In 1973, Michael Jackson was already famous with his brothers in the Jackson 5. He was also a 14-year-old freshman, and the school’s football coach had his eye on him.
The school was Montclair College Preparatory School, known as Montclair Prep, a private school in Van Nuys in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. Michael went there for 9th and 10th grade. The school closed in 2012, but in 2009 the principal and the football coach told a newspaper what they remembered about him.
Mark Simpson was the principal by then. His uncle had been running the school back when Michael was a student, and Simpson leafed through the old 1973 yearbook as he talked.
“He was a super kid,” Simpson said. “He was always making jokes; he wanted to be like everyone else.”
Like everyone else, Michael wore the uniform. The school did bend one rule for him, though. “Michael wore a uniform like all the students, but we gave him a bit of freedom,” Simpson said. “He could have long hair.”
Every morning a chauffeur dropped him off about an hour before classes started. Michael spent that hour in the car of an older student, Jon Blosdale, who was a junior. Blosdale was usually racing to finish his homework, and in Chris Cadman’s book “Michael Jackson the Maestro” he remembered his early-morning visitor fondly. “He was a really nice kid, too,” he said. But Michael couldn’t sit still in there: “he always had to push all the buttons in the car and ask what they did. I was trying to get my work done so sometimes I’d have to kick him out of the car.”
And Michael did his own work too. Cadman’s book says he got A grades at Montclair in English grammar, history, math and study methods.
Then there was George Giannini, the football coach. He wanted Michael on the team. “Still, he was good,” the coach told the newspaper.
Michael turned him down politely, and he had a real reason. Here’s how Giannini told it in 2009:
“He told me, ‘You know coach, I’d be a disappointment to the team because I have to leave for that tour in Tokyo with the band.’ I told him, ‘Michael, your singing career is going to end soon and you have to think about a Plan B.’ I think I goofed up!”
A Plan B. For Michael Jackson.
You can hear the coach laughing at himself in that last line. And Michael wasn’t making up an excuse. That spring, the Jackson 5 landed at Tokyo’s airport on April 23, 1973, for their first tour of Japan, with shows starting April 27 at Tokyo’s Imperial Theatre.
So while his classmates were suiting up for practice, the freshman the coach worried about was singing for crowds on the other side of the world. Here’s what Michael picked over a spot on the team.
The Jackson 5 on stage in Japan in 1973
Simpson also noticed how close Michael was to his mother, Katherine. “He idolized her. She was the saint,” the principal said.
It’s easy to see the funny side of the coach’s advice now, and Giannini clearly did. He was looking at a teenage boy and thinking about that boy’s future, the way a good coach does. But Michael had already made up his mind that spring, and the band won.