First dance with a superstar
Capel recalls unforgettable night of pickup with Jordan
Michael Jordan, a year removed from beating the Utah Jazz in the 1998 NBA Finals and six months after retiring for a second time, was playing pickup at the Dean E. Smith Center in Chapel Hill, N.C. His teammate? Pitt coach Jeff Capel. “I’ll never forget it,” Capel said. “I hear these stories about his competitiveness and his drive. And for that night, I got to see it firsthand.”
After being asked about ESPN’s “The Last Dance” documentary on Pitt’s “Panthers at Home” Facebook Live stream
Tuesday night, Capel took athletic director Heather Lyke, football coach Pat Narduzzi and the viewers back two decades.
At the time, Capel was between his illustrious playing days at Duke and the beginning of a coaching career that eventually led him to Pitt.
After a season with the CBA’s Grand Rapids Hoops and before heading to France to keep trying his hand professionally, Capel was home in North Carolina.
His brother, Jason, now a Pitt assistant, just wrapped up his freshman year with the Tar Heels.
North Carolina was having its annual basketball camp, where former players returned to Chapel Hill to help out and provide a little entertainment. It was a tradition, Capel said, that former players squared off with the current players in front of the camp.
Jordan, a Tar Heels legend, showed up. And apparently, he didn’t play well.
“He was anxious to play again, and they were not going to play,” Capel said. “So my brother called me that Thursday night and said, ‘Hey, I don’t know what you’ve got going on tomorrow, but I think Mike’s coming to play with us.’ ”
Capel guided Duke to the 1994 national championship game. He finished his career with the Blue Devils in the top 10 all time in minutes played, assists and 3-point field goal percentage. And he was a significant part of 83 of Mike Krzyzewski’s career wins. He experienced quite a bit in his career.
But the opportunity to play pickup with “His Airness”? For a guy who grew up wanting to go to North Carolina, who went to high school 90 minutes away from Chapel Hill, who, like every young basketball player in the 1980s and ’90s, admired Jordan, well, that was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity Capel knew he had to seize.
Capel’s decision to play that Friday night did ruffle some feathers. His girlfriend at the time — now his wife, Kanika — was interning in Charlotte, and he was supposed to visit for the weekend. Capel said him bailing led to “probably one of the biggest arguments” they’ve ever gotten into. But it was all worth it when Capel arrived at the Tar Heels’ arena with a couple former Duke teammates.
“We’re walking down the tunnel and all you hear is a ball,” Capel said. “They have all the bleachers back, and you have the courts. And all the way in the far corner — I mean, I’ll never forget this — he had on some black
Jumpman shorts, a lime green Jumpman shirt and black and green Jordans. And it’s him.”
Jordan was there putting up shots, playing a little one-on-one 30 minutes before the pickup session was set to get underway at 10 p.m.. When it did, Capel said, it was a game featuring the “who’s who of basketball.” More specifically, it was the who’s who of North Carolina basketball. Former Tar Heel stars Vince Carter, Antawn Jamison, Jerry Stackhouse and Rasheed Wallace — NBA All-Stars in their own right — took the floor.
In the meantime, Capel picked up three guys and left one spot open.
“And it just happened that Jordan’s team lost the first game. So now I have to pick a fifth, and it comes down to Michael Jordan or my brother. And it was a pretty easy choice. I picked Michael Jordan,” Capel said. “We won the rest of the games. He was by far the best player on the floor. He’s talking trash, and he’s competing at a high level against all these current NBA players. He’s dominating.”
Jordan and Capel’s team took four in a row before everyone stopped for a water break. Capel was exhausted keeping up with Jordan’s intensity, and so were his buddies. One of his teammates went as far to say he might not be able to keep playing. Capel grabbed him and in a hushed tone told him, “Hey man, we can’t let Mike down. We’ve got to keep going.”
Then, Jordan approached Capel. That’s when Pitt’s future coach asked arguably the greatest player who ever lived what was on his mind.
“I said to him, ‘Let me ask you a question: Do you play a lot?’ And he said, ‘No. Yesterday was the first time I’ve played since we beat Utah in the finals last year. And I was so bad. So this morning, I worked out, I lifted, I got up some shots. I’ve been in here since 8 p.m.,’ ” Capel remembered with a smile. “I’ve always told that story to my teams because he had a standard of who he was and what he expected himself to be.
“It was absolutely unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable, that experience.”