Michael Jordan to son: Don’t be like Mike
NBA legend advises son, an Illinois walk-on, to blaze his own trail
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Michael Jordan’s son takes to the court Nov. 9: Matt Lauer talks to the basketball star about being a dad, gambling and how Jeff beat him in a game. Today show photo |
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His last name is Jordan and his father’s first name is Michael, which means that when Jeff Jordan takes the court as a freshman with the University of Illinois basketball team, all eyes will be on him. But no matter what the expectations of the fans and media are, Michael Jordan doesn’t want his eldest child to be like Mike. Being like Jeff is all he asks.
“I want him to be his own person, you know?” Jordan, 44, said as he sat next to his son in a rare interview with TODAY co-host Matt Lauer. “I want him to enjoy his life, whatever he chooses to be that, you know? If you play basketball, you're a doctor, you're a lawyer, whatever, I'm gonna support you with the love and every effort, every inch of my body.”
The wide-ranging interview, recorded earlier in Illinois, covered everything from what the former NBA star told his children about his gambling to his divorce from their mother, Juanita, to the time Jeff Jordan beat his dad in a game of one-on-one hoops.
A guard, Jeff Jordan has his father’s lean build, but at 6-foot-1, he’s five inches shorter. Unlike his father, who was heavily recruited by colleges out of high school, Jeff Jordan enrolled at Illinois without the benefit of an athletic scholarship. He admits to being more shy than his dad and his younger brother, Marcus, a high-school junior, but, he said, he has the same drive to excel.
“He wants to be a basketball player, but he wants to do it on his own terms, which is all cool for me,” the six-time NBA champion said. “The thing that we have tried to tell Jeff is that you set your own expectations. By no means in this world can you ever live up to someone else's expectations of who you are.”
He said he includes himself in that and told how he let his sons discover basketball on their own and never forced them to play the game. Only when they came to him asking for advice did he get involved with them.
Growing up in the spotlight
Jeff Jordan didn’t really understand what expectations others had until he got to high school. He attended Loyola Academy, a private school near the family’s Highland Park, Ill., home, where no one made a big deal about who his father, who played most of his career and won his titles with the Chicago Bulls, was.
“I didn't realize who I was until probably second grade, third grade,” he told Lauer. “Kids never really brought it up that much. I graduated from eighth grade in a class of, like, 30. The community wasn't really that big on popular culture. So growing up there, it wasn't too bad.”
When he began to fully realize the enormity of being the son of the greatest basketball player who ever lived was when he started playing the game in high school and ended up on the front page of the sports section for playing as a freshman on the sophomore team.
“I think that was the first time I was really shocked by who I was and how big it was,” he said. “That was definitely the time where it really hit me all at once.”
“He wanted to go kind of underneath the radar, which is very tough,” Michael Jordan added. “But he wants to be his own person, which I admire.”
Learning from his father’s mistakes
In addition to being considered the best basketball player ever, Michael Jordan was also probably the most universally admired and respected. His were the feet that propelled the big-money business of signature shoe endorsements, and his face in an ad could sell anything. He’s been retired as a player for four years, but he still earns more than $30 million in endorsement revenues.
The only time anything resembling scandal touched his career was over the issue of his appetite for high-stakes gambling. While facing the Knicks in the playoffs in 1993, the New York tabloids learned that he had gone down to Atlantic City to play the tables the night before a game and trumpeted the news to the world. Later, a gambler wrote a book saying that he’d won more than a million dollars from Jordan playing golf. In a “60 Minutes” interview with Ed Bradley, Jordan admitted that he had sometimes been reckless with his gambling, but said he had never put his family or his livelihood at risk.
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