Driven from Within Read online

  You can talk about the grand scheme and the grand design, but here was a guy who really wanted to be somewhere else. Finally, when it was all said and done, it just manifested. I don’t know how you reproduce that kind of thing. Michaelangelo and the Sistine Chapel? I’m sure somebody could do that today, maybe even far better. The paint would be better. The brushes would be better. But it would be the Sistine Chapel? I don’t think so.

  THERE IS SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS WHEN SPECIAL PEOPLE COME TOGETHER THAT TAKES IT ALL TO ANOTHER LEVEL.

  You can’t do an analysis and put those pieces together. You can’t draw it up and execute. It’s not the nature of greatness. It’s like Phil looking around the Nike campus and saying, “Yep, this is exactly how I saw it all coming together when I was selling shoes out of the trunk of my car.” No, that’s not how it works.

  DAVID FALK It was like pre-Columbus. We were saying, “Hey Phil, the world is not flat.” It’s not that I knew the world wasn’t flat. I didn’t know. But I didn’t think it was. It’s so hard to take people back and have them understand that Nike’s goal was to have sales of $3 million four years down the road. The environment was so completely different then.

  THE ACCEPTED KNOWLEDGE WAS THAT A TEAM PLAYER COULD NOT BE MARKETED AS AN INDIVIDUAL. MAYBE A TENNIS PLAYER COULD DO IT, MAYBE A BOXER, MAYBE A GOLFER LIKE ARNOLD PALMER. BUT A TEAM PLAYER?

  NO WAY.

  When the first shoe came out, Rod Thorn, the Chicago Bulls general manager at the time, called me. He said, “What are you trying to do; turn this guy into a tennis player?” That’s exactly what we were trying to do. There was a time in the 1960s and 1970s when you had groups like the Supremes. What happened? People said it really isn’t the Supremes. It’s Diana Ross and the Supremes.

  IT BECAME MICHAEL AND THE JORDANAIRES.

  DAVID FALK

  MICHAEL SINGLE-HANDEDLY TOOK TEAM SPORTS AND CREATED A NEW HYBRID CATEGORY.

  IT WASN’T THE TEAM, AND IT WASN’T THE INDIVIDUAL.

  The Beatles had that kind of impact. They changed the way people wore their hair, impacted the clothes people wore. Part of it was just the fact Michael was so transcendent. He changed everything single-handedly. It’s what Elvis did, or what the Beatles did. There have been a handful of people in a century who have done what Michael did to the status quo. It was like breaking the four-minute mile. Nobody thought it could be done.

  When I went to Nike, they were telling me about their air sole technology, which was very innovative. But to me, that wasn’t as important as being close to the ground. I didn’t want to feel like I was playing in high heel shoes because it would increase my chances of twisting an ankle. It might have been innovative, but to me it also seemed dangerous.

  For runners, fine. They go heel to toe, heel to toe. But for basketball, everything’s on the ball of the feet, going right, left, stopping, turning. I wanted to feel like a race car, close to the ground.

  I WANTED MY SHOES TO BE LIKE A PORSCHE OR A FERRARI, SO WHEN I TURNED, THE SHOE TURNED.

  I was going against what Nike was developing at the time, but I didn’t care. I had to play with what made me feel comfortable. That’s another difference between today’s athlete and me. I wasn’t going to agree to anything without investigating, dissecting, understanding what I liked. I wanted to understand what was possible. I also wanted to know why they thought that shoe was for me.

  WHERE AM I IN THAT SHOE?

  I also didn’t want shoes I had to walk around in for a week to break them in. I wanted something I could take right out of the box and play in them. So I’m telling Nike, “I know it’s going to cost more money, but with the right leather I can play right out of the box.” I pushed them every way possible because I wanted to know they were committed to me.

  MONEY IS ONLY ONE KIND OF COMMITMENT.

  DAVID FALK I took Michael’s father, James, to Converse with me. The essence of their presentation was that they had something like 16 employees that stood 6-foot-6 and over, and that they were American basketball. They had Dr. J, Magic, Isiah, Larry, Mark Aguirre, Herb Williams, Bernard King. I told everyone the same thing: “Don’t ask what Michael can do for you, if you can’t figure it out after what he did in the 1984 Olympics.” I wanted to know what they were going to do for Michael. As simple as that sounds today, it was a great challenge in 1984.

  Converse basically said they would do what they had done with Dr. J, Magic and Larry. And James, in one of the funniest low-key lines, says, “Don’t you have any new creative ideas?” Here’s a guy who didn’t go to college, who had a lot of native intelligence, and after one month figured out these guys had the imagination of a wall.

  I COULDN’T BE A VOCAL LEADER AT THE BEGINNING. I WAS AFRAID TO SPEAK TO VETERAN GUYS, MOST OF WHOM WEREN’T MAKING AS MUCH MONEY AS I WAS.

  They had to have a level of envy to start with. So I felt I had to be very cautious. My leadership came from action, all action. I had to pick my friends very carefully, like Rod Higgins. He was and still is to this day a great friend. I could never be good friends with Orlando Woolridge or Quintin Dailey because I was stealing some of their thunder. But I was doing it with effort and work. I wasn’t asking for anything from anyone. My practice habits were great. I forced those other guys to improve their practice habits. I challenged them because [Bulls coach] Kevin Loughery challenged me. At the end of practice we would scrimmage, and the losers had to run. We’d be killing the second team, and Loughery would stop practice and put me on the second team. We’d still come back to win. Those were the things the other guys started to learn.

  HOWARD “H” WHITE If “The Guy” is going as hard as he can, what excuse can you have? If this guy is going so hard that people are shoving, getting into fights, then what are you going to be? Tired today? Hurt today? It was an outward challenge: If you are going to play with me, you better come with everything you’ve got every single minute. Michael’s a taskmaster, but look at the example he set. MJ is hard. But he’s hard on himself first.

  Our third game of the season we were playing Milwaukee in Chicago, and they used to kill us. We were down nine points going into the fourth quarter. Everybody had just written off the game. Now, Loughery tested me the same way he had tested me in practice. He wanted to see whether I was going to apply that same energy level to a game that looked like it was out of reach. He started running everything through me, and you could feel the game start to change. The crowd started coming alive, and pretty soon nine went to six and six went to two. Next thing you know, we had the lead, and we ended up winning by six points.

  THAT IS WHEN—I CAN HONESTLY SAY—I FELT LIKE I HAD EARNED MY STRIPES, AND THE CITY OF CHICAGO STARTED TO BELIEVE WE COULD CHANGE THE FORTUNES OF THE BULLS. NO GAME WAS OVER AS LONG AS I WAS PLAYING ON THE COURT.

  DAVID FALK

  YOU TAKE A 6-FOOT-6 GUY WHO IS ATTRACTIVE, MUSCULAR, ARTICULATE, A GREAT JUMPER, AND ALL THE OTHER INGREDIENTS THAT MAKE UP MICHAEL, AND YOU STILL NEED LIGHTNING TO STRIKE THE MIX TO CREATE WHAT HAPPENED.

  DAVID FALK I don’t think it will ever happen again. I’m not saying there won’t be a player who is better than Michael, but he came along in 1984 when the Olympics were in America, so he was on a worldwide stage. The NBA was coming out of its doldrums. There had been talk that six or seven teams could go bankrupt. Chicago, a major market, had been in the doldrums. Converse was at the top, but headed for a decline, Adidas was going through a transition.

  I think we had a good vision of what to do. Not a perfect vision, but we had a solid game plan.

  MY BIGGEST REGRET IS THAT IT WAS ALL FROM SCRATCH. THERE WASN’T A MODEL WE COULD LOOK TO AND REFINE.

  For example, Michael’s first deal with Nike was for five years. Rob Strasser, who signed Michael at Nike, was nervous. What if Michael was a good endorser, but the line didn’t work? No one had ever made it work in basketball to that point.

  Rob wanted an option to get out of the deal in case it didn’t work. We told him no, we weren’t there to do a
test drive. If you don’t think you can do it, then don’t sign him. So we compromised. They had the right at the end of the third year to stop making Michael’s shoe. If he didn’t make the All-Star team in any of the first three years, or didn’t average 20 points a game—there were four or five performance categories—then Nike would have to continue paying him through the end of the contract, but they could stop making his shoe in the fourth and fifth year.

  Then there was what I called a kickout clause. If Nike had bookings of $3 million for Air Jordans between the end of the third year going into the fourth, then even if Michael didn’t accomplish any of the performance categories, Nike had to keep making the shoes in the fourth and fifth years.

  THAT WAS NIKE’S GOAL: $3 MILLION IN SALES. THEY BOOKED SOMETHING LIKE $130 MILLION IN THE FIRST YEAR.

  It was off the charts. We were asking a company to take an unprecedented step. In hindsight we probably erred on the side of protecting the downside too much. If we had asked them for $1 a year and 50 percent of the profits, Michael would probably be a billionaire. But we needed Nike to have enough money in the deal to motivate them to spend additional money on marketing to cover the investment.

  The first Air Jordan shoe was the first time anyone had applied multiple colors. When I first saw it, I said,

  “I’M NOT WEARING THAT SHOE. I’LL LOOK LIKE A CLOWN.”

  Peter Moore, who designed the first two shoes, told me to just look at the shoe. “Put it on and look at it. Spend some time with it. If the shoe doesn’t grow on you, we’ll change it.” The more I looked at the shoes, the more they started to grow on me.

  I told Peter, “Every time I wear these shoes in practice, my teammates come up to me and tell me they are the ugliest looking shoes they have ever seen.” He says, “Guess what they are doing? They’re looking at them. No matter what they are saying, they are paying attention.” That changed my whole perspective. First and foremost, the shoes had to perform the way I wanted them to perform. How they looked was a whole different issue, because you have to think about marketing strategy. You want people to pay attention. If you see somebody walking down the street in pink shoes, you are going to look at them. That’s exactly what happened with the first shoe.

  I’M APPLYING THE SAME PRINCIPLES TO MY MOTORCYCLE TEAM.

  The first year, we used Carolina blue on the motorcycles. In 2005, I went to Mark Smith and told him I wanted to change the colors to yellow, black and red. Mark is an unbelievably creative guy who works with Tinker Hatfield in Nike’s Innovative Kitchen. I didn’t care how Mark incorporated the colors or where the inspiration came from—those were the colors. The first designs were wild. In motorcycle racing, it’s unheard of to put those kind of colors together. I looked at what Mark created and said, “I don’t know, man. That bike looks like somebody wrecked it and then put it back together with whatever they could find: a yellow back, a black fender.” I’m laughing because I know the kind of response it’s going to get within the race community.

  The riders told me they liked the Carolina blue a lot better, that the new colors would stand out. They said they looked awful. One of them said, “That’s not what the Jordan brand is all about.”

  But they were wrong. What we did is exactly what the Jordan brand is about. It’s about leading, not following. Sure, there are going to be critics, people who have been around motorcycle racing a long time who will be uncomfortable with a different design approach. I told them to do exactly what Peter Moore told me to do with the first shoe: Blow it up, put it on the wall and look at it for 45 minutes. Just look at it, take it in. But at the end of those 45 minutes, you are going to have everybody discussing and dissecting the designs, and we will have done exactly what we set out to do.

  Now, the bike is still only going to do what you can do as a rider. Same with the shoes.

  BUT THE WHOLE MARKETING APPROACH IS ABOUT DRAWING ATTENTION TO THE PRODUCT. ONCE THAT HAPPENS, AND EVERYONE PERFORMS THE WAY THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO PERFORM, THEN THE TWO COME TOGETHER LIKE A PERFECT MARRIAGE. AND THAT’S WHAT THE BRAND HAS BEEN: A PERFECT MARRIAGE OF STYLE AND PERFORMANCE.

  Peter Moore and Rob Strasser took the absurdness of what shoes could look like, put them on Michael Jordan, and let him go out and play. Now those shoes had their own style and substance. Peter and Rob changed Nike’s perspective by helping the company feel comfortable with the idea of being way out there, different, design leaders in the market. They helped push the company into the contemporary culture.

  IN RETROSPECT, THAT APPROACH WAS AN ESSENTIAL PART OF THE PROCESS, THOUGH WE REALLY DIDN’T KNOW WHAT WE WERE DOING AT THE TIME. NIKE DIDN’T KNOW.

  IT JUST HAPPENED, WHICH IS WHY IT’S SO DIFFICULT TO REPLICATE.

  UNCOMPROMISED

  SOME PLAYERS LOOK AT ME FOR ALL THE WRONG REASONS: MARKETING, ADMIRATION, MONEY MADE OFF THE COURT.

  They don’t understand the foundation I had to create to support everything that came afterward. They don’t know about lifting weights at 7 A.M., practicing hard every day, finding ways to motivate myself for every game, sitting up half the night with an ankle in a bucket of ice, or hooked up to an electronic stimulation machine. They don’t know anything about those things.

  WHAT THEY DO KNOW IS THAT I HAVE MY OWN SHOE LINE, AND THAT I DID MCDONALD’S COMMERCIALS.

  In a sense, my experience created a vision that obscured the hard work and commitment. With all the attention on the surface, it’s easy to become confused about the source of money and glamour.

  YOU HAVE TO BE UNCOMPROMISED IN YOUR LEVEL OF COMMITMENT TO WHATEVER YOU ARE DOING, OR IT CAN DISAPPEAR AS FAST AS IT APPEARED.

  Some players noticed me because of everything I was doing off the court, and that was the wrong reason to pay attention to me. Pay attention to the way I played the game. Pay attention to my passion. Pay attention to the idea of focusing on improvement every day. Pay attention to my commitment. Commitment cannot be compromised by rewards. Excellence isn’t a one-week or one-year ideal. It’s a constant. There will be days when you don’t feel on top of your game, or meetings in which you aren’t at your best, but your commitment remains constant. No compromises. No one on our Bulls teams ever missed a month with a sprained ankle. We took precautions against those kinds of injuries, and when they occurred we did everything possible to play through them. We were going to be the best every night we stepped on the floor. That approach created an atmosphere and expectation that every player and coach understood.

  LOOK AROUND THE LEAGUE TODAY, AND YOU SEE PLAYERS MISSING WEEKS OF GAMES WITH ANKLE SPRAINS.

  YOU DIDN’T WANT THE ABUSE THAT CAME WITH MISSING GAMES ON THE BULLS. WE HAD A SHARED COMMITMENT TO THE UNIT.

  Dennis Rodman could do whatever he wanted to do off the court and away from the team because he knew once he came back into the group, he had to plug into the team.

  My sense of commitment extended beyond the game of basketball. The Jordan brand has continued to grow because we have remained uncompromised. It’s easy to go the other way, though. It’s easy to rest on your laurels, or to get fat on success. I don’t ever want to get fat that way.

  When our motorcycle team made it to the podium for the first time in early 2005, I celebrated that night with the rest of the team. We toasted our success and talked about how far we had come, especially for a non-factory team. But the next day I sent everyone a letter. I wanted them to know I was proud of what we had accomplished, but it was time to move forward.

  Look around, and just about any person or entity achieving at a high level has the same focus. The morning after Tiger Woods rallied to beat Phil Mickelson at the Ford Championship in 2005, he was in the gym by 6:30 to work out.

  NO LIGHTS, NO CAMERAS, NO GLITZ OR GLAMOUR. UNCOMPROMISED.

  SOME KIDS LIVE DOWN TO THE EXPECTATIONS. ATHLETES, EVEN PROFESSIONAL ONES, DO THE SAME THING.

  Now I had some tough years in there, just like a lot of kids. Ninth grade was the toughest year of my life. I was 15. I was suspended the firs
t day of school because I walked across the street to pick up something to drink. I had to go home and tell my parents that on the first half day of school, I got suspended. I had perfect attendance from grades 1 through 8. I had eight of those certificates. Not only had I never missed a day of school, but I became the first one in the family to miss a day, thanks to that suspension. That didn’t go over too well, particularly when I already knew my parents were worried about me making anything of myself.

  I had a job that summer for a week before I quit. Hotel maintenance. My mother was furious because she had talked one of her bank clients into giving me the job. They had me cleaning cigarette butts from the pool, and all my boys kept driving by blowing their horns.

  MOM I knew he didn’t want to work, but I made sure this man gave Michael a job. Every day he came home complaining. I said, “You’re going to work tomorrow” The last day, he walked all the way home, I said, “How did you get here?” He said, “Please don’t make me go back there. Make me do anything else, but don’t make me go back.”

  It was all about learning that there were choices and responsibilities. Now how are you going to make those choices? Are you going to stand on the corner waiting for somebody to give you something? Or are you going to earn it and deserve it so no one can say you took anything without earning it? Those words went with Michael onto the basketball court. I told him not to wait for anybody to give him anything. Work hard so when you get the gifts, they are yours.