Jordan, Michael 1963–

Michael Jordan 1963–

Professional basketball player

A Slow Starter

Talent, Desire, Success

Life in a Fishbowl

Personal Tragedy and Its Aftermath

Announced Retirement in October of 1993

Sources

Michael Jordan needs no introduction anywhere in the world. Prior to his retirement in 1993, he was one of the highest paid and certainly one of the best-known athletes in the history of organized sports. The intensely competitive guard for the Chicago Bulls dominated the National Basketball Association (NBA) for almost a decade, most notably in the Bulls’ three consecutive NBA championship years of 1991-93. Sports Illustrated contributor Jack McCallum called Jordan “unquestionably the most famous athlete on the planet and one of its most famous citizens of any kind,” a sportsman who “has surpassed every standard by which we gauge the fame of an athlete and, with few exceptions, has handled the adulation with a preternatural grace and ease that have cut across lines of race, age and gender.” Gentleman’s Quarterly correspondent David Breskin likewise characterized Jordan as “the most admired, idolized and moneyed team-sport hero in the entire American-hero business.” Breskin added: “For some folks he has come to represent America—as in, we may not make cars or televisions too well, but we turn out a helluva Michael Jordan.”

Even those people who have never watched a moment of professional basketball recognize Jordan. The athlete has made a fortune in commercial endorsements of products such as Nike’s Air Jordan footwear, Wheaties cereal, and McDonald’s hamburgers. The combination of Jordan’s natural charms and his extraordinary basketball prowess have brought the likable star an estimated $35 million a year in revenues. As David Halberstam put it in Sports Illustrated, Jordan is the first super-athlete of the satellite age, the first professional player to benefit on a grand scale from a global audience for his talents and his products. “Jordan has created a kind of fame that exceeds sports,” wrote Halberstam. “He is both athlete and entertainer. He plays in the age of the satellite to an audience vastly larger than was possible in the past and is thus the first great athlete of the wired world.”

A Slow Starter

Michael Jordan was born February 17, 1963, in Brooklyn, New York, while his father was stationed there briefly on business. The fourth of five children, Michael has two brothers and two sisters. While he was still young, his family moved back to their hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina, where his father worked as a supervisor at a

At a Glance…

Born Michael Jeffrey Jordan, February 17, 1963, in Brooklyn, NY; raised in Wilmington, NC; son of James (a former equipment supervisor for General Electric and a retail business owner) and Delores (Peoples) Jordan; married Juanita Vanoy, 1989; children: Jeffrey, Marcus, Jasmine. Education: Attended University of North Carolina, 1981-84.

Professional basketball player, 1984-93. Drafted third in first round of 1984 National Basketball Association (NBA) draft by Chicago Bulls; member of Chicago Bulls, 1984-93. Also endorses a number of products/corporations in television commercials, including Nike, Wheaties, Gatorade, Wilson Sporting Goods, Hanes, Ball Park Franks, and McDonald’s; owner of Chicago eatery Michael Jordan’s: The Restaurant. Founder, Michael Jordan Foundation. Author of text to the photographic biography Rare Air: Michael on Michael, published by Collins Publishers San Francisco, November 4, 1993.

Selected awards: Recipient of gold medal for basketball at Olympic Games, 1984 and 1992; named NBA Rookie of the Year, 1985; member of NBA Eastern Conference All-Star Team, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992; NBA scoring leader 1984, 1986-93; named NBA Defensive Player of the Year, 1988; named NBA League Most Valuable Player, 1988, 1991, 1992; named “Sportsman of the Year” by Sports Illustrated, 1991; named NBA Finals Most Valuable Player, 1991, 1992, 1993.

Addresses: c/o The Chicago Bulls, One Magnificent Mile, 980 North Michigan Ave., Suite 1600, Chicago, IL 60611. Publisher —Collins Publishers San Francisco, 50 Osgood PI., Suite 400, San Francisco, CA 94133.

General Electric plant. Everyone in the Jordan family worked hard—everyone, that is, except Michael. “I could not keep regular hours. It just wasn’t me,” Jordan told Gentleman’s Quarterly. Michael threw all of his energies into sports, playing baseball and basketball with the same intensity that his parents and siblings devoted to their work. He said that he began playing with his tongue sticking out because his father would stick his tongue out whenever concentrating on a task.

Neither of Jordan’s parents were tall, nor were his brothers and sisters beyond average height. Michael himself seemed destined to be short, an unlikely candidate for the professional basketball career he dreamed about. In backyard games with his friends and brothers, he tried to compensate for his height by playing harder; thus was born his fierce desire to win, especially against the odds.

As a freshman at Wilmington’s Laney High School, Jordan tried out for the varsity basketball team and was cut. The next year he was cut again soon after the season began, while his best friend, Leroy Smith, made the team. Jordan told Reader’s Digest that when he discovered he had been dropped from the varsity again, “I went through the day numb. After school, I hurried home, closed the door to my room and cried so hard. It was all I wanted—to play on that team.” He added: “It’s probably good that it happened. It made me know what disappointment felt like. And I knew that I didn’t want that feeling ever again.”

Between his sophomore and junior years of high school, Jordan added several inches to his height. Almost overnight he grew from five feet eleven inches to six feet three inches. By the time he was a senior he stood at six feet six. Needless to say, he finally earned his berth on the varsity squad and—with his burning ambitions in tow—he became one of the most widely-recruited high school athletes in the country. He accepted a full scholarship to the University of North Carolina. “Everybody in Wilmington expected me to go to North Carolina, sit on the bench for four years, then go back to Wilmington and work at the local gas station,” he told Gentleman’s Quarterly.

Talent, Desire, Success

Michael Jordan never warmed the bench at the University of North Carolina. He was a starter for the Tar Heels from the first game of his freshman year. He became a national celebrity later that season when he sank a winning fifteen-foot jump shot in the final seconds of the 1982 NCAA Championship. Teammates and fans nicknamed him “Superman” and “Last Shot,” and he was voted Atlantic Coast Conference rookie of the year.

To this day Jordan remembers his years at the University of North Carolina fondly. He had a special rapport with Tar Heels coach Dean Smith, and many of the friends he made there are still his closest companions today. He spent two more seasons on the UNC team and was named Ail-American in 1983 and 1984 and Sporting News college player of the year in 1983. After a disappointing 1983-84 campaign in which he led the Tar Heels to an Atlantic Coast Conference championship but bowed in the NCAA tournament, Jordan was named co-captain of the 1984 United States Olympic basketball team. In Los Angeles in the summer of 1984, Jordan was one of the leaders on an Olympic team that gracefully captured the gold medal.

Against his parents’ wishes, Jordan decided to go professional in 1984. He was drafted third in the first round of the 1984 NBA draft by the struggling Chicago Bulls. The Bulls were limping through a decade of lackluster performance and were searching for an athlete who could galvanize the team as a player and a leader. Jordan fit the bill perfectly. In his first professional season he led the NBA in points and was chosen rookie of the year. Even though the Bulls still continued to struggle, attendance at home games leaped 87 percent as word of the rookie phenomenon spread. Nor was Jordan merely a local hero. In every NBA city, attendance rose dramatically when the Chicago Bulls came to town.

A foot injury sidelined Jordan for most of the 1985-86 campaign. At the very end of the season he convinced the Bulls’ coach and owner to allow him to play. With his help the team surged to win a trip to the playoffs, in which the Bulls met the Boston Celtics with their popular star, Larry Bird. The Celtics had little trouble defeating the Bulls in the playoff series, but Jordan scored 49 points in Game One and 63 points in Game Two. An astounded Larry Bird quipped that the new star in Chicago was “God disguised as Michael Jordan.”

Jordan combined several highly regarded American commodities: good looks, phenomenal athletic ability, and—perhaps most importantly—a clean, scandal-free image. Advertisers were quick to court the young star for commercial endorsements of products. One of the first companies to seek Jordan’s help was Nike, makers of athletic clothing and footwear. For Jordan the company designed a whole new line of shoes, “Air Jordans,” taking their name from the player’s uncanny ability to hang four feet above the ground as he took shots during games. The Air Jordan line put an end to Nike’s sagging sneaker sales, earning an estimated $130 million in the first year of sales. Jordan pocketed a share of the profits for this venture. Other endorsement contracts were signed with McDonald’s, Chevrolet, Coco-Cola, and Wheaties cereal, as well as numerous smaller businesses in the Chicago area.

Life in a Fishbowl

Many athletes have found that their on-court skills have been eroded when the demands of commercial endorsements and the crush of fame descend upon them. Jordan only seemed to get stronger. As the Bulls were rebuilt around him with a group of hungry young players, he continued to lead the NBA in scoring and often landed on the all-defensive first team as well. Breskin wrote: “The truly revolutionary aspect of Jordan’s brilliance is that although he possesses the most extravagant, high-cholesterol game in the history of the sport, it’s as controlled as it is wild and as thoughtful as it is free. There has never been such a spectacular player who was also so disciplined, so fundamentally sound. There has never been such a gifted offensive player who worked so hard, and so well, on the defensive end of the court.”

Few questioned Jordan’s ability, but as the 1980s progressed, naysayers pointed out that basketball’s newest superstar was unable to take his team to the NBA finals. One shadow that remained over the athlete’s career was the notion that great players who never win a title are somehow less great than those who do—that truly brilliant players will wring the best possible performance out of mediocre teammates. Jordan was saddled with this burden of proving himself as the Bulls were eliminated at various steps in the playoffs throughout the remainder of the 1980s. A particularly frustrating opposing team in this regard was the Detroit Pistons, who devised a whole scheme to undermine Jordan’s productiveness during games.

Gradually the personnel around Jordan improved, however, and the Bulls began to assert themselves as a team. In 1991 the long-awaited NBA championship was finally achieved in a four-games-to-one victory over the Los Angeles Lakers. McCallum noted in Sports Illustrated: “To many NBA observers, the Bulls had to win it all before Jordan could conclusively prove that he was more than a high-flying sideshow or a long, loud ring of the cash register. They did. And so he did.” Any questions about Jordan’s greatness were dispelled in the 1991-92 and 1992-93 seasons as the Bulls became the first team in thirty years to win three consecutive NBA Championships. In 1992 the Bulls defeated the Portland Trail Blazers, in 1993 the Phoenix Suns. Jordan played almost nonstop in each and every championship series. Not only did he dominate the NBA, he also managed to lead the first-ever United States Olympic men’s basketball team manned by professionals. The “Dream Team” easily grabbed the gold medal in the 1992 Olympic Games—just weeks after Jordan’s Bulls had won a second NBA championship.

After the Bulls beat the Suns in six games for the 1993 NBA championship, McCallum asked in Sports Illustrated: “Is Michael Jeffrey Jordan simply the best basketball player in the history of the planet?…You know the answer to that question: yes. A resounding yes.” Jordan made history as the only athlete ever named NBA Finals Most Valuable Player three consecutive times. He is the only player besides Wilt Chamberlain ever to score 3,000 points in a season and the only player in history to score 50 or more points in five playoff games.

Everything has its price, though. For Jordan, the adoration of basketball fans worldwide and an unprecedented level of fame for an athlete brought a multitude of problems. Negative publicity began in the 1980s when teenagers began to use violent means to obtain Air Jordan sneakers costing in excess of $100 a pair. More recently Jordan has had to defend himself against accusations of compulsive gambling on golf and card games. Twice the NBA has investigated Jordan’s gambling activities. In 1991 he admitted betting more than $50,000 on golf games played with James “Slim” Bouler, who has since been convicted of selling cocaine. During the 1993 NBA Finals, a San Diego businessman named Richard Esquinas alleged in a self-published book that Jordan owed him $1.25 million in the wake of a ten-day golf gambling binge. Jordan claimed that he never bet anything near a million dollars on a golf game and that he merely gambles as recreation. Both times the NBA supported Jordan, but some critics claim that the investigations were “soft” because Jordan was such a powerful box office draw in the league.

The implications of any lasting scandal were obvious: Jordan could have lost his lucrative endorsement contracts while still being hounded mercilessly by the press and his fans. Since 1985 Jordan endured great restrictions on his movements—he was and is recognized, and mobbed, everywhere he goes in public. Following the gambling uproar, he faced the task of defending his reputation against those who would characterize him as out of control. McCallum is one reporter who has noticed the change wrought by this lifestyle that is akin to living in a fishbowl: “Gone is much of the spontaneous joy that Jordan brought to the game in 1984, when he entered the league with a head of hair, a pair of North Carolina shorts beneath his Bulls uniform and a boyish appetite for fame and glory.…somewhere amid all the adulation and pressure, a spark went out of Jordan—one that, it seems, will never return.”

Personal Tragedy and Its Aftermath

The Jordan family faced tragedy in the summer of 1993 when Michael’s father, James, was brutally murdered in North Carolina. Jordan fought tears and tried to dodge the press during his father’s funeral and the subsequent police investigation that uncovered two teenaged suspects and an apparent motive of car theft. His father’s untimely death was yet another severe blow to Jordan, who had for some time contemplated retiring from the NBA in 1996. Just months before the murder, Jordan told People that he wanted to put an end to the strange, isolated existence he leads in an effort to avoid the media glare and the demands of flocks of fans. “I feel I’m at the stage of my career when it’s tough to move up,” he said. ‘I can only maintain and be consistent. I’ve set such high standards. You lose a bit of the joy as you move on.”

A bit of the joy may be gone for Jordan, but no amount of personal pain can erase the greatness of his career. As Richard Stengel observed in Time magazine in 1991, “All the commercial hype and publicity fade away when he does play, for Michael Jordan is the artwork and the artist, the poem and the poet. He reinvents the sport every time he rises—and rises—into the air.” Stengel concluded in the same article: “Michael Jordan is now his own greatest competition. When you make the miraculous routine, the merely superb becomes ordinary.”

Announced Retirement in October of 1993

Jordan had often referred to basketball as his “refuge,” but the combined toll of his father’s brutal murder, the media scrutiny surrounding his own gambling debts, the continuing pressures of his megastardom, and his professed feelings of having nothing left to prove on the basketball court are believed to have played a part in his decision to retire from the game at the age of 30. At a press conference held October 6, 1993, Jordan officially confirmed the rumors of his retirement from professional basketball, stating: “I’ve always stressed that when I lose the sense of motivation and the sense to prove something as a basketball player, it’s time to leave.” An Associated Press wire report released the evening before the news conference quoted him as saying: “It’s time for me to move on to something else. I know a lot of people are going to be shocked by this decision and probably won’t understand. But…I’m at peace with myself.”

In a photobiography titled Rare Air: Michael on Michael —which was completed during the summer of 1993, but published after the player announced his retirement—Jordan foreshadowed his decision to withdraw from the spotlight while still at the height of his career: “When I leave the game,” he wrote, “I’ll leave on top. That’s the only way I’ll walk away. I don’t want to leave after my feet have slowed, my hands aren’t as quick, or my eyesight isn’t as sharp. I don’t want people to remember me that way. I want people to remember me playing exactly the kind of game I’m capable of playing right now. Nothing less.”

Yet, as Mark Starr reported in Newsweek, Jordan still has the option to “unretire.” “I’m not going to close that door,” he said. “I don’t believe in never.” But as of the fall of 1993, Jordan felt it best to hang up his Bulls uniform, spend more time with his family, and expand his business ties. “I’m sure there are fans who think they know what it’s like being a professional athlete,” he wrote in Rare Air. “But I’m quite sure they don’t know just how different our lives are and how it impacts our wives and children.… I thought this was the perfect time in my career to give people an inside look at my life.”

In January of 1994, Jordan provoked widespread speculation in the sports world after it was reported that he would attempt a career with professional baseball’s Chicago White Sox. Jordan had played baseball through high school, but some critics doubted that he could make the jump to the major league game as a 30 year old. Nonetheless, Jordan’s agent confirmed in Sports Illustrated that his client had been taking batting practice for several hours a day. Jordan has unquestionably achieved greatness on the basketball court, but it appears that baseball may become the new challenge for one of the best, and best-known, athletes in the world.

Sources

Books

Greene, Bob, Hang Time, Doubleday, 1992.

Jordan, Michael, Rare Air: Michael on Michael, photographed by Walter Iooss, Jr., edited by Mark Vancil, Collins Publishers San Francisco, 1993.

Periodicals

Associated Press wire report, October 5, 1993.

Ebony, December 1993, pp. 128-38.

Esquire, November 1990, pp. 138-216.

Forbes, May 25, 1992, p. 168.

Gentleman’s Quarterly, March 1989, pp. 319-97.

Newsweek, May 29, 1989, pp. 58-60; December 4, 1989, pp. 80-81; June 14, 1993, pp. 72-74; August 23, 1993, p. 60; August 30, 1993, p. 59; October 18, 1993, pp. 65-70; October-November 1993 Collector’s Issue (devoted to Jordan).

People, May 17, 1993, pp. 82-87.

Publishers Weekly, July 26, 1993, p. 13.

Reader’s Digest, February 1993, pp. 79-83.

Shutterbug, December 1993, pp. 52-55.

Sports Illustrated, December 23, 1991, pp. 66-81; June 7, 1993, pp. 19-21; June 28, 1993, pp. 17-21; August 23, 1993, p. 11; October 18, 1993, pp. 28-34; January 17, 1994, pp. 32-35.

Time, June 24, 1991, p. 47; October 18, 1993, pp. 114-16.

Upscale, January 1994, pp. 28-32.

Michael Jordan was profiled on Eye to Eye with Connie Chung, CBS-TV, July 15, 1993; an interview with Jordan conducted by Oprah Winfrey for Oprah, was first broadcast on ABC-TV on October 29, 1993.

—Mark Kram