Forget it. It’ll be close at the end, and then with about twenty seconds left, Michael will have the ball and he’ll keep his eye on the clock, and then with a few seconds left he’ll go for a jumper and hit it. The Bulls will win, and the legend will live. It’s who he is, and it’s what he does

—Chuck Daly, NBA coach

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When I was thirteen, my father allowed me to put up a wooden backboard and basket in our backyard in Chicago. The yard was small, mostly grass, the only concrete being a narrow sidewalk leading to the alleyway. I used that basket in all seasons, including insultingly cold Chicago winters when I would daily shoot a hundred free throws with my gloves on. At other times, I would play fantasy games. Since I have always been of the realist school, in personal life as in literature, I would limit my scoring to anywhere between 24 and 33 points a game, usually winning for my team by popping in two free throws after the clock had run out. Not in my sweetest fantasies could I ever imagine myself doing what Michael Jordan, the recently retired star of the Chicago Bulls, would do in actuality some 40 years later. If I was a realist even when grounded in fantasy, he, Michael Jordan, was a magic realist, soaring in life.

In Playing for Keeps,¹ his book about Michael Jordan, David Halberstam uses the phrase “Jordanologist” to describe close students of the great player, marketing phenomenon, and international celebrity. Only now do I realize that, since 1984, when he left the university of North Carolina after his junior year to play with the Bulls, Jordanology has been, as the professors say, my subspecialty. Over this period of time I must have seen Michael—as we in Chicago refer to him—play perhaps a thousand games; even though I watched most of them on television, I feel that I know his facial expressions, his moods, his verbal responses at least as well as I do those of most members of my own family. When I acquired cable TV, I did so not chiefly but exclusively in order to see more of Michael before he closed out his career. The prospect of seeing him at night could lift my spirits during the day, actually watching him play—even through the cool medium of the screen—brought me the kind of ephemeral but never-to-be-gainsaid pleasure of a fine meal or a lightish aesthetic experience.

Maybe not so lightish as all that. Having had the chance to observe so much of Michael Jordan in performance may be the equivalent, in sports, of having had tickets to the early years of George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. If this reference to Balanchine seems too elevated, the law of carefully measured accolades has long ago run out on Michael Jordan. By now he has been compared with nearly every genius the world has produced, with the possible exceptions of Goethe and Proust. In many quarters, he has become the standard by which genius in other fields is measured. “Frank Galati,” I heard a former president of Northwestern University say about a theatrical director who happens to teach there, “is the Michael Jordan of the contemporary theater.”

When Michael retired, Jerry Sloan, coach of the Utah Jazz, whom the Bulls twice defeated in the NBA finals on their way to winning six championships in eight years, said that he should be remembered “as the greatest player who ever played the game.” Sidney Green, a journeyman player and briefly a teammate, asserted that Jordan “was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help us God.” Jayson Williams, the power forward for the New Jersey Nets, called him “Jesus in Nikes.” Bobby Knight, the coach of Indiana University, once remarked that we would not see his equal in our lifetimes and neither would our children or our grandchildren in theirs. Later he pushed things up a notch by stating that Michael Jordan was the greatest player of all time, not just of basketball but of any sport. My own view is that in Michael we had the reincarnation of Achilles, but without the sulking and without the heel.

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Chicago has not been notable for its winning teams—the Cubs, the stale joke has it, are now going into the 93rd year of their rebuilding program. But we have had a splendid run of gentleman black athletes, beginning with Ernie Banks and moving chronologically through Gale Sayers, Walter Payton, Andre Dawson, and Michael Jordan, with Sammy Sosa being the current entry. These are men who, like a much earlier generation of black jazz musicians, have brought a high degree of quality to their craft and much dignity to their personal bearing. Alas, with the exception of Michael, all have had to settle for playing on losing teams, while Michael, by contrast, after a few early years in the NBA desert without capable teammates, triumphed with an astonishing completeness.

In part because I grew up in Chicago, in part because of the mysteries of temperament, I identify in sports almost exclusively with the losers. The poor guy who misses a crucial field goal that costs his team the Superbowl, the pitcher who allows a game-winning home run late in the World Series, the nineteen-year-old kid who blows two free throws and knocks his team out of the Final Four—these are the athletes whose long, melancholy off-seasons I ponder, not those who, champagne dripping from their hair, announce they are off to Disney World. Having an athlete like Michael in my life, an athlete who is so clearly a winner, has been a switch, and of a radical sort. Yet in retrospect even Michael’s winning has seemed of the dramatic sort, that is, winning against the odds, coming from behind, pulling it out of the fire—which was, of course, his specialty.

I am a Jordanologist of sufficiently long standing to have seen Michael actually not come through, even to see him blow a few games with poor passes or by having the ball stolen from him. But the more lasting impression is of the surging Michael, the Michael who could put together a dazzling 24-point fourth quarter before a television audience of twenty million. Even in 1995-96, when the Bulls won 72 of 81 regular-season games, more than any other team in the history of the National Basketball Association, it seemed—whether true or not—that the vast majority were won by coming from behind, as often as not with Michael scoring at the buzzer.

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In this as in many other respects, Michael Jordan was very much a basketball player of the modern era. As a fan, I myself go back to the game in its medieval phase, being old enough to remember when Jews were still a strong presence. I recall the elegant Dolph Schayes, of the Syracuse Nats; and Nat Holman and, later, Red Holzman, two of the great names in coaching; and Abe Saperstein, the founder and original owner of the Harlem Globetrotters. In the Chicago Public League of my youth, there were coaches named Bosco Levine and Sid Novak, and many of the All-City players had names like Irv Bemoras, Harvey Babetch, and Eddie Goldman. One of the great annual sports events in the city was the game between the Catholic Youth Organization and the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization.

The best athlete in my own neighborhood, Ronnie Rubenstein, a kid two years younger than I, was good enough to start at Louisville, then as now a big-time basketball school; in Louisville, local Jewish businessmen would take the Rube to their tailors for bespoke sport jackets. Sports-minded Jews of my generation and slightly older had a special love for basketball, which may perhaps explain why so many NBA franchises today have Jewish owners. A man named Jerry Reinsdorf is the principal owner and managing director of the Chicago Bulls, and David Stern, the commissioner of the NBA, grew up basketball-crazy in New York.

As for the game itself, when I first came to it the great offensive weapon was the two-handed set shot, and free throws, more often than not, were still made underhand. The set shot elided into the one-hander, the one-hander into the jump shot. The slam dunk would come later—specifically, with the extraordinary and sudden advent of excellent coordination in large men, which seemed to have happened, quite mysteriously, in the late 1950’s.

But the really dramatic change occurred with the integration of black players into big-time college programs and the NBA. As late as the 1950’s, Harry Coombs, coach at the University of Illinois, and Branch McCracken, coach at Indiana, did not trouble to recruit blacks; and Adolph Rupp, at the University of Kentucky, was said to have no compunction about expressing his own racist sentiments. The first black in the NBA was Nat (Sweetwater) Clifton, a former Globetrotter. As everyone knows, basketball turned out to be a game at which blacks excelled and soon came to dominate. A black comedian, when asked why, replied, “It’s our golf.”

The game has been further jazzed up in recent years by such innovations as the outlawing of the zone defense, the installation in 1954 of the 24-second clock, and the three-point shot. The NBA has also lost the scruffiness that old-line fans like me used to love. I recall seeing a player named Togo Palazzi play a game, on national television, wearing shorts of the wrong color, which suggests not only that he was a careless packer but that NBA teams in the 1950’s operated on a very slim budget. Between then and now, the really huge difference has been made by money. Today the median annual NBA salary for players is more than $1 million and the minimum salary is $287,500. In his last season, Michael Jordan’s salary was $36 million, and he is said to have earned another $40 million or so through endorsements—for McDonald’s, Gatorade, Hanes underwear, Nike, etc.—as well as from royalties and personal contracts.

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Professional basketball has run in waves of success and failure, athletic and commercial. When I first began to watch, the Boston Celtics, with players such as Bob Cousy and Bill Sharman and then later Bill Russell and John Havlicek, were indomitable, magnificent to watch, and downright irritating in their refusal to lose championships. A new phase set in with the sleek New York Knicks of Willis Reed, Earl Monroe, Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley & Co. and the Los Angeles Lakers of Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, and Wilt Chamberlain. But then the play dipped badly. I recall going to a Bulls-Knicks game at some point in the mid-1970’s with Jerome Holtzman, the sports columnist for the Chicago Tribune. “They need four or five more balls out there,” he remarked as we watched the two teams pound drearily up and down the floor. “One ball isn’t enough for these selfish creeps.”

Things picked up again with the entrance into the NBA of Larry Bird of the Celtics and Magic Johnson of the Lakers, two players who revitalized the game. Others worthy of a connoisseur’s interest—Pete Maravich, Julius Erving, Isiah Thomas, Paul Westphal—came on the scene. Michael Jordan arrived toward the close of Bird and Johnson’s careers, and he clearly represented something new. He took things to a higher level, and brought an excitement of a kind the game had never quite known before.

Power in the NBA is demonstrated in a number of ways. But only a very small number of stars have had the authority, in effect, to appoint their own coaches. In practice, this has meant the power to fire any coach who does not run the team the way the star wishes. Magic Johnson, for example, was able to have Paul Westhead canned because his run-and-gun offense was not Magic Johnson’s kind of offense. Larry Bird might have been able to do the same, though under the strong management of Red Auerbach it is unlikely he would have tried.

But Michael Jordan outdid them all: he was able not only to insist on the retention of Phil Jackson, the Bulls’ coach during their championship seasons, but to elevate Jackson into serious money—roughly $7 million—during Michael’s and Jackson’s final year. The alternative was watching Michael retire early or otherwise take his golden-egg-making apparatus away with him, and there could be no mistaking the goldenness of those eggs: David Halberstam reports that, in 1993, with Michael playing, the NBA finals for the first time achieved higher television ratings than the World Series—and when he was not playing the audience dropped by eight million viewers, or roughly a third. In June 1998, Fortune estimated the reverberating effect of Michael on the national economy, including tickets, merchandising, television revenues, endorsements, and the rest, at “just about $10 billion—and still counting.”

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As for what gave Michael Jordan all that allure, commercial clout, and bargaining power, it was, to begin with, his performance on the court. He was a natural—with preternatural strength and speed, huge hands, astonishing leaping ability, amazing stamina. Adding to Michael’s leaping ability was his capacity to maintain himself in the air; “hang time” is the term of art here, and at moments—when leaving from the free-throw line for a slam, say—he did seem as if attached to an invisible hang-glider. When Hersey Hawkins, another player, asked him how he executed a certain shot, Michael replied: “When you get up, you hang for three seconds and let the defender fly by and then you release it.”

If Michael was a natural, he was a natural who worked hard to improve his game, and who possessed, along with great court savvy, an indomitable, a really quite fanatical, will to win. He began as a slashing, driving player, able to elude defenses and then arrange to score in some inventive way. Later in his career he developed one of the game’s great jump shots, which he released high in the air and fading away—a thing of beauty and a joy, if not forever then till the next time he did it. In The Jordan Rules,² a more critical book than Halberstam’s, the journalist Sam Smith records Phil Jackson’s continual amazement at Michael’s ability to score pretty much at will against even the best players in the world: “It was a curse in some ways to be a comet racing across the game with everyone light-years in your wake.”

On the court, finally, Michael was the complete player—as brilliant on defense as on offense. Led by Michael and two teammates, Scottde Pippen and Ron Harper, the Bulls had what was known as the Doberman defense. That is exactly what it must have felt like to play against these guys—as if one were being pursued by a pack of lean, mean Doberman pinschers.

David Halberstam argues that the great NBA players over the past twenty years have not only had a will to win but have been able directly to transfuse this will into their teammates. Not all the great players have been able to accomplish this: Julius Erving, one of the most elegant offensive players in the history of the game, could light a fire only under himself; Kareem Abdul Jabbar, one of the most consistently efficient players, could not lead; Wilt Chamberlain, one of the strongest athletes in any sport, was so lacking in this capacity that it seemed a team could not hope to win with him (though the Philadelphia 76’ers did, once, in 1963). But three players who did have it—and of whom Halberstam provides lengthy accounts—were Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Isiah Thomas.

Did Michael? He certainly had the will to win, and to the highest power. But sometimes this worked to the detriment of the team itself. He practiced so hard that he often tended to wear his teammates out. He was a specialist at baiting other players on his own team. If he did not think a newly arrived player fit, he would stay on the guy’s back until he either remade himself to Michael’s specifications, asked to be traded, or simply disappeared from the league. He had a nice taste for vengeance, never forgetting either a slight or an injury.

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Basketball began as a non-contact sport, but it has not been one for decades. So violent can the rebounding become that the area around the basket is known among the players as the alligator-wrestling pit. Everyone in the NBA now does weight training. Superior coordination and endurance and style are important, but, at the highest level, without the muscle to back it up they do not come to much. The Detroit Pistons, who dominated the league before the Bulls, did it on sheer physical intimidation; the New York Knicks, under the coaching of Pat Riley, attempted the same thing, though without comparable success.

When Michael Jordan first came into the league it was understood that his then-teammate Charles Oakley was his bodyguard. Anyone roughed up Michael, Oakley would find a way to repay him later in the game. It is dangerous out on an NBA floor, where one’s masculinity is regularly tested. Michael himself eventually muscled up. He came in at 6′6″ and 185 pounds; he ended his career 30 pounds heavier—all of it muscle, carefully acquired with the help of a personal trainer so that the added weight would not slow him down.

But the largest problem that Michael presented, especially to his own team, derived not from his weight or his manners but from his extraordinary ability, with which he dominated every game. One of his teammates, a now-forgotten center named Dave Corzine, complained that when the team won it seemed it was Michael’s doing but when the team lost it was everyone else’s. A man with so much talent tends to render the concept of teamwork beside the point, if not wholly to derogate it.

When the Bulls first attempted to install their complicated Triangle offense, which would, among other things, have taken some of the pressure off Michael’s having to score so frequently, he described it derisively as “an equal-opportunity offense.” In The Jordan Rules, Sam Smith reports that once, during a time-out, Phil Jackson was designing a complex play in a tight spot. Cutting him short, Michael told him, “Give me the fuckin’ ball.” The temptation to do just that in each and every tight spot had to be great. Basketball writers took to calling the Bulls “Michael and the Jordanaires,” and Michael himself referred in a press conference to his teammates as “my supporting cast”—not a smart move in a man who made few bad moves, on the court or off.

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Off the court, one of the reasons Michael was able to garner so much endorsement money is that he gave off the solidest of vibrations. Bill Russell, the great center of the Boston Celtics and then for a few years coach of the Seattle Supersonics, is said to hold a low opinion of most contemporary professional players. Yet he thought Michael an exception, a young man of good character. Halberstam notes in him “an innate elegance and coolness.” He could make baldness look good, he wore clothes splendidly, and if there are still best-dressed-men lists he must be atop most of them. “I wanna be like Mike,” was the tag line from his Gatorade commercial, and many people did.

He also had a way of making people forget about race. “As Jordan smiled,” Halberstam writes, “race simply fell away.” In good part this was owing to his absolute refusal to whine, complain, or show moodiness of the kind too many black athletes are susceptible of whenever things do not go their way. Unlike many of them, Michael never fell back on white racism as an excuse to justify poor performance or broken contract negotiations. No less impressively, he kept himself well away from the drug and easy-sex scenes that in recent decades have been part of the world of NBA players, young men with the dangerous combination of too much money and too much free time on their hands. The closest he came to scandal was when he lost serious-sized bets to a golf hustler with a criminal record.

Michael has also kept himself free from politics. When the Nike company was found to be manufacturing its products at low wages in southeast Asia, brave columnists in the New York Times proclaimed that Michael ought to denounce the practice and perhaps threaten to break with the company. But he chose not to speak on the matter—or on any other, similar matter. After one of the Bulls’ championships, he even declined to attend the team meeting at the White House with George Bush, preferring to play golf. Whether he thinks politics bad for business, or just does not care, nobody knows for certain; perhaps a combination of the two keeps him apolitical.

Halberstam refers to Michael as “very well-spoken.” I disagree. I would say he is half well-spoken. Certainly he has mastered the jock jabberwocky that passes for analysis in post-games interviews: “I thought we had a nice flow of energy out there, especially in the second half, when the momentum seemed to shift. But it was a question of whether we could keep our focus down the stretch and if our bench could step up, which they were able to do.” He can also do the false-humility bit as well as anyone: at his retirement press conference, with journalists from all over the world gathered in a huge hall, he began by reminding everyone of a recently murdered Chicago policeman whose funeral was taking place the same day, noting that this was the real story of the moment.

Michael is more believable when his natural and controlled—and, I would add, earned—arrogance shows through. The genuine Michael is the man who replied, when asked what advice he might give to his then-teammate Dennis Rodman, who had taken to having himself photographed in a wedding dress: “I’d advise him to wear pants as often as possible.” This is also the Michael who is said to have regularly driven the better part of the 30-mile trip from his suburban home to Bulls games in Chicago on the shoulder of the Kennedy expressway. Typically, the police, if they stopped him, would recognize him and let him go; when necessary, he gave them tickets to the game or a signed basketball before driving off.

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Une saison en enfer, Arthur Rimbaud titled one of his two books of poems, but Rimbaud did not know the half of a season in hell of the kind Bull fans are currently undergoing without Michael Jordan. The team is currently in last place in its division in a season truncated by a long strike, and we figure to undergo many a sad saison more.

Without Michael, professional basketball itself has come to seem, at least to this fan, flat, devoid of drama, without magic. Still, one counts one’s blessings. Having spent too many hours watching boys and men hit, kick, and throw balls, and having been born too late for Babe Ruth or Bobby Jones or the prime of Joe Louis, I am grateful that I was around to see my share of Michael Jordan. A fine rousing spectacle, watching this magnificent athlete who turned his sport into an art—the art of coming through in the clutch, which he did, splendidly, time after time after time.

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¹ Random House, 426 pp., $24.95.

² Pocket Books, 1992.

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