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.”