Yo, Michael! You're the Best!

By Richard Stengel

Modern life suffers from the Mona Lisa complex, the idea that when you finally see a legendary work of art, it inevitably disappoints, appearing somehow smaller and less awe inspiring than you had imagined it. Except Michael Jordan.

Jordan, whose gleaming visage is probably more familiar to American kids than that of Leonardo's lady, is an icon that grows more revered by the day. Millions more people have seen him pushing Nike Air Jordans, Pepsi and Wheaties than performing magic -- make that outperforming Magic -- on a basketball court. But all the commercial hype and publicity fade away when he does play, for Michael Jordan is the artwork and the artist, the poem and the . poet. He reinvents the sport every time he rises -- and rises -- into the air. He plays the game without cliche.

When Jordan led the Chicago Bulls to their first N.B.A. championship last week in a lopsided 4-1 series against the Los Angeles Lakers, he removed the last shadow on a peerless career: the notion that great players who never win a title are somehow less great than those who do. In truth, brilliant individual players are not always brilliant team players, and that is why their teams do not always win championships. But in conquering the Lakers, Jordan did the very thing that is often hardest for a virtuoso talent: he used his genius to raise the talents of those around him.

Countless odes have been sung to Jordan's uncanny, unearthly, preternatural ability to defy gravity. Rightly so, for airborne wizardry is what makes Jordan the apotheosis of the playground player, the supreme performer who unites hard-court fundamentals with the improvisational creativity of the blacktop. Pardon the pretentiousness, but Jordan's artistry fuses the classic and the romantic.

But amid the oohing and aahing over his impossible dunks, something important is usually overlooked: Jordan's passing. In the grammar of basketball, passes are verbs. More than that, passing is a form of altruism, the unselfishness that transforms an agglomeration of individuals into a cohesive unit. Superb offensive players are rarely good passers. They appear narcissistic, locked inside their own talent. Elgin Baylor, Earl Monroe, Jerry West, Julius Erving often seemed alone on the court with the ball, solo artists in a team sport.

Jordan showed that he is much more. In the final minutes of last week's final game, it was Michael's sharp assists to guard John Paxson, not his 30 spectacular points, that won the day and the series. Jordan's passing violates two sacrosanct rules: don't go up in the air unless you know what you're going to do there, and don't throw the ball crosscourt. Jordan invariably found the open man because he has a map of the court and all its players inside his head (he majored in geography at North Carolina). He knows that a pass to someone less strong can make the team stronger.

Yet when you are an unstoppable force in basketball, selfishness too is a virtue. Jordan also knows this, and that is why he stopped and popped with 3.4 seconds left in Game 3 to tip the contest into overtime. That is what the best player in the game is supposed to do.

Like Leonardo, Michael Jordan is now his own greatest competition. When you make the miraculous routine, the merely superb becomes ordinary. Audiences feel cheated unless Jordan pulls off one of those twisting, soaring dunks that are living proof of post-Newtonian physics. Now that he has won an N.B.A. championship, he doesn't really have anything left to prove -- except, of course, that he can do it again.