Jordan has brought it up endlessly, writers like Bob Greene and David Halberstam trumpeted the tale, and the idea that the Best Player Ever could not be included amongst the 10-best players in tiny Laney High School in Wilmington, N.C., back in 1979 tends to boggle the mind.
It should boggle the mind, because it isn't true. Not just that he wasn't amongst the 10 best, Jordan clearly was, but because MJ was never really "cut." He was sent to the JV team by a 26-year-old coach who was recently brilliantly profiled by Thomas Lake at Sports Illustrated. Coach Clifton Herring is a man who probably didn't think he'd be the subject of anything having to do with Sports Illustrated at the time, much less 30-some years later.
It is a long (for the blog generation) but worthwhile read that cuts to the ever-shrinking core of Jordan, the person whose accomplishments need no inflating, but someone who has taken self-aggrandizing to a new level in the same way that he dominated the game of basketball for two decades after that "cut."
Here's a clip:
In those days it was rare for sophomores to make varsity. Herring made one exception in 1978, one designed to remedy his team's height disadvantage. This is part of the reason Mike Jordan went home and cried in his room after reading the two lists. It wasn't just that his name was missing from the varsity roster. It was also that as he scanned the list he saw the name of another sophomore, one of his close friends, the 6'7" Leroy Smith.
Over the next three decades Jordan would become a world-class collector of emotional wounds, a champion grudge-holder, a magician at converting real and imagined insults into the rocket fuel that made him fly. If he had truly been cut that year, as he would claim again and again, he wouldn't have had such an immediate chance for revenge. But in fact his name was on the second list, the jayvee roster, with the names of many of his fellow sophomores. Jordan quickly became a jayvee superstar.
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