Searching For Michael Jordan in Wilmington

In the summer of 2022, I drove to Michael Jordan’s childhood home in Wilmington with my 11-year-old son. It was a balmy, sun-dappled afternoon. We arrived at an unassuming but comfortable two-story house flanked by a green lawn and some trees. 

The ground floor is pale-brown brick; the second story has white wood siding. The garage doors were open, and a couple of cars were parked in the driveway–nothing fancy. I checked the address to make sure we were in the right place. We were: 4647 Gordon Road. 

I drove halfway up the driveway, peering at the house, before it occurred to me that there was a decent chance that someone was inside, perhaps wondering who was coming up their driveway. I reminded myself that this was not a museum, not a well-marked spot on a tour, but a private home.

I was, without knowing it, echoing a discussion that had occurred decades earlier, when there was a heated civic debate in Wilmington about how to celebrate its favorite son. 

Back in 1988, a proposal had been floated to change the name of Gordon Road, described by the local paper as a rural, two-lane road, to Michael Jordan Parkway. Jordan’s mother, Deloris, was among those in favor. But some longtime residents objected. Petitions were presented on both sides.

“Let’s not bury a part of history just to add a new name,” said one of the objectors, a longtime Gordon Road resident named Oliver Goodwin. Speaking to the New Hanover County commissioners, Goodwin explained, “An address gets to be part of you.”

Whatever their motives, the commissioners seemed to find this a compelling enough argument and did not rename Gordon Road. 

Part of me wants to scrutinize this decision for signs of racism or to impute some other dubious motive for this withholding. But it is also important to consider that in 1988, the person being discussed was not yet the Michael Jordan of the six NBA championships and the 1992 Olympic “Dream Team.” His chief accolade at that point was winning a Most Valuable Player award in only his fourth season with the Chicago Bulls. 

The commissioners still found a way to honor Jordan. They endorsed naming a seven-mile stretch of Interstate 40 in his name. 

When the naming ceremony was held three years later, the Wilmington Morning Star reported that 1,000 people showed up to “whoop, holler and cheer” as state dignitaries named the highway for Jordan. He was on hand to give a speech.

“Ten years ago, back in 1981, I was only about a mile away from here in school,” Jordan said. “It’s a real privilege for me to be standing in front of everyone, and to know that within 10 years, I have gotten every dream I could imagine.” 

Thirty years before the Jordan Crying meme (and 25 years or so before the word “meme” became part of our lexicon), the local newspaper ran a front-page photo of Jordan with tears streaming down his face. “I lost a bet to my best friend … because I said I wasn’t going to cry,” Jordan said that day. 

It is amazing to note all the things that this remark foreshadows: for starters, the Jordan Crying meme, whose origins were in his Hall of Fame induction speech in 2009. A meme that became so ubiquitous that Jordan himself referenced it, while crying, at the memorial for Kobe Bryant (“Now, he’s got me, and I’ll have to look at another crying meme for the next … ”), getting an impromptu laugh from the otherwise somber audience. 

Why such fascination with crying Jordan? Perhaps one way to measure the fierce, stoic, almost insanely competitive nature of Jordan is to note the vividness of those tear-streaked episodes. Crying Jordan, the meme, packs a comic punch in juxtaposition to Jordan as a symbol of winning. It is the man in the air returned to the ground. 

These paradoxes–Jordan as winner vs. Jordan as crier, myth vs. mortal–came together most vividly for me in The Last Dance documentary, when he wins his first NBA championship after his father’s death. He is shown collapsed on the floor, sobbing and clutching the championship trophy like it was his father embodied, which may say something about what drove him to excel. 

That is the curious condition that Jordan finds himself in now, and really for the last couple of decades–a mortal who lives within us, as myth, as metaphor, and as symbol. In Wilmington, it’s difficult to find signs of either man or myth.   

No Playground Plaque

After that first visit to the unadorned, unremarked-upon former Jordan home, I headed to the basketball court at Empie Park, where he played as a kid. I found no mention of Jordan there, either. Same with a visit to the Boys & Girls Clubs where he once played. 

I had come down to North Carolina ever since getting married in 2005; my wife grew up in the Raleigh area and still had her parents and family there. A few years ago, her mother moved to a retirement community in Wilmington, which is when we began to visit the city.

I had witnessed two striking things about North Carolina over the course of 20 years. One was how fast the landscape was being transformed, the highways cutting through the forests, sprouting interchanges and developments. 

The other was how all this newness accompanied an almost compulsive need to evoke the old, specifically Olde England, or Olde Scotland, in the names of developments and streets. There are places in North Carolina with more English names than you’ll find in England. Driving around Jordan’s neighborhood, I passed Shelley Drive, which crossed Coleridge Drive. There was a street named for Lord Tennyson. A whole neighborhood of English poets. 

I began to feel like the city was leaving something on the table in the 21st century with regard to Jordan. At the very least, the basketball court where he once played as a kid could be set up as some minor tourist spot. I went so far as trying to get in touch with Wilmington’s City Hall in the hopes of getting someone to answer the question: Why isn’t there a plaque in front of his old playground?

I eventually succeeded in this errand, or thought I did. I had an interesting chat with a parks department staffer in Wilmington. He brushed aside the question of what the city should do to honor Jordan and instead told me that my call was well timed. At that very moment, the movie Air, starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who also directed, was being filmed in California about the origin of the eponymous shoes. 

We spent time talking excitedly about Jordan and the movie. But then, a few minutes into our talk, he said something that made me realize I was talking to someone in Wilmington, Delaware.

That an entire Hollywood movie could be devoted to the circumstances by which Jordan’s shoe deal came together says a lot about the legend of Jordan and how it’s so entwined with both an otherworldly excellence and the very earthbound, worldly matter of money. 

Air has some insight into how this came to be, portraying Jordan’s mother, Deloris, as a shrewd businesswoman who has the crucial epiphany that her son’s deal should not be just work for hire but should include future royalties, at the time a highly uncommon arrangement for star athletes. It was one of the all-time great business decisions. 

Her perception that intellectual property intersects with sports predates, by a couple of decades, the moment when Ed O’Bannon gazed at the cover of a video game featuring his likeness wearing a UCLA jersey, and, having been told that he was due no money because he had been an amateur while in college, decided to sue for a cut of the profits. That set in motion the Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) upheaval in college sports that is ongoing. Deloris Jordan had descended from a family with a strong business sense.

According to Roland Lazenby’s 2014 biography of Jordan, Deloris’ father, Edward Peoples, “was a distant, some would say humorless man, known for his ambition and hard work. Among the many frustrated and penniless black farmers, a generation of men who spent their lives in overalls, confounded by an economic system that almost guaranteed their failure, Edward Peoples found rare success.”

A Box of Wheaties

When I talked to people in Wilmington (North Carolina, this time) about what the city should or could do to honor Jordan, the conversation kept coming back to what he had done for the city. 

There was a faint echo of the famous line from President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speech, “Ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country.” Jordan, it was pointed out, has done a lot for Wilmington, most notably donating $10 million in 2021 to open a pair of medical clinics.

“I sat there wondering what it would be like to donate $10 million to something,” said Jonathan Barfield Jr., who spent 16 years as a New Hanover County commissioner and is currently running for mayor. 

Barfield went on to recount other instances of Jordan’s philanthropy, starting with an early memory: “He was a few years older. I went to New Hanover High School, and he went to Laney. I recall when he returned [in 1993 after retiring the first time]. He came back home, and he went to speak to the kids in the Boys & Girls Club. By the time he got there, the word had spread. The gym was packed. He asked to borrow a mic, and I was the one that brought it to him.”

He went on to cite another time Jordan came home after a hurricane and handed out Thanksgiving meals and care packages at Lowe’s, and the times he donated sneakers to the Boys & Girls Clubs. He donates to Laney High School’s basketball program. “A lot of what he does is low key,” said Barfield. “Not trying to be in the spotlight.”

One theme that emerged was of Jordan as a combination of Greta Garbo, the reclusive actress who died in 1990, and writer Herman Melville’s central character in Bartleby, the Scrivener, who doesn’t want to do anything or even leave the office. Like Bartleby, Jordan would prefer not to when asked to take part in ceremonial events, which would involve spending time talking to a bunch of people he doesn’t know. 

This has led to some curious omissions. Jordan has not been inducted into The Greater Wilmington Sports Hall of Fame, for example. They want him, but their guidelines require inductees to attend the induction ceremony. He apparently would prefer not to.

As it happens, there is a Jordan exhibit at the Cape Fear Museum of History and Science, and it’s quite wonderful in a way, precisely because of its modesty. The museum is devoted to the region; there is a boat outside, and a giant ground sloth skeleton inside. 

Jordan is represented by a single glass showcase, set off near a staircase. It contains various childhood artifacts. “Achieving Success,” is the headline, beneath which is an inspirational quote from Jordan: “I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” 

There is a box of Wheaties with his likeness on the cover, a pair of the original Nike Air Jordan basketball sneakers, and reference to his former ownership of the Charlotte Hornets. But the bulk of the display and its overriding mood is that of the artifacts of childhood, of the man when he was a boy and college student. His toy Hot Wheels cars. A wooden box that he made in shop class with his name, birthday, and astrological sign (Aquarius) carved into the wood.

There is a notebook from a college English class he took in 1983. The accompanying text reads: “Michael studied movie criticism in English 42 class at UNC Chapel Hill.” It is courtesy of a loan from Deloris Jordan, who founded the James R. Jordan Foundation, named for her late husband and Michael’s father, and now lives in Chicago, according to the National Women’s History Museum. 

One can almost hear the maternal pride in the phrasing of the text and the whole exhibit. And by extension, civic pride. It’s charming as hell in its understatement. But it is also, given the global obsession with Jordan, very modest. 

I think of the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, a huge building on the Ohio River that opened in 2005; of the plaque in front of the pink house in Louisville where Cassius Clay grew up. These are points of pride for the city, and part of its efforts to generate tourism. 

Consider Ali and Jordan together. They are arguably the two most famous athletes of all time, or at least in a small pantheon that could make a claim on that title. They both combined incredible physical talents with a distinct personal charisma that informed the way they are thought of and remembered. 

Both evoke flight: Ali’s “Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.” Jordan’s flight–with its echoes of North Carolina and the Wright Brothers–conjures all those dunks, all that hang time, distilled into a brand, a logo: Jumpman. 

Wilmington already thinks of itself as a tourist town; Wrightsville Beach with its surf shops and retro hotels is 15 minutes from downtown. Why not develop something with Jordan’s name? Why not put the Jumpman brand to use in the place where he first took flight? Why not the Jordan Museum?

New Hanover County was, for a while, working with the Jordan family to build a separate Jordan museum as part of a downtown redevelopment initiative called “Project Grace.” But last year, the Jordan family decided not to proceed with the new museum. 

“A lot of it was timing,” said Cape Fear Museum director Kate Baillon. “We were in the process of developing and designing an exhibit for that space. We have had a good relationship with the Jordans for over 25 years, and it was not going to work.”

Baillon is a native of England, her accent bright and melodic, a bit plummy. We laughed about the fact that every other house in London has a plaque explaining that so-and-so once lived here; you can’t go a mile in some cities in Italy without finding a similar plaque stating that Byron had walked these streets, swam in this grotto. Or maybe D.H. Lawrence. I think of the intersection near Gordon Road: Shelley and Coleridge get their names on a Wilmington street, but not Jordan.

“​​Mrs. Jordan made the decision that the time was not right for that,” Baillon said, explaining why plans for the Jordan wing were put aside. “She is in her [80s]. How much energy do you want to put into something that would take a lot of time? 

“The county was ready to do what it needed to do on our end,” she said. “It was all about timing. I don’t know that Michael Jordan wants anything here.” 

Then she added that he was “a legend and also a brand. And the brand is very managed.” The downside of being the human embodiment of the logo is that the logo is always there, hovering over the man.

Correction: This article originally said the Cape Fear Museum planned to build a Jordan wing in a new museum. It has been corrected to say New Hanover County was working with the Jordan family to build a separate Jordan museum. The Jordan family has decided not to proceed with the new museum. 

Thomas Beller, a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow and professor at Tulane University, is a longtime contributor to the New Yorker and The New York Times. He is the author of Lost in the Game: A Book About Basketball and four other books. His memoir, Degas At The Gas Station will be published in the fall of 2025 by Duke University Press.