At a moment when we are preoccupied with the millennium, with events and people who marked this grand passage of time now nearing their end, the temptation is to call Michael Jordan a man for all seasons–even if he did struggle with the summer game.
The truth is, Jordan was the man for his season, this moment in the waning years of the 20th Century and second millennium when image often was everything and talent was only a component of celebrity in sports and entertainment.
He stands alone for a combination of surpassing athletic talent refined by hard work and composure that made being Mike look effortless. It was not only his court presence but his having a presence off the court that made Jordan so unusual even other star athletes were in his thrall.
“He is a cultural icon,” said world champion cyclist Lance Armstrong, “and I mean around the world.”
After Jordan announced Wednesday his second retirement from pro basketball, it seems not enough to remember just his achievements as a basketball player. After all, what more can one say beyond the hyperbolic inscription on the statue outside the United Center: “Best There Ever Was. Best There Ever Will Be.”
Ever Will Be? There presumably are a lot of millennia still to go before our sun burns out, and “ever” covers all of them. Yet there is no doubt Jordan will transcend in some way the future of sport, at least as the measure by which all of basketball’s subsequent great players will be judged.
“He is the most famous person in the sports world since Muhammad Ali,” gold-medal skier Picabo Street said. “But above all, we love to watch Michael play basketball because his moves were revolutionary.”
He also has become a cultural icon in a world where athletes are revered and sport has become a near theology, even if sport itself is “of relative unimportance to the condition of society,” in the words of sociologist Harry Edwards. Jordan clearly has transcended sport through a singular ability to live up to the iconic image a shoe company helped manufacture for him.
“No matter how marketed you are, you still have to perform,” Olympic figure skating champion Scott Hamilton said.
Jordan did that so well and with such style that his fame knows no boundaries. Lots of those billion-odd Chinese apparently do care and the French daily sports newspaper, L’Equipe, devoted the first three pages of its Thursday editions to the star of this most American game. In France, where the national soccer team just won the World Cup, kids in the poor Paris suburbs relate more to Jordan and basketball than to soccer heroes.
The hero of that world championship team, Zinedine Zidane, became last week the first Frenchman selected L’Equipe’s world “Champion of Champions.” Jordan, who won the annual award in 1992, was second. Zidane found it more than odd to be ahead of Jordan on any list.
“Be serious. I don’t even live on the same planet as Jordan,” Zidane told the paper. “There is no comparison between us.”
Zidane plays the most global of games. Jordan is the star of the world as global village, a place so saturated by modern communications you can find Bulls hats on patrons of a Tehran pizzeria.
“Regardless of how popular the sport is, people around the world like American culture, and Jordan has the whole image–cool and talent,” said Alexi Lalas, the first U.S. soccer player to make Italy’s top league. “Michael Jordan is like rock ‘n’ roll.”
Rock ‘n’ roll has proved a lasting cultural force. Whether that is true of Jordan remains to be seen in his years out of the game. While he belongs in the front row of a 20th Century athletic pantheon, along with Ali, Pele and Babe Ruth, Jordan’s career has not included the defining social significance attached to the sporting lives of Ali, Jackie Robinson or Joe Louis.
“My responsibility has been to play the game of basketball to relieve some of the everyday pressure of people who work 8 to 5,” Jordan said at his retirement press conference, which he opened with a reference to how Wednesday’s funeral of slain Chicago police officer John C. Knight put things in perspective
“I can’t save the world, by no means,” Jordan said later.
It is unfair to ask a person to become what he or she is not, and these relatively tranquil times have not included color barriers to be broken or unpopular wars to protest. Yet there is no doubt Jordan’s becoming the most widely accepted black sports star in U.S. history owed in part to his being viewed as white bread in terms of his public political and social consciousness.
“If you want to call him the greatest basketball player of all time, that’s one thing,” said John Hoberman, author of “Darwin’s Athletes,” a study of how sport has damaged black America and preserved racial myths. “If you want to see him in the larger context in which black athletes inevitably are viewed in the 20th Century, you miss an entire dimension with Jordan.”
Jordan remained silent on allegations of Third World labor exploitation involving his sponsor, Nike. He was an active participant early in this year’s NBA labor negotiations but was notably absent when they became bitter and image-threatening at the end. There was never any fear Jordan would put his $150 sneakers in his mouth the way Patrick Ewing did, because Jordan kept his mouth closed.
“Where is the statue of Muhammad Ali in front of a pavilion somewhere?” Edwards said. “His greatness was equal to that of Michael Jordan’s, but Ali spoke out on issues that made the mainstream more uncomfortable.”
Jordan took his risks on the court. Few have dared themselves or greatness more consistently than he did. That Jordan took the final and winning shot for the Bulls as they won a sixth NBA title is especially appropriate. That he has chosen to make it his final shot is both satisfying and maddening to his fans, many of whom are star athletes themselves.
“I feel fortunate to have been around when he was playing,” Hamilton said.
“I am glad he is retiring on his own terms,” said Michelle Kwan, the Olympic figure skating silver medalist, “but if he was standing right here, I’d be going, `Keep playing, keep playing.’ “
Apparently, 12 1/4 seasons were enough. In that time, Jordan not only made himself, his game and Nike rich–Fortune magazine last year calculated his economic impact at $10 billion–but used a unique crossover move to help basketball and himself become worldwide phenomena.
“I think what he has done is the dream of every musician–to be able to cross over,” said Stan Feig of Bill Graham Presents, which promotes music and sports shows. “I liken it to Madonna, who also has done films, but Jordan has done more things–commercials, cologne, clothing.
“He is the No. 1 entertainer in the world. Who else has done it all?”
Jordan’s globalization began with the NBA Dream Team at the 1992 Olympics, the second in which he would win a gold medal. At that time, though, the biggest NBA celebrity was Magic Johnson, labeled “the Beatle of Barcelona” by Mike Downey of the Los Angeles Times.
The Barcelona Olympics gave the NBA a world stage for its players’ show-stopping abilities just as Jordan was taking total command of the league as the star of its champion team. With its multinational marketing muscle, Nike used that confluence of events to make Jordan the equal of Ali and Pele in planetary recognition.
It was equally important that Jordan then was old and mature enough, at 29, to cope with what Nike and the media did to aggrandize him. Ronaldo, the 21-year-old soccer star from Brazil, fell apart under similar promotional pressure at last year’s World Cup, when he was expected to perform as the Michael Jordan of soccer.
“Jordan is synonomous with basketball in the world,” said Boris Stankovic, president of the Interntional Basketball Federation. “His influence and impact on the popularity of our game is a great reason why we are so sad he is retiring.”
Said former Bulls teammate Bill Wennington, surveying the media attendance as Jordan announced his retirement: “This obviously is a decision that affects a lot of people worldwide.”
Jordan’s appeal to the world’s athletes was not limited to basketball players. Lalas saw that when he would talk about Jordan with other members of his Italian soccer team.
“Guys who couldn’t name three other NBA players and who couldn’t play basketball to save their lives had an overall understanding that what he had done for his team and his sport was amazing,” Lalas said. “They were just in awe, even if they had no idea what he was doing on the technical side.”
Kwan said she would like to ask Jordan about how he motivated himself to win three more titles after he returned to basketball following his brief flirtation with baseball. Like nearly all of us, she knows Jordan only from a distance.
“We all are human,” Hamilton said, “but sometimes we think Michael isn’t.”
That is another way of calling Jordan larger than life, which he has become. Few can survive the scrutiny such outsize fame brings, and Jordan has not been immune to criticism. His penchant for high-stakes gambling had him rubbing shoulders with some serious lowlife characters. He may not have meant to, but he belittled teammates by referring to them as his “supporting cast,” and he contrived to make Bulls fans think ill of the man who paid him $33 million last season.
“If anyone had the chance to meet him, they would find a very normal and real human being,” said Street, also a Nike athlete. “We all have bad days and bad moods. What amazes me is how he is Mr. Calm Guy in the middle of a situation where everybody else is freaking out.”
That was what helped Jordan control games in the frenzy of their final seconds just as it helped him endure the demands of Michaelmania. He kept his distance, to the point that the announcement of his 1995 basketball comeback emerged, disembodied, from his agent’s fax machine.
Yet there was never a question about the competitive spirit behind the words “I’m back.” It is that side of Jordan that most impressed Armstrong, who has made a comeback from cancer.
“Not only was he the best, but I always had the impression he worked harder than anyone else to be the best and was more serious in his preparation than anyone else in the NBA,” Armstrong said.
In the public eye, he looked serious about everything. Impeccably dressed. Not a hair or a word out of place, even if he made one task easier by shaving his head and the other easier by trimming his conscience out of his public discourse.
“You have to pick your spots,” Hamilton said. “If you get to feel strongly about something, you have to balance it against the other demands of your life. If you spread yourself too thin, you will have no impact at all, and he understood that better than anybody.
“Without basketball, who knows what he will do?”
Who, indeed? The man already has been a lion in winter, not to mention fall and spring, as his Bulls won six NBA titles in eight years.
Only twice has the summer solstice arrived before the end of the NBA Finals, and those years the Bulls were not in them. The 1999 NBA Finals also will extend into summer, but Jordan will not be playing. He could not be a man for that season, for all seasons, but his career always will seem a season in the sun.
