4 Chapter Four: September 11, 2009—Springfield, Massachusetts: James Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony
When Michael Jordan stepped onto the stage to give his induction speech at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, it was hard to see him as anything other than godlike. Even when tears of joy streamed down his face, which became the infamous Crying Jordan meme and took over every corner of the internet because Michael Jordan has a way of taking over everything, it was impossible to see him as mortal. It’s always been hard to see him as mortal. For almost his entire career, since the very first moment he stepped on an NBA basketball court, he’s been praised as the greatest human being to ever do this one thing. His Hall of Fame induction was the culmination of the career of the most globally iconic man of a generation. A quarter century after his first NBA game, there he stood atop this shrine to basketball, the world revolving around him once again, showered with glory in a room filled with the rest of the greatest individuals to ever play this game, but none who played it as great as he did.
Seated along the aisle in the third row of this crowd was another former basketball player named Leroy Smith. Smith is not a basketball immortal. He played at the college level for the University of Charlotte and played professionally in England, Germany, and Japan, but never in the NBA. It didn’t matter on that night. He still got a better seat at the ceremony than Charles Barkley and many of the game’s living legends due to one special achievement he held over all of them, including and especially Jordan’s induction classmates John Stockton and Jerry Sloan.
“And then there’s Leroy Smith,” Jordan said as he moved through his long list of people to thank for his greatness. “Now you guys think that’s a myth. Leroy Smith was a guy, when I got cut he made the varsity team. He’s here tonight. He’s still the same 6’7” guy, he’s not any bigger, his game is probably about the same. But he started the whole process for me. Because when he made the team and I didn’t, I wanted to prove, not just to Leroy Smith, not just to myself, but to the coach who actually picked Leroy over me, I wanted to make sure you understood you made a mistake, dude.”
The camera panned to Smith sitting behind Jordan’s family engaged with the room’s collective laughter. Dressed in a slick dark suit, he cracked a smile and shook his head casually as if being teased by a god were a daily occurrence. He looked every part the good sport. Smith found his calling after basketball in the TV business, becoming the VP of sales and marketing for NBC Universal and was named one of the Most Influential Minorities in Cable by Cablefax in 2006. He even looked like he was in better shape than Jordan at the Hall of Fame.
Along with Smith’s smiles and laughs, you could see a measure of relief cross his face. Relief that now, finally, Michael Jordan had nothing left to achieve and there was no longer any reason for the world to talk about the random guy who once made a high school basketball team over the greatest basketball player who ever lived.
Leroy Smith did make the basketball team at Laney High School in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1978 and Michael Jordan did not. This is what Jordan wants you to know, and it is fairly accurate. There are a couple key omissions from it representing the full truth, but Jordan has always understood how to not allow the truth to get in the way of a good story. Here’s a more accurate version:
Leroy Smith made the varsity basketball team at Laney High School in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1978, and Michael Jordan made the junior varsity basketball team at Laney High School in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1978. The head coach at Laney High, a man named Clifton “Pop” Herring, who is another constant omission in Jordan’s version of events, held one spot for sophomores on his varsity roster. Varsity was a level for the upperclassmen in North Carolina in the late 70s. Today, the best freshmen in the country play on stacked squads on the AAU circuit and upload their mixtapes of highlights to YouTube pages with view counts in the millions. It was a different time. “Back when freshmen played on freshmen teams,” Jim Valvano said in his iconic speech at the 1993 ESPYs.
We already know Jordan grew four-and-a-half inches between his sophomore and junior years in high school, which means he could have been no taller than 6’2” at the time of the 1978 tryouts. Smith had already bloomed to his 6’7” peak. Is it really hard to see Herring’s reasoning here? The tie went to the tall kid. Smith got the sophomore spot on varsity. Jordan landed on the JV team with all the playing time in the world to allow his game to blossom.
No matter how deep you dig on Basketball-Reference, essentially the official encyclopedia of basketball in this country, you’re not going to find too many players with their JV game log listed, but you can find Jordan’s pretty easily. There are 19 JV games listed for the 78-79 season on Jordan’s player page, and his stats are provided for 13 of them. He averaged 22.0 points per game in the contests we have data for, with a high of 45 points scored in an early-season road win against East Carteret.
Jordan’s first recorded in-game dunk took place during a JV game he played as a sophomore in high school.
This is not to say that the greatest of all time not getting the nod for the lone sophomore spot on the varsity team isn’t a notable tale worthy of hearing. It is. Considering the hyper competitiveness and determination Jordan is well known for, there’s no doubt his junior varsity detour crushed him and motivated him to prove he belonged on varsity the next season, the season after that, and all the seasons to come on his way to becoming the most globally iconic athlete of a generation. He not only “came back a better ball player,” as Coach says in Michael Jordan’s Playground, he came back as a completely different ball player. A ball player who was taller, bigger, faster, stronger, older, and fresh off a year of developing and feeling himself by dominating his JV competition. Imagine if he had really gotten cut outright. Imagine if he hadn’t been allowed to play basketball at all that season like what we see happen to Walt. Imagine it, because that’s the version of the story we’ve been imagining in the basketball community for the last 40+ years.
This story is never directed at kids who get sent from the varsity side of the gym to JV and need just a little bit of development to reach their natural potential like Jordan in his sophomore year. It’s aimed at the kids who don’t hear their names called or find their names on a sheet of paper posted in a locker room. It’s aimed at kids like Walt, who just had to watch their peers revel in the joy of their own hoop dreams coming true before enduring a long dark winter of going home or to the playground by themselves after school while their best friends go to practice. A shitty and humbling experience that we can only pretend the greatest of all time actually had to go through.
At no point in Michael Jordan’s Playground does Jordan reveal to Walt he actually got to spend his sophomore season on the Laney High JV team. Apart from briefly saying “you guys think that’s a myth,” he doesn’t clarify much on the ‘78-’79 season in his Hall of Fame induction speech either, and he never even mentions “Pop” Herring by name. It’s hard to look at this as an oversight in Walt’s case considering the artfully crafted montage by Snyder showcasing Walt shooting around by himself as the seasons change and declaring that “I like to play alone anyways! I don’t need to be part of the team!”
Both Walt as a fictional character, and Smith as a former teammate, are too important to the genre and storytelling of Michael Jordan Fantasy. Jordan intentionally keeps Smith at arm’s length in his Hall of Fame speech even though he’s in the building. Michael Jordan’s Playground intentionally doesn’t expand to a large enough world to allow Walt to become anything beyond a flat character. Any additional context to the roles in which they’ve played would compromise the way we’ve come to view MJ through the movies and through his career. The greatest player of all time playing on a JV team is difficult to wrap your head around, but the truth is fairly unremarkable to the fable. Jordan has never been just a great ballplayer, he is also one of our all-time greatest storytellers, and whether he’s working with Zack Snyder or embodying the words of one Mark Twain, there’s one rule Jordan always abides by, though you might not find it in the rules the 1980s Pistons wrote under his name.
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
