Back when Jordan used to shoot a lot of commercials, his security team would wait for him in his trailer while he was on set. A woman named Linda cooked Michael’s meals, and he loved cinnamon rolls. She’d bake a tray and bring it to him. When it came time to film, he’d see the guards eyeing the cinnamon rolls and he’d walk over and spit on each one, to make sure nobody took his food.
In the late ’80s, Jordan looked in Whitfield’s closet and saw that half of it was filled with Nike and the other half filled with Puma. Jordan bundled the Puma gear in his arms, tossing it onto the living room floor. He took a knife from the kitchen and cut it to shreds. Call Howard White, his contact at Nike, he told Fred, and tell him to replace it all. Same thing happened with George. He bought a pair of New Balance shoes he loved, and Jordan saw them one day and insisted he hand them over. Call Howard White at Nike.
“He demands that loyalty,” Whitfield says.
“Anywhere we go,” Portnoy says, “he looks at people’s feet.”
“First thing he looks at,” Whitfield says. “He looks down all the time.”
“You know what’s funny?” Portnoy says. “I do the same thing now.”
“I do too!” Whitfield says, laughing.
A group from Nike comes into the suite, along with a team from the ad agency Wieden+Kennedy. Around these people, you see most clearly that Jordan is at the center of several overlapping universes, at the top of the billion-dollar Jordan Brand at Nike, of the Bobcats, of his own company, with dozens of employees and contractors on the payroll. In case anyone in the inner circle forgets who’s in charge, they only have to recall the code names given to them by the private security team assigned to overseas trips. Estee is Venom. George is Butler. Yvette is Harmony. Jordan is called Yahweh—a Hebrew word for God.
Jordan is used to being the most important person in every room he enters and, going a step further, in the lives of everyone he meets. The Gulfstream takes off when he steps onboard. He has left a friend in Las Vegas who was late, and recently left two security guards behind. He’s been trying to leave George for years but can never beat him to the plane. He does what he wants, when he wants. On a long trip to China in the Nike plane, he woke up just as everyone else was taking an Ambien and settling in to sleep. Didn’t matter. He turned on the lights and jammed the plane’s stereo. If Michael is up, the unwritten rule goes, everybody is up. People cater to his every whim, making sure a car is waiting when he lands, smoothing out any inconvenience. In Chicago there was someone who kept gas in his cars. Not long ago he called his office from Florida, fuming, stuck at a gas station, unable to fill up.
“What’s my billing zip code?” he asked.
It was down in Florida, where he was spending time with Yvette’s Cuban family, that he got a taste of the life he’d traded for the jet-set circus of modern celebrity. They weren’t fawning—her grandparents, who speak little English, aren’t basketball fans—and he sat at a dinner table, with people laughing and eating home-cooked food. That’s what it was like growing up in Wilmington. “It’s gone,” he says. “I can’t get it back. My ego is so big now that I expect certain things. Back then, you didn’t.”
The people in the suite know about his ego, and his moods, and his anger. They know better than most. George jokes a lot about the bite marks on his ass. But they also know Jordan, and if they’re being honest, they love him. They know how kind he can be, having roses sent on Mother’s Day to every mom who works for him. They see him gutted after meeting with another Make-a-Wish child. They see him swell with pride over any success of his children. They’ve been inside the machine, seeing firsthand the siege of fame, the hardness and cynicism it demands. So they think all the stories of Michael being Michael are funny, even endearing, while someone from the outside can hear the same story and be horrified, seeing a permanent adolescent spitting on food or cutting up clothes.
His friends, for instance, watched the Hall of Fame speech and laughed.
* * *
—
In the three and a half years since Jordan built his induction remarks around all the slights that pushed him toward greatness, the speech has become Exhibit A for those who believe Jordan is, as one basketball writer put it, “strangely bitter” and “lost, wandering.” They’re not wrong, not exactly, but something was obscured when the speech became a metaphor for swollen ego and lack of self-awareness.
The speech itself, if you watch it again, is an open window into what Jordan is like in private: funny, caustic, confident, sarcastic, competitive. He sees himself not as a gifted athlete but as someone who refused to lose. So standing at the podium—after he composed himself, wiping away tears nine times before he even began, sniffling well into the first section—he said that he had a fire inside and that “people added wood to that fire.” Then he listed every doubter, cataloging all their actions, small and large. He started with his brothers and worked through high school to college to the NBA. He took a shot at longtime nemesis Jerry Krause: “I don’t know who invited him . . . I didn’t.” It was petty but also startlingly honest.
The unspoken thread that runs through the criticism is that Jordan didn’t understand what was required of a retired athlete, a mixture of nostalgia and reflection. The five-year wait is supposed to give those emotions time to sprout and grow. People wanted the Jordan on the floor of his closet, not the one who did whatever it took to win. That’s the allure of a Hall of Fame speech. It reveals that these icons were sort of like us all along. Jordan didn’t give that speech, and the reason is both simple and obvious. He didn’t see himself as part of the past or as someone who’d found perspective. He wasn’t nostalgic that night. The anger that drove his career hadn’t gone away, and he didn’t know what to do with it. So at the end of the speech, he said perhaps the most telling and important thing in it, which has been mostly forgotten.
He described what the game meant to him. He called it his “refuge” and the “place where I’ve gone when I needed to find comfort and peace.” Basketball made him feel complete, and it was gone.
“One day,” he said, “you might look up and see me playing the game at 50.”
Chuckles rippled through the room. His head jerked to the side, and he cut his eyes the way he does when challenged, and he said, “Oh, don’t laugh.”
Everyone laughed harder.
“Never say never,” he said.
* * *
—
He’s trying to change, taking small steps. For the past few years, he’s gone on sailing trips because Yvette loves them, even though he hates the water. The first time, he went stir-crazy on the boat. This most recent trip, he felt his rage dissolve. It was a victory. He didn’t watch basketball. Every morning he’d wake with the sun and plant himself in the fishing chair, popping his first Corona by 8 with his friends, reeling in big yellowfin tuna. They make great sushi. Jordan was happy. “Drinking and eating and drinking and eating and drinking and eating” is how he described the vacation to a friend, going through cases of his favorite tequila, fully unplugged, which lasted until he flew home. Then he was around the game again, and the old urges began to eat at him.
In Charlotte, he starts thinking about 218.
Every morning since returning from the islands, he’s been in the gym. At mealtime he texts his nutritionist to find out what he can and can’t eat. Ostensibly, the reason is that he stepped on a scale after leaving the excess palace of Mister Terrible and saw this number staring back: 261. Nine days later, sitting in his office and surrounded by basketball, he’s down to 248. He’ll claim it’s about health, or looking good for his 50th birthday party. But in his mind, there’s a target: 218, a familiar and dangerous number in Jordan’s world.
That’s his playing weight.
When he mentions that Yvette never saw him play basketball, he says, “She never saw me at 218.” On the wall of his office there’s a framed photograp
h of him as a young man, rising toward the rim, legs pulled up near his chest, seeming to fly. He smiles at it wistfully.
“I was 218,” he says.
The chasm between what his mind wants and what his body can give grows every year. If Jordan watches old video of Bulls games and then hits the gym, he says he’ll go “berserk” on the exercise machines. It’s frightening. A while back, his brother Larry, who works for the team, noticed a commotion on the practice court. He looked out the window of his office and saw his brother dominating one of the best players on the Bobcats in one-on-one. The next morning, Larry says with a smile, Jordan never made it into his office. He got as far as the team’s training room, where he received treatment.
“You paying the price, aren’t you?” Larry asked.
“I couldn’t hardly move,” Jordan said.
There’s no way to measure these things, but there’s a strong case to be made that Jordan is the most intense competitor on the planet. He’s in the conversation, at the very least, and now he has been reduced to grasping for outlets for this competitive rage. He’s in the middle of an epic game of Bejeweled on his iPad, and he’s moved past level 100, where he won the title Bejeweled Demigod. He mastered sudoku and won $500 beating Portnoy at it. In the Bahamas, he sent someone down to the Atlantis hotel’s gift shop to buy a book of word-search puzzles. In the hotel room, he raced Portnoy and Polk, his lawyer, beating them both. He can see all the words at once, as he used to see a basketball court. “I can’t help myself,” he says. “It’s an addiction. You ask for this special power to achieve these heights, and now you got it and you want to give it back, but you can’t. If I could, then I could breathe.”
Once, the whole world watched him compete and win—Game 6, the Delta Center—and now it’s a small group of friends in a hotel room playing a silly kid’s game. The desire remains the same, but the venues, and the stakes, keep shrinking. For years he was beloved for his urges when they manifested on the basketball court, and now he’s ridiculed when they show up in a speech.
His self-esteem has always been, as he says, “tied directly to the game.” Without it, he feels adrift. Who am I? What am I doing? For the past 10 years, since retiring for the third time, he has been running, moving as fast as he could, creating distractions, distance. When the schedule clears, he’ll call his office and tell them not to bother him for a month, to let him relax and play golf. Three days later they’ll get another call, asking if the plane can pick him up and take him someplace. He’s restless. So he owns the Bobcats, does his endorsements, plays hours of golf, hoping to block out thoughts of 218. But then he gets off a boat, comes home to a struggling team. He feels his competitiveness kick in, almost a chemical thing, and he starts working out, and he wonders: Could he play at 50? What would he do against LeBron?
What if?
“It’s consumed me so much,” he says. “I’m my own worst enemy. I drove myself so much that I’m still living with some of those drives. I’m living with that. I don’t know how to get rid of it. I don’t know if I could. And here I am, still connected to the game.”
He thinks about the things Phil Jackson taught him. Jackson always understood him and wasn’t afraid to poke around inside Jordan’s psyche. Once during his ritual of handing out books for his players to read, he gave Jordan a book about gambling. It’s a Zen koan Jordan needs now, in this new challenge: To find himself, he must lose himself. Whenever he obsesses about returning to play, he tries to sleep, knowing that when he wakes up, things will be better. He knows he won’t get to 218. He knows he won’t ever play pro basketball again. He knows he’s got to quiet these drives, to find a way to live the life he worked so hard to create, to be still.
“How can I enjoy the next 20 years without so much of this consuming me?” he asks, sitting behind his desk as his cell phone buzzes with trade offers. “How can I find peace away from the game of basketball?”
* * *
—
He’s home.
Jordan steps into his loft, which is dark and modern, with exposed ductwork and a sparkling backsplash in the kitchen. The design feels masculine, vaguely Asian. A pool table with tan felt is to the left, cigar ashtrays scattered around the place. There’s an hour until the Bobcats-Celtics tip-off in Boston, which he’ll watch from his favorite chair, a rich brown, low-slung lounger.
“Where you at?” he calls toward the rear of the condo.
Yvette’s voice sounds bright and cheerful.
“Hey, honey,” she says. “I’m back here.”
She’s 34 years old, has worked in a hospital and in real estate, and is happiest with the domestic life that Jordan lost long ago. This past year, Portnoy got a birthday present from her boss, as usual, but for the first time in 16 years, she also got a card. It was from the store Papyrus. She recognized it, and inside, Jordan had signed his name. Estee laughed, mostly at her own surprise over such ordinary behavior. Yvette had done what any person would do when a birthday approached. She’d bought a card on her own. She didn’t staff it out.
Whatever changes he’s made are because of her, and she offers him the best hope to rediscover pieces of the boy who wrote those letters from college. Two Easters ago, Yvette went with him to North Carolina to visit family, which is spread around the state. She’d been bugging him about taking her to Wilmington, to show her where he grew up. Like most people, she sometimes struggled to imagine him before. She wanted to meet the Mike Jordan who needed his mom and dad to send stamps. This required about seven hours of driving, which he didn’t want to do. Finally, he gave in. “It’s amazing what women can talk you into doing,” he says. “Make you change. Ten years ago, we’d have been arguing all fucking day. I would’ve won. This time, this stage where I am, you win. That’s progress.”
Tonight, the guys are ordering Ruth’s Chris to go, and Yvette and Laura are making salads. Friends gather around the kitchen island, and the place is filled with laughter. They’re washing lettuce. It’s easy and loose. Jordan is killing Buckner about drinking all his wine, everyone erupting at the volleyed barbs, and later, when George hands Quinn an expensive bottle of merlot with a bendy straw in it, Yvette falls into hysterics. It was a joint George-Yvette operation, from the sound of her giddy cackling.
She pushes Jordan, making him try new things. The home in Florida is almost finished, and it will be theirs together. In conversation among his staff, the golf club estate has been called a “retirement home,” and Jordan’s friends like to imagine him in the huge outdoor living area, lounging on a big couch, relaxing. Their wish for him is peace.
He seems to have it tonight, at least for a moment.
“Baby,” Yvette says, “can you get us some wine?”
Jordan ducks into the climate-controlled wine room and comes out with one of his favorites. The cork pops softly. Glasses line the counter, and he pours wine into each one, handing them off as he finishes.
“Here ya go, ladies,” he says.
* * *
—
Over the next seven hours, all of it spent watching one basketball game after another, he’s again pulled inward, on a Tilt-a-Whirl of emotion, mostly shades of anger, from active screaming to a slow, silent burn. He transforms from a businessman returning from the office—Honey, I’m home!—to a man on fire. The first sparks come from a SportsCenter debate, one of those impossible, vaguely ridiculous arguments that can, of course, never be won: Who’s a better quarterback, Joe Montana or Tom Brady?
“I can’t wait to hear this conversation,” he says.
He stretches his legs out on the ottoman, wearing sweats and socks, and as one of the guys on television argues for Brady, Jordan laughs.
“They’re gonna say Brady because they don’t remember Montana,” he says. “Isn’t that amazing?”
Aging means losing things, and not just eyesight and flexibility. It means watching the accomplishments o
f your youth be diminished, maybe in your own eyes through perspective, maybe in the eyes of others through cultural amnesia. Most people live anonymous lives, and when they grow old and die, any record of their existence is blown away. They’re forgotten, some more slowly than others, but eventually it happens to virtually everyone. Yet for the few people in each generation who reach the pinnacle of fame and achievement, a mirage flickers: immortality. They come to believe in it. Even after Jordan is gone, he knows people will remember him. Here lies the greatest basketball player of all time. That’s his epitaph. When he walked off the court for the last time, he must have believed that nothing could ever diminish what he’d done. That knowledge would be his shield against aging.
There’s a fable about returning Roman generals who rode in victory parades through the streets of the capital; a slave stood behind them, whispering in their ears, “All glory is fleeting.” Nobody does that for professional athletes. Jordan couldn’t have known that the closest he’d get to immortality was during that final walk off the court, the one symbolically preserved in the print in his office. All that can happen in the days and years that follow is for the shining monument he built to be chipped away, eroded. Maybe he realizes that now. Maybe he doesn’t. But when he sees Joe Montana joined on the mountaintop by the next generation, he has to realize that someday his picture will be on a screen next to LeBron James as people argue about who was better.
The debaters announce the results of an Internet poll, and 925,000 people voted. There was a tie: 50 percent said Montana and 50 percent said Brady. It doesn’t matter that Montana never lost a Super Bowl or that, unlike Brady, he never faded on the biggest stage. Questions of legacy, of greatness, are weighted in favor of youth. Time itself is on Brady’s side, for now.
The Cost of These Dreams Page 3
