Michael Jordan, regarded by many sports fans as the greatest player in the history of the National Basketball Association, played for the Chicago Bulls from 1984 to 1993 and 1995 through the 1998 season. After that he spent a less stellar career with the Washington Wizards, 2001-2003. His NBA records include the highest regular season scoring average per game of any player in NBA history, the highest average points scored in playoff games, seven scoring titles, the Most Valuable Player in the NBA five times, and the leader of the Bulls six championship seasons.
A former Chicagoan, I had not followed the Bulls in 1990 when I attended an academic conference in Cuba. I told a Cuban friend that I was born and raised in Chicago. He was surprised to learn that I was not familiar with Michael Jordan and the Bulls. He said that even in Cuba, blockaded by the United States, he was a follower of Jordan and the Bulls. When I returned to the US, I became an avid NBA/Chicago Bulls/Michael Jordan fan, particularly since I had been a longtime suffering fan of the Chicago Cubs baseball team which had not won a world series since 1908.
Thirty years after being introduced to Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in Cuba, I spent five corona virus Sundays watching “The Last Dance,” a ten-hour Ken Burns-light documentary about the 1990s Bulls. The centerpiece of each one-hour episode was the world-renowned star and entrepreneur Michael Jordan. As to his business acumen, Jordan had lent his name to a gym shoe produced by Nike, named the “Air Jordan,” in 1984. By the 1990s the shoe was coveted by young aspiring basketball players everywhere.
The documentary included an historical narrative about the Bulls from the late 1980s through the dynasty’s last season in 1998. The use of film footage had to be approved by Jordan. Episodes were engaging as drama, as comedy, and as historical remembrances for old NBA and Bulls fans. Also, the massive ESPN viewership was stimulated by a sports deprived citizenry suffering from the Covid 19 stay-at-home shutdown.
Each week, sports commentators on the radio and in print media evaluated the prior Sunday’s two one-hour editions of the series. Each episode in multiple ways revolved around the exploits of Michael Jordan. While time was given to the owner and General Manager of the Bulls, Bull’s coach Phil Jackson, some of Jordan’s teammates, and selected “enemies” of Jordan, the documentary was really all about Michael Jordan. (Jordan’s production company was involved in the series and the star had approval rights over the footage that was used in the documentary).
A centerpiece of the Jordan documentary was the athlete’s unbridled, uncompromising, dogged competitiveness. Viewers saw him belittling and harassing his teammates for their inadequate performances in practices as well as games and his consistent efforts to publicly demean and denigrate other teams and players (particularly those billed by the media as possible competitors of his). Scenes show him pursuing domination at card games, on golf courses, and even throwing bottle caps at designated targets. Jordan is presented, by his own admission, as a ruthless competitor. Winning was the only way to be for a star like Jordan.
This competitive passion proudly defended by Jordan, was all consuming. For him, defeating adversaries would not countenance simple acts of compassion. This almost ruthless drive was only tempered by his love of his father who was brutally murdered in 1992. A sub-text of the documentary was Jordan’s remembrance of his father but even that remembrance was manifested in even greater competitiveness.
Most sports commentators, on radio and in print, spent these five weeks of the series deconstructing every episode, every segment, every interview, and most importantly every word of remembrance and commentary spoken by the iconic Jordan. As to the latter he belittled his adversaries, from the Bulls General Manager, to players he competed against. All was about winning. And the sub-text was: winning requires unbridled competition with friends and adversaries. To paraphrase another sports film: “there is no compassion in basketball.”
Jordan made it crystal clear that his motivation for being in athletics, in business, and in life was competition. And he is alleged to have commented when he was urged to endorse Democratic Party senatorial candidate Harvey Gantt who was running against incumbent racist Republic Jesse Helms in 1990 that “Republicans buy gym shoes too.”
A very small coterie of critics, including the perceptive sports analyst Dave Zirin, pointed to the negative consequences of the ethos of competition that Jordan so frankly and proudly articulated. After all, Zirin suggested, the competitive spirit is the root passion that makes the capitalist economic system possible. But for most commentators, even if they spoke critically of one or another egregious Jordan act, such as pushing around Steve Kerr or laughing at journalists who at the time praised some defenders against Jordan, his competitive spirit was what made the Bulls and him winners. And, after all, winning is what sports and by implication life is about.
Critics of the political culture of possessive individualism, market fundamentalism, social Darwinism, and the unregulated pursuit of markets and profit find the Jordan persona problematic. And perhaps even more important than the philosophy of life of Michael Jordan is the way that commentators today excuse his celebration of competition and themselves celebrate the implicit assumption that success, personally or socially, is contingent upon ruthless competition. In this trope there is no room for cooperation, solidarity, and altruism.
This lionization of Michael Jordan should be seen as a political and cultural backdrop to the messaging of the Trump Administration today. “Making America Great Again” is not about helping the needy, overcoming inequality, challenging discrimination. It is about being the best in a heartless world.
In the end, struggling to achieve a more humane world requires analyses of and challenges to the consequences of our most cherished cultural narratives in film, music, television, the internet, as well as sports.
