More than two decades after his retirement, Michael Jordan continues to capture the imagination of posterity. His mettle as a player and a businessman needs no introduction, but the personality that drove him still remains an enigma to many. People who worked with him for decades remained curious about the “mystery man” years after their stint together ended.
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Tex Winter came into the league as an Assistant Coach for the Bulls in 1985, barely a year after MJ’s draft, following a four-decade-long successful NCAA coaching career. The former Bulls Assistant Coach and Michael Jordan worked together in almost all of Jordan’s 12-season-long career with the franchise.
In Jordan’s 2014 memoir Michael Jordan: The Life, author Roland Lazenby mentioned Winter’s inquisitiveness regarding Michael Jordan’s character. He was unable to figure out the core of Jordan’s inner psyche. The innovator of the Triangle Offense was filled with curiosity about MJ’s personality and even after observing him for decades, Winter believed that there should be research on Jordan’s persona. As per the coaching maestro, even the man himself was clueless about what constitutes his being.
“Personality-wise, he’s[Michael Jordan] a study. He really is. I[Tex Winter] guess I don’t have the intelligence to grasp a lot of things that make Michael tick, that make him what he is. I think I analyze him pretty good, but he is a mystery man in an awful lot of ways, and I think he always will be, maybe even to himself,” Lazenby quoted Winter in the 2014 memoir.
Jordan’s peers have often been affected by his obsession with winning and outcompeting everyone in everything. MJ’s former friend Charles Barkley has even called him crazy for his fixation on retribution against other players. It will be certainly interesting to research what fueled Jordan’s insanely vindictive and petty mind.
Meanwhile, Winter didn’t find himself mentally equipped to discern the personality traits of His Airness. While he sought to examine the nature of MJ’s being, sports psychologist George Mumford was unsettled after observing his mental makeup.
Michael Jordan continues to stump even the experts
As per Lazenby’s 2014 book, the Bulls’ psychologist George Mumford was captivated by Jordan’s “hyper-energy” during Bulls’ practices. He took into account the Bulls superstar’s hyper-intensity despite a lack of sleep and his mood swings during “low” periods. It led him to conclude that he was “manic depressive or bipolar”. The competitive hoopers’ oscillating moods and his “ability to concentrate” at the same time made it difficult for the psychologist to determine how his mind worked.
“He[Michael Jordan] was frenetic, all over the place with this hyper energy. I thought, he can’t sustain that,” Lazenby quoted Mumford in Michael Jordan: The Life.
The psychologist was blown away by Michael Jordan’s “zone of high performance”. For Mumford, Jordan’s Herculean ability to “lock in” was “coming from a different place.” This led him to conclude that a “winning” frame of mind comes naturally to the hyper-focused athlete.
For Winter, it was the incredible athlete’s personality that made him worthy of an academic pursuit. Mumford does have a strong understanding of an athlete’s psyche, but even he couldn’t “study” the enigmatic figure. As for Jordan, it was all about winning. Jordan’s boundless zeal to win is what stumps experts from across the board.
