Basketball: The One And Only

We should be sick of Michael Jordan. We should send him–his Italian suits, wagging tongue, faint mustache and gold hoop earring–straight back to the ’80s where he belongs. This is a guy who’s had his own shoe since 1985. Are we still watching Miami Vice and moonwalking and wearing skinny ties? Come on, people. Move on.

But we can’t. Sure, it’s un-American not to back the underdog, but even the hardworking, muttily named Utah Jazz (did Satchmo summer in Salt Lake?), with its working-class Mailman and great white hopes, couldn’t drag us away from Jordan’s charm. For a spasm of a second last month, it seemed O.K. if Larry Bird’s Pacers won the conference championship–there was mythological resonance to the protagonist’s being felled by a warrior ghost–but by Game 7, we were right back in our proper seats behind Jordan. We wanted one more hit of Jordan’s hyperintensity, and we were willing to sacrifice our belief system for it.

Because, if you haven’t heard, this series may be Jordan’s last. The complex derivative of keeping Jordan in the NBA probably involves the rehiring of coach Phil Jackson, who publicly feuds with both blowhard Bulls general manager Jerry Krause and cheapskate owner Jerry Reinsdorf. Jordan steadfastly refuses to play without Jackson. That could probably be resolved (suck it up for one more year, Krause). But Jordan, 35, most likely won’t return without sidekick Scottie Pippen. Pippen originally refused to play this year, despises Krause even more than do Jackson and Jordan (who, high-school-style, doesn’t say hi to Krause when they pass in the halls). In fact, he is so eager to go to another team to prove he’s the second-best player in the NBA that he and his brother have been marketing “Last Dance” merchandise during the play-offs. But it’s really much simpler than that. “Not that he’s particularly attached to me, maybe not attached to the system of basketball,” explains Jackson. “It’s just the whole thing that’s grown around us: the friendship, the reliability, the privacy that he has working here.” Think about it: for the last year of your storied career, you wouldn’t want Donnie the intern stopping by your office every five minutes yelling, “Hey, Mike, there’s a guy downstairs who says he knows you.”

According to the Vancouver Province, Jordan has put a deposit on a summer rental on the coast in West Vancouver, Canada, a posh suburb where his neighbors would be folks like Bryan Adams. There, with the chords of Cuts Like a Knife wafting out to the Pacific, Jordan could decide whether to re-retire. (He left for 1 1/2 years to play baseball, and–since he refused for a long time to talk to SPORTS ILLUSTRATED after it criticized him–let’s just say as an outfielder he was an outstanding shooting guard.) His agent David Falk told TIME at Friday’s game, “Being the great decision maker that he is, he’s going to take some time after the season is over and get away from it for a while, and have a chance to really think it through and probably make a decision sometime in July or August. And whatever he decides, whatever makes him happy, will make me happy.”

That’s pretty generous, though not convincing. And it’s not the attitude most fans are taking. Although many have been preparing all season, there are plenty of X-Files-style conspiracists who refuse to let go. “I don’t care what they say,” says Jordan fan Michael Sims, 27, of Detroit. “I don’t think the NBA will allow it.” Even in Piston country, Jordan reigns. Which is a political miracle if you remember that Jordan disrupted Detroit’s dynasty, with a little help from Jackson, who taught him the importance of limiting himself for the good of the Bulls. Alan Jones, 30, also of Detroit, rants against Chicago but deifies Jordan: “He’s a gentleman. He’s not a boaster. He could say, ‘I’m the best thing since fried ice cream.’ But that’s not part of him.” Though passionate, Jordan fans aren’t necessarily the most articulate.

Through such fans Jordan has, according to FORTUNE magazine, added $10 billion to the economy. What makes him a perfect pitchman for absolutely anything (Nike, Gatorade, McDonald’s, Oakley, Rayovac, WorldCom…) is that he wins. While his skills were once those of Baryshnikov, age and triple-teaming defenses have grounded him. So, like Sinatra after he lost his crooning voice, Jordan, with delimited skills, developed an even better game. Through practice, his fadeaway jumper, passing and defense are twice as good as when he started in the league. During the last seconds of the play-off series with the Pacers, Bird told his team to swarm Jordan and see if he was great enough to pass. He was–and Bird should have known it, because it has been true for some time (review the tape of last year’s final play-off game, Larry).

Through maturity and Jackson’s required Zen meditation sessions, Jordan has bottled his frenzy, turned it into intensity and shared it with his teammates. Ex-Bull B.J. Armstrong, whom Jordan never fully embraced, said Jordan showed him how to win. “He has passion. And you have to have that same passion, that same will, to beat him,” he says. “He prepares himself in a way that no one will understand because I don’t think too many people are willing to pay that price.”

His will to power is what has kept us on his side after all these years. His stumbling, brilliant performance, cramped by stomach flu, in last year’s play-offs overwhelmed the opposition by sheer force of spirit. Last week his halftime speech to his team in Game 3 against Utah was, “Let’s bury these guys and make them think about it.” They routed the Jazz by 42 points. Without the benefit of a rival (imagine Ali without Frazier, Navratilova without Evert) and without innovating the game (Dr. J had already defined the dunk), Jordan became the greatest player of all time through intensity and hypercompetitiveness. Nets center Jayson Williams says that when he faces Jordan, his plan is never to look in his eyes.

Other than winning with supreme self-assuredness, Jordan is loved because his image is, above all else, personality-less. There are many kinder ways to put this–he’s a gentleman; he’s classy; he has old-world values; he’s modest; he has a blue-collar work ethic; he’s quintessentially American–but the truth is, he’s bland. Think about all the interviews you’ve seen and the stories you’ve read. (And like it or not, you have. He’s been mentioned in, on average, 100 newspaper articles a day.) Can you describe his personality? His politics? His sense of humor? His likes or dislikes? Bitter sitcom writers, accustomed to having edgy material rejected, use this analogy: Bugs Bunny is funnier, smarter and more interesting than Mickey Mouse, who has no known personality except for being vaguely likable and harmless. Mickey is worth a trillion dollars. Be like Mickey.

But while it’s easy for a cartoon character to be Mickey Mouse (especially when he hasn’t appeared in a full-length film in decades), it’s quite an accomplishment for a human being under Truman Show conditions. Jordan’s public image is empty by immaculate design. “I’m around him all the time, and what he has to put up with–media attention and people making demands of him and wanting him to be here, there and everywhere–he does a tremendous job. He’s done a great thing with his image and really kept it pretty clean,” says Bulls backup center Bill Wennington. “And he’s so cute.” Jordan is a vessel into which America can pour anything it wants. He’s noble, charming, righteous and kind, not because he necessarily is but because we want him to be. And, yes, Bill, it helps that he’s good looking.

But he does work so hard at his reflexive nonimage. Though thin-skinned (ask any reporter who has criticized him in print), he almost never loses his temper. He never appears so much as shirtless in the locker room and changes from shorts into a fine Italian suit for each short walk from hotel room to team bus, because those few seconds may be the only time those particular fans crowding the lobby see him, and he wants to get it right. He is so polished that his few scrapes with indiscretion–losing tens of thousands of dollars in golf and poker bets to hustlers, getting named in a paternity suit last week, commenting that playing Reggie Miller is like chicken fighting with a woman–bounce off him in ways Ronald Reagan only dreamed about. Apart from instinctive curiosity, few have ever questioned what chicken fighting with a woman means.

We let him do this because he is so good at letting us. He is clutch, not in a pained, John Wayne sense, but joyfully, shrugging and grinning as he backpedals away from each accomplishment. He makes us believe, against our own experience, that hard work can reward–that even 0.8 sec. means there is hope. And in doing so, he has defined masculinity despite publicly admitting that his favorite performers are Toni Braxton and Anita Baker; this guy could say his favorite movie was Beaches, and he’d still be the alpha male. He has unwittingly followed the plot of a hero, suffering like Ulysses: His father, to whom he was extremely close, was murdered in a carjacking in 1993. He left the game shortly thereafter, on a journey in a minor-league bus, getting $16 in food money a day and sleeping in less than four-star hotels. With his daily-shaved head hiding a hairline creeping to Burt Reynolds’ at low tide, he returned to dominate the league for another three years. At least.

Should he quit, he cannot expect to lead the normal life he says he wants. On account of the ever growing hunger of the media, he has less chance than Muhammad Ali of taking his wife and three kids to the mall he keeps saying he longs to stroll. Because even in countries that don’t have basketball courts (which, come to think of it, probably don’t have malls), he’s the man. Photographers traveling in Asia and Eastern Europe have used photos of him as currency. And in some countries, Americans are sometimes greeted by locals in the only words they know in English: Michael Jordan. It’s one thing to be known by your first name if it’s Elvis, but it’s something entirely different to turn Michael into a signifier.

We will probably keep seeing him after he retires, his hypercompetitiveness perhaps leading him eventually to golf on the senior PGA tour, or at least the Nike tour (he’s got to have an in there). Or perhaps he will be on the cover of FORTUNE again, only this time as the CEO he has been molding himself into. But even though 35 sounds too young to retire, it’s old for an athlete, older for a shooting guard and ancient for the top player in the game. And, perhaps, just old. John Updike, who knows Phil Jackson, had his most famous character, Rabbit Angstrom, struggle to recapture the glory of his high school basketball days. “The fact that he peaked so early in his youth makes him true to life, truer than my own life is,” Updike once told a reporter. “We all, in a way, peak at 18.” Jordan got twice as much as most of us.

–Reported by Julie Grace with the Chicago Bulls, John U. Bacon/Detroit and Sally B. Donnelly/Washington