re going to, we’ll push the button.”

She turned. One of the men, the smaller one, helped her up. He was trying desperately to restrain a laugh. He bit his lip. He said, “When I told my man here to hit the floor, I meant that he should hit the elevator button for our floor. I didn’t mean for you to hit the floor, ma’am.”

The three of them gathered up the quarters and refilled her bucket. When the elevator arrived at her floor, the woman was still unsteady on her feet, and the men insisted upon walking her to her room.

The woman closed the door. She could hear them laughing outside.

The next day, a dozen roses arrived at her door, a one-hundred-dollar bill attached to each one.