The Chief
The Basketball School inspired many, perhaps none more than Charlotte Hornets President Fred Whitfield
Before a crowd of media, microphones, cameras and anyone with a stake in the city of Charlotte, Fred Whitfield and his longtime friend Michael Jordan beamed.
For five years, the duo — the greatest basketball player of all time and one of the few members of his famous “inner circle” — had worked to revive a downtrodden NBA franchise and make the city and the state relevant to pro basketball at a level not seen since the early 1990s.
On June 22, their hard work paid off.
Commissioner Adam Silver was in town to announce Charlotte as the host of the 2017 NBA All-Star Game, an event projected to have more than a $100 million economic impact on the city. An event that screams, “Charlotte is back, basketball fans.”
With Whitfield at his side, Jordan spoke of his purchase of the then-Charlotte Bobcats in 2010, reteaming with Whitfield, named the franchise’s president and chief operating officer four years earlier. Jordan called the last five years “our passage back to the top,” a passage that included the revival of the “Hornets” name that left for New Orleans when the team did in 2002.
“It’s been a lot of work,” Jordan said over the sound of lens clicks and shuffling reporters. “Fred knows this.”
Rewind a few months earlier — Whitfield’s sitting in his office on the second floor of the Time Warner Cable Arena, one window overlooking a downtown parking garage and the other a practice court emblazoned with the new Hornets logo. He’s spent the past 45 minutes talking about his time at Campbell University where he was a member of the school’s first Division I men’s basketball team and later inducted into the program’s Hall of Fame — and how the world famous Campbell Basketball School shaped his life.
It was in Buies Creek, he says, where he learned about life and the game of basketball from great men like Wooden, McCall, McKinney and Maravich. It was in Buies Creek where met Jordan and became fast friends long before MJ’s meteoric rise to basketball stardom. It was in Buies Creek where Whitfield was convinced to pursue degrees in business and law — decisions that cleared the path that would eventually lead to Charlotte.
In less than an hour, it becomes clear that the Charlotte Hornets’ success wasn’t just the result of a five-year plan. The city’s return to basketball respectability was molded decades earlier, 136 miles east in a cramped, musty gym in Buies Creek.
Whitfield attended his first Campbell basketball camp when he was 8. Two hours away from his parents in Greensboro for a week, he attended the camps with his friends every summer until he was 18. He has fond memories of the gyms they learned in, the buses they rode in and the dorms they stayed in on campus.
“Every June I looked forward to coming back and seeing all my friends,” he said. “You had kids from all over the state and some from out of state, and the camaraderie we had … that’s what really stuck with me. That’s what I remember most.”
The camps helped his game tremendously as well. McCall’s camps had a strong focus on fundamental basketball skills, Whitfield said. He was able to take those fundamentals and hone them in the weeks leading into his middle or high school basketball seasons. The result — Whitfield was recruited by Campbell after his senior year, but he instead chose to play for UNC-Greensboro, a Division III school at the time. After his freshman year, Whitfield was named an honorable mention All-American.
“Coincidentally, after Campbell’s run in the NAIA finals, they chose to become a Division I school that next year,” Whitfield said. “I reached out to Coach [Danny] Roberts, because I wanted to play against better talent.”
Campbell went 9-15 in its first year as a Division I independent and 10-16 the following season, playing most of its games on the road and even its “home” games in Raleigh or Fayetteville because Carter Gym didn’t meet certain specifications to host big games. In his senior year, the Camels went 15-12, and Whitfield earned a spot on the national All-Independent team (it would take another seven years before Campbell earned a winning record again). He finished his career averaging 12.6 points per game.
Playing for Campbell offered Whitfield the opportunity each summer to take part in the camp he loved so much as a kid. By the late 1970s, Campbell Basketball School was still drawing more than 1,500 kids and dozens of big- name coaches and athletes from the ACC and other big conference schools. Whitfield became a counselor, which meant teaching kids throughout the day and taking part in some of the legendary pick-up games at Carter Gym at night.
“The counselor games at night … we had the entire community coming to see these games,” Whitfield said, recalling games that included mega-stars like Virginia’s Ralph Sampson, UNC’s James Worthy and Clyde Austin, Sidney Lowe and Hawkeye Whitney of N.C. State. “I took these games seriously. All the Campbell players took them seriously, at least more than the ACC players. This was our opportunity to gauge just how good we really were, as opposed to how good we thought we were.”
Another star Whitfield got to know was a young kid coming off a memorable freshman year at UNC that ended with him hitting the game-winning shot in the national title game. Whitfield, by then an assistant coach for Campbell, was in the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans in March 1982 for a coaches’ conference when Michael Jordan became a national name by hitting a 16-foot jump shot from the left wing with 15 seconds to go to beat Patrick Ewing’s Georgetown Hoyas, 63-62.
Jordan had first attended Campbell’s camp a year earlier after his senior year of high school and would return to Buies Creek two months after the big shot that made him a big shot. Pre-celeb Jordan was in Whitfield’s group during that first camp, and the two hit it off immediately. When Campbell wasn’t playing, Whitfield would drive up to Chapel Hill to catch Jordan’s Tar Heels and often go out to eat with him and Jordan’s roommate, Buzz Peterson, after those games.
In Buies Creek, Whitfield shared the bench as an assistant coach with Press Maravich, former head coach at Clemson, N.C. State and LSU and father to Hall of Famer “Pistol” Pete Maravich. Whitfield earned his MBA during his return to Campbell, and the elder Maravich was on his case constantly about getting out of basketball and getting a law degree.
“Press was a father figure and a mentor to me,” Whitfield said. “I sat next to him for a whole year, and he kept on me about law school. ‘You’re too damn smart to be a coach,’ he’d tell me. I didn’t know what he meant by that, because it felt like some coaches were doing pretty well for themselves. But I took it to heart.”
Whitfield left Campbell, MBA in hand, and worked in marketing for Southern Bell. It took one more push by Maravich — this one in the form of a long hand-written letter — to convince him to seek another path. The next year, Whitfield was accepted to North Carolina Central’s law school.
This was in 1985. The following year, Michael Jordan set an NBA record with 63 points in a playoff game against the Boston Celtics. In ‘87, he wowed the world by winning his first of two straight Slam Dunk Contests.
Back in North Carolina, Whitfield would visit Jordan or Sampson during breaks from law school and catch as many games as possible, especially games in Charlotte. With law degree in hand, Whitfield went to work for the law firm that represented Jordan and other NBA stars like Ewing, Charlotte’s Alonzo Mourning, Muggsy Bogues and Dikembe Mutombo. From there, Whitfield went on to Nike, where he managed more than 150 players in the NBA’s Eastern Conference and negotiated their shoe endorsement deals. He was a big factor in the highly successful “L’il Penny” ad campaigns featuring the Orlando Magic’s Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway.
Each step in his career — coach, marketing professional, lawyer and player agent — molded Whitfield to become the successful NBA team executive he is today. As president and chief operating officer, Whitfield oversees all business operations for the Hornets and Time Warner Cable Arena. Since his arrival, he’s overseen the most dramatic growth in both franchise and arena history — from simultaneously signing an arena naming rights deal and a television broadcast rights deal to doubling the number of corporate partners and launching the Cats Care community initiative.
In his time, Charlotte has attracted the CIAA, ACC and NCAA tournaments, global concert tours like Paul McCartney and Billy Joel and the 2012 Democratic National Convention. This year’s All-Star announcement was the icing on the cake for a man who says he’s “too busy” to sit back and reflect on his career and his success. But he is well aware of where it all started.
“The culture of the camps at Campbell, the great education I got there, having a guy like Press really push me to dream much bigger than I was dreaming at the time and to ultimately meet my boss,” said Whitfield, who was recently named to the University’s Board of Trustees. “Other than being fortunate to have the parents I have, Campbell is at the core of everything positive that’s happened in my life.”