Michael Jordan_ The Life ( PDFDrive.com )_compressed (1)_compressed

Chapter 1
HOLLY SHELTER
THE “GOD OF BASKETBALL,” as he would be called by fans worldwide, was born
with a bloody nose, in Brooklyn of all places, on the kind of chill February
Sunday in 1963 that sent steam rising from the sidewalk sewer grates outside the
ten-story Cumberland Hospital. Basketball guru Howard Garfinkel would later
enjoy pointing out that the hospital also served as the birthplace for brothers
Albert and Bernard King, making it something of a fabled location in a city that
treasures its sports figures.
Despite the aura of this Brooklyn beginning, it was elsewhere and much
earlier that the full force of Jordan’s extraordinary life gained its first traction,
just before the turn of the twentieth century, with the birth of his greatgrandfather
down on North Carolina’s Coastal Plain.
In those days, death seemed to be everywhere. It had a nose to it that crept
upstream each morning and curdled with the brackish air. The gulls screamed
like banshees in those little shantytowns, where nobody dared take simple
survival for granted. That’s really where the story of Michael Jordan’s life
begins, in a shotgun shack on the banks of a blackwater river that winds among
the pine forests and swamps, where the moonshine drips oh so quietly and the
mystery hangs like clumps of gray moss sagging from the trees.
The year was 1891, just twenty-six summers removed from the great violence
and confusion of the American Civil War. The place was a little riverside hamlet
called Holly Shelter, in Pender County, about thirty miles northwest of
Wilmington, forty miles if you rafted down the winding Northeast Cape Fear
River as Jordan’s ancestors often did. The place supposedly earned its name
after Revolutionary War soldiers took refuge under the holly trees there on cold
winter nights. The savannah is bordered by swamplands that during slavery’s
days also provided shelter of another sort, for runaways. One of the region’s vast
plantations was supposedly owned by a white preacher from Georgia named
Jordan. With emancipation, many freed slaves gravitated to Holly Shelter. “They