The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  Which is why, two years ago, when Jordan starred in Space Jam, Falk took a deep breath and made the same move. “I waived all my producing fees on the movie,” he says, and you know that it must have felt like passing a kidney stone. “Since I was the executive producer of the movie, I got a very substantial fee. And I talked to different people who said, ‘You’re crazy. We have to explain to Michael that in Hollywood whether you got a dollar or ten million dollars to be executive producer of the movie wouldn’t affect how much he made as an actor by one penny.’ I said, ‘I understand that, and you understand that, but I know he’s not comfortable with it.’ He just didn’t feel it was appropriate for me to be involved on two or three different levels. He never asked me to do it. I went to him one day and just told him, ‘I want you to know, I’ve earned x and I’m going to give it back to you.’ And he was very appreciative of that. That’s really what he wanted me to do.”

  This is the kind of thing you do when you value and protect your assets. Jordan got flak in the late eighties when, frustrated by the Bulls’ poor performance in the playoffs, he took to calling his teammates “my supporting cast,” but that’s pretty much the way Falk sees things. He says, “You could almost have a lottery and take all the players in the league and say, ‘OK, Michael, you need eleven players. Take any four centers, any four forwards, and any three guards.’ And you’d have a pretty damn good team.”

  I start to protest. “But you wouldn’t have the Bulls and their dynasty.”

  “I think that’s overrated,” Falk says breezily. “Truthfully. I think you take Michael away and I think they’re a very average team.” Spoken, we can agree, like a man who secured his client a thirty-odd-million-dollar contract for the current season. Nothing but net worth.

  Not all Jordan’s relationships involve commercial transactions, of course, and if he’s been buoyed by his business ties he’s been both protected and grounded by his personal ones. It’s a significant fact about him that he has never surrounded himself with a gangsta-style posse—that his closest friend is a sixty-one-year-old black guy named Gus Lett, who used to work for him as a security consultant, and who somehow reminds him of a fellow who is no longer around, his father. Like James Jordan, Gus is an Air Force veteran and is almost exactly the age James would have been had he lived; he’s also a man who worked long hours for many years, as an officer in the Chicago Police Department. When I finally met him, I was reminded of guys who used to hang out at my local black barbershop: this was the kind of fellow who knew how to drink bourbon and play bid whist at the same time, who taught his kids to do the right thing and call their elders “Ma’am” and “Sir.” Dressed in jeans and a cap, Gus came across as both earthy and down-to-earth, well versed in sports but not obsessed with them, and quietly, vigilantly protective of Jordan. They became friends in 1985, when Jordan was limping around with a broken foot and Gus was working as a security guard at the Chicago Stadium. Gus used to help the young player with his bags as he negotiated the stairs, and somehow the two clicked. How close are Jordan and Gus? Jordan gave the man his championship rings.

  Jordan became almost misty when he described the friendship. “Gus is very smart, very intelligent, but yet our rapport together is always joking and kidding,” he told me. “And we can’t do anything without hanging together. If it’s going to the riverboat, he goes. I would never—I feel awkward telling him how much I love him, but yet…he knows.” For the first time, Jordan’s speech was halting. “And it’s reciprocal, I can feel it. It’s so unique where honestly my best, best friend is sixty-some years old and we share so much now. I can see it’s like my father has come back and is living through this guy.” Jordan’s gaze drifted over to the large photograph of his father, who was killed in the summer of 1993, the victim of a roadside robbery in North Carolina. “It’s God’s way of telling me that I’ve gotta make some mature decisions without the support system of a father,” he has said of his father’s death, and yet he has also sought to re-create such a support system. “I trust Gus,” Jordan said softly. “I know he’s watching out for me, no matter what.”

  It has been a blow to him that, just recently, Gus was found to have metastatic lung cancer, and has had to undergo chemotherapy. Over the past several weeks, Jordan has been paying him regular visits and has made sure that he receives the best possible treatment. “He’s got my back,” Jordan has always said of Gus. Those guys have each other’s back.

  “Michael’s just a southern guy,” Juanita Jordan, his wife of eight years, tells me. “The night before a big game in the playoffs, he’ll sit down and write out a list of names of the people that he has to remember to give tickets to. I find it amazing that he still does that. And he’s always welcoming people to the house. His friends—friends he’s known since North Carolina—are always there hanging out.” She sounds faintly exasperated on this score, and makes it clear that she has had to establish certain boundaries. She grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and her husband’s country ways are still slightly foreign to her. “It used to be that they’d just show up. I’d open the door and say ‘Yes?’ ‘Oh, Michael didn’t tell you?’ ‘No, he didn’t. What do you want?’ And meanwhile the cab’s pulling off.” A tight smile: “So now they call.”

  Juanita, who is four years older than her husband, is a poised, attractive, light-skinned woman, who has grown accustomed to the glare of publicity, though not inured to it. She’s had a stint writing a column for a Chicago gazette, and recently returned to school, taking courses in journalism at Northwestern University. A lot of her time these days is spent helping to set up the M & J Endowment Fund, which will support community endeavors like shelters for battered women. And a lot of her time is spent raising their three children: Jeffrey, who is nine; Marcus, who is seven; and Jasmine, who is five. They’re a photogenic family, though for the most part Michael has sensibly protected them from the klieg lights. Even so, being married to fame—having a husband you can see more easily on the tube than in the flesh—has been a curious experience. “In the early days of our relationship, I almost felt I wasn’t part of his life: I was watching this celebrity person, and it was really kind of surreal,” she told me. “In the beginning, the children would also be mesmerized by his appearance on the television set, almost thinking, What’s he doing in there? But now when one of Daddy’s commercials comes on, they’ll just say, ‘Oh, there’s Daddy again,’ and go on about their business.” Not that turning the TV off would make much difference; these kids live in a world festooned with their father’s image.

  Michael Jordan has, indeed, been called a human billboard, but he’s acutely conscious of the fact that a billboard can be defaced. There are ironies here. Basketball is the most naked of team sports. Jordan has conjectured that he and other players tend to overdress off the court because they must wear so little on the court. Unlike other players, though, he never changes when reporters are patrolling the locker rooms. He will not risk being pictured—by word or image—in a state of undress; and surely it isn’t much for even the world’s most famous man to ask that his privates not be made public. There’s a larger sense, too, in which Jordan doesn’t wish to be caught undressed. He who lives by the image may also perish by it. In the fall of 1990, James Worthy, Jordan’s old college teammate and a power forward with the Los Angeles Lakers, was arrested in Houston on charges of solicitation when two call girls he hired turned out to be undercover policewomen; the episode received widespread and undue attention, along with many predictable jests about double-teaming. Among the athletic elect, schadenfreude vies with an even stronger emotion: there but for the grace of God. (One of the oldest NBA jokes: “What’s the toughest thing about going on the road?” “Not smiling when you kiss your wife goodbye.”) Jordan has said that being caught in a scandal that would taint his image is one of the things he dreads most.

  It’s an anxiety that his corporate clientele undoubtedly share. David Aaker, who is the author of Building Strong Brands, and is
a marketing professor at Berkeley, says, “There’s a big advantage in having a Pillsbury Doughboy or a Betty Crocker, because at least you know they won’t take drugs.” Or accumulate large gambling debts to convicted felons, which proved to be Jordan’s principal indiscretion. In the early nineties, checks of his amounting to more than a hundred thousand dollars turned up in the possession of some unsavory characters, apparently as a result of high-stakes golf and poker games. Falk told reporters that his client had got hustled; Jordan told them that he was “no Pete Rose;” and Jordan’s father told them, reasonably, “The amounts of money to me and you would have been astronomical. But with the kind of money he’s making it’s peanuts.” Then a onetime golf partner wrote a book—tackily titled Michael & Me: Our Gambling Addiction…My Cry for Help!—claiming that Jordan had lost more than a million dollars in bets to him. Jordan was known to be fiercely competitive; now he was known to be a man who would bet on anything.

  Not good. But not that bad, either. The betting was confined to recreational pursuits, golf and poker, and, though the stakes were high, Jordan’s father was right to point out that they weren’t anything he couldn’t handle. As a rule of thumb, an indiscretion is truly damaging only if it is discordant with your perceived character: Thus teen idols should be discouraged from cruising the men’s rooms in public parks, and children’s-television actors from getting off in adult movie theaters. In this case, though, the picture of Jordan as a man possessed to win—in any endeavor—wasn’t inconsistent with his demonic presence driving the lane. Besides, the misdeeds were, in nature, nonvenal, nonsexual, and nonviolent. Most fans figured he was much more the better for being a little bad.

  Jordan, you could even argue, is as much at risk from his corporate clients as they are from him. It must have been discomfiting when, in the summer of 1990, Jesse Jackson’s Operation Push announced a boycott against Nike, charging that the company was taking from the black community without giving back to it. It must have been discomfiting when subsequent controversies arose over Nike’s use of low-paid overseas labor. But Jordan has handled the situations with considerable skill, chastising neither the company nor its critics. To be sure, that nimbleness in sidestepping political controversy has itself come under attack. The football legend Jim Brown—speaking at President Clinton’s town meeting on race and sports in April—was only the latest activist to complain that Jordan had failed to use his visibility for social or political causes. Falk says, “Michael is definitely apolitical,” and he means it as a recommendation. Others say it as a rebuke.

  But should athletes be required to serve as political spokesmen? Jesse Jackson, who likes to say that his role is to be the social conscience of the mighty (“Whether Michael or the president,” he says, in a significant pairing), urges a sensible division of labor. “Why is it expected of a ballplayer or a boxer to be an astute sociopolitical analyst?” he asks. “That is not what they are really qualified to do. They move from city to city, and they’re on the road six months a year, and they’re not in the best position to be social interpreters. Michael has not succumbed to that temptation.”

  This could sound like a backhanded compliment, but I’m not sure Jackson means it that way. “You’re saying he has sense enough to keep his mouth shut?”

  “And that is a great contribution,” Jackson replies smoothly. “Besides, the issue of trading with Indonesia without regard to human rights or child labor is fundamentally a matter that United States trade policy must address. It isn’t right to shift the burden to him because he’s a high-profile salesman.”

  Jordan has never sacrificed himself to a political cause in the way that Muhammad Ali did, but he isn’t apolitical, either, in the way that Falk makes out. First, he’s not afraid to admit some mildly partisan allegiances. (“I told Colin Powell I would be right next to him, supporting him.”) But, more than that, he does have a strong social conscience, as was clear when I asked him about the predominance of blacks in sports. “To be honest, I think it’s a curse,” Jordan said. He was talking about the odds—the simple fact that to practice hoops instead of hitting the books is like spending food money on the lottery. “Doctors, lawyers, dentists will be practicing for thirty years, but our window of opportunity is, at the most, eight years,” he went on. “That’s a heck of a risk. And we’re our own worst problem in terms of the marketing and projecting”—of burnishing the mystique of the black athlete as opposed to that of the black professional. Jordan has not occupied the crow’s nest of popular culture so long as to have forgotten how powerful the perch is. Or how precarious.

  Everyone on top lives with a morbid consciousness that fame—heat, stardom, sociocultural fit—is a waterwheel. The rule obtains in the political and the recreational realms alike: There is, as it were, a physiognomy of fortune, and sooner or later it alters. Robert Coover, in one of his early novellas, writes about a political fixer who, back when he was a congressman, had the sagacity to foresee his own electoral defeat against a “young tight-lipped challenger”:

  You see, I am blessed—or damned, as you will—with puffy pink lips. They helped me to win my seat in the House of Representatives, just as later they helped me to lose it. My short stature, round belly, smooth pink scalp, anonymous name, and occasionally irascible temper no doubt contributed, but mainly it was the fat lips. By thrusting the lower one forward, I was able to project a marvelous complexion of self-righteous anger, a kind of holy Bible-belting zeal for judgment, which complemented nicely the central issue, so-called, of my winning campaign: an attack on my incumbent opponent’s corruption. That wonderful pout did me little service, however, in defending myself against the same attacks two years later. Of course, there were many factors, many vectors, but the fat lips were decisive.

  And there you have it. One day the star wakes up, and those projectile Gaultier breastplates aren’t doing it anymore; the masses want a toothy, virginal, choir-girl Whitney Houston, not the platinum-haired, sexually adventurous material girl. Fandom starts out like a love affair: No detail about the object of desire is too trivial to be of interest, and tabloid reams are filled with personal minutiae. But in time there comes a phase when the object, although prized, is taken for granted; then a measure of boredom sets in; and then you agree to see other people.

  So the real question, as Jordan correctly maintains, is how the Jordan mystique has lasted as long as it has. “Each and every year, I’ve been expecting it—the drop-off,” Jordan says. “Just from human nature, from seeing someone’s name in lights for so many years that everyone gets tired of hearing about that person. When you see something consistent all the time, you start to say, ‘Well, wait, where’s the change? Where is the next person? Where is the next phenomenon?’ But it’s not happening. And I don’t really know why, or how long it’s going to last.”

  In this respect, Jordan’s core product—shoes—may be a useful augury. Nike, in the years since its original alliance with Jordan, has become the Microsoft of the sneaker, accounting for more than 40 percent of the 350 million pairs of sneakers that Americans bought last year. But now sneaker sales are in general starting to ebb. To Nike’s distress, “brown shoes”—as non-sneakers are known in the trade—are gaining among its customers. In March, Nike announced that its 1998 earnings had declined by 70 percent, and that it had laid off sixteen hundred employees. Jordan’s imminent retirement is likely to show up on the bottom line, too: This has been clear since he spent that sabbatical, courtesy of Jerry Reinsdorf, playing minor-league baseball. “We didn’t sell enough baseball shoes to make up for what we lost in basketball shoes,” Phil Knight, Nike’s charismatic chairman and CEO, says dryly.

  Part of Nike’s problem may be the overfamiliarity of its distinctive, high-impact advertising. Jordan’s sneaker spots have come in every imaginable cinematic style, but during most of the past decade the campaigns produced by the ad agency Wieden & Kennedy, under the creative director Jim Riswold, set the tone: the play of silvery chiaroscuro, the beaut
iful black-and-white camerawork, the edgy message and understated product sell. What Josef von Sternberg was to Marlene Dietrich or what Scorsese was to De Niro, Wieden & Kennedy has been to Jordan. Its ads depicted him as an object of allure, a mascot of urban manhood—supple, smooth, commanding, powerful, and hip. A stunning achievement, by any yardstick, but has it overtaken its sell-by date? Joanne DeLuca, a market researcher at Sputnik, has concluded that the deification of unreal athletes is losing its lustre, and that the “hard-edged ‘win-at-all-costs’ message” is beginning “to turn off younger consumers.” More worrisome is the growing sense of backlash against the Air Jordan dynasty, against the hegemony of Nike generally, and even against what some people are cattily calling the swooshtika.

  Has Jordan been overexposed? Phil Knight has made no secret of his concern that Jordan’s value to Nike was attenuated by his other endorsements. Nike may own the “jumpman” logo—an icon of Jordan jumping toward an unseen basket—but it doesn’t own Jordan’s visage. His endorsements for other companies may have helped entrench the brand that is Michael Jordan but lessened the specialness of his association with Nike. “If you were teaching a course in marketing, that wouldn’t be the way to do it,” Knight told me, adding quickly, “But he has overcome all those mistakes by his greatness.” It’s possible to be less sanguine about this situation. The advertiser’s main enemy, of course, is what the industry calls “clutter,” which is to say other people’s ads. You hear estimates that the average consumer encounters almost three thousand marketing messages a day. Not a few of those messages bear the countenance of Michael Jordan. A koan for Madison Avenue: What do you do when you are your own clutter?