Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism. - Review - book review

Challenge, March, 2000 by Edward Chase

Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism. By WALTER LAFEBER. New York: Norton, 1999. 181 pp. Hardcover. $22.95.

Walter LaFeber's new book, his eighth, is bountifully nutritious despite its brevity. One gets a history of basketball, the story of sneaker development, a bio of Michael Jordan, the saga of Nike's ascendancy, and a gee-whiz analysis of the new transnational economics and of American popular cultural imperialism abetted by fiber-optic cable TV. What is more, the book prompts sober reflections on the ethics of "free" market labor practices and on the stupendous idiocy of endorsements--how, for a billion gullible suckers, Jordan somehow endows shoes, Wheaties, Hanes underwear, Coca-Cola, Gatorade, and corn flakes with his excellence.

LaFeber's awe of Jordan can be infectious, since Jordan's basketball exploits are truly astonishing. But one may question some of LaFeber 's encomiums. Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali matched Jordan's global fame. And for athletic prowess, the argument for Babe Ruth's number- one ranking endures. In the 1920s and early 1930s, all American athletic talent was channeled into professional baseball. There was nothing comparable, no basketball, negligible pro football, really no mass popular sport--and no television. Ruth dominated on both offense and defense, early on not only as the best pitcher but as the greatest hitter. Unique.

LaFeber's sneaker story is a beaut. He tells how Phil Knight, genius founder of Nike in the 1960s, studied the efforts of his Oregon track coach, Bill Bowerman, to produce a lighter track shoe, scientifically calculating that if one ounce could be shaved from the shoe's weight, the runner would be freed of 550 pounds during a mile race. Knight, at Stanford Business School, wrote up an analysis of how profitable it would be to import cheap but good Japanese running shoes, then sell them in the United States. Later he went to Kobe to see the producers of the inexpensive Tiger running shoe. He and Bowerman then bought the company and started selling the Tiger shoes from their automobile at track meets. "Blue Ribbon Sports" was what they named their little new company.

They wanted a still better shoe.

One Sunday morning, with his wife at church, Bowerman poured melted rubber into the family's waffle iron. Waffle-soled, square-cleated athletic shoes, made of lightweight fabric, were the ultimate result. Knight decided to concentrate on the shoes he and Bowerman were developing. But he needed a name, a trademark, an easily recognized symbol. One of his young designers, Jeff Johnson, had a bad night's sleep during 1971 in which he dreamed of Nike, the Greek winged goddess who symbolized victory. Without any better idea, Knight decided to try Johnson's suggestion.

The next year. a Portland State University design student, Carolyn Davidson, sketched a flat, floating check mark as a symbol for the running shoes. "I don't love it," Knight told her, "but maybe it'll grow on me." He bought the design from her for thirty-five dollars. Nike employees called it the "Swoosh." But by the 1990s, when it was worn by Knight endorsers Michael Jordan, golfer Tiger Woods, and tennis champion Pete Sampras, among many others, the Swoosh had become the most recognizable commercial logo in global sports. Davidson later received Nike stock from Knight, and rightly so. Her design made it possible for people in faraway lands whose languages did not easily translate the word Nike to identify Nike products simply by the Swoosh. Only an image, not words, was needed to reap profits in other cultures.

Knight had discovered that endorsement by sports champions, the most universally recognized celebrities, was the most effective marketing ploy, and coincided perfectly with the burgeoning nationwide obsession with physical fitness, especially jogging. Soon half of all running shoes sold were Nikes. Sales jumped from $10 million to $270 million in no time.

And even if one knows it already, LaFeber's saga of Michael Jordan's basketball career makes good reading. The subsequent murder of Jordan's father and Jordan's brief abandonment of basketball for baseball, then Jordan's super-triumphant return regaining the NBA championship, make for a very dramatic, heartwarming tale. No wonder LaFeber is smitten by Jordan. Yet he is too serious a writer to ignore Jordan's mundane shortcomings, to wit, his associations with some shady gambling chaps, his weakness for gambling itself, and especially his near indifference to the plight of the Asian laborers producing Nike sneakers and of inner-city black kids literally killing to get Jordan gear. LaFeber duly notes that Jordan has directed some of his millions to good causes. At one time he worked for the United Negro College Fund and for the Special Olympics for the disabled. He also became involved in Ronald McDonald House Charities and the Starlight Foundation, which helps children who are terminally ill. Still, it remains disturbing to contemplate an educated African American, himself so blessed with riches and status, being the beneficiary of virtual slave labor. LaFeber's vivid take on "the new global capitalism" underscores the contribution to the growing gap between rich and poor, social injustice taken for granted nowadays as just another inevitable aspect of today's socioeconomic order.