Ethiopian Review

As he heads to the Basketball Hall of Fame this week, those of us who watched his career closely know that Michael Jordan doesn’t belong there, with George Mikan, Lute Olson, and a host of other excellent players and coaches.  He is somehow bigger than Halls of Fame, bigger than comparison, bigger than the whole business of having peers.  Michael Jordan is simply the greatest athlete of all time.  Why?  Lots of reasons.

First and foremost, watching Jordan was watching someone impose their will on a game or a series.  Basketball, among all team athletic competitions, is art:  dynamic parts coming together in patterns, moving toward a purpose.  Patterned offenses, planned defenses, so much moving of players and the ball.  The great ones form the whole of the game into one pattern — they influence scoring, they influence how their team stops other scoring, the ball avoids them on defense, and flows from them on offense like Luke Skywalker using the Force on a good day.  Magic Johnson had that.  Oscar Robertson too.  Larry Bird.  But Michael Jordan most of all.  Though not playing on the point as much as those three, Jordan controlled and influenced the course of a game through his will.

Jordan was at once the best offensive player of all-time, good for 35 points a night, the scoring champion so many times over, and also the best defensive guard in the league for years, winning the 1988 Defensive Player of the Year Award, along with MVP and scoring champ, a Triple Crown that will not be done again.

Six berths in the NBA Finals without a loss.  Among 1991-1993 and 1996-1998 (the six playoff seasons in which Jordan played with Pippen and a decent power forward, 24 series wins, and oh, no losses:  and only two Game Sevens — a 1992 forty point stomping of Riley’s Knicks, and a 1998 East Finals gut-check against Miller’s Pacers.)  Except for the first game of the 1991 NBA Finals (the only one the Lakers won), Jordan’s teams never trailed in six NBA Finals.  While homecourt matters in the Finals, in 1993, his Bulls stormed to two road wins in Phoenix to open the series, and stole one in Utah in 1998 to keep the advantage.

Yet even in failure, the fierce burn that was Jordan was unmistakeable.  In 1989 the 47-35 Baby Bulls played the Pistons (4-3 losers to the Showtime Lakers in the 1988 Finals on bad calls in favor of Kareem in the decisive game) in the East Finals, with the Bad Boys at the peak of their power.  Jordan carried the Bulls to a 2-1 series lead.  By Game Three, Jordan had the Pistons’ full attention, rough defense all around, Rodman tripping him whenever he drove the lane — and he scored the Bulls’ last sixteen consecutive points, to pull them back from 93-83 to a 99-97 victory, the last hoop a kiss off the top of the glass over two defenders, one a fully extended seven footer, when everyone in the building including the best defensive team in recent NBA history, knew Jordan would drive for the winning basket.

Another failure was among the most brilliant you’ll see in sports — Jordan dropping 63 points on the defending champion Celtics in round one of the NBA playoffs, in the venerable Garden, through three overtimes, leading a team that couldn’t win thirty games, a veritable collection of empty jerseys, nearly to victory against a collection of true greats.  (That was the only time Jordan was swept in the playoffs — by contrast, Shaq was swept out of the playoffs by Jordan’s Bulls, Hakeem’s Rockets, and the Stockton to Malone Jazz before he made Phil Jackson’s acquaintance.  Not to be negative on the great Shaq, but there is competitive will, and then, there is competitive will.)

But the successes were so glorious.  Jordan down for the only time in the Finals — to the heavily favored Lakers.  He responds with a 15-18 shooting performance, the legendary hand-switching layup where he hung in the air while his defender faded, and led the Bulls to a blowout win.  (For folks who even compare Kobe Bryant to Michael Jordan, yes, Kobe gets his points, but 15 for 18?  Kobe’s repertoire of Finals performances includes far too many 40% shooting nights, and nothing like what Michael put on the Lakers during that sticky Chicago night in June, 1991.)  In the next year’s Finals against the Blazers, six threes in the first half, and shrugging in modesty at Magic Johnson, sitting at the announcer’s table that night.

MJ’s guts shone through the next year, when he played with a thinner and older bench, and was tired from so many years of extended playoff runs and the 1992 Olympics.  Lacking homecourt in the 1993 East Finals, Jordan’s Bulls trailed Riley’s bad boy Knicks 2-0.  Jordan was too old, right?  His team too thin, too tired, right?  First a 105-85 rout of the Knicks, then the series evened at 2-2.  Returning to MSG, the Knicks shot nine more free throws in Game Five.  MJ distributed, set up open threes, got to the line, defended, led, pleaded, and cajoled, and the Bulls won a 97-94 thriller over a Knicks team that would have won the championship in most other years that I regard as the Bulls’ guttiest win in Jordan’s career.  Game Six was foregone, as was the relatively easy defeat of Sir Charles’ Suns in six in the Finals.

After his father’s death, Jordan was looking for himself.  He was ridiculed for playing AA baseball for two years, but led his minor league in stolen bases as a rookie in his thirties, and hit .200 after not playing organized baseball since high school.  This blows my mind, as does the suggestion that his stint was pathetic.  Unsuccessful, yes, but nonetheless remarkable.

When he returned to the league, Jordan’s will burned as fiercely.  In his first full season back, 72 wins, after a 41-3 start, no less.  And that was with two years of additional age on his frame, in this young man’s game, and with two years away from the hardwood.  The next year, 69 wins — the second best in league history — and the epic Game Five in the Finals, in which a flu-stricken and barely standing Jordan, helped from the court at timeouts, stamped his will indelibly on the Jazz, the series, and history.

And when Jordan was belittled by the Magic’s Nick Anderson for a 1995 4-2 series loss to the Magic (in his partial comeback season, in which the Magic had Horace Grant and the Bulls no real power forward)?  The next year, the Magic were defending Eastern Conference champs and won over 60 games, and professed to be ready for the 1996 Bulls.  Jordan led his mates to a forty point rout of the Magic, who didn’t win a game in the series.  He cut their heart out.  After Game One, the Magic did not and could not compete.  That was Mike.  And for that Magic, that was that.

The last sequence in his Bulls career was a picture-perfect end to that career:  stealing the ball from Karl Malone, bringing the ball back the other way, (yes, pushing off Bryan Russell), and hitting the immaculate jumper for championship six.  That was Jordan.  A Game Seven on the road with Pippen injured beyond usefulness would likely not have gone well.  With the inevitability of a Hollywood film, Jordan got the necessary steal, and hit the necessary shot.  He did whatever the game asked to win.  He hit the winning shot in an NCAA Championship, and drove his team to a perfect and unmatched 6-0 record in NBA Championships.

Sport is enforcing your will on the game.  Tiger Woods does it in a Grand Slam, sapping the will of opponents, but his sport is solo.  Joe Montana did this in game-ending drives, but almost always had superior personnel on his side.  Jordan did this in a team sport (harder than Woods), and with teammates generally (other than Pippen, a great) not on the level of the stocked Niners teams that made both Montana and Steve Young look even better than their undeniably excellent selves.  Michael Jordan made basketball his own, as Babe Ruth did with baseball sixty years earlier.  Ruth also played with so many other greats, and was basically an offensive machine.  Jordan was more complete, and more enduring within his own sport.

For me, the answer is simple.  Jordan is the Greatest.  Athlete.  Ever.  And no Hall of Fame is big enough to contain or reflect what he really was.  You simply had to be there.

(Dag Blog)