In 1989, Time magazine called Michael Jordan “the hottest player in America’s hottest sport.” Sportscasters were labeling him “Superman in Shorts.” Although at 6’6” he was a full inch shorter than the average NBA player, Jordan, Time breathlessly proclaimed, moved in a world of his own, “a world without bounds. He gyrates, levitates, and often dominates. Certainly he fascinates. In arenas around the country, food and drink go unsold because fans refuse to leave their seats for fear of missing a spectacular Jordan move to tell their grandchildren about.”1
This superman had no problem using his powers to create money magically. The Bulls sold out more games in eighteen months than they had during their entire history before Jordan arrived. Personally, he made many times his Bulls’ salary by endorsing Chevrolet, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola (then later Gatorade), Johnson Products (one of the largest and most profitable corporations run by African-Americans), and, of course, Nike. He became the first basketball player to appear on a Wheaties cereal box.
If, however, Jordan’s skills translated into basketball records and wealth, they had not translated into a team championship. Americans, for all their immodest individualism, saved their highest praise for the Mikans, Russells, Johnsons, and Birds who raised teammates to a championship level. Many could score, but only a few could transcend individualism (that too often in sports, as elsewhere, was only a disguise for selfishness) to win it all. When legendary coach John Wooden was asked in 1990 to rank the greatest players, he chose Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, but not Jordan: “He’s a show within himself, he’s not a team player.”2
Jordan’s fans placed the fault on a lack of a good supporting cast. That might have been a problem in the mid-1980s, but by 1989, the Bulls had a talented team. Pippen was becoming the second-best all-around player in the league. It went, however, beyond the team. Chicagoans chafed when their hometown was called “The Second City.” Given the history of the Cubs and the White Sox, Chicagoans never glimpsed even second place most baseball seasons. While Boston won sixteen NBA championships between 1947 and 1989, and even Minneapolis won five, Chicago’s professional basketball teams had twice gone bankrupt and had reached exactly one conference championship (1972–1973—when they lost), in twenty-seven years.3
No one felt the failure more sharply than Jordan, simply because no one was as competitive. By 1989–1990, he was not only adjusting to Jackson’s demands for a team offense, but making his own personal adjustments. For years this athlete who could not get dates in high school had been pursued by numerous women. It was not unknown for Bulls’ practices to be interrupted by well-known actresses who were meeting him for dinner. Nor was it unknown for women to lie in front of his car and refuse to move until he talked with them. Jordan decided to eliminate such distractions.
In 1985, Jordan had met Juanita Vanoy, an independent-minded executive secretary for the American Bar Association. By 1987, they were making wedding plans, only to cancel them by mutual agreement. In November 1988, Jeffrey Michael was born. Ten months later, Michael and Juanita were married. On Christmas Eve morning of 1990, another son, Marcus James, arrived. The Jordans began planning a 26,000-square-foot house on eight acres in a Chicago suburb where the family could find refuge. Michael too seldom said no to the incessant demands on his time. Juanita, he knew, was more careful. “I have no problem saying no,” she told Ebony magazine. “If someone doesn’t step up and say no, there would be no time for his family. Everyone wants a piece of Michael.… I know it makes me look like a bitch,” but “if that is what I have to be, then I will be a bitch.”4
With his personal life in order, Jordan set out in the autumn of 1990 to prove John Wooden wrong. The season began badly. The Bulls lost their first three games. Then they won two in a row, including a rout of Larry Bird’s Celtics. When the Bulls returned to Boston in February 1991, they were at full speed. Jordan scored 39 points, Pippen 33, as they whipped the Celtics by 30 points. “The Bulls are the best team I’ve ever seen,” Bird announced. With a record 61 wins, 21 losses, and Jordan’s fifth straight scoring title, the Bulls cruised into the playoffs, where they demolished the New York Knicks in three straight. They then defeated Philadelphia four games to one and, finally, humiliated their long-time intimidators, the former champion Detroit Pistons, in four straight games.5
Jordan and the Bulls then faced Magic Johnson and Los Angeles in the championship series. The Lakers won Game One. The second contest turned out to be pivotal. The Bulls destroyed the Lakers 107–86, as Jordan sank fifteen of eighteen shots to score 33 points. During a 15–2 run that won the game, Jordan made a shot that became famous. He soared to the basket to dunk with his right hand, in midair encountered a Laker blocking his path, brought the ball back down, switched it to his left hand, then somehow glided to the left of the basket and banked the ball in to score—all before returning to the ground. Magic Johnson admitted that “he did the impossible, the unbelievable.”6
The Bulls won the next three games and the championship. Even with a painfully bruised toe, for which he used a specially slit shoe to obtain some relief, Jordan dominated the games. He and the Bulls finally had their championship. He clutched the Most Valuable Player trophy after the final game, hid his head in Juanita’s arms, and cried before tens of millions of viewers. He then apologized to reporters: “I never showed this kind of emotion before in public.” The Chicago Tribune’s Sam Smith wrote that Jordan did not have to apologize: “He really is human” after all.7
New York essayist and literary critic Stanley Crouch could say that Jordan played with “disciplined audacity.”8 Americans liked that kind of play because “the improvisational hero is the great American hero. Louis Armstrong, Fred Astaire, or Michael Jordan conceiving some sort of remarkable play while in motion.” As if comparing a basketball player to an inventor of jazz (Armstrong) or a creator of modern dance (Astaire) were not sufficient, Time believed Jordan surpassed the Mona Lisa: “Modern life suffers from the Mona Lisa complex,” the magazine gushed, “the idea that when you finally see a legendary work of art, it inevitably disappoints, appearing somehow smaller … than you had imagined it. Except Michael Jordan.” Only the Bulls’ star united “hard-court fundamentals with the improvisational creativity of the blacktop.”9 In other words, he played in the ordered commercialism of the twenty-thousand-seat auditorium, but with the imagination and seldom-seen skills exhibited on inner-city (or rural) playgrounds.
All in all, Paul Sullivan wrote in the Chicago Tribune, Jordan did not have “a bad year. He welcomed his second son into the world, had a hamburger named after him [McDonald’s McJordan] …, agreed to let a network use his likeness in a Saturday morning cartoon, earned his second Most Valuable Player award, cut a commercial with [famed rock-and-roll musician] Little Richard …, hit a free throw with his eyes closed,” and finally could wear “the championship ring.”10
Sullivan’s list was only part of the story. When Sports Illustrated gave Jordan its coveted “Sportsman of the Year” award for 1991, the article’s subtitle read: “The consummate player and the ultimate showman, Michael Jordan has captivated America and is about to conquer the world.” A leading sports advertising agent declared, “He has a level of popularity and value as a commercial spokesman that is almost beyond comprehension. It is a singular phenomenon. It never happened before and may not ever happen again.”11
In 1992, Jordan earned about $25 million. Only $3.8 million came from his Bulls salary. The rest came from endorsements, including new deals with the Illinois State Lottery Commission, Guy Laroche (for making Time Jordan watches), and a restaurant bearing his name in Chicago. Not all the gloss turned to gold. Time Jordan attracted few customers. Other markets, however, seemed to be infinitely elastic. An unbelievable six million Wilson basketballs bearing Jordan’s signature had been bought. Nike’s Air Jordan remained the world’s most profitable sports shoe.12
It was his success in the global market that set Jordan apart from the earlier commercial triumphs of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson. The NBA broadcast the Bulls-Lakers finals to more than seventy overseas countries. Nike featured six advertisements teaming Jordan and filmmaker Spike Lee, which had been widely acclaimed when initially shown several years later. The commercials worked well overseas. Rated the most “likable” and “familiar” of all performers in America, according to one poll, Jordan was becoming equally popular in some overseas countries.13
Soon after the Bulls won the championship, calls started coming in from Japan. “They want him for commercials,” his agent explained. “I was just speaking to a broadcaster in Yugoslavia,” a friend told Jordan, “and he told me you’re the biggest star there. They see the games on tape delay.”14 Especially remarkable was Jordan’s and the NBA’s popularity in such countries as Italy, Spain, and Hungary, for they had long, successful basketball traditions of their own. Some of their leagues were considerably older than the NBA. But tradition seemed to be no match for communication satellites, global-minded advertising executives, the drive of David Stern’s NBA marketing powerhouse, and Nike commercials.
Another dimension of Jordan’s cross-cultural popularity in 1991 was revealed by a sports goods dealer in Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. “Michael Jordan is the same for everyone who walks in here. He is a hero,” said Pradip Baywe, who had been born in India. “Anybody. Germans. Russians. Poles. Indians. Koreans. They are all looking for Michael Jordan, No. 23.” The famous, sometimes infamous and bloody, ethnically divided communities in Chicago had found something in common. Meanwhile back in India, Pradip Baywe noted, his nephew wore Air Jordan shoes.15
This movement of commerce and culture went both ways. Europeans and Japanese flooded U.S. markets with their goods in the 1980s and 1990s. Gucci, Chanel, Benetton, Armani, and Italian-designed jewelery reached well over $2 billion annually in exports to the United States. And these upscale goods brought with them styles and smells that many Americans considered the standard for international elegance. But with the important exception of some Japanese and European automobiles and electronic goods, these products were styled and priced largely for the elite. American society showed increasingly wide gaps between the rich, the middle class, and the poor. The new post-industrial, information-technological revolution acted like earlier radical technological changes of the mid-nineteenth and late nineteenth centuries: they further widened the gaps between the classes and especially hurt the poor.16
Meanwhile, the NBA, Nike, McDonald’s, Gatorade, Bugs Bunny, and other products associated with Jordan conquered the United States and spread across the mass cultures of Europe, Asia, and Latin America, made newly accessible by cable and satellites. European exports to the United States set some fashion standards, while American sports set new standards in reaching untold numbers of potential buyers. The $2 billion or so of the high-fashion exports into the United States were dwarfed by the many billions of revenue generated overseas by Nike, McDonald’s, and Disney.
One major nation chose to fight this Americanization of its mass culture. France had long been proud of its own cultural accomplishments, not least its language—which, before World War II and the ascendancy of English, had been the language usually accepted as standard for conducting international relations. As early as the 1920s, many French complained that U.S. films, business techniques, architecture, and music were corrupting their culture. Americans noted, however, that most French did not complain. As writer Matthew Josephson observed while living in Paris, he found “a young France that … was passionately concerned with the civilization of the U.S.A., and stood in a fair way to be Americanized.” One of the great authors of the century, F. Scott Fitzgerald, followed out the logic while he lived in France in the 1920s: “Culture follows money,” so Americans “will be the Romans in the next generation as the English are now.” The French Ambassador to the United States seemed to show little delight when he had to admit to Americans, “Your movies and talkies have soaked the French mind in American life, methods, and manners. American gasoline and American ideas have circulated throughout France, bringing a new vision of power and a new tempo of life.… More and more we are following America.”17
Some sixty years later, in 1982, a French Culture Minister dropped the politeness. Culture, as Fitzgerald noted, still followed capital. The French official warned of “American cultural imperialism.” A cartoon appeared in 1986 showing the noble European continent defended by the great literary figures of d’Artagnan, Don Quixote, and Shakespeare against a U.S. attack—from the skies—led by Mickey Mouse, E.T., Marilyn Monroe, and a hamburger. The cartoon caught the problem rather accurately: culture was indeed becoming international, but it was not becoming harmonious. Europe’s elite traditions were being blitzed from the skies (where the communication satellites roamed) by American mass culture. One critic put it bluntly: “The success of American popular culture abroad is due in part to the populist values on which it is based, [and is] more attractive to many of the common people … than the traditional values of their own countries.”18 The United States, moreover, possessed the capital and technology to ensure that the “common people” saw that culture.
Michael Jordan represented a movement not only threatening to overthrow the basketball dynasty of Magic Johnson and the Los Angeles Lakers. He and the products he endorsed also endangered traditional dress and even eating habits around the world.
In 1991–1992, the Bulls set another record by winning sixty-seven of their eighty-two games as they conquered a second straight championship. After Jordan also won his second consecutive Most Valuable Player award, Sports Illustrated’s Jack McCallum wrote that he “stands alone on the mountain top, unquestionably the most famous athlete on the planet and one of its most famous citizens of any kind.… He transcends sports.”19 Jordan’s dominance was tragically enhanced on November 7, 1991, when Magic Johnson announced that he had been infected with the HIV virus that causes AIDS, and that he would retire from the Lakers. Having become a close friend of Johnson’s, the news devastated Jordan.
The 1991–1992 season was again a smashing commercial success for the Bulls’ star. During the January 1992 Super Bowl, Nike ads gained international acclaim when they teamed him with Bugs Bunny on a basketball court. Critics ranked this “Hare Jordan” advertisement as the best of the day—a day that had become a kind of Super Bowl for hotly competitive U.S. advertising executives and their clients (who paid a million dollars for mere seconds of ad time during the game’s time-outs). Phil Knight later said the Super Bowl ads had been “a big risk.” “We invested in six months worth of drawings and a million dollars in production costs to show Michael Jordan, probably the most visible representative of Nike, paired with a cartoon character.” But it worked: “We got thousands of positive responses.”20
When Newsweek magazine listed the hundred most influential people in American culture, Jim Riswold was one of the select. Riswold was hardly a household name. But he was the writer who had turned out dozens of Nike advertisements since the late 1980s. Knight and Riswold so fine-tuned Nike’s marketing that they had divided their global sales for basketball shoes into three segments. One was Air Jordan, by far the most popular. When that shoe lost sales, however, Nike produced “Force,” which was represented by the burly Charles Barkley of the Phoenix Suns, and “Flight,” represented by the balletic Scottie Pippen. “Instead of one big glop,” Knight bragged, “We have the number one, the number two, and the number four brands of basketball shoes.”21 Adidas, Reebok, and the others had to take whatever Knight, Riswold, and Jordan left them.
In 1992, the United States put together the greatest-ever basketball team to represent the country at the Olympic games in Barcelona, Spain. The “Dream Team,” as it was soon called, was led by Jordan, Pippen, Bird, Johnson (who came out of retirement for the games), and Barkley. As the Olympics approached, media attention grew so intense that the Dream Team chose to live in high-security seclusion apart from the other athletes.
Jordan was the focal point of the media and public. Each month, hundreds of babies in the world were being given the first two names of Michael Jordan. When Nike threw a mammoth press conference in Barcelona, a Japanese correspondent asked, “Mr. Jordan, how does it feel to be God?”22
Julius Erving knew something about public adulation, but he was nevertheless stunned when he arrived in Spain. Jordan, “Dr. J” concluded, was less a person than “something of a 24-hour commodity.” Erving and Jordan tried to get away from the crush by taking a helicopter out of Barcelona to a private golf course in the Pyrenees Mountains. By the time the two reached the fifth and sixth holes, however, the local inhabitants had spread word that Jordan was playing the course. People “started coming out of the bushes, down the hills,” Erving marveled. By the time the two left there were “200 or 300 people waving goodbye to the helicopter.… I realized he needed some time to get away from the game and find some peace.”23
Given Nike’s genius in exploiting communication satellites and cable, it was not obvious where that peace could be found. At his last open public appearance, his biographer Jim Naughton records, Jordan went to a Dallas shopping mall where he signed autographs for an hour and a half, yet satisfied only a small number of the five thousand who overran both tight security and the mall. At a Memphis golf tournament for charity, huge crowds followed him in hundred-degree heat, while men tried to offer him hundred-dollar bills in return for an autograph.24
Several years earlier, Jordan had begun to try to retreat from such a crazy world. Once gregarious and spontaneous, he moved behind security, living in secret hotel suites. Sports columnist Mike Lupica later compared Jordan’s determined attempt at finding privacy with similar attempts by the most legendary, and reclusive, baseball star of the post-1930s era, Joe DiMaggio. The New York Yankee great, however, had destroyed any chance to find seclusion by marrying Marilyn Monroe, who rightly considered the media and cameras to be her best friends. Not surprisingly, the marriage lasted less than a year. Jordan, on the other hand, had married in part to ensure his privacy. “Regardless of how available he is,” Lupica wrote, “it’s as if there is a line he has drawn between himself and the world. And he does not want that line crossed.”25
Trying to draw such a line while being the center of global media attention during a long, nine-month season, or while he daily appeared in global living rooms through the power of Jim Riswold’s advertising and the new technology that raced across boundaries—all this seemed to be a contradiction. As the new media developed after the early 1970s, as television moguls learned how to gain audiences and riches by exploiting this technology, they revealed the most private of experiences, then transmitted these revelations instantaneously around the globe. It sometimes seemed to be a symbiotic relationship. One partner maintained its celebrity and wealth by revealing deep secrets to the other, which, in turn, demanded more such secrets to maintain its audience. The media happily and lucratively kept the information and fascination flowing in both directions, while developing new devices to deepen the dependency. Given Jordan’s fame and the squeaky-clean image he (and Nike, and his other endorsements), had so labored to create, it was only a matter of time before the media that helped make him would try to profit by breaking him.
As Jordan later admitted, he’d brought some of it on himself. In October 1991, President George Bush invited the Bulls to the White House for a celebration of their first championship. Jordan decided not to attend the ceremony. He said he had already met the President. Nor did he want to be the center of attention and take the limelight away from his teammates. The media speculated, however, that his absence might have more to do with Jordan being a registered Democrat who was not enthusiastic about the Republican President. Other media alleged that at the time of the White House ceremony, Jordan was playing golf at his retreat in Hilton Head, South Carolina, where bets on each hole supposedly reached four figures. When reporters caught up to ask why he had snubbed the President of the United States, Jordan uncharacteristically lost his control: “It’s none of your business,” he blurted out.26
Criticisms over missing the President’s party had barely quieted before another barrage occurred. Jordan, his agent, and Nike threatened to sue the NBA for using the star’s image without either their permission or their access to the profits generated by the wildly popular likeness of the Bulls’ leader. The NBA backed down, but Jordan emerged looking to many like a greedy multimillionaire who willingly attacked the very system that had made him rich and famous.
Then, in late 1991, Sam Smith published The Jordan Rules. The star emerged from Smith’s account as a selfish, mean, ghoulishly demanding egoist who physically beat, or launched tirades against, teammates when he thought they let him down. At one point, Smith charged, Jordan had punched teammate Will Perdue in the face when he decided the giant center had not played up to Jordan’s standards. Of course no one, especially the earthbound Perdue, could approach Jordan’s standards. Smith also claimed that he had been bitterly sarcastic in complaining about Bulls General Manager Jerry Krause. Jordan apparently made fun of both Krause’s plump physique and some of his deals for players. As observers pointed out, however, in a half-dozen years, Krause had assembled a team that already owned two championships and had made Jordan not merely a scorer but a winner.
Coach Phil Jackson recalled that when the book appeared, “Michael was furious.” Jordan had been careful to follow a discipline and a set of values that made him respected as well as popular. In 1984–1985, he had quickly taken off the gold chains and fur coat when he realized these might be misunderstood by the audiences he wanted to reach. Reporters noted that Jordan never allowed himself to be seen in public without fashionable, usually conservative, clothes. He did not even let himself be seen in the Bulls’ dressing room without being fully and well dressed. He showered and dressed in the trainer’s room, which was off-limits to the media, so he could always appear appropriately before the cameras. Jordan declared with conviction that if a person only saw him once for a fleeting moment in a hotel lobby, he wanted that person to remember him as proper, well-dressed, and respectable—which, indeed, he seemed to be.
That he had to endure growing criticism of his actions on and off the court was therefore most painful. He told Sports Illustrated that he always tried to be a “positive image” and a “positive influence.” “I never thought a role model should be negative,” Jordan declared. “If you want negativity, then you wouldn’t have asked for Michael Jordan. You might’ve asked for [heavyweight boxing champion] Mike Tyson or somebody else.”27
But trying to be a role model twenty-four hours a day in the televised fishbowl that seemed to be his life was, not surprisingly, difficult. As Erving had seen firsthand, there seemed to be no place to escape. “I look forward to playing now, more than ever,” Jordan said in 1991, because it was the only place he could avoid the constant spying into his private life. “Basketball is my escape, my refuge,” while “everything else is so … busy and complicated.”28
Within another year, however, not even basketball could be a refuge from alleged scandal and personal tragedy. Every allegation against Jordan, every sorrow he endured was, moreover, relayed to global audiences by cable and satellite. Nike was also coming under bitter attack. The gap between image and reality in the new media-made world of the 1990s was growing so wide that not even Michael Jordan could leap across it.