Michael Jordan was born in Brooklyn on February 17, 1963, but grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina. From an early age, he displayed exceptional athletic ability, playing whatever sport was in season and excelling. That included Pop Warner football, but his real love was baseball. He was just 12, in fact, when he was named MVP while competing in a state baseball tournament.
Jordan eventually gravitated to basketball. In 1978, the 15-year-old, standing just five-foot-10 and still not able to dunk the ball, tried out for his school’s varsity team but wasn’t chosen. The discouragement he felt evolved into a steely resolve to make it next time. “Whenever I was working out and got tired and figured I ought to stop, I’d close my eyes and see that list in the locker room without my name on it,” Jordan told Newsweek.
By the following year, Jordan was both bigger and better, having built muscle mass while gaining four inches of height. This time he made the team, and during the course of the season, his abilities exploded. “His level of play was just so much higher than the rest of us,” Jordan’s older brother, Larry, told ESPN, recalling watching his little brother eclipse him on the court. “People ask me all the time if it bothered me, but I can honestly say no, because I had the opportunity to see him grow,” he explained. “I knew how hard he worked.”
