TURIN, 1999
The Juventus forward Filippo Inzaghi scored the first goal just six minutes after kickoff, a nifty little tap-in off a left-side cross. Five minutes later he struck again, this time with a deflected chip shot over the goalkeeper’s head. Before the match had properly begun, the score was Juventus 2, Manchester United 0. The slaughter was on. The sixty-nine thousand fans at Turin’s Stadio delle Alpi broke into a pounding chant: “Ale, ale, ale, La Juve!”
To the United faithful, it all seemed too familiar. Despite having been in business since 1878, owning a long and glorious record in English soccer, and being arguably the world’s most popular team of any kind, United had two pressing sources of embarrassment: One, it had never won a match on Italian soil; two, it hadn’t won a European title since 1968. On this damp and chilly late-April evening, United’s players knew the task ahead was a tall one. This was the semifinals of the Champions League. To make it to the final in Barcelona and the chance to win their first European title in thirty-one years, they would have to score three unanswered goals against a team renowned for its defense, in the belly of one of the loudest stadiums on earth. They would also have to defy history.
United’s Irish-born captain, the twenty-seven-year-old midfielder Roy Keane, had been in this situation once before. Two years earlier, United had lost in the Champions League semifinals to Germany’s Borussia Dortmund by a 2–0 aggregate score. Keane was determined that this time United would break through.
Just thirteen minutes after the second Juventus goal, during a David Beckham corner kick, Keane charged into the box, headfirst, guiding the ball off his forehead and into the net to make the score 2–1. Ten minutes later, United tied the match. In the final seven minutes of normal time, after Juventus botched a clearance, United’s Dwight Yorke dribbled between defenders and into scoring range before he was taken down. United’s Andy Cole rushed over to collect the ball and tap it into the net, sealing the improbable 3–2 victory. Manchester United’s dramatic comeback had earned it a spot in the Champions League final, or, as one television commentator described it, “the gates of football heaven.”
Roy Keane had been, hands down, the hero of the night. Every time the camera found him, he’d been running. He had sealed every passing lane, challenged every ball, and launched a dozen attacks with pinpoint passes. As he left the pitch, thoroughly spent, the Italian fans were so awed by his performance that they stood and applauded. Alex Ferguson, United’s manager, said Keane had competed “as if he would rather die than lose.”
After the match, the United players poured into the dingy visitors’ dressing room, shouting, hugging, and posing for photos. “Well played, boys!” someone shouted. Ferguson was so caught up in the moment he’d forgotten to take off his raincoat. As his teammates exchanged piggyback rides and whipped tape balls at one another, Roy Keane took a seat in front of his locker. He chugged the contents of a plastic water bottle, staring off at nothing in particular. A thought registered on his face and his eyes dropped to the floor.
Nine minutes after scoring his captain’s goal, Keane had made a late, reckless tackle on the Juventus midfielder Zinedine Zidane, for which he’d been given his third yellow card of the tournament. The booking, under Champions League rules, meant he would have to sit out the next match—the final. Incredibly, Keane’s most majestic feat as a player and captain had come within a few minutes of his most egregious lapse in judgment.
On any European soccer forum, when the subject of captains comes up there is always someone who proffers the view that the problem with team X is that its players need a swift kick in the arse from a captain like Roy Keane.
At five foot ten and 179 pounds, Keane was not physically intimidating. As a teenager he’d been so small, skinny, and brittle-looking that most top English clubs wouldn’t even give him a tryout. By the age of sixteen, he’d fallen out of football entirely, forced to live at home and take a job working in a potato field.
After fighting his way up the ranks to sign with Manchester United, however, Keane’s ferocity captured the imagination of the soccer world. He became the showroom model for a certain type of leadership, the Roy Keane school of captaincy. Nearly everything about this man, from the way he looked to the way he played, was ripped from the pages of Tier One. He wasn’t a big scorer or a showy handler of the ball. He wasn’t a speech-giver, although teammates say he talked constantly and, by all accounts, constructively on the pitch. He hated attending club events, avoided the press whenever possible, preferred the company of his family, and had no patience for the trappings of stardom, which he described as “the bullshit of celebrity, fame, and associated nonsense.” On the night when Beckham married the former Spice Girl Victoria Adams, Keane blew off the celebrity-studded affair to drink alone at his local pub, the Bleeding Wolf.
On the pitch Keane was, by his own description, a “driven bastard” who never tapped the brakes. His managers were astounded by how much ground he covered. His inner fire was so abundant, and his posture so tightly wound, that he seemed more like a boxer than a footballer. His coal-black eyes, which sat just below the straight unforgiving line of his brow, locked hard on any target of his ire, and his face, with its strong jaw and permanent black stubble, was engineered for snarling. A master of aggressive displays, Keane once said that when he sensed his team getting too comfortable, he would make a reckless challenge or a bruising tackle just to “inject some angry urgency into the contest.”
In one famous incident, before a 2005 match against Arsenal, Keane pushed his way through the tunnel toward the Arsenal captain, Patrick Vieira, who had been trying to bully one of his teammates. “I’d shut my mouth if I were you,” he shouted, motioning to the pitch. “I’ll see you up there.” As a referee blocked his path and told him to cool it, Keane, chest puffed out, complained that Vieira had “shot his fucking mouth off.” United, fired up by their captain, clawed back from an 0–1 hole to win 4–2 in a match in which several usually mild-mannered United players contributed to a total of six yellow cards and one red. “They were a big team, and in the tunnel they were even bigger,” Keane said. “So I said to myself, ‘All right, let’s go.’ Aggression must be met with aggression.”
Like the captains in Tier One, Keane never hesitated to speak out against anything that stood in the way of winning—a list that included opponents, referees, teammates, his manager, and even United’s increasingly well-heeled fans, whom he once accused of being too preoccupied with their “prawn sandwiches” to properly support the team. After a tough loss in a 2002 Champions League semifinal, Keane ripped his teammates for the way they’d played and even the way they primped in the dressing room mirror. They had become so caught up in the trappings of wealth and celebrity, he said, that they “forgot about the game, lost the hunger that got [them] the Rolex, the cars, the mansion.” When Keane captained the 2002 Irish World Cup team, he became so incensed by the lackadaisical approach to training and the poor quality of the facilities booked by the Football Association of Ireland that he lit into the team’s manager in the dressing room and ultimately flew home rather than continue to play. “You’re a fucking wanker and you can stick your World Cup up your arse,” he said. On its face, Keane’s combative nature wasn’t unusual for an elite captain. What was different about it, and what made it stand out from the crowd, was its pervasiveness. During matches his hair-trigger temper not only attracted special attention from the referees, it made him a target for opposing teams, which tried to provoke him into blowing his stack. Keane was booked almost seventy times in his Premier League career, with thirteen red cards, racking up a list of offenses ranging from berating referees to stomping on opponents as they lay on the turf. On three particularly infamous occasions, he elbowed an opposing player in the face, stood on a goalkeeper to prevent him from getting up, and threw a ball at the back of an opponent’s head. When Keane got riled up, Ferguson wrote, “his eyes started to narrow, almost to wee black beads. It was frightening to watch.” Oftentimes, his aggressive style of play was too much for his body—producing several ankle injuries, a season-ending torn knee ligament, and a chronic hip ailment that led to a 2002 surgery.
Keane also had a nasty habit of getting into trouble off the pitch. In May 1999, one month after the victory in Turin, he got into a brawl with some Manchester pub-goers who were pestering him. At ten P.M. he was stuffed into the back of a police van and taken to jail under suspicion of assault. His team paid a price, too: In the FA Cup final four days later, Keane—who later admitted he wasn’t feeling fit—injured his ankle and hobbled off after eight minutes. One year earlier, during a preseason tour of Asia, Keane got into a drunken fight with a teammate, the Danish goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel, who later showed up at a press conference with a black eye.
There is no question that Keane was an effective leader. During his eight-year captaincy, Manchester United earned a place in Tier Two by winning four Premier League titles in five seasons, including three consecutively. During the 1998–99 season, United became the only team in English soccer history to win the league title, the FA Cup, and the Champions League in the same year, an achievement known as the treble.
To his many supporters, Keane was the epitome of the “Captain, Leader, Legend” species—an inspirational Führungsspieler whose passion to win and contempt for opponents gave his team a backbone. They believed that his glorious record absolved him for his frequent outbursts. “Sport is not a place for flawless people,” Gary Neville, a teammate, wrote. He believed that Keane’s “fight and passion” helped pull his fellow players along. “The idea that my role model should be a football-playing angel who never gets booked is alien to me.”
Keane’s critics took a different view. Given Manchester United’s fan base and financial resources during his captaincy (a league-topping $230 million in revenue in 2000), its historical prestige (fourteen English titles through 2001), its legendary coach (Ferguson), and its rare abundance of young talent (David Beckham, Nicky Butt, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, and Gary and Phil Neville), they believed his teams should have achieved more.
The case of Roy Keane was a curious one. No captain of his stature, as far as I could tell, had ever done so many egregious things on the field or gotten into so much trouble away from it. He did not seem to possess the ability to neutralize his negative emotions and his lack of restraint often had negative consequences for his team. No top-tier leader I studied had ever been so beloved yet so widely viewed as a problem child.
Most athletes understand that on the field of play, they enter a zone of “bracketed morality” where they might do things they would never do in polite society. In this setting, there are two flavors of aggression: one that is “instrumental,” in that its purpose isn’t to injure but to further some laudable goal; and one that is “hostile,” revealing itself when someone sets out to inflict harm, regardless of the consequences.
The rampant aggression that made Roy Keane such an icon was the same quality that made him different from the Tier One captains. On the field or off, he was unable to regulate his ferocity. In the heat of a match, it was difficult to tell whether he was acting out of indiscriminate hostility, a desire to fortify his team, or both. Unlike Maurice Richard, whose anger seemed to stem, at least in part, from the unfair treatment he felt he’d received as a French Canadian, Keane really had no excuse. He seemed to be bubbling with malevolence nearly all the time.
In sports, the term of art for when an athlete removes whatever brakes they may have on aggression is that this person “plays angry.” In 2016, a Rutgers sports psychologist named Mitch Abrams, who had worked with professional sports teams, decided to survey all of the research he could find about violence and aggression in sports and tie it all together in a position paper that, he hoped, would clarify the state of thinking on this issue. Abrams began by citing a number of studies that suggested that athletes who play angry do reap some benefits. “Anger can be an emotion of action as the physiological surge of the sympathetic nervous system can lend itself to an increase in strength, stamina, speed and a decrease in perception of pain,” he wrote.
But when taken as a whole, Abrams found that the studies presented more evidence that playing angry can produce negative returns. It wasn’t just that anger could draw sanctions from the referees. Intense anger, he wrote, could also harm a player’s performance “due to impairment in fine motor coordination, problem-solving, decision-making and other cognitive processes.”
In 2011, a pair of researchers from Stanford and Dartmouth published a study in the journal Athletic Insight that attempted to explore the competitive strengths and weaknesses of aggressive athletes. The researchers gathered five full seasons’ worth of data from the NBA and ranked every player in the league by the rate at which they earned technical fouls. Unlike routine fouls, technical fouls are called when players aggressively step out of line—either by confronting referees, fighting, hurling insults, or making excessively hard or blatant contact with an opposing player.
After controlling for variables like position and minutes played, the researchers found that “aggressive” players—those with the highest technical foul rates—were, in fact, different from their colleagues. Some of their qualities were positive: They were more likely to excel at tasks that required power and explosive energy, such as rebounding and shot blocking. They also tended to take, and make, more field goals. The “energy” that a technical foul creates, or the angry disposition behind it, “may facilitate successful performance in some aspects of the game,” the researchers said.
Yet the data also showed that these players were no better—or were considerably worse—at the aspects of basketball that involve “precision and carefulness.” While they took more foul shots, they were no better at converting them. When it came to taking, and making, three-point shots, the players who competed in a “high-arousal state” struggled mightily. The aggressive players also showed a greater propensity to commit turnovers. “Aggressive players may be prone to recklessness, which is consistent with research showing that angry people tend to engage in risky decision-making,” they said.
This study, along with others like it, didn’t suggest that “playing angry” was a scourge to be avoided. But the researchers did suggest that it might be more helpful in sports where people spend more time banging into one another. As much as playing angry might have made Keane a more vigorous athlete, his sport required a combination of physical force and precision.
Keane was well aware that his temper sometimes crippled his team. “Ever since I was a kid, small for my age, my instinct has been to look danger in the eye rather than turn the other cheek,” he once explained. Because he lived in a state of perpetual aggression, he believed he possessed a “self-destruct button” that led to incidents with negative consequences. Sometimes other people pushed it. Sometimes he did.
The captains in Tier One were certainly not immune to destructive outbursts. Inside their case files, I’d found nearly a dozen examples of incidents where they had let their emotions get the best of them, usually in situations where the pressure was high. Among them, there were two that stood out—but for different reasons.
On August 28, 1951, the New York Yankees and the St. Louis Browns were in the fifth inning of a late-season game. The outcome only really mattered to the Yankees, who were locked in a tight race for first place in the American League.
With St. Louis at bat, the home-plate umpire, Ed Hurley, made what seemed to be a routine ball-four call. But because the bases were loaded, it allowed the Browns to walk in a run, cutting the Yankees’ lead to three. Yogi Berra, the Yankees’ catcher, never had any trouble objecting to calls made by umpires. On this occasion, however, he did more than just argue. He whipped off his catcher’s mask and started berating Hurley. He bumped chests with him and, by some accounts, grabbed his arm. His stunned manager and teammates, who rushed over to restrain him, thought Yogi was about to throw a punch.
Berra was ejected from the game, and his teammates and the fans feared what the umpire might put in his game report. Berra was the team’s most indispensable piece—he was on his way to winning the American League’s Most Valuable Player award. If the league suspended Berra, the Yankees knew, they would be hard-pressed to make it to the World Series.
As luck would have it, the league went easy on Berra—he was fined fifty dollars but not suspended. If his teammates hadn’t intervened, however, there was a chance that Berra’s loss of control might have torpedoed the season and eliminated the Yankees from Tier One.
The second peculiar outburst by a Tier One captain came at the tail end of a 1994 World Cup qualifier between the U.S. women’s soccer team and Trinidad and Tobago.
During this era in women’s soccer, the Americans were one of only a handful of truly competitive teams. As such, the Americans spent most of their time going through the motions against overmatched rivals. Trinidad and Tobago was one of the worst teams the United States played on a regular basis, but the routine thrashings had begun to wear on the players. With the game well in hand and Overbeck controlling the ball at midfield, one of the Trinidadians came after her, landing a forceful, studs-up tackle. Then, after they’d both gotten up, the Trinidadian player punched the U.S. captain in the back of the head.
Unlike Berra, whose team was in a tight race for the American League pennant, Overbeck had no compelling reason to strike back—the score at the time was 10–0. But on this day, she wasn’t having it. She not only smacked the player in the face, she tackled her and started punching her on the ground. “I lost it,” she told me. “I’d never lost it like that.”
Overbeck should have been booked. Had they wanted to, soccer officials could have slapped her with a suspension. But the match referee didn’t seem to have a firm grasp on what had happened. In the end, one of Overbeck’s teammates, who’d been trying to break up the fight, was ejected instead.
On the surface, these aggressive acts seemed as if they’d been ripped from the book of Roy Keane. The closer I looked, however, the more different they were. It wasn’t what happened in the heat of the moment but what took place afterward.
As soon as the St. Louis game was over, for example, Yogi Berra parked himself outside the umpires’ dressing room to apologize to Ed Hurley and make clear that he hadn’t meant any harm. Hurley accepted his apology and suggested a light punishment.
When I asked Carla Overbeck about the fight with the Trinidadian player, she explained that she was emotionally spent; the U.S. team had been on the road for two months straight and resented having to play yet another qualifying match against a wobbly opponent. Moreover, she said, she was mortified by what she’d done. “Everyone was like, ‘That was awesome,’ and I’m like, ‘No, it wasn’t.’ I pride myself on being in control. Here we are, crushing them 10–0, and I let her get to me. Afterward I was sobbing.”
Time and again, after Keane had lost his temper on the field, his response was the polar opposite—he rarely showed remorse, even long after the fact. If anything, Keane was known for holding grudges and waiting years to get revenge. In his 2002 memoir, Keane described the motives behind a brutal tackle he’d put on one longtime nemesis, the Norwegian defender Alf-Inge Håland, who had taunted Keane on the field after he’d injured his knee four years earlier. “My attitude was fuck him,” he wrote. “What goes around comes around.”
The more I studied Roy Keane, the more I wondered why—if he knew that his team paid a price for his loss of control—he didn’t try harder to do what Maurice Richard had done: learn to turn his anger on when it was helpful and shut it down when it wasn’t.
Researchers have spent a lot of time looking at the question of why some people are more aggressive than others. They have suggested that these people have different kinds of brains, suffer from cognitive impairment or immaturity, or possess a “warrior gene” that predisposes them to risky behavior. One psychologist, Michael Apter of Georgetown University, theorized that aggression is driven by the pursuit of a pleasure sensation that comes from seeing a rival’s fortunes reversed.
Another idea, backed by laboratory experiments, is that some people have chronically hostile and irritable personalities—they possess a “hostility bias” that makes neutral actions seem threatening and prompts them to react angrily to challenges. People who have this bias struggle to come up with explanations for the motives of others that don’t involve hostility and to respond in ways that aren’t violent.
I suspected Roy Keane might be one of them.
There was one small problem, however: If Keane’s aggression was driven by a hostility bias, then what explained the occasional violent outbursts I’d seen from the captains in Tier One?
A possible answer to this question came in the form of a paper written in 2000 by a trio of researchers at Case Western Reserve University. These researchers believed, as Richard Davidson did, that every person is born with a different mechanism for controlling negative emotions. Some people have robust systems for restraining them, while others do not. But the Case Western scientists believed that restraint wasn’t some machinelike force; it was a resource—a form of energy people kept in reserve. The levels of these reserves varied not only between people but within them. In other words, our restraint tanks will either be empty or full at any moment, depending on how often we’ve been forced to draw from them.
The key argument this study made was that restraint is finite. The more we’re forced to employ our self-control, the less of it we have; and the less we have, the less able we are to inhibit our worst impulses. It’s not clear that this theory is true—later experiments haven’t always backed it up. But it’s still fair to say that the ugly things Yogi Berra, Carla Overbeck, and the other Tier One captains did on the field might have been anomalies. It’s possible that they had ample reserves of restraint, but in those particular moments their tanks were down to fumes. The difference between these captains and Roy Keane was that for them, these incidents were exceedingly rare.
In 2001 and 2002, the momentum that Manchester United had built over three dominant seasons began to fade. The team finished third in the Premier League and failed to make it to the Champions League final for a third straight year. Early in the following season Keane started taking pain injections in his hip, and at the beginning of the next season, after he was suspended for five games for what he’d written about Håland, he opted for surgery.
When he returned to the team in December 2002, Keane vowed to become less confrontational on the pitch—both for the sake of his body and the performance of the team. “I’d come to one firm conclusion, which was to stay on the pitch for ninety minutes in every game,” he explained. “In other words, to curb the reckless, intemperate streak in my nature that led to sendings-off and injuries…to find the balance between unbridled and controlled aggression.” Finally, it seemed, Keane had turned the corner to become a calmer, more deliberate player—and under his steadier leadership, United rallied to win the 2002–03 Premier League title.
The following year, United’s David Beckham left for Real Madrid, and the team struggled to incorporate a new wave of players. Suddenly surrounded by young stars like Cristiano Ronaldo, Keane grew more distant and remote. He resented the way the new generation of players fixated on their clothes, their hair, their flashy cars. United finished third in the league again and bombed out of the Champions League in the round of sixteen.
By November 2005, with the team struggling and Keane nursing a foot injury, his vow to keep a lid on his temper finally gave way. Keane gave an interview in which he ripped into his teammates, accusing them of arrogance, self-absorption, and a shortage of character. “It seems to be in this club that you have to play badly to be rewarded,” he said. “Maybe that is what I should do when I come back. Play badly.”
In one sense, Keane was just doing what Philipp Lahm and other great captains would have done—taking a stand for what he thought was right. He insisted that the interview had been a calculated decision. But while the motivation for speaking out might have been a good one, Keane showed another reason why he didn’t fit the Tier One profile. His comments hadn’t been task-oriented at all. He wasn’t dissecting the team’s strategy on the field the way Lahm had done. His comments about his teammates were aggressively personal. He had taken a bad situation and made it toxic.
After the interview, Alex Ferguson decided he’d had enough. Keane left the team by “mutual consent” and retired as a player soon after.
Since he left the game, Keane has bounced between managing jobs and from one angry confrontation to the next—he was hauled into court over an alleged road rage incident (he was found not guilty) and got into an altercation with a fan at a hotel bar in Ireland. He was accused of angrily ringing the doorbell of a former player for fifteen minutes in an attempt to confront him about malicious rumors he believed the player had spread about him. None of this leaves much doubt that he possesses the hostility bias scientists described.
Roy Keane wasn’t a failure as a captain. Not by a long shot. He had so many of the right traits that it’s no surprise he’s so fondly regarded. There is no question, however, that he was a flawed captain. He lacked a kill switch to regulate his emotions, and he had a penchant for making personal attacks on teammates.
The bigger problem, when it comes to Roy Keane, is that the least effective parts of his character are what he’s most admired for—the fighting, the lack of contrition, and the unyielding barrage of hostility he directed at everyone around him. From the outside, these things made him so vividly different from other captains that they seemed to be the hallmarks of his success as a leader. They overshadowed the things he did that actually helped his team: his dogged play, his water carrying, and his unrivaled talent for making displays of powerful emotion to shore up his teammates.
When soccer fans say their team needs a captain like Roy Keane, what they’re really saying is that it lacks an enforcer on the pitch who intimidates the opposition, or that the players are too soft and comfortable. These things sound good in online forums, but the evidence suggests they’re not the kinds of qualities that turn teams into long-standing Tier One dynasties.
Before this book was published, whenever I told people that its subject was the captains of the world’s greatest sports teams, they would always come back at me with the same response: “Oh, so you’re talking about Michael Jordan and the Bulls.”
To state the obvious, Michael Jeffrey Jordan was a magical athlete, an otherworldly leaper who seemed to hang in midair on the basketball court. But there was more to it than that: Jordan could rebound, defend, handle the ball, slash to the basket, and score from any distance. Another thing that’s rarely acknowledged is how fast he was. Jordan’s college coach said he once ran the forty-yard dash in 4.3 seconds. This unprecedented cocktail of skills produced ten NBA scoring titles and five MVP awards.
On the surface, Jordan’s leadership record seemed equally impressive. He was the Chicago Bulls’ co-captain during each of the team’s six NBA title runs. Like Roy Keane, Jordan had a lengthy list of Captain Class traits. He was tough, focused, and dogged on the court, playing and practicing with relentless intensity. During the 1997 NBA Finals, he battled through a raging stomach bug to score thirty-eight points and hit the clinching shot, only to collapse after the buzzer. Jordan didn’t have the kinds of violent episodes Keane did, but he was still highly aggressive, constantly probing the limits of what the referees would allow, especially in the area of shit-talking opponents.
There is no doubt that the Bulls were one of the best basketball teams in history. In the two seasons between 1995 and 1997, Jordan’s team recorded the two highest NBA Elo ratings of all time, as compiled by FiveThirtyEight.
If public opinion mattered, it would be no contest. Michael Jordan would be one of the greatest captains in history, period. But there are two powerful reasons why this may not be the case. The first is that his teams never made it to Tier One. The second is that Jordan did not match the Captain Class blueprint.
Though it’s often overlooked, Jordan’s first six years in the NBA were not a triumph. Even as he became known as the league’s most electric player, the biggest star in sports, and his team’s undisputed leader, the Bulls did not make it to the NBA Finals. In his first three seasons, the team had a losing record and bombed out in the first round of the playoffs. When Phil Jackson arrived in 1989, he was Jordan’s fourth coach. As captain, Jordan led mostly by needling and belittling his teammates, who lived in perpetual fear of his famously sharp tongue. When Jordan lost confidence in a player, he would lobby management to get rid of him.
In 1988, the Bulls acquired Bill Cartwright, a veteran center. Though he was clumsy and unflashy, had terrible knee problems, didn’t block many shots, and couldn’t catch passes unless they were thrown directly at his nose, Cartwright had excellent footwork and knew how to neutralize the league’s top big men. He could score twenty points a game if called upon but had played alongside enough NBA stars in his nine-year career with the New York Knicks to know how to make space for them. He had no problem carrying water.
Cartwright was quiet and remote in public, with a perpetually pensive, slightly sad expression. He didn’t do speeches, but he was an enthusiastic mentor to the younger players, who called him Teach. As Sam Smith wrote in his book The Jordan Rules, Cartwright had a remarkable work ethic and no illusions about anything coming easily. As Cartwright once put it: “You just play until there’s no game left in your uniform.”
Jordan could not have been more different. On the court he was emotional and animated. Off the court, he was congenial and charming, with stunning good looks and a fondness for finely tailored suits. The first thing that made him stand out from the captains in Tier One was his enthusiasm for celebrity. Beginning with his groundbreaking work for Nike, Jordan would become the most prolific product endorser in sports, building a portfolio that eventually brought in an estimated one hundred million dollars a year. Jordan didn’t just like being a celebrity; he became the model for what a sports celebrity is.
The second difference was the way he played basketball. Jordan rarely labored in the service of his team. He ran the Bulls’ offense as he wished, to the exclusion of the supporting cast, and judged everything the organization did by how much it helped him.
When the Bulls acquired Bill Cartwright in 1988, they traded away the forward Charles Oakley, Jordan’s closest friend on the team. Jordan told the Bulls’ general manager, Jerry Krause, that he virulently opposed the move. Furious about losing Oakley, Jordan went out of his way to make Cartwright feel unwelcome. He mocked him in the locker room, often while Cartwright was within earshot, at one point labeling him Medical Bill for his persistent knee problems. On the court, Jordan sometimes ignored Cartwright when he was open.
Behind the scenes, Cartwright made it known to teammates that he wasn’t a fan of “Michaelball.” Eventually, the tension came to a head. According to Smith, Cartwright confronted Jordan for the things he’d said about him and for telling other players not to pass him the ball. “Michael could walk over just about anybody because he was so overwhelming with his talent,” the former Bulls scout Jim Stack said. “But Bill held his line.”
In 1990, at the beginning of Jordan’s seventh season, the Bulls were on the cusp of putting it all together. They had made three straight trips to the conference finals but couldn’t seem to finish the deal. When the team got off to a sluggish 7–6 start, Phil Jackson decided it was time to do something to heal the locker room. In a stunning move, he announced that Cartwright would join Jordan as co-captain.
The idea of Jordan sharing power was shocking—the fact that he’d be sharing it with Medical Bill was hard to fathom.
Jackson told the Chicago Tribune he’d tapped Cartwright for the role because he was the kind of communicator who could help convince the other players to buy into their roles. “It was about stability,” Cartwright told me. “I’m the guy who was always there early for practice, never late, stayed after, talked to guys, and took care of myself. It was more about the example for the young guys.”
The team responded to Cartwright’s captaincy immediately with a five-game winning streak. The Bulls would go on to finish the season 61–21, sweep through the playoffs with a 15–2 record, and at long last win their first NBA title. It was only then that Jordan finally acknowledged Cartwright’s contributions. “I loved having Charles [Oakley] on the team,” Jordan said, “but Bill made the difference.”
The 1990s Bulls were known as Michael Jordan’s team, and he was credited with leading it to glory. He became a global model for leadership among sports fans—and also for a generation of teams and athletes. But the fact remains that the Bulls hadn’t been able to make their “turn” until Bill Cartwright joined Jordan in the captaincy. It was Bill Cartwright who carried the water, put in the work, and provided the practical communication. He was, in short, the kind of Captain Class presence the team hadn’t had.
Setting aside Jordan’s leadership ability, there was another reason the Bulls never managed to put together a winning streak worthy of Tier One. In 1993, while still in his prime, the thirty-year-old Jordan retired from basketball. Though he would return to the team eighteen months later, Jordan’s hiatus put the Bulls in a tough spot. After three straight titles, they bowed out in the quarterfinal round of the playoffs in the next two seasons.
Of all the ways Michael Jordan strayed from the profile of Tier One leaders, this one was the most baffling and the hardest to unravel. How could he quit?
At the time of his retirement, Jordan was coping with his own devastating personal loss: the death of his father, James, who was murdered in a botched car robbery at a highway rest stop in North Carolina. Jordan had shared a close bond with his dad, and the twists and turns of the investigation consumed him. It would be easy to understand if Jordan had retired because he couldn’t focus on basketball—but Jordan didn’t explain it that way. “Before my father passed, I was thinking about quitting anyway, not quitting but retiring, because I just kind of lost my motivation for the game of basketball,” he said. In another interview, he explained that he’d become “a little bit bored.”
To the public, this was a confounding admission. After all, nobody loved competition more than Jordan. Whether he was playing Horse with teammates after practice, or golf, or table tennis, or poker, he couldn’t bear to lose. In a 1993 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Jordan conceded that he might be a “compulsive competitor.”
Jordan’s obsession with winning never shut off. It was a permanent condition that seemed to be driven by deep emotional forces. Basketball had proved to be a good conduit for a while, but it hadn’t been enough. After retiring, he barely took a breath before setting off on a new challenge: trying to make the roster of Major League Baseball’s Chicago White Sox. Jordan played 127 games in 1994 for the minor-league Birmingham Barons, hitting a measly .202 with 114 strikeouts. Not until baseball’s players went on strike the following summer did Jordan, suddenly idle again, return to the Bulls.
On the field, the captains in Tier One shared Jordan’s relentless drive. Off the field, however, they were basically homebodies—intense competition seemed to be the last thing on their agendas. Early in his career, Bill Russell retreated to his basement after games to play with his model trains. Maurice Richard spent nearly all of his free time with his family and sometimes slept twelve hours a night. Jack Lambert’s teammates accused him of being antisocial on road trips because he spent so much time buried in a book. Carles Puyol, no fan of nightlife, once said: “I consider myself a very quiet, family-oriented person. There are many things that can make you lose focus, and so I have tried to avoid all of that.”
Jordan wasn’t wired this way. He was gripped by an insatiable desire to compete in every waking moment—the longer the odds were against him, the sweeter the victory. Basketball was just one outlet. When he wasn’t on the court, he turned to other pursuits—golf outings, high-stakes poker games, and endorsement deals.
The great mystery of Michael Jordan, the one that made his story so unusual, was why the greatest player basketball has ever seen felt such an overwhelming need to keep proving himself.
Michael Jordan’s induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame, which was held in Springfield, Massachusetts, in September 2009, began with a video tribute. The lights at Symphony Hall dimmed, and soon the audience was treated to a montage of Jordan in his familiar scarlet uniform, launching his body at baskets, pumping his fists after nailing game-winning shots, and, of course, hoisting trophies. By the time he strode up to the podium in a loose-cut putty-colored suit with a black tie and a white pocket square, Jordan was in tears. “Thank you,” he said, drying his watery eyes with long strokes of his thumb and index finger. It took eighty seconds for the cheering to stop. “I told all my friends I was going to come up here and say thank you and walk off,” he began. “I can’t. There’s no way. I’ve got so many people I can thank.”
Jordan began with a few touching tributes to former teammates, coaches, and heroes he’d looked up to. About five minutes in, as he was talking about his siblings, he made the first reference to his “competitive nature.” At the six-minute mark, the speech took a strange turn. Jordan told a story about his high school coach, who hadn’t promoted him to the varsity basketball team as a sophomore. “I wanted to make sure you understood,” Jordan said. “You made a mistake, dude.” The crowd laughed and applauded. Jordan poked out the famous tongue, as if he’d slipped back into game mode.
Most Hall of Fame induction speeches follow a pattern. The player thanks his family, heaps appreciation on teammates and coaches, and praises God for giving him the talent to have such a blessed career. Jordan dispensed with all of that rather quickly. His speech devolved into a long catalog of ancient beefs as he took shots at former NBA players, coaches, and executives who’d disrespected him. It wasn’t the speech of a legend. It was the speech given by an underdog who succeeded despite everyone else’s best efforts.
The reviews of Jordan’s address were resoundingly negative. The NBA writer Adrian Wojnarowski likened it to “a bully tripping nerds with lunch trays in the school cafeteria.” Jordan, he wrote, “revealed himself to be strangely bitter.”
Four years later, Jordan answered his critics in a TV interview. “I was really explaining to people about my competitive nature,” he said. “Most people say that was the worst speech? Okay. That’s from your perspective….I’ll go to my grave thinking, ‘I said what I wanted to say.’ ”
What the speech revealed is that throughout his basketball career, Jordan had spent a great deal of time nourishing every narrative in which he’d been dismissed. Like Roy Keane, Jordan played angry, but his anger wasn’t the kind that pushed him to violence—he rarely lost his temper on the court. Jordan’s anger was an elaborate fabrication. To play his best, he needed to feel slighted, which, in turn, fired him up to go out and try to prove the doubters wrong. “That’s how I got myself motivated,” he once said. “I had to trick myself, to find a focus to go out and play at a certain level.”
To keep the fire of bitterness burning hot, Jordan had to dig deep. He vacuumed up every ancient snub or critical newspaper column he could remember and tossed it into the furnace. The captains in Tier One seemed to have a kill switch to block negative emotions. Jordan had rigged his control box to supply them with fertilizer. The problem with Jordan’s approach is that when the games ended and the arena lights shut off, his emotional appetite did not. He set off to find another game, another kind of challenge—preferably one in which he would be underestimated.
The reason Jordan quit basketball in his prime after winning three NBA championships is that nobody dared to question him anymore. He wasn’t bored, he’d simply run out of fuel. In the end, he wasn’t so much a star as a meteor. When his anger finally burned out, so did the Bulls.
Michael Jordan was one of the shiniest objects sports has ever seen. And because his play received so much attention, his personality was so magnetic, and his teams won so many trophies, people assumed he was the leader of the Bulls and was doing a bang-up job of it. The fact is that he wasn’t a superior captain.
By the time Jordan returned to the Bulls in 1995 for his second tour, Cartwright had left the team. Jordan shared the captaincy with Scottie Pippen, who’d filled in during his absence. Jordan said that he knew that he had some work to do as a leader—but after the team struggled that season, he reverted to his old ways. Jordan’s constant criticism so rankled the veteran guard Steve Kerr that the two men got into a fistfight during preseason training camp.
Those Bulls teams would go on to win another three titles, bringing Jordan’s career haul to six. Yet without Bill Cartwright—and later, Scottie Pippen—sharing the captain’s role, it’s not clear Jordan would have won anything.
Michael Jordan deserves to be celebrated for his sublime athletic ability, his burning will to win, and the extent to which he reimagined celebrity. That’s all fair and appropriate. The notion that he was also an elite leader is not only wrong, it does a disservice to the institution of captaincy. As much as the fans admired and enjoyed their behavior and equated it with surpassing leadership, Jordan and Roy Keane were false idols. As leaders, they were not purebred members of the Captain Class. For teammates, coaches, and executives, their captaincies were the stuff of a thousand migraines.
The best leaders in sports history were not mesmerizing characters. They didn’t always make for great television. That’s what we’ve come to expect, however. So that’s what we continue to get. The chief reason teams choose the wrong people to lead them is because the public judges every captain against this distorted picture.
In the next chapter, we’ll examine another consequence of these mistakes and misperceptions. It’s the increasingly popular notion that leadership is something we’ve outgrown.
• The general opinion among sports fans is that leaders of spectacular teams should operate at a fiery temperature. In recent decades, this logical bias has gone in search of bodies, and it has found them in the person of two men: Roy Keane and Michael Jordan. Both of these captains are considered leadership icons. But a close examination shows that the traits they’re most widely renowned for, and that are most often identified as the key factors that made them outstanding leaders, did not fit the profile of the captains in Tier One.
• The problem with these flawed captains is that they have distorted the picture of what enlightened leadership looks like. They have set a standard that is not only impossible to meet but does not produce the best results. The danger is that people who are charged with choosing leaders will end up promoting people who have the wrong characteristics. But it also increases the chances that after they fail, they will start looking for ways to eliminate the role of a captain entirely.