U.S. 117 IS the mother road of Michael Jordan’s past. It runs from Wilmington to Wilson. There have been Jordans living along that corridor since the Civil War. Al Edgerton, a longtime engineer in the North Carolina Department of Transportation and a grade school classmate of Jordan’s, was part of a crew that resurfaced 117 less than a decade ago. The highway cuts through fields and little towns. “A lot of agricultural type equipment is running up and down that road,” Edgerton says. “When you get around Wallace, where Mike’s dad was from, that’s an ag-type county. You have a lot of farm trucks and tractors, pulling trailers of tobacco.”