Michael Jordan is an icon not only for what he did on the basketball court but for his Air Jordan sneakers and his Jordan line of clothes. There may be no athlete who’s had as big an impact on the world of fashion. But his former college teammate Kenny Smith recently revealed a time long ago when the greatest basketball player ever had no fashion sense of his own.
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The Jet and His Airness played together at the University of North Carolina for just a single season in 1983-84, and they made beautiful music on the court. Though the Heels were knocked out in the Elite Eight by Indiana, they finished ranked No. 1 in the AP poll.
That year, Smith ran point and averaged 9.1 points and 5.0 assists as a freshman (a more impressive feat in those days than it appears to be now since freshmen rarely got playing time under Dean Smith).
The same season, Jordan scored 19.6 per game on his way to winning the Naismith, Wooden, and AP Player the Year awards and being named a First Team All-American.
Smith was asked by the StrictlyBBall YouTube channel what his favorite moment with Jordan was, and his response was hilarious. “He used to steal all of my belts and clothes, ’cause I was from New York and they didn’t have anything like that in Wilmington, North Carolina.”
Jordan, of course, was born in Brooklyn, but moved to North Carolina at a very young age, and it seems he wanted to get some of that New York style that he had missed out on.
It’s funny to think of someone who’s now a billionaire needing to steal his college teammate’s clothes, but this was before the days of NIL, and there probably wasn’t much available in Chapel Hill in Jordan’s size anyway.
Despite Jordan’s “borrowing” habits, Smith has always talked about how important MJ was to his college experience.
Michael Jordan was a big reason why Kenny Smith chose to attend UNC
Smith appeared on the All the Smoke podcast two years ago, and he told Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson that he went to Carolina because he wanted to challenge himself by playing with the best players.
He said, “I chose North Carolina ’cause when I went to the practice and I saw Sam Perkins, Brad Daugherty, Michael Jordan, I looked at it and I said, ‘I don’t know if I can play here.’ I was a little nervous … I said, ‘I gotta go here,’ ’cause I can’t be there thinking that they’re better than me.”
Playing with Jordan and those other greats was definitely the right choice, as Smith also went on to become a First-Team All-American in his final year of school. He was then chosen sixth overall in the NBA Draft before going on to play 10 years in the league and winning two titles, which, ironically, came between Jordan’s two three-peats.
