The night Pitt coach Jeff Capel met Michael Jordan
Jeff Capel has kept busy in recent months rebuilding his team with a five-man freshman class.
But when Pitt’s basketball coach is off the clock, he makes sure not to miss “The Last Dance,” the ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan.
It brought to his mind the night in the summer of 1999 when Capel, who played at Duke, was a teammate of Jordan’s at the Smith Center on the campus of the University of North Carolina.
Capel said he was planning to drive to Charlotte, N.C., to visit his then-girlfriend (now his wife), Kanika, when his brother, Jason, called with the opportunity to play pickup basketball with several NBA players who had played for the Tar Heels. Jordan was one of them.
Capel, who said he grew up a “huge” Jordan and Chicago Bulls fan, decided to cancel the Charlotte trip.
“It was probably one of the biggest arguments we ever got in,” he said of the girl he eventually married. “I stayed to play.
“We walk into the Smith Center, you’re walking down the tunnel and you hear a ball (bouncing). And all the way in the far corner, I’ll never forget this, he had on some black Jumpman shorts, a lime green Jumpman shirt and some black and green Jordans. And it’s him.”
When Capel was picking his team, he left one spot open.
“It comes down to Michael Jordan or my brother (now a Pitt assistant). It was a pretty easy choice. We won the rest of the games.”
When they took a water break after playing four games in a row, Capel was exhausted, but savoring the moment.
“Mike’s there, so you’re playing so hard,” he said.
When another player told him he was ready to call it a night, Capel grabbed him and said, “Hey, man, we can’t let Mike down. We have to keep going.”
Jordan walked up to Capel and admitted he wasn’t at his best. Didn’t matter. “He was, by far, the best player on the floor,” the future Pitt coach said.
“And he’s talking trash, competing at a high level. Against all these current NBA players, he’s dominating.
“You hear these stories about his competitiveness and his drive and for that night, I got to see it first-hand.”
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Jerry DiPaola is a TribLive reporter covering Pitt athletics since 2011. A Pittsburgh native, he joined the Trib in 1993, first as a copy editor and page designer in the sports department and later as the Pittsburgh Steelers reporter from 1994-2004. He can be reached at jdipaola@triblive.com.
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