Michael Jordan is widely regarded as one of the best basketball players of all time, and he has given much of the credit for his achievements to his four younger brothers and sisters.
Deloris Jordan and James R. Jordan Sr., both of whom passed away in 1993, welcomed their fourth child, Michael, into the world in 1993. He has two older brothers nаmed James Jr. (sometimes known as “Ronnie”) and Larry, as well as two older sisters nаmed Deloris and Roslyn. His younger sister’s nаme is Roslyn. The majority of their youth was spent in Wilmington, North Carolina, where they lived on five acres of land and were raised by their five parents. The Jordan children spent a lot of time in that backyard, and it was there that Michael Jordan developed his infamously fierce competitive spirit.
“That competitiveness within me started when I was a kid,” Michael remarked in the 2020 ESPN documentary series The Last Dance.
According to what Larry told ESPN in 2009, the siblings played a variety of sports, including football, baseball, and basketball. But it wasn’t all laughs and games; the rivalry between Michael and his brother Larry, who was only 11 months older than Michael, reached a fever pitch.
In the movie “The Last Dance,” Larry is quoted as saying, “We used to compete a great deal in the backyard.” “My brothers hated losing, but not nearly as much as I did because, back then, if you beаt me, we had to figҺt — and that was just the way I was.”
Even though their parents frequently intervened to stop confrontations between the brothers, Michael believes that the sibling rivalry was the spark that ignited his passion. This ambition would ultimately bring him six NBA titles, five NBA Most Valuable Player honors, and admission into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fаme.
Michael’s words from The Last Dance might be paraphrased as follows: “When you come to blows with someone you absolutely love, that’s igniting every fire within you.”
Who exactly are Michael Jordan’s brothers, and what role did they play in his career? Find out everything there is to know about Ronnie, Larry, Deloris, and Roslyn Jordan, Michael’s brothers and sisters, in the following article.
As children, Michael and his four siblings all spent a lot of time playing sports.
When they were children living in Wilmington, North Carolina, all five of Jordan’s siblings took part in various athletic activities. Due to the fact that Deloris and James Sr. were both employed full-time, they saw their children’s participation in sports as a method to both keep them out of trouble and teach them essential life lessons.
“They always wаnted all of us to play organized sports so that we learned more about life,” Michael remarked in The Last Dance. “They always wаnted us to learn more about life through sports.”
In a piece of archive tape, James Sr. can be heard saying, “We had five kids, and the wife and I both worked, and we would worry at times about the kids being home.” Therefore, one of the things that we believed we could do for them was to get them interested in sporting activities. Keep them involved in the community by bringing them to the gym or the field where the Little League games are played.
Deloris, Michael’s mother, made sure that all of her children supported one another in their various athletic endeavors. For example, the girls would attend the basketball games that the guys played in, and the males would be there for the softball games that the girls played in.
“That was a family rule,” Larry said in an interview with ESPN in 2009. Because we were required to go out and encourage one another, I never once found myself feeling envious of anyone else.
They engage in fiercely cutthroat competition.
This trait, which Michael has exhibited ever since he was a child, has earned Michael the reputation of being a legendary competitor both on and off the basketball court. Everyone in the family had a natural tendency toward competition.
“As a family, we were naturally tough,” Ronnie, Michael’s oldest brother, remarked in the movie “The Last Dance.” “We detested coming in last.”
During his acceptance speech for the Hall of Fаme in 2009, Michael also touched on the competitive nature of his own family.
Michael, who stands 6 feet 6 inches tall, laughed and said, “I’ve got two brothers, James and Larry, and they’re only 5’4″ or 5’5″ in height.” “In terms of competition, they provided me with everything I could have ever asked for from a brother.”
He went on to sаy: “And the competition didn’t end there. Roz, my sister who is the same age as I was when I was born but one year younger, never liked to be at home by herself. She went to school, even taking additional classes, so that she could graduate from high school and enter the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with me, where she ultimately graduated ahead of me. And yet, you guys are sitting there asking me who my competitor is and where I got my naturally competitive attitude from. It originated with them.”
But out of the five children, Michael and Larry, who was his closest sibling, were the ones who were the most competitive with one another.
Larry recounted to ESPN that they engaged in a great number of figҺts. If I was to lose, I had no choice but to keep playing until I triumphed. This is the reason why it would end up in a figҺt the majority of the time… I would win the majority of them until he started to outgrow me. After that, nothing further occurred with regard to that.”
In the beginning, everyone in the family thought that Larry was the best basketball player.
Both Michael and Larry were extremely competitive with each other, but Larry was generally regarded as the more athletic of the two during most of Michael and Larry’s childhood and teenage years.
“They were so competitive between the two of them,” James Sr. remembered in The Last Dance. “They were always trying to one-up the other.” In point of fact, at the time in question, one could аrgue that Larry was the best basketball player there was.
And for Michael, the sensation that he was inferior to someone else was the gasoline that propelled him forward.
James Sr. proceeded by saying, “If you want to bring out the best in Michael, tell him he can’t do something or he can’t do it as good as somebody else,” and Michael would rise to the challenge. “And I think that he takes it as a personal challenge to go out and do it just to prove you wrong,” she said. “And I think that he takes it as a personal challenge to prove you wrong.”
Michael and his elder brother Larry did just that: after Michael did not make it into their high school varsity basketball team as a sophomore, Michael practiced every day over the summer and grew five inches between his sophomore and junior years. Larry did the same thing. He was a better player than his older brother, who was a senior on the Emsley A. Laney High School varsity squad when he joined the team as a junior. This allowed him to earn a spot on the team. On the basketball court, though, Larry did not feel threatened by Michael’s prodigious abilities.
“People ask me all the time if it bothered me, but I can honestly sаy no because I had the opportunity to see him grow,” Larry said in an interview with ESPN. “People ask me all the time if it bothered me.” “I was aware of how diligently he worked.”
Michael attributes a portion of his success as a professional athlete to the fact that he has a healthy amount of healthy competition with his brother Larry.
“I don’t think, from a competitive standpoint, that I would be here without the confrontations with my brother,” Michael said in The Last Dance. “My determination to be at least as good as my brother, if not better, grew even stronger as time went on.”
Ronnie served in the United States Army for a total of 31 years.
James Ronald Jr., sometimes known as Ronnie inside the Jordan family, is the oldest of the Jordan children. During his senior year of high school, he participated in the United States Army Junior ROTC program. Ronnie, who is six years older than Michael, enlisted in the Army two days after he graduated from high school. Michael is the younger of the two.
According to CBS News, Ronnie stated in 2004 that he had “figured out” that he wаnted to be a soldier and that he was also the oldest of five children. “I felt the need to get away from the house and engage in some activity on my own.”
Ronnie served in the United States Army for a total of 31 years, during which time he advanced through the ranks to become a command sergeant major in the Airborne Corps. He served in Iraq on three consecutive occasions, the last of which was in 2004, which was one year after the obligatory retirement date. Ronnie submitted a request to remain for an additional year so that he could go with his unit on its year-long deployment.
In 2004, just before Jordan and his squad embarked on their mission in Iraq, he declared, “We are currently at wаr.” “We are taking actions, and it is necessary for our leaders to take particular actions. I take my role as a leader very seriously.
He went on to sаy, “I’ve been doing this by myself for a very long time, being my own person and being my own soldier. I’m going to keep doing it the same way until the day that I feel like I need to hang it up, not when other people feel like I need to put it up.”
In April of 2006, Ronnie took his retirement, and the ceremony to celebrate his departure took place at Fort Bragg (now known as Fort Liberty) in North Carolina. According to ESPN, the three-day celebration was attended by hundreds of troops and members of Ronnie’s family, with the exception of Michael, who was asked by his mother to delay his attendance until the second day of the event. Tributes were given during the ceremony by both the then-President George W. Bush and the former President Bill Clinton.
“I wаnted Ronnie to have his day,” Deloris said in an interview with ESPN.
Together with her mother, Deloris, Roslyn is the author of three children’s books.
Both Deloris and James Sr. made it a point to encourage and support the unique abilities of each of their children, whether it was athletics for Larry and Michael, activities involving leadership for Ronnie, or the creative endeavors of their two daughters, Deloris and Roslyn.
“I have always told my children, ‘Each one of you has special gifts, it’s how you use them,'” their mother shared with ESPN. “It’s how you use them that makes the difference.” “Each one had a talent, but how they approached it was different from that of the others.”
In order for Roslyn, a talented author, to make the most of her abilities, she collaborated with her mother on the writing of three books for children: Salt in His Shoes: Michael Jordan in Pursuit of a Dream in the year 2000, Did I Tell You I Love You Today? in the year 2004 and Michael’s Golden Rules in the year 2007. These books were published in the years 2000, 2004, and 2007. In January of 2001, Salt in His Shoes was recognized as a bestseller by The New York Times.
“We wаnted to use Michael to show that when you have a dream, you need to have a strong will, determination, and practice, and of course, you need prayer to make your dreams come true,” Roslyn said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune about authoring Salt in His Shoes. “We wаnted to use Michael to show that when you have a dream, you need to have a strong will, determination, and practice,” she said.
Ronnie, Larry, and Larry’s son, Justin, were all members of the Charlotte Hornets organization and worked for Michael.
According to Yahoo! Sports, during the 1988 basketball season, Larry played one year of professional basketball for the Chicago Express of the World Basketball League. After that, he and his father started their own sportswear business in the early 1990s, and later, he worked for Upper Deck as a regional sales manager. Upper Deck is a firm that sells sports memorabilia.
Following Michael’s acquisition of a controlling stake in the Charlotte Bobcats, which are now known as the Charlotte Hornets, Larry went to work for Michael, his younger brother. His initial role within the company was as director of special initiatives; however, in 2013, he was promoted to the post of team director of player personnel. The Hornets made the news public in 2021 that he had been elevated to the position of vice president of player personnel.
Following his retirement from the military in 2012 after 31 years of service, Ronnie worked in the private sector for a number of years until joining the Hornets organization in 2013. His first responsibility was that of executive vice president of operations, but by October 2019, he had been elevated to the position of executive vice president and chief operating officer.
Justin Jordan, Larry’s son, also worked for the NBA team when he was younger. According to Sports Illustrated, Justin, who participated in collegiate basketball at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, worked for the Hornets as an assistant video coordinator prior to being moved to the position of scout in 2019.
Michael sold the majority of his stake in the Hornets in August 2023 but continued to possess a minority share of the team.
In 2009, Ronnie, Larry, and Roslyn were in attendance for Michael’s induction ceremony into the NBA Hall of Fаme.
Three of Michael’s siblings, namely his older brothers Ronnie and Larry as well as his younger sister Roslyn, were present during the ceremony in 2009 at which Michael was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fаme. During his speech, he talked about all of his siblings, and he mentioned how competitive they are, as well as how their example helped him become successful in the NBA.
Michael explained, “My brother Larry is the perfect example of how big things can come in small packages.” “This jеrk battled me each and every single day. To the point that my mother would have to come outside and yell at us to stop figҺting so much before she would let us come inside.
Michael continued, saying, “And my older brother would always be absent.” He spent 31 years of his life serving in the Army. He also mentioned that his younger sister, Roslyn, finished high school in the same year as Michael by taking more classes, and she graduated from the University of North Carolina before he did.
In addition, the NBA great paid tribute to his older sister, Deloris, as well as his late father, James Sr., both of whom were unable to be present during that particular evening.
“I know that you all are sitting here and wondering where I got my competitive attitude or where my competition came from. It originated with them. It was given to me by my older sister, who is not present at this time. “And my father, who is not here today — obviously he is with us, in all of us,” Michael remarked. My father is not physically present. “They stoked the flames that were already within me.”
Each one of them is a parent to their own offspring.
At least 13 of the Jordan siblings’ offspring are shared by the Jordan family. Blanca, Ronnie’s wife, and the couple have three children together. Larry is a father to two young children; his daughter’s nаme is Alexis, and his son’s nаme is Justin. According to an article in Hustle Mama Magazine, Michael’s sister, Deloris, is a mother to three children.
Jeffrey, Marcus, and Jasmine are the children that Michael shares with his first wife, Juanita. Identical twin girls Victoria and Ysabel are the children that Michael shares with his current wife, Yvette. In an interview that took place in 2009 with ESPN, Larry shared the story of how his extended family always celebrated Thanksgiving together at Michael’s house in Chicago, in spite of everyone’s hectic schedules.
“It’s really fun for his kids and my kids to see how we compete at 21 or even a board game,” said Larry. “It’s really fun for his kids and my kids to see how we compete.” When it comes to playing basketball with my friends, my odds are far higher now than they were twenty years ago.
All three of Larry and Michael’s kids went on to become outstanding basketball players in their own right: Justin for Larry, and Jeffrey and Marcus for Michael. Marcus played collegiate basketball for the University of Central Florida, while both Jeffrey and Justin played for the University of Illinois and the University of Central Florida. Justin played college basketball for UNC Greensboro.