How to Be Like Mike by Pat Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

things that you have control over, because you have control over them.”
    One of the measures of Jordan’s impact is that everyone who met him seems to carry away a story. For Mary Lou Retton, the Olympic gymnast, it came when she asked about the death of his father, about how he dealt with the pain and the loss.
    Jordan shrugged. Said he did the best he could with it. Tried to take something positive away. “I had him for thirty-one years,” he said. “Some people don’t even have a father for two or three.”
    There was nothing he could do. He couldn’t bring his father back. He couldn’t prevent the crime, couldn’t lash out anymore at the men who’d committed the crime. It was characteristic of Jordan’s acceptance of the random order of events, and his recognition of that which he couldn’t alter.
    Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself, in your secret reveries, that you were born to control affairs.
    —Andrew Carnegie
INDUSTRIALIST
    Of course, the common reaction to unalterable courses of events—to delays, to market fluctuations, to trends, to the action of our competitors—is panic or rage or despair. We overreact, unspooling our emotions, unraveling our concentration. We lose our train of thought. We lose sight of our direction.
    “My grandparents always used to say, ‘Think before you act, and be in control at all times, ’” Jordan said. “I always remembered that. You forget about the outcome. You know you are doing the right things, so you relax and perform. After that, you can’t control anything anyway. It’s out of your hands, so don’t worry about it.”
    All it can do is shatter your focus. All it can do is cloud your dreams.

M y advice to kids is to let them just enjoy the game. Develop a love for the game.
    —Michael Jordan
    T he feeling first overcame him in the backyard, on the court his father built in Wilmington, North Carolina, in the midst T of brutal one-on-one games against his older brother, Larry. It was there that Michael Jordan fell in love with basketball. He delighted in his improvement, in his first victories against a sibling who once had overpowered him. He spent hours on that court, until he was good enough to make his high school team, until he blossomed into a star.
    Those early glimpses of his potential were a revelation for Jordan. “He knew that he was going to get better,” says Buzz Peterson, who roomed with Jordan at a high school basketball camp and later played with him at North Carolina. “For the first time he had a sense of what the future might bring for him—and he was in love with it.”
    Jordan kept those diligent habits as his notoriety grew, as the temptations to succumb to distraction swelled around him. Every practice was a source of enthusiasm; games were punctuated by a grin, by a helpless shrug of the shoulders as another three-point shot faded into the net. Didn’t matter if it was a tepid evening in January against the Clippers or the heightened tension of a finals game against Utah, Jordan was there every night, pushing, prodding, elevating the moment. He was a relentless talker, always dancing along the edges of cockiness, yet able to sharpen that edge by backing up his attitude.
    A reporter once asked Luc Longley, Jordan’s teammate in Chicago, what it was that amplified Jordan’s game, what made him such a rarity. Longley was a rangy center for the Bulls, an Australian of moderate talent who was often the victim of Jordan’s consistent urgings. And to the reporter, Longley replied, in his rich Australian accent, “Michael Jordan is always up.”
    When I was in college at Xavier, I saw an MJ quote in Jet magazine: “I play for the love of the game, not for the love of money.” I went and got a tattoo on my chest because of that. It says, “For the Love.”
    —Michael Hawkins
NBA PLAYER
    For eighty years, a cellist named Pablo Casals began every morning with the same exacting routine. He’d walk to his piano, play