How to Be Like Mike (5 page)

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade; in short, in all management of human affairs.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

O
n the morning of Game Five of the 1997 NBA Finals against Utah, during what would be his next-to-last flourish in pro O basketball, Michael Jordan was swathed in blankets in a Salt Lake City hotel room, curled into a fetal position, his body limp and wracked with illness. He had a hundred-degree fever. Headaches and nausea had kept him awake all night. He was being pumped with intravenous fluids to replenish his strength.

Word circulated that Jordan was profoundly ill. In the locker room, his teammates surveyed his unusually ashen skin, and television cameras captured Jordan’s laconic attempts to practice before the game began.

The Jazz pulled out to an early lead. And yet it was Jordan who kept his team in the game, scoring twenty-one points in the first half, playing nearly the entire second half even as his body began to wither and his energy faded. He hit a three-pointer to give the Bulls the lead, and they won, 90–88. He’d scored fifteen points in the fourth quarter. He’d done it even though he could barely stand. He’d blustered through the malaise, through the breakdown of his body, and he’d maintained his focus on the series, on the game, on his team.

There are a multitude of aspects to the persona that is Michael Jordan: his intelligence, his competitiveness, his perseverance, his leadership. Combined, they are the reason for Jordan’s six NBA titles, for his ascendance into the spectrum of the world’s most transcendent figures.

But this day in Salt Lake City, Jordan was stripped to his essence. This was Jordan with a singularity of purpose, a focus, that could not be blurred.

The following March, as our team, the Orlando Magic, was arriving for a game in New York, I took a seat on the team bus next to B. J. Armstrong, a veteran guard who played with Jordan in Chicago during their championship run in the early 1990s. It was late, nearly two in the morning, and I had the outline for this book stuffed in my Franklin Planner, which, if you know me, you understand is where I keep everything that is dear to me, except perhaps my children (but only because they couldn’t fit). At the time, this book had ten chapters, because motivational speakers like to think in the realm of hard-and-fast numbers.

Think about MJ’s focus. He’d have two or three defenders on him at all times. Think how it must feel to compete against two or three guys every night. He’d face that battle every game.

—Nate McMillan
HEAD COACH, SEATTLE SONICS

So I extracted the outline and handed it to B. J. and asked him if he would look it over. He said he would. He took a few minutes as the bus rumbled toward our hotel on 54th Street.

To focus on what's around you diminishes your ability to focus on what’s before you.

—Andy Stanley
PASTOR AND AUTHOR

Finally, he handed it back to me.

“Looks good,” he said. “Looks like you’ve captured it all.”

There was a pause.

“Except you’ve missed the most important thing.”

I nearly choked. “What?” I said. “Tell me, B. J.”

“The thing that makes Michael who he is,” he said, “is his focus. His ability to concentrate absolutely. To set everything else aside other than what needs to be done right now.”

I took the outline into my hotel room and revised and reshuffled for another hour. Which is why you’re reading this chapter before the others. Because B. J. Armstrong was right.

It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.

—Winston Churchill

“The thing I’ve noticed about Michael Jordan,” says Tom Smithburg, the Bulls’ former publicist, “is that he’s just completely focused. It’s like he’s decided to turn on that switch that brings down the curtain and shuts everything out but basketball.”

“There was a reason MJ was so focused. He had a routine and nothing could break it. He was never late. He was always extra early. He put his socks on the same way every time, then put on his shorts perfectly. Everything had to be just so,” said John Salley, former NBA player.

Smithburg speaks of an invisible “tunnel,” of Jordan’s ability to walk glassy-eyed through that tunnel from the first day of the season until the last game of the play-offs. He kicked over a garbage can during half-time of a play-off game against Orlando, and it was as if he didn’t even realize he’d done it. He’s confessed that the games he played were the most serene part of his existence, that he could hear nothing in the tunnel, that he could think prolifically in the midst of that noise.

And it’s not that the tunnel affects his demeanor among the public. He’s still personable and engaging. There’s just an everlasting sense that the tunnel exists.

“Even when he’s smiling and talking to his teammates, or walking through a crowd,” Smithburg said, “you know he’s in the tunnel, looking toward the end.”

“Some athletes have a competitive drive that interferes with their focus,” said football coach Bill Walsh. “Very, very few have the complete inventory of qualities: the truly gifted athlete with the truly innate sense of focus. Michael had it—in spades.”

The team ophthalmologist for the Bulls and White Sox, David Orth, had a test he used to measure reaction time. A player would peer through a screen into a dark area and Orth would flash sets of numbers on a tic-tac-toe board. They’d appear in increments, from a half-second to one hundredth of a second. The players called out the numbers as they were flashed.

Jordan called out more numbers than anyone.

“What that showed,” Orth said, “was spectacular vision. But it was more than that; it showed a tremendous physical ability to concentrate.”

I coached in the 1988 All-Star game in Chicago. MJ won the slam-dunk contest on that Saturday, but was sick with a bad sore throat. Most guys wouldn’t have played in the game on Sunday. MJ went for forty-two against Magic Johnson and theWest team.

—Brendan Suhr
FORMER NBA ASSISTANT COACH

Success in anything is about focus and concentration. When I coached, I’d say to the players, “Yes, I know you played hard, but that’s not good enough. You’ve got to stay focused on the task at hand the entire game.”

—Rick Barry
FORMER NBA STAR

And so Hank Aaron would pull his cap low over his eyes and peer out at troublesome pitchers through a vent in his hat. Broadcaster Ken Venturi insists that you could tell Jack Nicklaus his house was burning down while he stood on the first tee, and he’d shrug and tell you, “I’ll take care of it when I get in.” Cal Ripken won’t read on game days so as not to deplete his daily allocation of focus. Ben Hogan once sank a putt while a train whistle exploded in the distance, and when someone asked him about it, he asked, “What whistle?”

And Michael Jordan became accustomed to the attention in the same ways. He merely factored it in. When team photographer Bill Smith needed to take pictures, Jordan allowed him ten; he’d count them all, and in each he’d give Smith the perfect shot—smiling broadly, eyes wide open and alive. When so many of his games were being broadcast by NBC, Jordan built the pregame interview with the network into his schedule. One day, when NBC decided not to interview him for variety’s sake, he approached broadcaster Marv Albert during warm-ups.

“Why didn’t we do the interview today?” Jordan said. “You broke up my schedule.”

Jordan also knew how to escape the attention. He knew how to hide. He would hole himself up in trainers’rooms and locker rooms before big games, shielding himself from the glare of the moment until it was time to play. Once, before a play-off game, referee Wally Rooney walked into the officials’ locker room and found Jordan sitting there. When Rooney asked him what he was doing there, Jordan said, “I had to get away.”

In 1998, author Mark Vancil followed Jordan for an entire season while working on a book project. Vancil probed Jordan as thoroughly as he could about the way he handled himself in the midst of those last-second shots. “Don’t you feel fear?” Vancil asked. “Don’t you have negative thoughts?”

To which Jordan replied, “Why would I think about missing a shot I haven’t taken yet?”

“Michael had the ability to execute in the moment,” Vancil said. “He didn’t allow time to wash over itself. He moved through life in step with time, and that was what made him special, more than any physical gift he had. His focus was otherworldly.”

There was a certain amount of fear I took into the games. Not physical fear, but the fear of being humiliated.

—John Hannah
FORMER NFL STAR

“The main business,” said author Thomas Carlyle, “is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to see what lies clearly at hand.”

Losing ourselves in the moment. This is focus. My son Stephen once kicked a game-winning goal for his soccer team, and as his teammates mobbed him, he looked confused, even a little stunned. Later, in the car, he admitted that he thought his team trailed 1–0, and that his goal had tied the game. “Talk about a lack of focus,” he muttered, without realizing that what he’d done was what few of us have the ability to do, to bury the circumstances, the outside influences, to hone our perspective to a narrow path. Stephen learned a life lesson that day: Everyone pays—either attention or dearly.

“In all the years I coached against MJ, I tried to figure out how we could get to him. I never could find a way. You couldn’t get to his mind, his body or his spirit. You just couldn’t go at him in any way. He totally perplexed me. He was unattackable. He’d just break guys. I had a deep-seated respect for him,” said Pat Riley, head coach of the Miami Heat.

First game of the 1997 NBA Finals at Utah. The Delta Center is tricked up like Barnum and Bailey’s Circus: light shows, fireworks, motorcycles, pulsating music, clouds of smoke billowing. The Bulls’ players stand in their pregame line, covering their ears, fighting to block out the noise and the colors and the kaleidoscope of distractions. And Utah general manager Scott Layden looked over and saw Jordan, his back to the court, his head bowed, lost in meditation.

“It was chilling,” Layden said, “watching him get zoned in like that.”

It is the thrust behind the Zen principles that Jordan’s coach, Phil Jackson, attempts to impart upon his players. But really, this was not Jackson’s influence.

“What did you learn from Phil?”Vancil once asked Jordan.

“I learned that all the Zen stuff Phil had been teaching me,” Jordan said, “I’d been doing all my life anyway.”

“I never looked at the consequences of missing a big shot,” Jordan said. “Why? Because when you think about the consequences, you always think of a negative result. If I’m going to jump into a pool of water, even though I can’t swim, I’m thinking about being able to swim enough to survive. I’m not jumping in thinking to myself, ‘I think I can swim, but maybe I’ll drown.” ’

“Focus enabled Michael to step up to another level every day,” said NBA coach Lenny Wilkens. “The great ones have this quality. Bird had it. Magic had it. But not at Michael’s level.”

I have some idea of how exceptional focus in sports can be. Before I discovered my future was in the front office, I played baseball. In all my career, I think I experienced that heightened awareness three times. It was as if the ball appeared to be moving in slow motion, as if I could pick up the path of a curve ball as it left the pitcher’s hand, as if I could see the stitches twirl.

I remember the time Michael was taping a Chevrolet commercial. The crew was preparing for a long session, a lot of takes. Michael did the whole shoot in one take.

—Chet Coppock
BROADCASTER

Once it happened to me as a senior in high school, in back-to-back games. On a Friday afternoon, I got three hits, two of them home runs. In the next game, the opposing coach (who happened to be my uncle) walked me four times. Once it happened for a whole week in college, at Wake Forest, during a Florida trip my junior year. And once it happened in pro ball, in Miami, when I had four hits in a game at Tampa. I never felt it again in my career. Which explains, once more, why I’ve spent my career in the front office.

Michael’s ability to nail a commercial spot on the first take was absolutely legendary.

—Jeff Price
NBA EXECUTIVE

I once asked Philadelphia Phillies’ scout Art Parrack, what allowed certain talented players to rise above the others. “Their focus,” Parrack said. “Their ability to concentrate on every pitch, every game, every year.”

You hear the great athletes speak of it in reverent tones: as if their game is linked to a remote control, slowed down in the midst of chaos, an almost heavenly vision of self-actualization. Bill Russell would talk about this phenomenon in almost spiritual terms.

I have picked up this awful habit late in life of running marathons, a task that requires not only a large amount of self-hatred, but heavy doses of concentration to push through the times when the body begins to break into pieces. In 1998 I was running the Boston Marathon with my wife. We passed the seventeen-mile mark with our feet leaden and our heads dizzy. We passed a woman who held up a sign that shouted in capital letters: FOCUS!

If there is any one secret of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.

—Peter F. Drucker
AUTHOR

We both lifted our heads and plunged onward. We both finished as the words of Alexander Graham Bell became clear to me: “Concentrate all your thoughts on the task at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.”

“One night I went into the Bulls’ locker room in Denver to talk with MJ. There were about ten writers around him. He said, ‘I’ve got to watch this video. ’ For the next ten or fifteen minutes, he sat and focused on the Nuggets’ last game. We waited. Then he turned to us and focused on our questions,” said sportswriter Clay Latimer.