Genius never rests

Sporting News, The, Feb 16, 1998 by Dave Kindred

Despite Michael Jordan's public musings about retirement now ratcheted up to declarations, my guess is he will play another year or two. Yes, he's turning 35 next week. He has won five world championships. Money he has in multiples of millions. His ears are famous. So why not do a Seinfeld?

Because he's Michael. He'll quit someday rather than embarrass himself. But such a day, if ever it would come, is far off. Meanwhile, he'll find a way to keep playing basketball. He always has.

In 1986, on a bad foot and under orders from the Bulls to sit still, he played pickup games in North Carolina. "I love the game like a wife," he said then. Ever since, he has proved it. A lost year riding baseball buses reminded him of what he missed. To breathe, he needs basketball. And now he'll quit? Because Phil Jackson, the Bulls' coach, is leaving?

One thing argues for playing on. His madness. "All I have to declare," the playwright Oscar Wilde once told a customs agent "is my genius." So does Michael Jordan move with the beautiful madness that is genius. It is a compulsion to excellence that raises him to marvels of work unintagined, as on a night in Minneapolis when ...

... he's on the rim, bringing the ball past the key ... and now he's in the air, high, floating, and as he floats toward defenders with nowhere to go, he somehow turns his back to them ... and with the ball in his right hand as he re-enters the Earth's atmosphere, he slaps that wrist with his left hand ... popping the ball up ... and into the basket..

Hundreds of places. Thousands of games. Tens of thousands of players. I'd never seen such a thing. Jordan said he'd never done such a thing. "You get into places where you just have to do something," he said.

Such is Jordan's genius that in practically every game, he goes somewhere and does something. You'd swear no one ever before had done that thing because that thing was impossible to do even if, by some hallucination, he had thought it up beforehand.

Would a man walk away from such work?

Only when he has to.

Maybe 20 years ago, in a coffee shop late at night, I suggested to John Thompson, the Georgetown University basketball coach, that Muhammad Ali should quit fighting.

"That's why he won't" Thompson said. "All his life, he fought against the odds. Odds said he couldn't beat Liston, couldn't beat Foreman, couldn't beat Frazier. Now that the odds are against him because he's old, he's going to fight those odds. And you know something else?"

Thompson leaned across the table. "He won't quit because if he quits, he won't be who he wants to be. Without fighting, he's not the Muhammad Ali he likes."

Better than Ali, better than any other athlete, Michael Jordan has created a persona outside his game. He would have us believe he is as much a businessman as he is a basketball player. Maybe he is, in a dollars-and-cents way. But not in any real sense.

Television commercials are shills not to be trusted. I'd pay $50 to see Michael Jordan play basketball. But not 50 cents for cologne with his ears on the bottle.

It's Jordan the athlete I admire. The columnist Jonathan Yardley, the Mencken of our time, says two men first come to mind when he thinks of people in the public eye whom he admires "without significant reservation." They are Michael Jordan and Cal Ripken Jr.

"What matters about these two," Yardley writes, is not that they are athletes but that they have developed their natural gifts to the fullest, that they are steadfast in their loyalties and solid in their convictions, that they work hard and meet the challenges before them, that their presence enriches all of us."

As much as Americans worship (the right word) Jordan, it remains true that once he stops playing basketball, he's a different person. Michael Jordan running a clothes business, Michael Jordan acting. Please. Jordan as a serious golfer? Get serious. If he were meant to be those people, he'd have been them. He was born for basketball.

It's far too early for him to leave the game and lose the validation that comes with his wonders. The great thoroughbred trainer Horatio Luro advised, "Never squeeze the lemon dry." Sadly, we saw the lemon dry the day Willie Mays stumbled away from home plate. But Jordan, even at an antique basketball age, is yet an extraordinary player capable of unimagined things.

The hope here is that he plays another year or two. I'd like to see him with Phil Jackson. They made the Bulls a dynasty, Jackson helping Jordan raise the level of his teammates' games. But the inevitable erosion, long resisted, has now set in at Chicago. The front office there has decided it's time to remake the franchise. So Jackson is gone after this year. And Jordan has said, if the coach goes, he's gone.

Which is not the same as saying he's retiring. Maybe if Jackson is coaching somewhere next year, Jordan plays for him. The latest rumor: Jackson to coach the Nuggets, as bad a team as the law allows. And who has always said he lives for a challenge? Michael Jordan.

Dave Kindred is a contributing writer for The Sporting News.