That Story About Jordan Being Cut in H.S.? Yeah, It’s Not Really True

Michael Jordan, the pro, has enough mythology to write books on top of books. But when the complete Jordan story is told, it often begins with some version of this: Michael Jordan was cut from the Laney High School team. From there, greatness was born. Jordan Brand even created an ad campaign that finds its roots from this story -- a story that is being loudly debunked and refuted as fiction as Jordan gets ready to enter the Hall of Fame.↵↵The Thursday Charlotte Observer has a package on Jordan, including one story which focuses on the legend of Jordan’s high school cut. The problem is that it just didn’t go down like that:↵

↵↵⇥“Back then, (most) 10th-graders played JV; that’s just the way it was. Nobody ever ‘cut’ Michael Jordan,” [Ruby] Sutton, who still teaches physical education, said this month, shaking her head as she retold the story for at least the 100th time. ↵⇥↵⇥“Him not making the varsity that year was not his motivator – he was motivated well before that. He just always wanted to be the best.”↵⇥

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↵⇥↵⇥“Leroy (Smith) was not a better basketball player than Mike, he just had size,” Lynch said. “We didn’t have a lot of tall kids, and Leroy was 6-6, 6-7 … and (head coach) Pop Herring thought we had plenty of guards but needed size. ↵⇥

↵⇥↵⇥“The Hollywood version is that Mike got cut, came back the next year, and was great. That’s not true. He played on the JV team, was our best JV player, and played on the varsity his final two years and scored more than 1,400 points (including a triple-double average his senior season: 29.2 points, 11.6 rebounds and 10.1 assists). It was never a situation where Mike was ever a bad player.”↵⇥

↵↵↵OK, so we’ll obviously all agree that it’s interesting to hear that none of this really happened the way it’s been told for decades now, but what about the real victims in this story? I am talking about, of course, people who run summer basketball camps. Do they adopt some sort of new motivational speech for the pudgy kid who forked over his $200 now that this one isn’t true? Perhaps this becomes the summer basketball camp version of Santa Claus. Until a certain age, it’s OK to let a kid think that they can fly like Michael, because even the G.O.A.T. wasn’t that way until he was older. ↵

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