Getty NBA legends Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. VINCENT LAFORET/AFP via Getty Images)
Kobe Bryant may be the closest to Michael Jordan and apparently, Adidas wanted to replicate that MJ feel.
In a recent conversation on the Scoop B Radio Podcast with writer and hoops historian, Roland Lazenby who has written more than five dozen nonfiction books, mainly about basketball and American football.
Check out our Q&A discussion about the late Lakers icon and his Chicago Bulls hero.
Brandon ‘Scoop B’ Robinson: Was that the case when you wrote the book about Michael Jordan?
Roland Lazenby: Well Michael helped me out when I had done a bunch of books on the Bulls, I had done their Championship books – you know, the most amazing thing I saw was covering a game in Charlottesville [Virginia] when UVA was playing Carolina in ’83. Jordan made the MOST amazing play. And so I’ve seen Michael a lot and I learned how to talk to him. You know, how to get access to talk to him. And that in itself is a major thing. Everybody who covers an NBA team, and you know – that’s the one thing I wanted to do: cover things at the highest level. But whenever you are covering something at the top level, that’s a strong environment and you have to learn to be strong willed yourself a little bit in that environment. You gotta really be on your game. And so it was great fun, so the greatest shot I seen that Jordan make was Ralph Sampson the 7’4” player for UVA, he and Jordan were considered the best players in the country, and UVA hadn’t lost at home in like, forever and Carolina had this great big lead on them and at the end of the game UVA came storming back, they got within a few buckets and Ralph [Sampson] came storming down to take an elbow jumper from the left elbow and Jordan was all the way down on the right block, he had really gotten back because he always could defend, and Sampson went up to take the shot and Jordan soared diagonally across the lane and blocked that ball so hard – a jump shot from a 7’4” guy, he blocked that ball so hard it went along press row and scared EVERYBODY!! [laughs]…People jumped! It was amazing! About fifteen years later it was before a game late in Jordan’s career in Charlotte, and he was sitting there sipping coffee out of a Styrofoam cup and I asked him about that and said, “You remember that?” he said, “Remember?!? How could I forget it?”… he said, “Man! I surprised myself that day!”… and Terry Holland who was coaching UVA was cheering! [laughs]…”it was such an amazing play that I had caught myself and realized that I was clapping against my own team!”. So Jordan has always done extraordinary things. If you learn to converse with him, and this is a terribly long answer to your question, if you are lucky enough to get the opportunity to converse with him, and I probably worked around the Bulls for a year before I really got to where – and it required a whole strategy, but once that happened then Michael would you know – he enjoys talking basketball, he’s a bright guy, he finds his own life to be as a big of mystery as everybody else does. He’s amazed. He was just a kid out of Carolina and he thought he was going to go in the Air Force or something, he didn’t think he could start – he wanted to go to Virginia, he didn’t think he could get on the court at Carolina and he was just such an unknown and for his life to become what it has become, it’s one of the all-time journeys. And not only that, he had his all his people eager to follow along with it. And so when I was going to do this book, I’m getting around to answering your question, I went to him and shook his hand and told him what I was doing, and I went to ask him about his great-grandfather because a big part of the book focuses on him. My goal is when I do these books, is to connect the past with the future. And that’s not a comfortable thing to do. We have our racial history in this country and for many reasons people want to forget that or to overlook it or gloss it over and I just think that history IS important. I think the people I write about are not just basketball players, they become big corporate and cultural figures on the global stage. My Michael Jordan book is 16-17 languages, he’s important to people all over the world. And so his story and the story of his family coming off the coastal plains of North Carolina, the things they endured…when I wrote about Jerry West – before I did a book about Jordan I did a book on Jerry West, I did it for ESPN Books I connected – because my old man was always a two-handed set shooter out of the hills in Southern West Virginia he played Semi-Pro ball, he was just a basketball maniac, but this was back in the 30’s. They had a center jump EVERY basket. They would talk those long two-handed set shots. If you knocked one down they immediately went to center court and jump the ball up again which made like a soccer match. And so you know just – when I did the Jerry West book I wanted Mammoth, West Virginia. A lot of poor hillbillies, and poor immigrants and all kinds of people in the hills working in the coal mines. And I wanted to tell their story. And just like I wanted to tell the story of the sharecroppers and the moonshiners who were Michael Jordan’s family because some of the things that they did in some ways was the equivalent to an NBA trophy; and I know that sounds ridiculous but things that Jordan’s family did in real life, that’s probably the REAL trophy. But anyway, it shows who folks are. Nobody’s just born in a bubble. We’re all a product of you well know and all your listeners know we’re a product of our family. We don’t know who our family is and just like everybody else and in one of these days when I get through everybody else’s family story I need to try to figure out who all these old hillbillies are down here in the mountains because it’s a powerful part of the story. I think it’s particularly important for African-Americans though because their story is the reason – we got the American Revolution and we got this and we got that, but the quintessential American story is African-American. And anybody that looks at history, any kind of impartial view knows that, that story, that journey, is what defines with this country, it defines freedom, and it defines the essence of all of us. I don’t care if you’re green or pink, yellow or polka-dotted, black or white. It defines us in the USA. And we’ve fought wars over it, ripped this country apart over it, we have done the most evil stuff in the word over it, and so it is…number one, I just think it’s just silly to divorce basketball from that. The Jerry West story went on for years. Jordan’s great-grandfather in his story was an amazing story: 5’5” and crippled, and a moonshiner and a sharecropper and was a badass! He worked on the river before they had I-ways and barges where they moved all the goods. I found it interesting that Jerry West’s people were roughnecks on the river and Michael Jordan’s great-grandfather and family members before him. The work that the guys did on the river was dangerous work and they were roughnecks, a lot of tough guys, some of them former slaves some slaves and so it’s just interesting to see the evolution of this persona in the families. Jordan’s grandfather on his mother’s side was a rough dude. He was a sharecropper. He was not a pleasant man but he was all about business and nobody – I found this report on sharecroppers in North Carolina in 1922 at the height of 20th century racism by the North Carolina Board of Agriculture, was in the library down there found out about sharecroppers. In 1922 it said it didn’t matter if you were black or white, nobody – and there were a lot of white sharecroppers too and it didn’t matter if you were African-American or Black. They interviewed 10,000 farmers. Black and white and the system was rigged. You weren’t going to get anywhere. You were going to live your life in debt, you’re going to have to borrow money to eat even though you were a farmer, it was going to be very tough and this was the only job for 99% of African-Americans and for a huge percentage of the white population they were just land only farmers. They didn’t own anything. They rented the mule, they didn’t own anything. Jordan’s grandfather on his mother’s side and they lived in two or three room shacks that held about twelve people sometimes. I went through the health records and the death records and I was doing this during the Obama push for healthcare. If I could help this guy sell the bill, I was going back into these North Carolina counties, like back in 1910, 1915 just looking at all the deaths, reading the death certificates…their water came right next to the outhouse and was just terrible circumstances, the poverty was terrible. Jordan’s grandfather on his mother’s side came to win his own land. To own it. To have saved and bought and worked all these jobs and nobody did this. Nobody in the population could do this and it came to that he had a bigger house – and the difficulty of that, I mean we make a lot over basketball, but becoming that guy to win the day which was rigged as it could be…that’s pretty astounding. And so you have a guy like Jordan. He doesn’t just have it. He’s a product of generations. And if you look and say that they’re average people, you don’t do what his grandfather did by just being an average person. You do not do THAT. And the degree of difficulty on their lives, none of us today could handle that. We couldn’t be who those people were. And so connecting that to the family background, and Jordan idolized his great-grandfather he was around for about 7-8 years of his life, when I asked Michael about him I told him I was going to do a book, I was stunned a tear came down his cheek, and Michael did not want to participate, he got pissed off at me for doing it. But Larry Bird said I don’t like that stuff. But I understand. I think it’s important to tell the stories. The response from readers is – and some of it helps you explain as in Kobe’s case. There were things and I was trying to be tough on Kobe. And I found some stuff, not too much. Everywhere I turned I found things – and I knew Kobe ever since he was a kid. And I was astounded at how badly people wrote stuff about him like he was and his family was – they were people getting something that they didn’t deserve I guess to put it in one way…cutting corners there was NONE of that. They were assuming Kobe and his father were plotting to make him Laker for example. Kobe didn’t have any idea about that. They didn’t say anything to anybody about that. What happened was Kobe wasn’t even thinking about – I mean he liked Michael Jordan but he did think to be exactly like Jordan with shaving his head and all that stuff, that was because Adidas discovered him and thought that he could be the next Jordan and told his AAU coach that. They began pushing that agenda and suddenly what do you do when you have a 16 year old kid and you tell him he’s going to be the next Jordan? Well next thing you know he’s shaving his head, he’s studying the tapes, you know if that’s going to be his job he’d better know what it is. And so then everybody was saying that Kobe was some kind of – I don’t know what the problem was with Kobe, but it was negative. If you recall even in Philly it was negative. Like he was trying to jump line. I think that’s probably sort of the attitude; Kobe and his family was trying to jump line at the cafeteria or something you know? They thought that he was trying to jump in front of people. I know Rick Fox told me that. When Kobe came to the Lakers as a teenager, you know there’s all these veterans working hard for their money and here’s this kid being shoved in front of us and so it created – and he never once bothered to say, ‘Man I wasn’t planning any of this, this stuff just happened to me’… he was granted by working as hard as he did, smart as he was, but he wasn’t out there schemin’…