Tuesday, November 6, 2018 
 
 TIP OFF 2018
4B

I

t was June, and Jordan Poole 
wanted to talk.
He dialed John Beilein, fresh 
off a flirtation with the Detroit 
Pistons, and secured a meeting. 
The two, along with assistant coach 
DeAndre Haynes, sat down in Beilein’s 
office. This wasn’t the first time the trio met 
over the course of the Poole’s first year in 
Ann Arbor, but the tone had changed — and 
that change had come from Poole.
The sophomore wanted Beilein to know 
that he was ready to be a leader. He wanted 
Beilein to know he was locked in, putting 
in hours at the gym. He wanted Beilein to 
know that, with Duncan Robinson, Moritz 
Wagner 
and 
Muhammad-Ali 
Abdur-
Rahkman gone, he was ready to step up and 
help fill the void. More than anything, he 
wanted Beilein to know that freshman year 
was behind him.
Haynes quietly smiled throughout the 
whole thing.
“He was proud, I guess, for the way that 
I called the meeting,” Poole told the Daily, 
all 6-foot-5 of him hunching forward in 
his chair. “Cause he was in all the other 
meetings that weren’t so good, earlier on in 

the year.”
Three months before making that 
phone call, Poole etched himself into 
Michigan lore with a game-winner that 
sent the Wolverines to the Sweet Sixteen 
and added a sentence to his epitaph. He 
ran laps around the arena that night in 
Wichita, then embraced a horde of cameras 
disproportionate to his playing time as the 
Wolverines carved their way through the 
NCAA Tournament field.
That moment is what his freshman year 
— and perhaps his entire career with the 
Wolverines — will be remembered for. It’s 
not what his freshman year was about.
Five days after that shot, against Texas 
A&M, Poole jumped a passing lane when he 
should’ve stayed put, handing the Aggies’ 
Robert Williams an uncontested dunk. 
Poole went straight to the bench. That 
wasn’t what his freshman year was about 
either.
Rather, it was finding the balance 
between those two moments — the unafraid 
shotmaking that extended Michigan’s 
season and the undisciplined flashes that 
would send Beilein into a conniption — that 
defined the last year for Jordan Poole.

“I was just outgoing,” Poole said. “And 
coming from a high school where I’m 
always able to be the man, and the coach 
who has been here so many years and he 
wants things his way. And a kid with so 
much confidence — I wasn’t gonna let him 
break me.
“… It was definitely like a clash.”
***
Jordan Poole is a walking superlative — 
unique, outgoing, confident. Anyone who 
has ever met him will tell you this, and it 
doesn’t take long to see.
Once Poole arrived at Michigan, it took 
all of one pickup game for that to become 
apparent.
“He came in and just fired the first shot,” 
said Ibi Watson. “I knew that from right 
there, he wasn’t lacking any confidence.”
It wasn’t just the first shot though. It was 
the first shot, on his first touch, in his first 
pickup game, of his first year, and it was a 
deep 3-pointer. The next time down the 
floor, as soon as he touched the ball, Poole 
launched it again. Oh, and he hit them both.
“It’s not that it’s disrespectful or anything 
like that,” Robinson said. “But it definitely 
kinda put everyone else on notice.”

