“Losing it is as good as having it.”
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Looking back on the full arc of Jordan’s basketball life (let’s dismiss any thoughts of a possible comeback, shall we?–they’ll only be an aggravation), what strikes me again is the pure mythos of it. Not that Jordan is a deity deserving of worship and adoration–the sports world, thank goodness, has matured beyond that childish level, even if it does remain tied to the related idea that athletes must be role models–but when one steps back from his story for a moment, there is a mythical aspect to it that even a Joseph Campbell might gawk at. Getting cut as an underclassman from his high school basketball team–that’s pretty typical. But then making the game-winning shot in his freshman year to give his veteran coach his first college basketball championship–that’s the sort of prodigious feat that seems to bode greatness. The thing is–and it’s essential to keep in mind–a feat like that can also be the high point of a person’s life or career (as anyone who remembers Indiana’s Keith Smart can attest). Jordan came to Chicago, was given a free hand to dominate an otherwise talentless and moribund franchise, and grew to be, if anything, too great; he desired a championship as the ultimate proof of his worth, but a one-man team was never going to win a title, even if it might allow him to produce moments like the original “shot” in Cleveland against the Cavaliers in 1989. What still transfixes me about that shot is the way Jordan fakes left with the ball to get Craig Ehlo to commit himself, then pulls it back to the right, squares his shoulders with the basket–all while flying in the air–and rattles the shot in. Joined with two role-playing veterans, Bill Cartwright and John Paxson, with two younger players almost as talented and hungry as he was–the Castor and Pollux duo of Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant–and eventually with a coach, Phil Jackson, capable of finding new ways to challenge him as a person and as an athlete, Jordan and the team grew to championship level, though first they had to slay the ogre, the bad-boy Detroit Pistons, an assigned labor that gave them the inner toughness all heroes require.
All writing, it seems to me, is an attempt to hold on to whatever is being lost, to whatever a person knows will be lost over time, and when I think back to those heady days of late 1990, when the Bulls were first flexing their full strength and just crushing their opponents, I remember an image that has come to me again and again over the years. It is of Jordan typically erupting out of a crowd for a left-handed slam dunk, and the way that red sweatband on his left forearm, rising out of the tangle of players, suggested a banner being carried into war.
It’s mythic, but I think it’s wrong to search for any lesson in this tale. Rather, it serves only to remind me of what I got into sportswriting for in the first place. I was a sports maniac as a child, but in college I gave it all up, falling under the influence of Henry James and William Gass in the belief that the world created by any worthwhile artist was better and more deserving of study than the imperfect world we slog through day by day. Yet I returned to sports, because in sports I found an in-between realm that could be more dramatic than any drama. The absolute outcomes of victory and defeat weren’t contrived for effect–they were real. Improbable as sports outcomes could be, they were authentic. Someone just arriving in Chicago from another country and acquainting himself or herself with the Jordan story would be tempted to call it a fairy tale. Yet we saw it, and we have the videotape.
For athletic achievement and cultural impact, Ruth, Jordan, and Muhammad Ali are the three greatest athletes of the century. I’ll allow no debate on that. Yet Jordan, I now believe, outdid Ruth, outperformed him, at least on the field of play if not in the national imagination. Ruth was in large part what made New York New York in the Roaring 20s; he defined his time and place. By contrast Ali, while great, never really belonged to any one city or even any one people; he was a citizen of the world. Michael Jordan was ours, ours in Chicago, ours to take pride in, ours to delight in. Yet, with his retirement comes the once again painful reminder that no human being every really possesses another. He was the greatest athlete we can expect to see in our lifetimes, and now all we have left are the videotapes and the photos and the memories and, yes, sometimes the words.
