Michael Jordan says North Carolina wasn’t his first choice: “I always wanted to go to UCLA”
Dean Smith didn’t want Michael Jordan to play in the Five Star Camp because the other schools would see him.
Before he won six championships for the Chicago Bulls, Michael Jordan shined at the University of North Carolina, where he played three seasons before turning professional.
While MJ is a Tar Heel legend, UNC wasn’t his first choice when he was still in high school.
During a 1992 interview with Playboy, Jordan revealed that there was a top program that he dreamed of playing for. Per MJ:
“I always wanted to go to UCLA. That was my dream school,” said MJ. “Because when I was growing up, they were a great team. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton, John Wooden. But I never got recruited by UCLA.”
Jordan wasn’t heavily recruited in high school
Before he attended the Five-Star basketball camp, Michael Jordan wasn’t heavily recruited in high school. In fact, former NBA head coach Hubie Brown said that only two schools had recruited MJ. Five-Star founder Howard Garfinkel also said there were probably just 10 people outside of North Carolina who had heard about Michael Jordan.
But one of them was at UNC, whose head coach Dean Smith was tipped by MJ’s high school coach. UNC invited Jordan to their summer camp so they could get a closer look and they could get an inside track. That was all the Tar Heels needed.
According to Jordan:
“They were recruiting me when I was in the eleventh grade. My high school coach wrote to them, so they sent a scout down. I went to North Carolina with the Five-Star camp, even though Dean Smith didn’t want me to go. He tried to keep me hidden. If I was at Five-Star, they would open up the doors of the schools, and everybody would notice. I won about ten trophies in two weeks. I was an all-star and the M.V.P. for two weeks in a row, and my team won the championship both weeks. I was racking it up. Then everybody started recruiting me.”
The cat was out of the bag after the Five Star camp
Former UCLA head coach Larry Farmar, who was an assistant for Larry Brown at that time, said this about Jordan:
“Based on what we saw of Michael as a freshman at North Carolina, had we known about Michael in high school, there is no doubt we would have been in his home, and we’d have tried to get him to campus.”
Michael Jordan entered the 1980 Five-Star camp not in the Street & Smith‘s Top 650 high school players. After the two-week camp in Pittsburgh, Five Star handed out five individual awards, and Jordan got all five. Then everybody started going crazy about MJ, including UCLA, but it was too late.
“By the time they wanted to recruit me, they had heard that I was going to stay close to home, which was not necessarily true. I also wanted to go to Virginia because I wanted to play with Ralph Sampson for his last two years there. He was going into his junior year. I wrote to Virginia, but they just sent me back an admission form. No one came and watched me. Then I visited North Carolina, and I was happy with the atmosphere, so I committed early.”
We all know what happened next, and how the Michael Jordan story unfolded.
