Michael Jordan might be a superstar on the court, but as a student? Not so much. In high school, he was so fixated on honing his basketball skills that he often ditched classes to hit the gym, often practicing solo. By ninth grade, his antics caught up with him, resulting in a suspension. “I asked him what his goal was. He said it was college,” his father, James Raymond Jordan, told The Washington Post in an interview. “I just looked at him and said, ‘Well, the way you’re going, it’s not going to happen. No way.'”
That reality check was what Jordan needed to make a change. His mother, Deloris Jordan, wasn’t having any of his nonsense either. She made sure he got his act together, with Jordan telling GQ, “My mother takes me to her job and has me sit in the car, that hot car, all day doing my homework. If there is a most likely to succeed, I was the least.” Thanks to his parents’ tough love, he became a B+ student in high school. And while there are conflicting reports, during his undergraduate years, he maintained a modest 2.5 GPA, according to the 1984 write-up by The Post. And despite the skeptics, he went on to become the greatest player ever — and that’s according to the NBA itself.
“Everybody in Wilmington expected me to go to North Carolina, sit on the bench for four years, then go back to Wilmington and work at the local gas station,” he recalled. But we all know how that turned out.
