The Gamer
The USAir Arena sits on the
edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The
Washington Bullets play here, often quite badly. They haven't made the playoffs
in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways
to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold
out--technically--but with plenty of empty seats, the signature of a town full
of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans.
But on Friday, Feb. 21,
everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded
that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road
outside, begging for tickets. The mayor of Washington showed up, and the coach
of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of
the United States came rolling up in his motorcade.
Clinton took his seat with
little fanfare. No one played "Hail to the Chief." The crowd applauded
politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of
the Chicago Bulls. Fans were straining at the railings of the stands. Eyes were
riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was
about to emerge. When he finally appeared, people did not clap--they shouted,
screamed, as guards told them to back off.
"Michael! Michael!"
Michael
Jordan didn't look up. His head was bowed as he jogged toward the court.
Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not
noticing them.
Jordan is smoother than everyone else--his movements, his
skin, the top of his shaved head. He looks polished. Next to Jordan, the other
Bulls are big slabs of meat with protruding limbs. Luc Longley: a human ham
hock. Dennis Rodman: all knuckles and knees and elbows and tattoos and nose
rings and yellow hair. For Rodman, every night's a full moon.
On the
radio the other day, sportswriter Frank Deford called Jordan "our Lindbergh."
(Was Lindbergh really that good? What was his percentage from three-point
range?) This night at the USAir Arena, the sportswriters kept looking at Jordan
and saying, "He's Babe Ruth." Like Ruth, Jordan so exceeds the norm as to be an
anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot
more home runs than anyone else. How did he do it? OK, he was strong, he used a
big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for
"greatest-ever" is always mysterious. You can't reduce it to any obvious
variables. You just say a god walked among us.
Jordan is 34 years old, borderline geriatric,
and he still leads the league in scoring, racking up nearly 31 points a game,
while the next-highest scorer averages only about 26. How does Jordan do it?
He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and
wonder.
For the national anthem
Jordan rocked from one leg to the other, still staring at the floor in front of
him, while nearby the president lustily sang--or at least moved his mouth
dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing.
Seconds
after tipoff, Jordan launched a turnaround jumper, his new signature shot,
hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three
quarters of the game. Jordan missed a shot, and then he missed four more shots,
and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by
the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly
points while his sidekick, Scottie Pippen, had scorched the Bullets for 17.
The sportswriters had a potential story line: Jordan might
not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something
that hasn't happened in years. Was Jordan slipping? Were we seeing it tonight?
The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to
write as the game progresses. It might be too soon to write the end-of-an-era
story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy.
Jordan
kept struggling. At one point, he'd taken 14 shots and hit only four. By the
end of the third quarter, he'd cobbled together 18 sloppy points to Pippen's
authoritative 28. The Bulls were winning by 11 points, but the Bullets were
hanging tough. Jordan had been outplayed by their Calbert Cheaney, a streaky
player.
Then the fourth quarter began. The fourth
quarter is Jordan Time.
Jordan got free on a fast
break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward
the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out,
fans stand up to watch. Jordan, flying, wore a face of absolute manic rage. The
dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child
to see. It was as though Jordan was funneling all his frustration into a single
thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout,
knowing they'd have no chance if Jordan caught fire.
A minute later Jordan hit a
pull-up jumper. Then he hit another.
One of the young Bullets,
Jaren Jackson, tried to smother Jordan and prevent him from getting the ball.
Jordan knew what to do: Cheat a little. With his left hand Jordan almost
imperceptibly held Jackson--this showed up on the television replay--and then
dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a
two-handed dunk, hanging on the rim an extra second to make sure everyone knew
who was in charge.
The next
time down the court Jordan hit a wide-open three-point shot. The Bullets kept
assigning different players to cover him, but Jordan seemed to be emitting some
kind of paralysis beam. Even Jordan's teammates were rooted in place. The game
plan was, "Pass it to Jordan."
Jordan hit an impossible 15-foot turnaround jumper.
Jordan hit foul shots.
Jordan hit another
three-pointer.
Jordan juked right, shook his
man, dashed right past 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, and burgled the backboard for
an easy layup.
Jordan hit six shots in a
row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what
everyone else in the arena was thinking: Jordan had done it again! Impossible!
A 34-year-old geezer! The paralysis beam still works. Statisticians insist
there is no such thing as a "hot hand" in basketball, that accurate shots
distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has
made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make
the next one. So we are to believe that Jordan's feat this night--his ability
to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when
everything is on the line--is a fluke. What the statisticians don't realize is
that some things in life aren't logical, and that the Jordan phenomenon is one
of them. He scored 18 points in the fourth quarter, 36 for the game, making him
the high scorer. The Bulls won 103-99.
"There's
no way Michael was going to let the Bulls lose in front of the president,"
Johnny Red Kerr, a Hall of Famer and former Bulls coach, said outside the
locker room.
There has been talk in recent days about human
cloning, and you repeatedly hear people mention the idea of cloning Michael
Jordan. The New York Times cited the idea of a Jordan clone in its lead
editorial. Such talk robs Jordan of his due. It subtly suggests that he is just
a "natural athlete" who merely has to walk onto the court and let his DNA take
over. The fact is, Jordan's greatest gift is in his head. He dominates the game
at 34 even though he can no longer out-quick and out-jump and out-dunk his
opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on
speed and a 42-inch vertical leap. He wasn't considered a top-flight shooter.
Now he has this deadly turnaround jumper and routinely hits three-pointers.
What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and
still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start
out as a pitcher?)
Like that
politician sitting in the stands, Jordan is compulsively competitive. When you
apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short,
because the rest of us don't want it that badly. Jordan has to win at
everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands
gambling at that game). After the death of his father, Jordan took up the
doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. "He had balls the
size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport," my colleague Tony
Kornheiser said before the Bulls game. Bob Greene reports that Jordan--the
greatest basketball player of all time--was motivated by a sports fantasy: that
he'd be batting for the White Sox in his first professional baseball game, and
would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head
straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing
in front of the awed crowd.
As the USAir Arena emptied out, the sportswriters gathered
outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly
appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and,
for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared.
One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't
want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and
left.
We went into the locker room,
and soon Jordan emerged, already dressed in a perfectly pressed olive suit, his
tie knotted tight at the stiff collar of a white shirt. Jordan always dresses
this way in public. A professional.
"I totally hadn't found my
rhythm the first three quarters," Jordan said. "When I found it, things started
to click."
Sweat
popped out on his head in the close-up glare of television lights. Reporters
pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He
obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs.
His agent, David Falk, said his client would
play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a
free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay
the big money. This year Falk got Jordan $30 million. Next year? Falk wouldn't
say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things
are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the
purple mountains?
Someone asked Jordan if he'd
stick around town the next day to watch his alma mater, North Carolina, play
Maryland. It was a huge game in college basketball.
He shook his head.
"I got a job to do."
Jordan drives to the hoop
in Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Championship Series against the Los Angeles
Lakers (30 seconds; video only) :
