I'Ll Fly Away

By Richard Stengel

Basketball is a team sport, but Michael Jordan often played it as if he were all alone. Call it genius or call it selfishness -- the two traits often overlap -- but Jordan sometimes seemed to resent the fact that he had four teammates on the floor with him. His talent was so singular that he was often competing only against himself, against the memory of his last impossible dunk, his last acrobatic steal, his last whizzing cross-court assist. And in the end, that kind of competition bored him.

While he could express himself on the court, off it he was a captive of his own role as a megacelebrity. So assailed was he by fans, autograph seekers, hangers-on and the usual detritus of pop fame that he would rarely leave the protection of his hotel room when he was on the road. At the same time, as the most popular corporate spokesman in America, he was stuck in the persona that marketing wizards had created for him: the smiling, aw-shucks athletic phenom whom you would gladly have over to your house for a breakfast of champions.

Michael Jordan is a prisoner, a prisoner of his talent and his public mythology. Both aspects of the Jordan imprisonment were on display last week when Jordan announced his retirement from the game he played better than anyone else.CBS, NBC and CNN covered the event live, treating the press conference with the kind of portentousness usually reserved for invasions or civil wars. A relaxed but resolute Jordan said he was quitting because he had nothing left to prove, because the thrill was gone. "I've always stressed to people that have known me and the media that has followed me that when I lose the sense of motivation and the sense to prove something as a basketball player, it's time for me to move away from the game." He had "reached the * pinnacle," he said, and there was no place left to go but down.

When Jordan was asked whether his father's murder earlier this year in rural North Carolina had anything to do with his retirement, he noted that he had been thinking about retiring for awhile. But the death did make him realize "how valuable life is . . . that it can be gone and be taken away from you at any time." Jordan did leave open the possibility, however, that a life without basketball might feel less valuable to him than it does now. "Five years down the line, if that urge comes back, if the Bulls have me, if ((N.B.A. Commissioner)) David Stern lets me back in the league, I may come back." The phrase had a curious ring to it, as there are still rumors that the N.B.A. is unhappy with Jordan's inveterate gambling and that the league's investigation of him did not totally exonerate him.

The jolt of national dismay and disappointment over Jordan's retirement might seem wildly inappropriate to those indifferent to the game. (The White House even issued a sentimental statement in the President's name: "We may never see his like again.") But in fact, the response is in proportion to the disproportionate reverence with which athletes are treated in America. Jordan himself seems to acknowledge this. In the end, he did not so much seem to be tired of playing basketball as he seemed tired of being Michael Jordan.

Great athletes reinvent their sport. They reveal that the game can be played in a way that no one before had imagined. In basketball, Bill Russell showed that great defense spelled even better offense. Elgin Baylor showed that basketball was played in the air, not on the ground. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar revealed that a seven-footer could be as graceful and mobile as players a foot shorter. Jordan combined all the exemplary skills of the greats who preceded him in one leaping, gyrating package. Sometimes it seemed as though he did everything better than anyone else had ever done it.

Like all artists, athletes can be divided into Romanticists and Classicists. The playing style of the Romanticists is characterized by emotion and imagination and an emphasis on individuality; the play of Classicists is more controlled, more cerebral, more reliant on teamwork. Earl Monroe was a Romanticist; Oscar Robertson a Classicist. Magic Johnson, for all his flair, was a Classicist who controlled the tempo of the game; Julius ("Dr. J") Erving was a Romanticist who played according to his own rhythms. Although he has all the skills and talents of a Classicist, Jordan is a Romanticist. He is a splendid passer and defender, but those skills are subordinate to his individual genius. Any player who goes up in the air not knowing what he is going to do with the ball until he gets there is most certainly a Romanticist.

The thing to remember about Jordan is that above all else, he wants -- and needs -- the ball. In that 94-ft. by 50-ft. rectangle that constitutes a basketball court, there are always 10 players. All things being equal, each player would only have the ball 10% of the time. But Michael Jordan wanted the ball 100% of the time. Without the ball he is a wizard without the wand. Perhaps that is why he likes golf so much. It is the ultimate individual sport. Your only opponents are yourself and that infernal little white ball.

Jordan's testiness with the press at his news conference was just another sign that he is not the blithe spirit advertisers make him out to be. He is a fierce and exacting perfectionist who does not suffer imperfection among his teammates. Over the years, there have been many stories of Jordan's hounding other Bulls, quarreling with his coaches, angling to bring other players to the team. In the 1993 play-offs, he almost gouged out the eye of Reggie Miller of the Indiana Pacers. He's a man who still feels burned by the fact that he once didn't make his high school varsity basketball team.

But this less-than-winning side of Jordan was often hidden from view because in the end what was revolutionary about Michael Jordan was not what he accomplished on the court but what he achieved off it. Jordan earned $4 million a year putting a ball through a hoop, but he made about eight times that for selling sneakers, cars, cola, cereal, hamburgers and underwear. In the past few years he was not a basketball star who played at business but a businessman who played basketball. His leaping, legs-splayed silhouette became as famous around the world as the large-eared shadow of another corporate and entertainment icon, Mickey Mouse. Until Jordan came along, FORTUNE 500 companies rarely used a black face to push their products.

Under the tutelage of men like Phil Knight of Nike, Michael Jordan became the first great crossover athlete, a black man whose appeal spans race, age and gender. Little old ladies who have no idea what a jump shot is know -- and like -- Mike. Because of his responsibilities as a corporate spokesman, Jordan ! was meant to maintain a Goody Two-Sneakers image. At times this seemed to bewilder him. On the one hand, Jordan was so afraid of complicating his image that when reporters asked him to comment on the Los Angeles riots last year, he mumbled something about not knowing what was going on. On the other hand, he grew restless within his corporate straitjacket, like the time he went gambling in Atlantic City the night before a play-off game with the New York Knicks.

Jordan's absence from the court will not diminish his presence on the small screen. He will remain Nike's main salesman, for which the company pays him an estimated $20 million a year. (Nike in turn earns 10 times that much selling products with Jordan's imprimatur on them.) Jordan recently signed a 10-year deal with the Sara Lee company to promote everything from Hanes underwear to Ball Park franks. He has a 10-year $18 million contract with Quaker Oats to sell Gatorade. "Michael is truly in the league of legends. Whether he is playing or retired, he is still going to be a tremendous draw," says Nancy Young, a director of corporate affairs for Sara Lee. If Joe Namath can still push stereos and Joe DiMaggio sell insurance, then surely Jordan will be endorsing Gatorade when he's a grandfather.

The N.B.A. will miss Jordan most. He was seen by many as the savior of the league. In the 1970s, N.B.A. revenue was down, television deals were waning. The reason was simple if unpleasant: pro basketball was becoming a predominantly black sport, and the audiences the teams and the networks wanted were mainly white. Along came Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, and the N.B.A. started perking up. But it took Michael Jordan to take the sport into the promised land of perpetually full arenas and high Nielsen ratings. Everybody liked Mike. The N.B.A. groomed Jordan just the way his corporate sponsors did. In his nine years as a player in Chicago, the value of the Bulls franchise increased nearly tenfold. In 1984, Jordan's rookie year, only 14% of Bull home games were sold out; last year none of the Bulls' 41 home games had an empty seat. The Bulls are a microcosm of the N.B.A. In 1984 the N.B.A.'s revenue from television was a little over $30 million. Next year television revenues will be $275 million.

In Jordan's forthcoming photo autobiography, rare Air (Collins Publishers), he writes, "The basketball court is still my refuge; even when the season ends, it's the place that I can go and find answers." Right now Jordan is / suggesting that the answers are to be found elsewhere. In all his contracts with the Bulls, he had a "love of the game" clause, that allowed him to participate in pickup games whenever and wherever he wanted. Jordan seems to have lost the love for which the clause was written; perhaps he thinks he will regain it by not playing. But in the meantime, he will relieve himself for a little while of the burden of being Michael Jordan.

With reporting by Julie R. Grace/Chicago