How to Be Like Mike (6 page)

I passed one of our former players, Ben Wallace, in the Magic locker room before a game in 1999 against Golden State. I asked him if he was ready to play.

His eyes bored through me. He was expressionless.

“I’m always ready,” he said.

When I met Clarence Weatherspoon, an NBA power forward, I asked him if he had any stories about Jordan. He didn’t. Here’s why.

“I don’t focus on anyone or anything,” he said, “except what I’m meant to be doing on the floor.”

I thought Michael might appreciate that.

May 17, 1993. Richfield, Ohio. Bulls versus Cavaliers. Almost four years earlier, in this same building, after the Cavs had taken the lead with three seconds to play, Jordan hit a game-winning shot with Craig Ehlo draped on him.

This game is tied. Eighteen seconds left. Jordan: “The fans are booing. They hate me. They’re thinking, ‘He can’t do this to us again. ’This one fan under the basket is really getting ugly, but that’s only helping me to concentrate, because, you know, God doesn’t like ugly.”

Jordan drifts across the foul lane and sinks a jump shot. The Bulls win, 103–101. Again. The Coliseum is awestruck, silenced. It is not the first time Jordan has cut through the din of an opposing audience with unwavering composure. It would not be the last.

After the Georgetown– North Carolina title game in 1982 where Michael hit the winning shot. MJ said, “I could see myself hitting the shot. I could see it on the bus, on the way to the game.”

—John Swofford
FORMER N
ORTH
C
AROLINA
ATHLETIC DIRECTOR

Jordan had no tolerance for lapses—from teammates, from coaches, from anyone. He understood the detriment, even the danger, of divided focus.

Once, during an early season blowout, veteran official Ed Rush’s mind began to flit. Jordan could sense it. During a time-out, he walked over and said, softly, “Ed, could you let us know when the game is over? Because we’re still playing.”

“MJ was focused in the warm-up lines,” said NBA player Billy Owens. “You never saw him smiling in those lines. He was all business.”

Jordan shot 84 percent from the foul line for his career. Before every one, he spun the ball in his hands. Then he dribbled until he felt comfortable, somewhere between three and five times. He spun the ball again. And he shot. “When I’m doing that,” he confessed, “I don’t see anyone.”

If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.

—Ancient Proverb

Marv Levy, longtime college and NFL coach, tells a wonderful story about focusing on the moment:“I forget where I was, maybe Cal. I was walking up the tunnel, it was a beautiful day, it’s a beautiful location, and we were playing Stanford in the Big Game. And I sort of said to myself, ‘Man, where else would you rather be than right here, right now?’ I got to the sideline before the game and I had the team around, and I could see it in their faces that they felt the same way. And I said it. And from that point I have said it before every kickoff of every game. It’s the way I feel.”

Karl Wallenda had been walking on high wires for years when he stretched a wire between a pair of buildings in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and attempted to tiptoe across. This was late in his career, and already, Wallenda had seen two relatives die when a seven-person family pyramid toppled. “All Karl thought about, for months, was not falling,” said his wife.

It is no surprise, then, that Karl Wallenda fell to his death in San Juan.

So how do we get there, to that place beyond the minutiae of daily life, beyond the noise and distractions of the workplace, beyond the weight of consequence?

The truth is, focus begins with recognition. Of where you are. Of what can be controlled. Of the moments in which we live, and the moments that we can affect. It begins with today.

That’s what author Barbara Sher meant when she wrote. “
Now
is the operative word. Everything you put in your way is just another method of putting off the hour when you could actually be doing your dream. You don’t need endless time and perfect conditions. Do it now. Do it today. Do it for twenty minutes and watch your heart start beating!”

Past Performance
Is No Guarantee of
Future Success

This is the best day in the history of the world, even though yesterday that seemed an impossibility.

—Jack Kent Cooke
sports mogul

H
e shocked us more than once. He left basketball for baseball, enduring skepticism and doubt, and he returned to basketball with a decisive two-word press release—“I’m back.” He abandoned the game once again while still near his prime, and he left the placidity of retirement for the challenge of rebuilding a downtrodden Washington Wizards franchise. If there is a thread through Jordan’s expansive career, it’s that he does what he wants, when he wants, regardless of public perception. He exists in his own moments, carrying ahead into his own select challenges, dedicated toward maximizing life in the present tense.

Phil Jackson was always preaching about being in the moment and living for the moment and enjoying each day for what it is.

—Steve Kerr
NBA
PLAYER

“Michael taught me to live in the moment. He never talked about the future. If it was the second quarter at Miami, Michael was in the second quarter. He was about right now. Next week’s game will take care of itself,” said B. J. Armstrong.

Late in the summer of 1993, Jordan’s father, James, pulled his car into a rest stop near Lumberton, North Carolina, to take a respite from the road. Two young men came upon him, murdered him and stole his car.

It had already been a pensive time for Michael Jordan. Earlier that year, he’d won his third consecutive NBA title, and he’d begun to realize nearly all of his goals in basketball. He’d always been driven by challenges, by the insinuation that he couldn’t accomplish something. At first, the media had written that an individual scoring champion couldn’t win a team championship. So he won three. Then he wanted to be better than Julius Erving, better than David Thompson, better than Walter Davis, better than Elgin Baylor. He had done it.

But now, no one would deny him anything.

At his father’s funeral, Jordan spoke for twenty minutes about relishing the positive aspects of his father’s life and avoiding the circumstances that surrounded his death. “We all walked away looking for the positive in this tragedy,” said Jordan’s friend, Fred Whitfield. “My respect for Michael went way up.”

Meanwhile, Jordan took measure of the positives in his own life. The game had become less uplifting, less rewarding. The daily routine had become a chore, and the hubbub surrounding him—in his dealings with the media, in his spectacular array of endorsement contracts—began to wear on him. James Jordan’s death only accentuated these points.

“When I did lose the appetite to prove myself again and again,” Michael said, “I started tricking myself. I had to create situations to stay on top.”

Jordan needed something else. A newsituation. He’d hinted before at delving into baseball, his boyhood dream, the sport his father had once believed was his son’s best. That summer, he told his personal trainer to begin preparing him for a baseball career.

Life is always walking up to us and saying, “Come on in; the living’s fine.” And what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

—Russell Baker
AUTHOR

Baseball, it would seem, was a failure. Jordan never progressed past the Double-A level with the Chicago White Sox. He struggled to hit professional pitching. He barely managed to keep his average above the . 200 level in 1994. This was an athlete we were not accustomed to seeing fail, and being at the peak of his fame, in the wake of winning three NBA championships, it only meant the risk he took was that much bigger.

“There was something quite admirable about what he set out to do, a player at the top of his game, a uniquely proud man—arguably the best ever—walking away from one sport and willing to begin at the lower rungs of another very demanding sport, willing to endure the possibility of failure,” wrote David Halberstam in his biography of Jordan,
Playing for Keeps.

BAG IT, MICHAEL,
Sports Illustrated
declared on its cover as Jordan was in the midst of his struggles in baseball. But what
SI
missed, and what all those who peered at Jordan with a jaundiced eye missed, is that even in failure—even when the experiment came to an end and Jordan returned to basketball—he’d succeeded. He’d worked as hard as he could: arriving early for batting practice and staying late. He’d enjoy each moment, his interaction with the young players, the freshness of it, the shifting focus of a career that had otherwise grown stagnant.

“The key is being mentally strong to deal with disappointments, day in and day out, and still having the energy to come back the next day and try to start fresh,” Jordan said of his baseball career. “It’s very easy to carry things over from game to game, but if you do, it’s just going to last a little bit longer.”

Winston Churchill believed the key to success was going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. And this is the first step toward accentuating our present existence, toward making the most of today. It’s why the windshield of your car is ten times the size of the rearview mirror. That’s what Ralph Waldo Emerson meant when he wrote, “Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year. Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can; tomorrow is a new day.”

There is a line on every mutual fund prospectus that reads:
“Past performance is no guarantee of future success.”
It is the story of so many lives, that people either wallow in recent failures or exult in past triumphs so readily that they begin to cloud their present with visions of the past. And they become complacent. They lose sight of the fact that yesterday already happened.

This doesn’t mean we should disconnect ourselves entirely from our past. It should be used to help us shape the present that we want. That is, as long as we don’t mire ourselves in it.

And so once we’ve come to terms with our past, there is only a future to confront. It lurks angrily before us, with no promise except uncertainty. It’s what Jordan faced in turning to baseball, in risking his reputation, his name, on a romantic risk. He could have hedged. He could have let it go, dismissed it as fantasy, as a pipe dream. But what he had to face couldn’t compare to what he might gain. So he dove in.

History informs us of past mistakes, from which we can learn without repeating them. It also inspires us and gives us confidence and hope bred of victories already won.

—William Hastie
POLITICIAN AND JUDGE

This is the only way to live, really. Otherwise we make promises to ourselves that we have no real intent of keeping. We become buried in regret, in lost dreams, in the consequence of our actions instead of the joy of them.

“Tomorrow, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Jordan said. “I think about today. People don’t believe I don’t know what’s going to happen next week, next month or next year, but I truly live in the moment. I have created the opportunity to have a choice. That is how I’m going to live.”

There is no medicine like hope. No incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something better tomorrow.

—Orison Swett Marsden
AUTHOR

Of course, it helps to chart our wishes, and make allowances for them so as to always be maximizing our present, guaranteeing our future. It’s why some Japanese companies have one-hundred-year plans, and why Walt Disney had what he called a fifty-year master plan.

“Life can be understood by looking backward,” said philosopher SØren Kierkegaard, “but it must be lived forward.”

Perhaps this may bewhy sinceWest Point was founded in 1802, only one class has been a staple of the curriculum— map reading. Knowing how to get from here to there is the most important part of any enterprise.

And this is why our goals carry such weight.

If Only I Had
Done This When I
Was Young . . .

Show me a person without goals and I'll show you someone who’s dead.

—George Allen
former NFL coach

S
usie Maroney had tried it once and failed. She was twenty-two the first time, in June 1996. She’d swam 107 miles in 38½ hours, starting in Cuba, heading across the Straits of Florida toward Key West, banging repeatedly into a cage she’d been swimming inside for protection from sharks. Finally, with her body ravaged by seasickness and dehydration, she collapsed twelve miles from shore.

It was not close enough for Maroney. There was no satisfaction. There was only the thought of bridging those twelve miles, of the goal, of becoming the first woman to swim the Straits of Florida.