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

their hearts and minds were strong enough to share the floor with him. The more
he accumulated, the more he tested. He established a record for being quite harsh
in this testing. James Worthy, his friend and teammate from North Carolina,
described him as a bully.
Jordan would admit as much. “I can be hard,” he acknowledged in 1998.
Mostly he tested himself.
It seemed that he discovered the secret quite early in his competitive life: the
more pressure he heaped on himself, the greater his ability to rise to the
occasion.
It all added up to immense complexity.
Tex Winter, the Chicago Bulls’ longtime assistant coach who worked with
Jordan longer than any other coach, said that in six decades of basketball he’d
never encountered a more complicated figure. “Personality-wise, he’s a study.
He really is,” Winter said of Jordan as their run together was nearing its end. “I
guess I don’t have the intelligence to grasp a lot of things that make Michael
tick, that make him what he is. I think I analyze him pretty good, but he is a
mystery man in an awful lot of ways, and I think he always will be, maybe even
to himself.”
That realization was hammered home for many fans in 2009 by Jordan’s
jarring acceptance speech during his Basketball Hall of Fame induction when he
offered a harsh assessment of so many major figures in his career, including
UNC coach Dean Smith. Former colleagues, media commentators, fans—all
expressed surprise and dismay in the wake of Jordan’s induction. He was not
what they had assumed he was in those early years when his image seemed so
perfect.
They thought they knew him. They did not.