The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  Franklin shows no discrimination in practicing noblesse oblige. “Humanity is humanity,” he says. “I serve without fear or favor.” A few years ago, he tried singlehanded to prevent a hoof-and-mouth epidemic that had broken out among the cattle in Spain from spreading to other countries. He took it upon himself to deliver lengthy reports to officials in Washington and Mexico City on ships sailing for North America with animals he thought had the disease, and on where the cattle came from, and on the buyers and sellers of infected cattle. “I sent one report by diplomatic pouch from Madrid,” he says. “One year later, there was a terrific outbreak of the disease in Mexico, all because those diplomats had been too busy to listen to me.” In Washington, a while back, Franklin lunched with several senators, including Barkley, Tydings, Chavez, and Magnuson, ostensibly to tell them how the prevalence of hoof-and-mouth disease in Mexico was affecting the price of beef in this country. An onlooker says that the luncheon topic suddenly became United States domestic and foreign policy, and that Franklin did all the talking. After lunch, the onlooker took Franklin aside and suggested that he might have allowed the senators to get a word in. “What do you mean?” Franklin asked. “How often do senators have the chance to lunch with a bullfighter?”

  Franklin’s noblesse oblige was extended during the last war to include an offer to the United States government to make himself expendable. The offer was accepted, and he was assigned to some mysterious work in North Africa. “If I had told Sidney to walk barefoot across some high mountains, he would have done it,” his superior in the war work recalls. “But it had to be a big thing. When you want to get credit for doing something big in war, you often get killed. Fortunately, I didn’t have anything big for Sidney to do.”

  Some of Franklin’s intimates say that he is one of the small percentage of men to whom friendship really means something. One day, he called at the home of a friend named Grant Mason, in Washington, and was told by Mason’s wife that Mason, who had just got out of the Army, was resting for a few months. “Tell Grant to go back to work,” said Franklin, and insisted that it would be bad for him to hang around the house all day. “You might say that Sidney is a kind of mother hen,” Mrs. Mason has remarked in telling of this. Franklin mothers not only his friends but strangers. When he was in Spain during the Second World War, an American bomber was shot down by German planes over the Bay of Vigo. One injured flier was interned in a hospital at La Coruña, near Vigo. At Christmas time, Franklin, who had heard about the American’s internment, spent three days with him. “I didn’t want the kid to be alone over the holidays,” he explained.

  Franklin is always trying to prove that there is nothing man can do with his hands that he can’t do. “He goes all over your house, getting half a dozen projects started,” a New York friend recently recalled. “Then he goes home, and no one around the place knows how to finish them.” Once, Franklin decided that a friend who lived in the country needed a doghouse. He went off into the woods, chopped down a tree, and made a rather large doghouse of hewn logs. His friend’s dog refused to sleep in it. Another country-dwelling friend says that Franklin is always trying to get him to build a wing on his house, or to put up a garage, or to have a tile floor laid. “He took one look at a rock garden I was breaking my back to build and told me to let it go,” the friend says. “He said what I needed was a large circular stone seat, to hold a lot of people. ‘But we don’t have a lot of people coming to our house,’ I told him. ‘You can never tell when you will have,’ he said. I built the seat.”

  Franklin likes to cook, and he has delighted fellow bullfighters in Spain with his dinners. His specialties are lobster and homemade doughnuts. Gerald Murphy, the Mark Cross man, is an admirer of Franklin’s cooking. “Sidney is an amazing gourmet, with a remarkably sensuous appreciation of foods,” he says. Murphy’s wife once let Franklin sample her special hors d’œuvre—slivers of the skin of baked potatoes simmered in butter until brown, a delicacy no guests had ever been able to identify. “Sidney knew immediately what it was,” Mrs. Murphy recalls. Another time, Franklin presented the Murphys with some delectable smoked fish. The Murphys went all over Brooklyn trying to get more of it. “Only Sidney knows where to get that smoked fish, and it’s his secret,” Mrs. Murphy says. “He knows the people who smoke the fish, and I think he knows the fish.”

  In general, Franklin says, he likes the life of a bullfighter because of the number of things he can pack into it. “You come into a town, and the moment you arrive, be it by plane, ship, train, or car, everybody is there to receive you,” he says. “You barely have time to change your clothes before it’s a high old round of banquets and dinners. You don’t pay for a thing; others consider it a privilege to pay for you. You’re yanked out to go swimming, hunting, fishing, and riding, and if you don’t know how to do those things, others consider it a privilege to teach you, to satisfy your every whim and desire. The select of all the professions like to be seen with you.” “They’re never alone,” Hemingway says morosely of bullfighters. “What Ernest has in mind when he says that is that all the sexes throw themselves at you,” Franklin explains. “I never went in for that night-owl stuff. I never let myself become detoured. Many of them allow themselves to become so detoured they never get back on the main highway.”

  Chaval’s attitude toward the bullfighter’s life is rather different. “I just like to scare girls,” he says. “Boy, I bring the bull so close to me, the girls, they scream. Boy, I get a kick out of making girls scream.”

  Franklin used to lecture Chaval on the significance of noblesse oblige in bullfighting to help the young man stay on the main highway. “I am alive today only because I was in perfect condition when I had my accidents in the ring,” he sternly told Chaval, who had night-owl inclinations.

  “Jeez, Sidney, all you gotta do in the ring is show you’re brave,” said Chaval. “That’s what girls like, when you’re brave.”

  Most bullfighters agree with Chaval, but they state their case with more dignity. A young woman who once met Carlos Arruza at a party in Mexico City complimented him on his bravery in fighting so close to a bull. “You think I am going to be killed, but for you I am courageous in the face of death,” Arruza replied gallantly. “This is manliness. I fight to make money, but I like very much to bring the bull to his knees before me.” The fearlessness of Manolete is legendary. He specialized in the most difficult and dangerous maneuver in bullfighting—the pase natural, which, properly executed, requires the bull to pass perilously close to the body. He had no worthy competitors, but he always tried to outdo himself. “Manolete was a tremendous personality,” a Mexican aficionado said recently. “He never smiled.” He was gored several times before he received his fatal wound. On more than one occasion, he might have saved himself by moving an inch or two. “Why didn’t you move, Manolo?” he was asked after suffering a leg wound one afternoon. “Because I am Manolete,” he replied somberly. Lack of fear has been attributed by some people simply to lack of imagination. Franklin disagrees with this theory. “I believe in facing facts,” he says. “If you’re a superman, you’re a superman, and that’s all there is to it.” Few of the critics who hold to the opinion that Franklin lacks artistry believe that he lacks valentia, or bravery. “Nobody ever lives his life all the way up except bullfighters,” Franklin says, quoting from “The Sun Also Rises.”

  In giving advice to Chaval on how to live his life all the way up, Franklin once said, “You’ve got to be the sun, moon, and stars to yourself, and results will follow as logically as night follows day.”

  “Jeez, Sidney! I don’t get it,” Chaval replied. “All I know is I gotta kill the bull or the bull kills me.”

  “Bullfighting taught me how to be the master of myself,” Franklin said. “It taught me how to discard all that was unimportant.”

  “Jeez, Sidney!” said Chaval.

  Franklin began to make history in the bull ring at his Spanish début, on June 9, 1929, in Seville. Aficionados who saw hi
m fight that day wept and shouted, and talked about it for weeks afterward. “On that day, I declared, ‘Bullfighting will never again be the same,’” Manuel Mejías, the bullfighting father of five bullfighting sons, has said. “Sidney Franklin introduced a revolutionary style in the bull ring.” “Sidney was a glowing Golden Boy,” recalls an American lady who was at the fight. “He was absolutely without fear. He was absolutely beautiful.”

  “I was carried out on the shoulders of the crowd through the gates reserved for royalty,” Franklin told Chaval ecstatically not long ago. “The history of the ring was then a hundred and ninety-nine years old. All that time, only four fellows had ever been carried out of the ring on the shoulders of the crowd. I was the fifth. Traffic in the streets of Seville was wrecked. The next day, they passed a law prohibiting the carrying of bullfighters through the public streets. I was taken out of the ring at seven and deposited at my hotel at twelve-twenty that night. I didn’t know what I was doing or what had happened to me. I was so excited I took all my money out of a dresser drawer and threw it to the crowds on the street. The die was cast that day. I was riding on the highest cloud in this or any other world. I felt so far above anything mundane that nothing mattered. I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t see anything. I looked, but I didn’t see. I heard, but nothing registered. I didn’t care about food. I didn’t care about drink. I was perfectly satisfied to lay my head on the pillow and pass out.”

  1949

  NET WORTH

  HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

  When do you know for sure? Basketball fans still talk about “the shot”—the sixteen-footer that a University of North Carolina freshman named Michael Jordan sank in 1982. With seconds left on the clock, Jordan scored the decisive basket against Georgetown, secured the NCAA crown, and put himself, in his own words, “on the basketball map.” David Falk, whom one would be tempted to call the Michael Jordan of sports agents if he weren’t Michael Jordan’s sports agent, tells about witnessing a similarly prophetic moment in Jordan’s career. In 1985, Jordan, a coltish twenty-two, was holding a press conference in Chicago to announce an endorsement deal he’d signed with the Coca-Cola Company. But those were not ordinary times, for New Coke had recently been introduced and a cola Kulturkampf was seething. “Which Coke do you like—New Coke or regular Coke?” a reporter threw at him.

  Even now, in the recounting, Falk wants to make sure I get the full picture: an inexperienced young player, the cameras, the microphones, the blazing lights—and his future as a pitchman in the balance. “And Michael instantly responded, ‘Coke is Coke. They both taste great.’” As the sportscasters say, nothing but net.

  No one could have faulted Jordan had he made a different play—had he plumped for New Coke, and tried to justify the choice without slighting its precursor. “I mean, for me, I would have probably picked one and tried to explain why,” Falk says intently. You can tell that the moment is part of his own personal highlights reel: the lights, the cameras, the question, the sudden clutch in his gut, and, finally, Jordan’s soaring, effortless dunk. “What a great answer!” Falk exclaims. “He just has amazing instincts.” If you’re Falk, that’s when you know.

  Après Coke, le déluge. Edible cake decorations, golf-club covers, shower curtains, pot holders, aprons, rulers, kitchen towels, sleeping bags, canteens, insulated travel mugs, napkins, tablecloths, popcorn tins, foam furniture, first-aid kits, gift wrap, memo pads, book bags, pencil sharpeners, erasers, buttons, key chains, wallet cards, magnets, ring binders, tissue holders, diaries, address books, envelopes, flashlights, kites, toothbrush holders, wastebaskets, Sony and Sega play stations, pinball games, soap dishes, walkie-talkies, curtains, acrylic juice cups, gum, cookies, bandages, and comforters: this isn’t a list of all the commodities that Jordan has endorsed, but it’s the beginning of such a list. The economist Tyler Cowen, who has compiled a far longer list than this one, has approvingly noted that these endorsements represent a very simple form of mutualism: “It helps sell their product, and it makes Michael Jordan more famous.”

  Two forces contend for the soul of contemporary America, playing out a sociohistorical version of King Kong versus Godzilla, only with better special effects. On the one hand, there’s the growth of what has been termed “winner-take-all” markets, visible in every economic and cultural realm but epitomized by the star system of the NBA. On the other hand, there’s the growth of market micro-segmentation—the fragmentation of culture into ever narrower niches, from the proliferation of cable channels to the supposed balkanization of the canon. For at least the past decade, the struggle has been ceaseless, dug-in, brutal. Corporate behemoths meet and merge; then, buffeted by shareholder capitalism, spin off divisions like whirling nebulae. Twenty thousand new consumer products were introduced in this country last year; 90 percent of them will fail. And so the battle continues. A bulletin from the front: Michael Jordan—the ultimate winner-take-all celebrity—is gaining the upper hand.

  “Forget the endorsements and the swoosh and the dollar sign,” Steve Wulf wrote in Time last year. “They just get in the way, like some beaded curtain that keeps us from truly appreciating what we have”—to wit, “the greatest athlete in the history of American sports.” An uplifting sentiment, but you might just as fairly stand it on its head. The man’s grandeur on the court—the dunks, the jump shots, the steals, the midair acrobatics—has tended to obscure another historic achievement: Michael Jordan has become the greatest corporate pitchman of all time. As a twentieth-century sports hero, he has plausible competition from Babe Ruth and Muhammad Ali; as an agent of brand equity, he is without peer.

  The first thing you notice when you sit down with Michael Jordan is how very much like Michael Jordan he is. The resemblance is uncanny, and not incidental to his success. He’s handsome and dark-skinned, with those three horizontal creases in his forehead which really become visible when he’s at the free-throw line, glistening with sweat and glowering at the basket. His baritone is the one you’ve heard on a thousand commercials. But, more than that, the manner—direct and artless—is familiar. (“He can’t really act,” Falk was quoted as saying shortly before the Jordan vehicle Space Jam had its theatrical release, and it occurs to me only now that Falk was reassuring us, not warning us.) Jordan, who is self-aware without being self-conscious, recognizes that the alchemy of image requires realness, which in turn requires exposure, albeit controlled exposure.

  “I know that it’s got some coloring to it, and you are only going to see certain portions that they want you to see,” Jordan says of his public persona. “But still, when I come in contact with people, I think they see me being a genuine person. And I get along with everybody. I’m a people person, yet I understand the game of corporate America and what they try to project.”

  We’re sitting quietly in his private suite off the second-floor dining room of an establishment called Michael Jordan’s Restaurant, on North LaSalle Street, in downtown Chicago. The most noticeable object here is an eleven-by-fourteen-inch photograph of his father, the late James Jordan. Otherwise, the suite is sedate and muted, with cream-colored walls, a couple of tan leather sofas, and a marble dining table. Michael Jordan is across from me, sipping a cup of coffee, nibbling on fruit salad, and occasionally lifting up a piece of flatware, tilting it this way and that.

  Jordan was exaggerating when he said he got along with everybody. He minces few words as he speaks about two of his previous coaches at Chicago: Stan Albeck, who he feels was tolerant of mediocrity (“very laid-back—do your job and then go out and party”), and Doug Collins, who was loyal to management but not to his players (“‘Fuck Doug Collins’ was the conversation on the court”). Still, when it comes to elements that affect his and his team’s performance, you wouldn’t expect the most competitive member of the NBA to display an attitude of live-and-let-live. Jordan has been equally acerbic toward teammates who he feels have not pulled their weight. The person who continues to elicit Jordan’s special loathing, though, i
s Jerry Krause, the general manager of the Chicago Bulls and thus Jordan’s putative boss.

  “I was a piece of meat to him,” Jordan says, recounting one of their many disputes. “He felt he could control me, because I had so much value to him. But he didn’t realize that I had value to myself: I was independent, and I understood what I was.”

  Considered even as a piece of meat, Jordan need make no apologies. At six feet six, he weighs almost twenty pounds more than he did when he started his pro career—the result of a strenuous regimen of upper-body weight training. The man is both hulking and suave, and it’s easy to see why he has become a totem of black masculinity; he makes Bill Cosby look like Uncle Ben. He’s dressed casually today: jeans, a beige T-shirt, and the familiar gold earring, an adornment that seemed faintly daring and piratical when he first adopted it, ten years ago. He does not generally push the limits of the acceptable. He may banter about condoms—he’ll never endorse them, he has said, because “they’re too small!”—but he seldom edges past PG-13. This is a guy who listens to Toni Braxton and Anita Baker, not to Ice Cube or the Wu-Tang Clan. He has a sense of being at ease with himself—a low center of gravity, so to speak, despite his prowess at the vertical game. Relaxed and polite, he discusses his television advertisements with the same combination of detachment and animation with which he discusses the game.

  A Nike spot that Jordan is particularly proud of aired in 1997; in it, he gives a recitation of missed shots and lost games, concluding, “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeeded.” Fade to the Air Jordan logo. “I had to fight the agency about it, because they had wanted to have me work with Oliver Stone on a commercial,” he says, making a faint snorting sound, “and Oliver Stone was going to go through that process of trying to figure out why my game is my game. And I said, ‘Oliver Stone don’t know shit about basketball. Why don’t you just show the actual situation? Let the people see exactly what’s happened over the twelve years of my career.’ The idea is to tell young kids, ‘Don’t be afraid to fail, because a lot of people have to fail to be successful—these are the many times that I’ve failed but yet I’ve been successful.’ Let them know that it isn’t always good for the people up top. I mean, they have bad things happen to them.”