The Buzz on MJ
Buzz Peterson will travel to Springfield, Mass., for the weekend and is looking forward to seeing his friend Michael Jordan inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Peterson, a roommate of Jordan when they played at North Carolina, said that it amazes him how hard Jordan worked to become a great player.
He recalled a basketball camp his senior year of high school before he knew Jordan – Peterson was on a different team at camp and didn’t get to see Jordan play – and asked one of his high-school teammates in Jordan’s group for a scouting report.
“I asked, ‘How good is this Mike?’” Peterson said. “He said, ‘He can jump. He can do an alley-oop or two. But he can’t shoot it. He can’t do any of that.’
“Thinking back to then and to have seen how his game developed, how he hit a shot to win a national championship, to do all that he went on to do…it’s incredible.”
Peterson obviously got the chance to make a first-hand assessment, and said that what has always impressed him the most is Jordan’s mental strength and determination.
“I think the biggest thing about him that I would tell everybody is how he’s so strong mentally,” Peterson said. “He’s so competitive. I don’t know if there’s anybody comparable to do that right now, unless maybe it’s Tiger Woods and how mentally strong of a competitor he is.
“When we were there in Chapel Hill the first year he would tell the veterans, ‘Hey, I’ll beat you one on one.’ They’d say, ‘come on, you can’t beat me.’ He’d say, ‘Let’s go play.’
“After a while, after he started beating everybody, when he said he’d do something they didn’t doubt it any more.
“He was so sure about what he could do.”