If one of those bad things is being stuck with a general manager like Krause, another, it seems, is being stuck with a team owner like the Chicago real estate developer Jerry Reinsdorf. Jordan tells me about the meeting with Reinsdorf when his Bulls contract for the 1997–98 season—a one-year retainer worth thirty-odd million dollars—was agreed upon: “We shook hands. But one comment stuck with me as we left, and I lost total respect for him when he said it: ‘At some point in time, I know I’m going to regret what we just did.’” For the previous eight years, Jordan had been saddled with a contract that had early on failed to keep pace with the escalating NBA marketplace. So the comment wasn’t exactly sporting. Now Jordan gives me a meaningful look. “And I’m saying, All these years where you knew I was underpaid and you been making money and your organization’s moved from a fifteen-million-dollar business when you bought it to a two-hundred-million-dollar business—all those years have just gone down the drain because you have for once paid me my value. And you regretted that! That hit me so deep inside—that sense of greed, of disrespect for me.”
Since this kind of friction is commonplace in the NBA, it’s easy to miss how strange the whole situation is. After all, Jordan, considered strictly as an athlete, is the Second Coming, and Reinsdorf, considered strictly as a mogul, is a second-rater. It’s as if Pat Robertson were making Jesus punch a time card.
And all this is aside from Jordan’s role as culture hero. A Plutarchian progression of biographies have mounted the best-seller list, chronicling the securely working-class childhood in Wilmington, North Carolina (father a foreman at a General Electric plant; mother in customer relations for the United Carolina Bank); the traumatic early failure (as a high school sophomore, he was cut from the varsity team); his taste of greatness as a Tar Heel, under the tutelage of Coach Dean Smith; his debut with the Chicago Bulls and the galvanizing effect he had upon the team and upon the sport in general. Later accounts describe the 1993 murder of his father, and his subsequent decision to leave basketball for minor-league baseball; the jubilation that marked his return to the Bulls in 1995; the ten scoring titles, five MVP titles, and five championships over the past seven seasons. These things have been inscribed on the national memory like the battles of the Revolutionary War. For this is someone who over the past several years has been mentioned in an average of a hundred newspaper and magazine stories a day.
Jordan, for his part, analyzes his celebrity so coolly that he might as well be marking up a playbook with X’s and O’s. “It could easily be a matter of timing, where society was looking for something positive,” he says. “It could easily be a sport that was gradually bursting out into global awareness at a time when I was at the top. And then there’s the connections that I’ve had with corporate America since I started with Coca-Cola and then went to Nike, which has gone totally global.” He breaks off. “I really, really can’t give you a sufficient answer.”
Maybe not, but he’s made a good start, as David Stern would agree. David Stern must himself be accounted a factor in Jordan’s success: He has been the commissioner of the National Basketball Association for the past fourteen years, and brought a financially troubled and scandal-plagued organization to the land of milk and honey. A shortish man with a head of graying hair, Stern is tough and funny, and a self-professed worrier. (Commending the virtues of institutionalized anxiety, he tells me, “That’s why it’s good to have a Jewish organization. You worry constantly.” True, the NBA has its share of tsuris these days, but it’s the kind you get when you’ve been all too successful: Such troubles we should all have.) The rise of Jordan and the rise of the NBA have been propelled by many of the same trends, and Stern delineates them as well as anyone. “You wind up with a marketing revolution, a television and cable revolution, at a time when our league is also growing in stature,” he says. However talented such players as Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell were, he points out, the numbers who watched them were minuscule relative to the numbers who watch NBA games today. When Stern started out, there were no regional sports channels; now those channels have fifty-five million subscribers. It’s the difference between a vaudeville stage and a modern cineplex.
Then, there’s the Jordan factor. “Here was a very handsome, friendly, eminently decent human being,” Stern says, “who is the kind of person you’d like to have as a friend, and who just happens to be the most fiercely competitive athlete of his time and the best basketball player perhaps ever.” Falk captures that quality in a nice formula: Jordan, he says, is “at once credible and incredible”—a down-to-earth guy who defies gravity on the court.
The guy on the court is the Michael Jordan who, in a game some thought might be his last in Madison Square Garden, drove the baseline, did a one-eighty in midair, then flipped the ball backward over his head and into the basket. During the game, he’d put on his original Air Jordans—a pair he wore back in 1984—and he played vintage Air Jordan ball. And even when he’s acting his age (he now tends toward artful outside fadeaways rather than the banging inside game of his youth), it only underscores his technical mastery. At one point in the second game of the playoffs against the Pacers last week, Jordan nearly lost his footing, then, as he stumbled, launched a high arcing shot to the basket. Nobody who has watched his sheerly kinetic presence on the court has to wonder why every Bulls game since November 20, 1987, has been sold out. Or why a huge bronze statue of him (his hand is as big as this page!) looms near an entrance to Chicago’s United Center. Still, athletic preeminence alone doesn’t explain why Jordan is a walking brand, and the most recognizable one on the planet.
An inherent feature of what marketers call a “powerbrand,” to be sure, is that this very status comes to seem inevitable and natural: We take it for granted that Michael Jordan is Michael Jordan because he’s Michael Jordan. And yet neither his athleticism nor his affability suffices to explain his global ubiquity. Nor are conventional theories about celebrity endorsement much help. For decades, research in the subject focused on attributes like “credibility” and “attractiveness,” but by the eighties the inadequacies of those models were obvious. In the heyday of The Cosby Show, the credible and attractive Bill Cosby did wonders for Coca-Cola and Kodak. Then E. F. Hutton signed him up, with disastrous results. John Houseman triumphed at Smith Barney but bombed at McDonald’s. A more sophisticated account—such as one introduced in the late eighties by the anthropologist and marketing theorist Grant McCracken—would register the fact that there were kinds as well as degrees of credibility and attractiveness. Fame wasn’t fungible. Different celebrities were repositories of different values and associations: Sigourney Weaver didn’t mean the same thing as Loni Anderson. “Celebrities ‘own’ their meanings because they have created them on the public stage by dint of intense and repeated performance,” McCracken declared. Yet meaning still traveled in one direction, from the celebrity to the product, and on to the consumer. “Thus does meaning circulate in the consumer society,” McCracken concluded.
Look closer. David Falk, back in the eighties, had intuitively grasped something that was still eluding many business school profs—the way “branding” can be a reciprocal process. Falk had no equity in Nike or McDonald’s or Coca-Cola or Chevrolet. He had equity in Michael Jordan. The corporations wanted Jordan to leverage their brands; Falk would use their brands to leverage Jordan.
“I think that my role in managing Michael’s image is one of the most misunderstood aspects of sports marketing,” David Falk says. “There is a faction that feels that we have ridden on Michael’s coattails as he has taken us along on a joyride through the world of sports marketing for the last thirteen years. There are others who think that I’m Dr. Frankenstein and I cooked up this formula in my laboratory to make Michael the marketing king of the century. And both are really wide of the mark.”
David Falk, now forty-seven, is tall and bald (albeit not so tall and bald as his most celebrated client), and, with his Zegna suits and Star-Tac phone, he has bec
ome a fixture at the NBA’s draft night, where he gets to exercise his skills at coaxing, cosseting, and cudgeling in rapid succession. His position in professional sports is essentially the position that Michael Ovitz once enjoyed in Hollywood, though his style is bristlier and more confrontational. After earning degrees in economics and law, he spent most of his career at the large sports management firm ProServ. He split in 1992 to start his own agency, f.a.m.e., and, unlike Jerry Maguire, he took all his clients with him. Just the other week, Falk sold his company to SFX Broadcasting for an estimated hundred million dollars, though he’s promised to stay on as chairman and CEO.
“Protect your assets” is one of Falk’s guiding rules, “assets” being the operative word. For what is perhaps the central relationship in Jordan’s career has never been a bond of sentiment. To their credit, the two do not pretend otherwise. Jordan speaks of Falk in terms that are businesslike but not brusque—as someone who can be a son of a bitch (“an asshole” is Jordan’s precise designation) but his son of a bitch.
Falk’s positioning of his client started with an appreciation of how wonderfully American he was. “It was clear when you met him that he grew up in a close-knit family,” Falk says. “His parents, James and Deloris, had been very, very close to their children, had great family values—they were disciplined, respectful, pretty much color-blind. And obviously, based on his style of play—and also based upon his tremendous success in the Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984—we felt that he represented something as all-American as apple pie. So the game plan was to get involved with all-American companies, like McDonald’s and Coke and Chevrolet. Which we did.”
The way Falk recounts the struggle to get Jordan “into the system,” you might think he was talking about integrating the lunch counters at Woolworth’s. “It took favors and arm-twisting,” he says. Even then, the first deals with McDonald’s were for local markets, in Chicago and North Carolina; they involved modest sums, and a lot of skepticism about whether a broad-based nonathletic brand could really be boosted by a black athlete—and a team athlete at that.
“In tennis or golf or boxing, the mystique is the individual,” Falk says, “whereas, no matter how great Bill Russell or Bob Cousy was, it was the Celtic dynasty—it was always institutional. Michael changed all that. Single-handed. Today, when the NBA markets the teams, it says, Come watch Penny Hardaway and the Orlando Magic, come watch Grant Hill and the Detroit Pistons. Ten years ago, the NBA resisted doing that. It was just that Michael’s force was so overwhelming. Basketball will never be an individual sport, but it’s become a hybrid.”
It was in Jordan’s rookie year that Falk took his client shoe-shopping. “Instead of asking for offers I asked all the shoe companies to make a presentation to us and explain what they would do to market Michael,” Falk recounts. An ailing sneaker company called Nike turned out to be the keenest suitor. “But still they refused to call it the Michael Jordan line,” Falk says. “That’s when I came up with the idea of calling the shoe Air Jordan, as a compromise between Michael Jordan and Nike.” The result was then the largest basketball endorsement deal ever—worth about $2.5 million over five years, plus royalties. Falk insisted that the company spend at least a million dollars on promotion, and so guarantee his client that measure of commercial exposure. Nike insisted on an out clause if sales didn’t take off. In fact, Air Jordan revenues reached $130 million by the end of the first year, and Nike happily spent several million dollars to promote the line. It was the most successful sneaker launch in history. The lesson wasn’t lost on the national marketing executives at McDonald’s and at Coca-Cola.
It is easy to lose sight of McDonald’s and Coca-Cola as the cultural promontories they are, in the way that it is hard to take in the Empire State Building from its base. They are the planet’s two most successful brands, as ubiquitous as the ground underfoot—or the buildings overhead—and sometimes as unnoticeable. In tandem, they elevated Jordan far beyond his peers, and not just through visibility alone. A recent study by four experimental psychologists published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology employs the term “spontaneous trait transference,” but you might as well call it the Michael Jordan Effect. Over time, speakers are seen as themselves possessing the qualities that they describe in others.
The basic notion is hardly new: It’s what underlies talk about basking in reflected glory, or the urge to kill the messenger. Even so, the strength of such “trait transference” is startling. For instance, in the recent study participants were shown a videotape of a man talking about an acquaintance who was cruel to animals. In follow-up surveys, they associated that specific trait with the communicator: He was viewed as cruel to animals. And the effect was equally strong when the participants were told what was going on—when they knew that the “interview” might have been scripted. Even when you eliminate rational warrant for the inference, people still make the association: Somehow we can’t not. It is, the researchers conclude, a “relatively mindless” process, and one that may powerfully affect our impression even of those well-known to us.
Yet the literature on the effect of endorsements upon the perception of brands has notably ignored the effect of brands upon the perception of their endorsers. Redoubtable though Jordan is, you might wonder whether his singular and singularly American charisma doesn’t derive in part from the venerable magic of history’s most powerful consumer brands. Dismiss Coke as mere sugared water if you like, but, culturally speaking, it’s a powerful concoction, and in ways that go beyond its core values of permanence (“Always Coca-Cola”) and authenticity (“The Real Thing”). The Coca-Cola Company conducts regular consumer surveys to determine how the beverage scores on more than a dozen value attributes, which have included “young,” “modern,” “warm,” and “friendly.” The tracking polls are keyed to a compensatory strategy: When the scores in a particular value wane, advertisements are designed to bolster them. Yet over the six years of Jordan’s association with the product (he was lured over to Gatorade in 1991) the more powerful trait transference surely went from brand to spokesperson—from the attributes to their communicator. Who seems more modern, warm, and friendly than Jordan? Who seems more enduring (Always Michael Jordan) and authentic (The Real Thing)? And the same mechanism applies to his early association with McDonald’s. Consider those core attributes of being reliable, fast, wholesome, American, and family-minded. Did somebody say Michael Jordan?
Fame, not water, is the universal solvent. What to do with the fact that the voice and the face of American corporate capitalism belong to an African American—a very dark and very male one at that? Various critics have offered conjectures about the phenomenon, but it may be that David Falk sums it up best. “Celebrities aren’t black,” he tells me patiently, in the way one might make an observation about heat regulation in reptiles. “People don’t look at Michael as being black. They accept that he’s different because he’s a celebrity. I’m not saying it to be derogatory. People who are exclusive and discriminatory don’t look at those people as being black.” Without ever playing the “raceless” card—without ever pretending to be anything other than what he was, a black kid from the South—Jordan has made race a nonissue. Talk about your fadeaway.
You can’t assess the marketing of Michael without taking the measure of his own business savvy. Executives at Nike will tell you that Jordan has a knack for taking charge of any meeting at which he is present. He has clearly learned a lot from sorcerers like Falk—and Stern—but he is no longer an apprentice. To an unusual degree, he has helped shape his “creatives.” Working with Tinker Hatfield, a senior designer at Nike, he has even been involved in styling his athletic footwear. All of which is to say that Jordan is, in a very 1990s way, both talent and suit. His partners know that he is sensitive to matters of dignity and does not care for every transaction to be commercial; but they also know that he can be wonderfully hard-core where matters of money are concerned. Indeed, the Falk relationship has lasted pa
rtly because Falk has been exquisitely attuned to this quality.
“For the first four or five years, Michael really kept me at arm’s length,” Falk says, “which only increases my admiration for him, because he shouldn’t have trusted me.” How, then, did Falk win Jordan’s trust? By strategic sacrifices, he’ll tell you, with the confidence of a chess master who knows when to forfeit a piece for a positional advantage. In 1988, Falk negotiated Jordan’s second contract, which (though its eight-year duration ultimately proved a bane) was then the most lucrative ever in basketball. Afterward, Falk presented Jordan with a bill—the standard sports agent’s fee, which is 4 percent of the client’s salary. Falk recalls that Jordan wasn’t pleased: “He said immediately, ‘I think it’s too high,’ and he offered to pay roughly half of what I had proposed.” Falk agreed, but then went even further: He told Jordan that he was going to reduce the agency’s marketing fee—the percentage, usually around 20 percent, that it took on a player’s marketing and endorsement deals—by a quarter. Falk recounts, “When he left, my partner said to me, ‘He told you he was happy with the marketing—why on earth would you propose that?’ I said, ‘Because, as the market continues to escalate, one day he’s gonna feel that it’s too high, and I’d rather offer it to him voluntarily, as a gesture of good faith.’ And from that day on we’ve never discussed fees again.” This way, as Falk figured the angles, he himself benefited from “the goodwill of Michael’s knowing that it was voluntary, as opposed to his putting a gun to your head one day and saying, ‘I want to pay half.’” Agents—even one as brilliant, innovative, and aggressive as David Falk—are replaceable. A client like Michael Jordan is not.
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