A former schoolteacher had one wish when she entered hospice care: to reconnect with one of her students, NBA great Michael Jordan.
Ms. Etta was the transportation coordinator at Emsley A. Laney High School in Wilmington, North Carolina when Jordan, 63, was a teenager. She said she wanted to give her former student one last hug.
Getting ahold of the basketball legend didn’t prove easy, but when a hospice care worker named Wendy received a call from an unknown number, the voice on the other end was unmistakable.
“Is this Ms. Etta,” Jordan asked.
Wendy put Ms. Etta on the phone and the two talked, reconnecting nearly 50 years after Jordan was her student.
“They laughed, reminisced, picked at each other, and shared a moment that brought tears to everyone in the room,” Ms. Etta’s facility, Lower Cape Fear LifeCare, wrote via Instagram on May 12 alongside photos of Jordan and Ms. Etta talking via video chat. “A memory her family will carry with them forever.”
“Our patient, Ms. Etta, taught Michael at Laney High School many years ago, and as she reflected on her favorite memories and former students, his name kept coming up,” the caption read. “Ms. Etta had an interesting bucket list wish…to hug Michael’s neck one more time.”
In a Facebook post the same day, LifeCare wrote that “this is what hospice is about.”
“It is about living as comfortably and fully as possible,” they wrote. “It is about creating moments of connection, peace, laughter, and love. Sometimes those moments are quiet. Sometimes they are unforgettable. And sometimes… they even involve the GOAT.”
Jordan graduated from Laney in 1981 after famously not making the school’s varsity basketball team as a sophomore. He went on to play college basketball at North Carolina, bursting onto the national scene with a game-winning shot over Georgetown as a freshman.
The Chicago Bulls drafted Jordan as the third overall pick in the 1984 NBA Draft, where he won six championships and five NBA MVP awards, retiring as arguably the greatest basketball player of all-time.
In 2019, he donated $1.1 million to his former high school, half of which went to the Laney athletic department, according to ABC11.
“Mike decided that he wanted to take care of Laney High School with him and his attorneys wanting to make sure that it would go entirely to Laney High School,” Laney Athletic Director Fred Lynch, who was Jordan’s high school basketball coach, said at the time. “So, Mike is still the man.”
He added that the portion of the money that did not go to athletics would “help everybody.”
“A school our size with 2,200 kids, there is always a need for laptops, computers and tech stuff that will benefit all the kids,” Lynch said.
