Jordan’s counselors grapple with these issues. After a few years of an endorsement spree, they halved the number of his corporate affiliations and increasingly emphasized long-term deals: Since 1989, Jordan hasn’t made a deal shorter than ten years. In general, Falk has been imposing discipline upon his client’s endorsement range, restricting his principal product associations to Nike, Quaker Oats, Rayovac, Sara Lee, Bijan (Michael Jordan Cologne was the top-selling new fragrance in its debut year), Wilson, CBS SportsLine, and WorldCom. Last year, Jordan’s income was estimated to have been in excess of seventy million dollars.
Jordan’s price tag not only reflects his extraordinary utility as an endorser; it may even contribute to it. There’s a school of thought that says the cost of advertising must be considered part of the content of the advertising—that the key message of lots of ad campaigns is “Look how much we’re spending on this ad campaign!” Marshall McLuhan didn’t get it quite right: The medium isn’t the message; the moola is the message. And the value of the celebrity endorsement? According to the economist Mark Hertzendorf, a big problem with ad campaigns is that consumers are unlikely to see all of an advertiser’s commercials, and so might not be properly impressed by its lavishness—a lavishness that implies its expectation of strong sales, which, in turn, implies the excellence of its product. The solution is to pack more price information into every spot; and you can do that by featuring a celebrity endorsement, since viewers know that such endorsements cost big. (“For example, a consumer who views one commercial containing an endorsement by Jerry Seinfeld can immediately conclude that the firm is spending millions of dollars on advertising,” Hertzendorf observes.) The fact that Jordan is the winner-take-all pitchman—the one whose services are known to be the priciest—means that, whatever the product is, he can be relied upon to send a message about a generous ad budget, and so about company confidence.
Falk has long had an intuitive grasp of the Hertzendorf effect—he knew it would be good for Gatorade to cough up eighteen million dollars for the privilege of being guzzled by the greatest—but his latest brainstorm is to generate “marketing synergies” among Jordan’s client corporations. “We’re trying to intermarry his companies,” Falk tells me. “For instance, since his next-to-last deal was with the telephone company WorldCom, we’re trying to get as many of his existing companies to pick up WorldCom for their long-distance carrier and business carrier as possible.” So far, it’s unclear that any of them have done so, corporations being an even harder sell than consumers.
Still, Falk gets points for innovation. He likes to speak of himself as an artist, and his clients as canvases. The paint is pretty much dry on the Jordan landscape. “Most of my work for Michael is finished,” he says, sounding almost elegiac. “It’s not like he’s looking for a lot more deals.”
Truth to tell, it’s hard to stay entirely unmoved on the subject of Jordan’s retirement. From a fan’s perspective, that’s because the game will have lost its greatest and most exciting player—a man who, at the advanced age of thirty-five, is the highest scorer in the NBA this season. From Falk’s perspective, it’s because—Joe Namath and those Noxzema commercials notwithstanding—the record concerning the commercial longevity of retired athletes is not altogether encouraging. All the same, Juanita Jordan tells me, “once he retires, the companies that he endorses products for are going to pick up a lot of his time—I think he really wants to sink his teeth into the Brand Jordan concept with Nike, and to follow through with the commitments he has made to the major companies he is endorsing.” Hence Falk’s mantra: “Being a basketball player has become his job, but it’s not his image.” And yet you might say that Jordan’s job is his image, in that being Michael Jordan has become his principal line of work.
Which means that Jordan has become a prisoner of repute. His livelihood as an endorser amounts to a gilded captivity, because his currency is his character. And it is so very hard to be so very good. He has summed up his relationship with Charles Barkley, the trash-talking forward of the Houston Rockets, as “a sort of good-son, bad-son thing,” where “Charles gets to say all the things I’d like to say.” And, though Jordan isn’t so close to the Bulls’ own enfant terrible, Dennis Rodman—he’s recently made it clear how much his patience has been taxed by him—he views Rodman’s bad-as-I-wanna-be act with some wistfulness. We’re talking about what happened to Dennis Rodman years ago, when, the story goes, he came home to find out that his wife was sleeping with Vinnie Johnson, then Rodman’s teammate on the Detroit Pistons. “It flipped him out,” Jordan says. “It changed him. It changed his whole persona, his personality toward his teammates.” He’s referring to Rodman’s now trademark combination of introversion and flamboyance. I tend to be skeptical about the lore of formative moments, but what strikes me is how fraternal Jordan sounds. Again, there’s a sort of division of labor, with Rodman’s freakishness helping to secure Jordan’s normality. Jordan says, “I think he’s a good person at heart. Like most people, he’s found a niche to make a living.”
Like most people, but not like Jordan. His burdens come from being the very opposite of a niche player. For one thing, the work of exposure, of supporting a global brand, presents clear-cut logistical problems for maintaining something resembling a private life. Jordan figures that it’s been a decade since he has been able to go outside without getting mobbed, and says that he “can’t wait till it changes.” The media frenzy has its own troughs and peaks. In the speculation-filled days before his official return to basketball in the spring of 1995, the paparazzi would do things like tape over the card reader on the players’ parking lot, hoping that Jordan would have to get out of his car and expose himself to their cameras. Of necessity, Jordan has become adept at setting limits: “I’ve come to grips, saying, ‘Leave me alone, this is my family time, this is my private time.’ And there are a lot of assholes who don’t understand that. I can really get harsh if I feel you’re infringing way past the niceness that I try to show you.” He speaks softly, but you can hear the steel.
There are various people who help protect him, and sometimes become part of his extended family. As we’re winding things up at North LaSalle Street, Jordan tells me about George Koehler, his friend and driver: “When I first came to Chicago, thirteen years ago, I didn’t know one soul, and the Bulls didn’t pick me up. I’m getting off the plane, and I run into this guy. He has his own limousine company, and his passenger didn’t show up. So he comes over to me and gives me a ride.”
At some point during the account, George Koehler himself makes an appearance, and is affably assured by Jordan that he’s been telling me lies about him. For both of them, in a manner that’s typically American and male, the vocabulary of intimacy is insult.
“Did you charge him?” I ask Koehler.
“Yeah,” Jordan puts in, “he overcharged me, I tell you.”
“I didn’t overcharge him.” Koehler sulks.
“He ripped me off then,” Jordan says, “and he’s been ripping me off ever since.”
“Actually, he gave me a huge tip,” Koehler says, brightening at the memory. “I told him twenty-five bucks, he gave me fifty bucks and said, ‘Keep the change.’”
“So I’m down here looking around and I’m scared as shit,” Jordan says. “I don’t know where the hell I’m going in a city that I’ve never been to. But he watched out for me.”
“I’m paying for it now,” George says.
“And he watches out for me now,” Jordan says. Maybe it sounds a little earnest, so he adds, “By lying. Being a pain in the ass.”
In The Frenzy of Renown, a classic study of fame and its history, Leo Braudy writes that seasoned spectators “look not for style so much as sincerity,” and that, traditionally, it was “the sports stars who most significantly handled the problem of public exposure because at their best they represented an unself-conscious perfection of the body, displayed for the pleasure of their fans. Here was fame unsullied by the alloy of hist
ory, language, or any mediation but the body’s own.” Jordan has rewritten the rules. In one magical package, Michael Jordan is both Muhammad Ali and Mister Clean, Willie Mays and the Marlboro Man. But if America’s powerbrands helped insure Jordan’s status as an international symbol of America, Jordan—and the sense we have that he’s ours—has become one of those things that constitute our identity as Americans, as citizens of the winner-take-all society. Trait transference isn’t a one-stop affair. And the work of what we call globalization, and what the rest of the world knows as Americanization, is never done. Michael Jordan, putting on his game face, says, “My father told me, ‘If you’re going to die, son, don’t die with no bullets in your gun.’ And I live by that.”
When I venture beyond the quiet of Jordan’s suite and into his restaurant, I feel oddly reassured by the loud carnival of Jordan iconography: huge posters, enormous murals, rows and rows of framed magazine covers, cascades of photographs—an empire of signs. The bar-and-grill on the first floor is dominated by a twenty-foot-by-six-foot video screen where customers can watch Jordan’s greatest moments over and over and over again. It’s a spectacle of kitsch—and, yes, of utter physical transcendence. Gazing for a spell at the highlights loop, I feel somehow uplifted by the procession of fadeaways, jump shots, dunks, fakeouts, double-pumps, alley-oops, layups. They also serve who only stand and cheer.
1998
“Here’s another one, men. Hang on!”
THE LONG RIDE
MICHAEL SPECTER
A couple of weeks ago, on a sweltering Saturday afternoon, I found myself in the passenger seat of a small Volkswagen, careering so rapidly around the hairpin turns of the French Alps that I could smell the tires burning. Johan Bruyneel, the suave, unflappable director of the United States Postal Service Pro Cycling Team, was behind the wheel. Driving at ninety kilometers an hour occupied half his attention. The rest was devoted to fiddling with a small television mounted in the dashboard, examining a set of complicated topographical maps, and talking into one of two radio transmitters in the car. The first connected Bruyneel to the team’s support vehicle, laden with extra bicycles, water bottles, power bars, and other tools and equipment. The second fed into the earpieces of the eight U.S. Postal Service cyclists who were racing along the switchbacks ahead of us. The entire team could hear every word that Bruyneel said, but most of the time he was talking to just one man: Lance Armstrong.
We had been on the road for about three hours and Armstrong was a kilometer in front of us, pedaling so fast that it was hard to keep up. It was the sixth day of the Dauphiné Libéré, a weeklong race that is run in daily stages. Armstrong doesn’t enter races like the Dauphiné to win (though often enough he does); he enters to test his legs in preparation for a greater goal—the Tour de France. Since 1998, when he returned to cycling after almost losing his life to testicular cancer, Armstrong has focused exclusively on dominating the 3,500-kilometer, near month-long Tour, which, in the world of cycling, matters more than all other races combined. This week, he begins a quest to become the fourth person in the hundred-year history of the Tour—the world’s most grueling test of human endurance—to win four times in a row. (In 1995, the Spanish cyclist Miguel Indurain became the first to win five consecutively—a record that is clearly on Armstrong’s mind.)
The cyclists had covered 108 kilometers, much of it over mountain passes still capped with snow, despite temperatures edging into the nineties. Now the peloton—the term is French for “platoon,” and it describes the pack of riders who make up the main group in every race—was about to start one of the most agonizing climbs in Europe, the pass between Mont Blanc and Lake Geneva, which is known as the Col de Joux Plane. In cycling, climbs are rated according to how long and steep they are: The easiest is category four, the hardest category one. The seventeen-hundred-meter Joux Plane has a special rating, known as hors categorie, or beyond category; for nearly twelve kilometers, it rises so sharply that it seems a man could get to the top only by helicopter.
“We start the Joux Plane with a lot of respect for this mountain,” Bruyneel said quietly into his radio. “It is long, it is hard. Take it easy. If people are breaking away, let them go. Do you hear me, Lance?”
“Yes, Johan,” Armstrong replied flatly. “I remember the mountain.”
With only a few days remaining in the 2000 Tour de France, Armstrong had what most observers agreed was an insurmountable lead when he headed toward this pass. He was riding with his two main rivals of that year: Marco Pantani, the best-known Italian cyclist, and Jan Ullrich, the twenty-eight-year-old German who won the Tour in 1997, and who in the world of cycling plays the role of Joe Frazier to Armstrong’s Ali. As they started to climb, Armstrong seemed invincible. Halfway up, though, he slumped over his handlebars, looking as if he had suffered a stroke, and Ullrich blew right by him.
“I bonked,” Armstrong said later, using a cyclist’s term for running out of fuel. A professional cyclist consumes so much energy—up to ten thousand calories during a two-hundred-kilometer mountain stage—that, unless some of it is replaced, his body will run through all the glycogen (the principal short-term supply of carbohydrates the body uses for power) stored in his muscles. Armstrong hadn’t eaten properly that morning; then he found himself cut off from his domestiques—the teammates who, among other things, are responsible for bringing him supplies of food and water during the race. “That was the hardest day of my life on a bike,” Armstrong said later. He was lucky to finish the day’s stage, and even luckier to hold on and win the race.
“This isn’t just a stage in a race for Lance,” Bruyneel said now, as Armstrong approached the bottom of the slope. “He needs to defeat this mountain to feel ready for the Tour.” This time, Bruyneel made sure that the domestiques ferried water, carbohydrate drinks, and extra power bars to Armstrong throughout the day. They periodically drifted back to our car and performed a kind of high-speed docking maneuver so that Bruyneel could thrust water bottles, five or six at a time, into their outstretched arms.
Last year, Armstrong won the Tour, for the third time in a row, by covering 3,462 kilometers at an average speed of more than forty kilometers an hour—the third-fastest time in the history of the event. In all, during those three weeks in July, Armstrong spent eighty-six hours, seventeen minutes, and twenty-eight seconds on the bike. “Lance almost killed himself training for the last Tour,” Bruyneel told me. “This year, he is in even better shape. But the press still wants to talk about drugs.”
It is, of course, hard to write about cycling and not discuss performance-enhancing drugs, because at times so many of the leading competitors seem to have used them. Strict testing measures have been in force since 1998, when the Tour was nearly canceled after an assistant for the Festina team was caught with hundreds of vials of erythropoietin, or EPO, a hormone that can increase the oxygen supply to the blood. But the changes have brought only limited success: just this May, Stefano Garzelli and Gilberto Simoni, two of Europe’s leading cyclists, were forced to withdraw from the Giro d’Italia, Italy’s most important race.
Because Armstrong is the best cyclist in the world, there is an assumption among some of those who follow the sport that he, too, must use drugs. Armstrong has never failed a drug test, however, and he may well be the most frequently examined athlete in the history of sports. Whenever he wins a day’s stage, or finishes as one of the top cyclists in a longer race, he is required to provide a urine sample. Like other professionals, Armstrong is also tested randomly throughout the year. (The World Anti-Doping Agency, which regularly tests athletes, has even appeared at his home, in Austin, Texas, at dawn, to demand a urine sample.) Nobody questions Armstrong’s excellence. And yet doubts remain: Is he really so gifted that, like Secretariat, he easily dominates even his most talented competitors?
“It’s terribly unfair,” Bruyneel told me as we drove through the mountains. “He is already winning, and is extremely fit. Still, people always ask that one question: How ca
n he do this without drugs? I understand why people ask, because our sport has been tainted. But Lance has a different trick, and I have watched him do it now for four years: He just works harder than anyone else alive.”
Lance Armstrong’s heart is almost a third larger than that of an average man. During those rare moments when he is at rest, it beats about thirty-two times a minute—slowly enough so that a doctor who knew nothing about him would call a hospital as soon as he heard it. (When Armstrong is exerting himself, his heart rate can edge up above two hundred beats a minute.) Physically, he was a prodigy. Born in 1971, Armstrong was raised by his mother in Plano, a drab suburb of Dallas that he quickly came to despise. He never knew his father, and refers to him as “the DNA donor.” He has written that “the main thing you need to know about my childhood is that I never had a real father, but I never sat around wishing for one, either…. I’ve never had a single conversation with my mother about him.”
He was a willful child and didn’t like to listen to advice. “I have loved him every minute of his life, but, God, there were times when it was a struggle,” his mother, Linda, told me. She is a demure woman with the kind of big blond hair once favored by wives of astronauts. “He has always wanted to test the boundaries,” she said. Armstrong admits that he was never an easy child. In his autobiography, It’s Not About the Bike, which was written with the journalist Sally Jenkins, he said, “When I was a boy I invented a game called fireball, which entailed soaking a tennis ball in kerosene, lighting it on fire, and playing catch with it.”
Armstrong was an outstanding young swimmer, and as an adolescent he began to enter triathlons. By 1987, when he was sixteen, he was also winning bicycle races. That year, he was invited to the Cooper Institute, in Dallas, which was one of the first centers to recognize the relationship between fitness and aerobic conditioning. Everyone uses oxygen to break down food into the components that provide energy; the more oxygen you are able to use, the more energy you will produce, and the faster you can run, ride, or swim. Armstrong was given a test called the VO2 Max, which is commonly used to assess an athlete’s aerobic ability: It measures the maximum amount of oxygen the lungs can consume during exercise. His levels were the highest ever recorded at the clinic. (Currently, they are about eighty-five milliliters per kilogram of body weight; a healthy man might have a VO2 Max of forty.)
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