On October 22, 1992, Michael Jordan was summoned to testify at the drug and money-laundering trial of James “Slim” Bouler. The media turned out en masse at the Charlotte, North Carolina, courtroom. Jordan’s appearance began a year of triumph and tragedy that set his international fame off in new directions.
In a nine-minute appearance on the witness stand, he admitted lying to the press about his $57,000 check to Bouler, which had been discovered by federal authorities. Jordan had earlier said the check was merely a loan. Actually it was payment for golf, poker, and other debts piled up over an October 1991 three-day weekend of nonstop gambling. He lied, Jordan declared, because he wanted “to save the embarrassment and pain” of such a “connection to gambling.” In other words, he did not want his vast public to understand what he had done. The U.S. Attorney intended neither to investigate the star nor embarrass him on the witness stand. The attorney knew that tough questioning could anger the jury from Jordan’s home state, where he remained hugely popular.1
Days later, he stood at the one place where, he always said, he felt most comfortable and secure: midcourt where cameras, satellites, and cable flashed his image to millions as another NBA season got underway. In their quest for a third straight championship, a feat not accomplished since Bill Russell’s Boston Celtics’ triumphs of a quarter-century earlier, the Bulls had little trouble winning their division and reaching the playoffs. Nor did Jordan have problems winning his seventh straight scoring title. In the first round of the playoffs, the Bulls disposed of Cleveland. In the conference finals, however, they lost the first two games against their hated rivals, the New York Knicks.
Just before the second loss, reporters discovered that Jordan had spent the late afternoon and night before the game gambling at an Atlantic City casino. He had supposedly lost $5,000 in a private pit the casino thoughtfully set aside for him. One witness claimed to have seen him at the gambling tables as late as 2:30 A.M., a charge Jordan heatedly denied. He insisted he was back in New York City and in bed by 1:00 A.M., SO had plenty of sleep for Game Two—in which he scored 36 points in the losing effort. Jordan’s father, acting as his spokesman, argued that his son had the right, indeed the need, to relax during the pressure-packed playoffs. Coach Phil Jackson agreed. Jordan could hardly sit in his hotel room for twelve hours, and because of his fame, the coach noted, “He can’t go anywhere in Manhattan. So if he went down there [to Atlantic City] I felt perfectly comfortable.”2
Much of the press, led by columnist Mike Lupica, also defended Jordan’s right to some privacy. Quoting columnist Bob Greene’s line that “He’s leading Elvis’s life,” Lupica declared that Jordan’s critics “really need to shut up.” For “Michael Jordan has been blessed with a talent for basketball the likes of which we will never see again.… He has spent a basketball life improving genius. Jordan didn’t break the law …,” Lupica concluded. “He let no one down.” Soon he “will get tired of all this and walk away, and it will feel like he took the whole sport with him.”3
The walking away was closer than Lupica, and probably Jordan, realized. But the getting “tired of all this” was immediate. For the first time, the Bulls’ star refused to talk to a press corps he believed had wronged him over the Atlantic City episode. “The great news media boycott of ’93,” as it was quickly dubbed, received full support from his teammates. His father handled all interviews. The NBA chiefs, however, were not pleased by Jordan biting the hands that fed them vast amounts of free advertising and lavish profits. Commissioner David Stern’s office fined the Bulls $25,000 for ignoring the press. New York Times columnist William C. Rhoden condemned Stern’s action: “The league’s primary responsibility is to protect its players rights, not to preserve media privileges, especially when those privileges seem to invade personal lives and privacy.”4
Rhoden was probably correct, or at least he was before the 1980s, when the NBA, led by Commissioner Stern and Michael Jordan, signed contracts to make millions of dollars by using the media for paid—and unpaid—advertising. The press, angered at Jordan’s and the Bulls’ boycott, now demanded its pound of flesh: access when and where the media desired. To live off the media opened the possibility of being damned by the media. Jordan and Stern had made an interesting Faustian bargain—that is, like the legend of the magician in medieval Germany who sold his soul to the Devil in return for knowledge and power, the NBA sold itself to the media for power and profit. Now the media demanded to receive its part of the bargain. As the Bulls, NBA, and media sparred, Chicago defeated the Knicks by 20 points in Game Three on the way to winning four straight games and the conference championship.
When the New York series ended, a book appeared from a San Diego sports executive, Richard Esquinas. He titled it, Michael and Me: Our Gambling Addiction. Esquinas claimed that in ten days of golf and card playing he had won $1.25 million from Jordan. Most of his winnings piled up, he claimed, when the star insisted on “chasing,” that is, betting double-or-nothing. According to Esquinas, he was embarrassed to take so much money from Jordan and, at the basketball player’s request, negotiated the amount down to $300,000. Jordan admitted he knew Esquinas, but pronounced the $300,000 figure to be “preposterous.”5
In headlining Esquinas’s charges, the media raised two highly troubling questions. The first: although Jordan piled up such debts and dealt with questionable characters, he claimed he never bet on basketball games. But, reporters speculated, when he owed operators such as “Slim” Bouler and Esquinas so much money, did they perhaps hint he could cut his debts by slipping them inside information about upcoming games?
The second question: leaving aside the issue of a possible addiction to gambling, it seemed obvious that Jordan had terrible judgment in choosing friends for golf and poker. Harvey Araton of the New York Times wrote, “From Jordan’s public scorecard, we know of one gambling partner who was shot to death, another who’s in prison, and a third who is apparently collecting a debt from Jordan by publishing a bet-and-tell-tome that has the [NBA] sweating out another Jordan scent of impropriety.”6 Famed Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko noted how Esquinas had apparently hustled Jordan into giving him strokes (a decisive advantage), then took his money on the golf course. Jordan had been so taken in, Royko believed, that this was not gambling—gambling meant taking a risk: “It sounds to me like Esquinas was taking about as much of a risk as a hawk does when it swoops down on a pigeon.”7
Jordan answered the first question adamantly: he had never done anything to compromise his play or his commitment to basketball. The NBA investigated Esquinas’s allegations, then again agreed that the star had done nothing to break league rules, especially rules outlawing betting on games. As for the second question, Jordan acknowledged he had to do better in choosing his friends and, especially, in playing golf with people he hardly knew.
The Bulls’ leader finally broke his silence and talked to the media after the first game of the championship series against the Phoenix Suns. Chicago had won 100–92, while Jordan led all scorers with 31 points. The game drew one of the largest television audiences in NBA history, less because of Jordan’s widely publicized scandals (although they doubtless drew some curious viewers), than because of a heralded matchup between Jordan and Suns’ star Charles Barkley. Another famed endorser of Nike products, Barkley was determined to surpass the Bulls’ star’s commercial popularity by acting on court and in television ads as Jordan’s opposite: a direct, tough-talking brawler.
Jordan took obvious pleasure in scoring crucial points as the Bulls defeated the Suns in six games. In Game Four, Jordan scored 55 points, including the decisive basket when he shot directly over Barkley. In the finals overall he shot often and well: his 41 points-per-game average set another NBA record.
As the final buzzer sounded, but before Jordan could join his teammates in celebration, a McDonald’s advertising crew was on the court filming a commercial. The voice-over in the commercial said, “Michael, you’ve just won your third straight NBA championship. Are you hungry for a fourth?” A sweating, smiling Jordan replied, “I’m hungry for a Big Mac.” Film footage was added from the final game showing Jordan flying to the basket for a lay-up. Within twelve hours the editing was finished. Within twenty-four hours the ad was fed by satellites to ESPN, MTV, and other cable networks, as well as into noncable networks. Jordan and the media had again profitably joined together through communication technology. Only when this job was done could Jordan celebrate.8
The Bulls had matched the great Celtic teams of the 1960s, while Jordan delighted in pointing out to the press that he had surpassed former greats Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Isiah Thomas, who had never won three consecutive championships. “This means I’m right up there with them … if not a step above.” His competitive fire rose to full-flame: “I was looking to separate myself from Magic and Bird. They never did it. But I did.”9
Jordan sounded a different note than he had several weeks before during his boycott of the media: “My love for the game is very strong now. And as long as the love is strong, I’m going to keep playing.” Nike, McDonald’s, and his many other endorsements were delighted to hear this. When these companies’ officials were asked about the gambling problems, they emphasized that Jordan had their full support. To prove it, they cancelled none of his advertisements. Chicagoans certainly agreed with these companies. As Don Pierson wrote in the Chicago Tribune, to fully appreciate Jordan’s global fame one had to have “a European perspective,” for in Europe, “in cities he never has visited, billboards loom [with Jordan’s face] with no identification necessary.” As “for Chicagoans, Jordan’s greatest contribution is he has displaced Al Capone as the city’s most famous character.… The world’s most visible athlete, he has brought new meaning to the word mob.”10
John Skorburg, chief economist for the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, declared he “wouldn’t be surprised” if Jordan’s value to the region “approached a billion” dollars. At least four of the companies the star endorsed were based in the area, as were two of the large agencies that made commercials for them. Newspaper sales leaped up 30 to 50 percent during the championship series. The Bulls themselves had been valued at $18.7 million in 1985, but after eight years of Jordan the franchise was now estimated to be worth close to $200 million. Especially notable was his pull on overseas businesspeople who looked for headquarters and meeting sites in the United States. As one Illinois state official observed, “When we attend international trade shows to sell the city and state overseas, one of the first things people ask is, ‘Do you have any posters of Michael Jordan?’”11
The Bulls’ star seemed to have climbed back to the peak of the basketball and business worlds. This ascent of 1992–1993, however, had been made treacherous by the gambling allegations and the revelations about some of his off-court associations. In a 1988 interview, Jordan recounted that he suffered nightmares in which he made a mistake and destroyed his reputation. Especially fearful of accusations of drug-taking or alcoholism, he was determined to stay far away from both. “They’re nightmares of something terrible happening to me that would destroy a lot of people’s dreams or conceptions of me—that’s the biggest nightmare I live every day.”
During the night of July 22–23, 1993, James Jordan drove from Wilmington, North Carolina, to Charlotte, where he planned to take a plane to Chicago to see his son. In 1985, James and especially Deloris Jordan had already become so busy traveling to make money for themselves (notably from television ads in which Deloris starred) or to help Michael that they had moved to Charlotte to be near a major airport. James pulled off Route 74 to sleep. Two eighteen-year-olds approached to rob him, then shot him once through the chest. He apparently died instantly. When the two killers searched the victim’s belongings and discovered who he was, they panicked. They drove the car thirty miles across the South Carolina border and dumped the body in a swamp. The two then aimlessly drove the car for three more days before ditching it in Fayetteville, North Carolina. A fisherman found the badly decomposed body on August 3. It was quickly identified as James Jordan. Authorities then linked the body with the deserted car.
The new technology and media again moved to center stage in Michael Jordan’s life. The two killers had used the car’s cellular phone to make calls. Unlike regular phones that usually depend on copper wires to carry calls, cellular calls are transmitted in the open by radio signals. Their source and destination are easy to trace through the carrier companies that provide the service. Larry Martin Demery and Daniel Andre Green were quickly arrested for the murder. Demery was already under indictment for armed robbery. Green had just been paroled after serving less than two years for assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill. He had also been sentenced for armed robbery. The two men were waiting along the road for someone, anyone, to rob. It was, noted a North Carolina investigator, “the kind of random violence that all the public was … afraid of.”12
Michael Jordan had grown close to his father. During the crises of the gambling charges, James had been Michael’s spokesman. (Ironically, when the murder was first discovered, some in the media mistakenly guessed that it must somehow be linked with Michael’s gambling associations.) At the funeral, the son held his composure until he left the church. He then broke down. Phil Knight, who had flown in from Nike’s headquarters in Oregon, also began to cry. Knight looked at Jordan and thought, “Superman in tears.”13
After mourning for several months, Jordan called a press conference on October 6, 1993. He dramatically announced his retirement from the Bulls. “I have nothing more to prove in basketball,” he declared.14 No one who followed the sport could disagree. But just four months earlier he had ardently professed his “love” for the game. To retire at his prime, when he was only thirty years old, and when the Bulls looked forward to a string of championships, led the well-informed to speculate that the gambling revelations, his father’s death, and the incessant media crush that had grown to hot intensity in recent months had actually forced the decision.
Jordan’s competitive urges, however, had not lessened. He needed challenges, public challenges, not merely those around the card table or on the golf course. He also needed public attention, especially for the benefit of his endorsements—although he wanted such attention on his terms. Soon after retiring from basketball, he told columnist Bob Greene of riding a bike with friends in California when they saw a pickup basketball game. Jordan got off his bike and joined the game. He told Greene that “pretty soon about six thousand people had gathered. So I finished the game and left.” Jordan added it was a good moment: “I think we’re going to re-create it for a commercial.”15
The opportunities and competitive fire were too strong. He decided to try the sport that had once been his first love, baseball. He kept it in the family by signing with the Chicago White Sox, a club owned by his friend Jerry Reinsdorf, who also owned the Bulls.
Jordan and his fans quickly discovered he might not be Superman after all, at least not while wearing a baseball uniform. At the ballpark he more resembled Clark Kent. The White Sox sent him to Birmingham, Alabama, to a Double-A league two levels below the major leagues in talent, two-hundred light years below the major leagues in style. While Bulls and White Sox players dressed in plush clubhouses where meals were catered, then traveled sumptuously on chartered jets, Class AA ballplayers dressed in dank, small park dressing rooms, lived on tight allowances of meal money, and tried to get their sleep on grueling long-distance bus rides. Jordan often moved by private car, although he bought a new, luxurious bus for the team. Otherwise, he tried to fit in and pay his dues. This was difficult given that he was the most recognizable athlete in the world who earned millions of dollars each month ($1,200 from his baseball salary), while his teammates earned hundreds.
The Birmingham Baron games became hot tickets. The Barons’ soaring attendance was not matched by Jordan’s performance on the field. His speed and baserunning skills approximated big-league standards. But his hitting, especially against breaking pitches, and fielding sometimes fell below even Double-A standards. He hit a sad .202 while driving only three balls out of the park for home runs. At times, Jordan embarrassed himself. He knew the embarrassments were being shown by the nationally, indeed internationally, watched sports shows that were shadowing him from town to town. Bob Greene noted that Sports Illustrated, which two years earlier put him on the cover as Sportsman of the Year, now ridiculed Jordan with a story whose coverline read: “Bag It, Michael! Jordan and the White Sox are Embarrassing Baseball.” Greene concluded that “Having used Jordan to sell magazines when his skills in one sport were superb, Sports Illustrated was attempting to sell a few more issues by making fun of his failings.”16 So went the Faustian bargain in the newly wired world.
Jordan could leave basketball, but he could not leave the media of the new information age. Nor did he and his corporate clients want him to leave this media. Nike’s annual sales had swollen to more than $4 billion while profits exploded. Many of those profits were generated from the $18 million Nike paid Jordan each year for his endorsement. He moved into an office at Nike’s headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon—the only other office on the floor where Phil Knight had his desk. Wieden & Kennedy designed a fresh series of radio and television spots for Jordan and Nike. Knight even released a new Air Jordan shoe that listed the star’s NBA highlights on the outersole. Meanwhile, McDonald’s happily continued to pay him $3 million each year, Sara Lee up to $4 million (for his Hanes ads), Wheaties up to $3 million, Gatorade $2 million, and Chicagoland Chevrolet dealers an undisclosed amount to tell the public about their products.17
These corporations had decided that even without basketball, Jordan stood alone as a salesman. “There will be other stars in the NBA,” a marketing analyst observed, “but it will be hard to get someone who packages all that Jordan had.” He was attractive, articulate, relaxed on camera, flashed a wonderful smile, and that was “in addition to what he did on the court.” His (and the NBAs) marketing prowess became glaringly evident when Jordan stood alongside baseball stars to sign autographs. Major league baseball’s owners remained in the Dark Ages on questions such as player relations, the commissioner’s power, profit-sharing with players and poorer teams, and notably national and international marketing. Jordan received “all the requests for autographs,” one sports marketing expert noted, while the baseball stars were “not given the attention their talents are due.”18
The Bulls figured out how even a retired Jordan could help them pull in fans. The team had a one-ton bronze statue of him sculpted so it could be placed at the main entrance of the new United Center. The statue displayed Jordan floating through the air as he prepared to slam the ball down through the basket. It was so lifelike that the statue even had hair under the arms and, of course, wore Nike shoes. As reporter Jeff Coplon noted, “There’s something peculiar here … and then you realize that the statue is the spitting macro-image of the [Nike] sneaker logo: marketing becomes art, becomes marketing once more.”19 The line between basketball and the market, never clear since 1891, had long since disappeared.
For both the game and the market, the inscription on the statue’s base was most appropriate:
MICHAEL JORDAN
CHICAGO BULLS
1984–1993
The best there ever was.
The best there ever will be.
Meanwhile, baseball as a game (as opposed to the marketing of it) was proving too much for Jordan. Experts gave him the benefit of the doubt: if he had played the game regularly in his teens and twenties, he might have developed the reflexes needed to hit a ninety-mile-an-hour breaking pitch or the instincts required to run bases successfully. In the 1994 Arizona Fall League, Jordan managed to hit only .252 against mostly rookie and minor-league pitchers. As their headline player struck out at the high rate of once every four times at bat, his team, the Scottsdale Scorpions, drove back and forth to the bank. With Jordan on board, Scottsdale alone accounted for 87 percent of the league’s total attendance. So many callers suddenly wanted Scorpion caps that an extra person had to be hired just to handle those orders.
In 1994, some twelve months after he had retired from basketball, Forbes magazine announced that Jordan led the list of athletes with the highest incomes for the third straight year. His marketing prowess was undiminished—partly, no doubt, because his advertising spots played well on the nostalgia of the Bulls’ great years, partly because of the media frenzy that followed him around the Alabama and Arizona ballparks. The frenzy required that he be accompanied by two beefy bodyguards even while he was resting in the dugout.20
As its sales surged toward the $5 billion mark, Nike also prospered. Phil Knight planned a massive international campaign that would make foreign buyers (who now accounted for one-third of the firm’s sales) more important than the U.S. market. Given his global popularity, Jordan was an integral part of Knight’s plans. But Nike was beset with problems which had less to do with sales than with public image—although as Knight and Jordan well knew, sales and image could sooner or later become two sides of the same coin.
Several years before, a group named The Made in the USA Foundation began a one-million-dollar advertising attack on Nike and other U.S.-headquartered firms that produced most of their products overseas. American labor deserved to receive preference, the Foundation announced, over poorly paid, child, or prison labor abroad. Its ads told readers to send their “old, dirty, smelly, worn-out Nikes” to Knight so the company would “come back home to the United States and start making shoes here once again.” The Foundation charged that during the 1980s, 65,000 U.S. laborers had lost well-paying jobs when Nike and other shoe manufacturers began doing more production and assembly in Asian countries. Made in the USA also quoted press reports that Nike spent $5.95 to make a pair of shoes in Indonesia, where workers were paid 14 cents an hour, then sold the shoes in the United States for between $49 and $125.21
Nike hit back by again noting it did not directly hire and pay Asian workers. The company instead worked through contractors who, it declared, had to pay a country’s minimum wage. Moreover, Nike announced it employed more American manufacturing workers (1,200 out of a total company workforce of 6,500 in the United States) than any other athletic footwear company. But the Foundation’s charges obviously stung. By 1994, Nike television ads began to show Jordan and track champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee talking seriously to students and adults about the need to support local youth sports programs.22
As the charges were hurled back and forth, Jordan continued to be silent about labor and wage issues. He appeared more frequently at his Chicago restaurant to chat up customers, and even moved around area country clubs in a self-proclaimed mission to become an immortal gin rummy player. But he could escape neither the continued frustrations of baseball nor the growing allegations against Nike.
The Arizona Fall League frustrations blended into a winter of following the Bulls as they won games in their splendid new United Center. Jordan seemed to be ready to leave, needing only an excuse to escape from baseball. Foolish owners and a myopic players’ union provided that excuse when their fumblings led to a players’ strike in 1994. The strike gave baseball a permanent black eye by cancelling the World Series. As the trouble staggered on into the early spring training days of March 1995, Jordan announced that the strike prevented him from working out so he could be a better player.
Seventeen months after leaving the Bulls, he told the world he was returning. The NBA season was in its final months, but Jordan’s impact was awesome, especially on the sport’s business side. His first game against the Indiana Pacers turned into, as Coach Phil Jackson described it, “a three-ring circus, which was broadcast worldwide and attracted the largest TV audience of any regular season NBA game in history.” Larry Brown, the Pacers’ coach, captured the mood by declaring, “The Beatles and Elvis are back.” When a film crew actually began zeroing in on Jordan’s Nikes, one observer declared, “Now they’re interviewing his shoes.”23
Jordan was rusty. He missed too many shots as the Bulls lost in overtime. Tabloid headlines charged that “Air Jordan” had become only “Fair Jordan.” A week later, however, he defeated Atlanta by scoring 32 points, including a long jump shot just as the final buzzer sounded. Then he scored 55 points to sink the New York Knicks, 113–111, in a media-splashed event at Madison Square Garden. Usually 100 to 150 media representatives covered Knicks’ games. On this night, some 350, from a dozen countries, showed up—so many that not enough seats could be found. Scalpers sold $95 seats for $1,000. The game, shown on Ted Turner’s cable station, drew an increasingly larger audience as the evening progressed until it hit a record number of viewers for cable broadcast of a basketball game.24
The Bulls lacked the cohesion to win another title. While Jordan had been away, they had consistently won. But there were no championships in 1994 or in 1995 after Jordan reappeared late in the season. A young Orlando team defeated them in the early playoffs. Not, however, without arousing a marketing mania. McDonald’s celebrated Jordan’s return with a set of television ads that featured him with other NBA stars. When he came back to the Bulls, he wore the number 45 on his uniform, instead of his old, now retired, 23—a change that ignited sales of Bulls jersey No. 45. In the Orlando series, one opponent who had guarded Jordan told the press that he was slower and “not the same as No. 23.” In the next game, Jordan switched back to 23 and scored 38 points. The Bulls won, but Orlando complained about the uniform change—as, Coach Jackson noted, did a large number of parents who had bought No. 45 jerseys for their children. No league rule prohibited the change of number. But marketing principles and public relations posed real problems. The NBA fined the Bulls $100,000 for allowing Jordan to switch. Meanwhile, sales of No. 23 Bulls jerseys again took off.25
Jordan, despite the baseball interlude, remained an immensely profitable commodity in a society that, especially with the end of the Cold War, seemed to value profit, celebrity, and marketability above all else. He and Nike thus became post-Cold-War symbols—indeed phenomena—of American culture, American globalization, American marketing, American wealth, American-headquartered media, American-based transnationals. Jordan and Nike were also becoming symbols for the sometime corruption of this Americanization, when its too often seamy underside contaminated its professed principles.
The power of the new, post-1970s technology lay here: while creating unimagined wealth more rapidly than ever before, it could also raise fundamental questions about the society that generated that wealth. It could raise such questions more rapidly and intensely, and to billions of more viewers, moreover, than ever before.