The Best American Magazine Writing 2014

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  He discovered old home movies and watched them, seeing his young kids. They’re all in or out of college now. Warmups had collected dust alongside his baseball cleats and a collection of bats and gloves. The astonishing thing to him was how much he enjoyed this. “At thirty I was moving so fast,” he says. “I never had time to think about all the things I was encountering, all the things I was touching. Now when I go back and find these things, it triggers so many different thoughts: God, I forgot about that. That’s how fast we were moving. Now I can slow it down and hopefully remember what that meant. That’s when I know I’m getting old.”

  He laughs, knowing how this sounds, like a man in a midlife crisis, looking fondly at something that’s never coming back.

  “I value that,” he says. “I like reminiscing. I do it more now watching basketball than anything. Man, I wish I was playing right now. I would give up everything now to go back and play the game of basketball.”

  “How do you replace it?” he’s asked.

  “You don’t. You learn to live with it.”

  “How?”

  “It’s a process,” he says.

  • • •

  The remembering continues in Charlotte, with Jordan and his best friend, George Koehler, crowding around an iPad map, trying to find Jordan’s first house in Chicago.

  There’s circular poetry about George being here. When Jordan first landed in Chicago in 1984, he stepped out of O’Hare and found that the Bulls had neglected to send anyone to get him. Still a country boy, Jordan was nervous and uncertain. A young limo driver saw him and gave him a ride. That was George, and he’s been with Jordan ever since. They’re together much of the time. Jordan trusts Koehler completely. Koehler might have more famous athletes programmed into his phone than anyone on the planet since one of the best ways to find Jordan is to call George.

  “Where you looking at?” George asks, pointing.

  “Essex Drive,” Jordan says, finding his old street. “I remember going up to that McDonald’s and getting my damn McRib. When I first got there.”

  There was a finished basement in that place. Charles Oakley lived behind him. So did another Bulls forward, Rod Higgins, who runs the Bobcats’ basketball operations. The basement had a hot tub and a pool table that could be converted for ping-pong. They’d play for hours, listening over and over to the first Whitney Houston album. Last year Jordan was sitting on the Bobcats bench with Curtis Polk, his lawyer and a team executive, when Polk received a text saying Houston had died. Her death really affected Jordan, not because he and Houston were close friends, but because it made him aware of his own mortality. It made him measure the distance between fifty and ping-pong on Essex Drive.

  “They had some battles down there,” George says, laughing.

  “Me and Oak,” Jordan says.

  Higgins is standing with them and is looking at the map too.

  “I used to kill him in pool,” Jordan says, nodding toward Rod.

  “I got a different version,” Higgins cracks.

  “Kill or be killed,” Jordan woofs. “Losing is killing.”

  There’s an unspoken shadow over the stories about that town house on Essex Drive. James Jordan remodeled the basement for his son. Did all the work himself because he’d never let Michael pay for something he could do on his own. The first winter, while Michael was out of town for the All-Star Game, his pipes froze. His dad ripped out the walls, replacing the pipes himself, patching and repainting when he finished. He spent two weeks fixing his son’s home. James and Mike—that’s where all this nostalgia has been headed, from the moment it began.

  Dear Mama and Pops … Please send stamps.

  • • •

  George Koehler looks down at the ring on his finger. It’s from the Bulls’ first championship. Jordan gave replicas to family and close friends.

  “I don’t know if I ever told you the story why I wear this ring,” George says.

  “Nope,” Jordan says.

  “I made a promise to your dad,” George says.

  George was always scared he’d get robbed, so he kept the ring at home. James, known to everyone as Pops, busted him: “Where’s your ring? My son didn’t spend his money to have you put that s———in a drawer.”

  “I can hear him saying it,” Jordan says, smiling.

  Pops told George that if someone stole his ring, “we’ll get you another one.”

  Jordan roars over the word “we.”

  “I like that,” he says, his shoulders heaving. “That sounds like him too.”

  “After what happened to him,” George says, “I wear the ring.”

  Memories come back. The day Pops was killed, he was scheduled to fly to Chicago. He’d called George the night before to ask for a ride. George waited at O’Hare, but Pops never came out. A half hour passed, and George called Mama J, his name for Deloris Jordan. Just wait, she said. Pops probably missed his plane. Two or three hours later, the next flight from Charlotte landed. Pops didn’t get off the plane. George dialed Mama J again, and she said that something must have come up and that Pops would call. Pops never called.

  “F———er,” George finally says, clearing his throat, “made me cry.”

  George tries to change the subject. He is attuned to Jordan’s moods and knows that when Michael gets sad, he becomes quiet, withdrawn, turning inward.

  “You know how many jump shots I took to get this thing?” George jokes.

  “Played your ass off, George,” Jordan shoots back.

  But the ghost of Pops is in the room now. “He never met my fiancée,” Jordan says. “He never got to see my kids grow up. He died in ninety-three. Jasmine was a year old. Marcus was three years old. Jeffrey was five years old.”

  “Where do you most feel your dad’s presence?” he’s asked.

  Five seconds pass, then ten. Silence. He leans back into his chair, limp, his paunch noticeable for the first time. The sky outside is gray. He scrunches his mouth, rubs his neck. Suddenly he looks older, his eyes glassy, and even twenty years after his father was murdered—robbed of a Lexus and two championship rings given to him by his son—it’s clear that Jordan still needs his dad. He finally answers.

  “Probably with him,” Jordan says, nodding toward George.

  On the floor, leaning against the wall, waiting to be hung, is a framed print Jordan moved here from Chicago. It’s of an empty arena, dark and quiet, with a bright white light coming out of the open tunnel doors, beckoning. Really, it’s about dealing with losses: with aging, with retirement, with death. In it, Jordan is walking toward the light and there’s a ghost walking next to him, with a hand on his shoulder. It’s his dad.

  “The thing we’d do,” he says, “we’d stay up all night and watch cowboy movies. Westerns.”

  Jordan still watches them obsessively, and it’s easy to imagine he does it to feel the presence of his father. One of his employees joked that she’d rather fly commercial than on Jordan’s Gulfstream because a passenger on his plane is subjected to hours of shootouts and showdowns.

  “Name a Western,” George says. “He’ll tell you the beginning, middle, and end.”

  “I watch ’em all the time,” Jordan says. “I watch Marshal Dillon. I watch all of ’em.”

  “I think his favorite Western is my favorite Western,” George says.

  “You and I have three we really like,” Jordan says.

  “Outlaw Josey Wales,” George says.

  “That’s my favorite,” Jordan says.

  “Two Mules…,” George begins.

  “…for Sister Sara,” Jordan finishes.

  “The other one I like is Unforgiven,” George says.

  “My father loved that,” Jordan says.

  • • •

  The opposite of this creeping nostalgia is the way Jordan has always collected slights, inventing them—nurturing them. He can be a breathtaking asshole: self-centered, bullying, and cruel. That’s the ugly side of greatness. He’s a killer, in t
he Darwinian sense of the word, immediately sensing and attacking someone’s weakest spot. He’d moo like a cow when the overweight general manager of the Bulls, Jerry Krause, would get onto the team bus. When the Bulls signed the injury-prone Bill Cartwright, Jordan teased him as Medical Bill, and he once punched Will Perdue during practice. He punched Steve Kerr, too, and who knows how many other people.

  This started at an early age. Jordan genuinely believed his father loved his older brother, Larry, more than he loved him, and he used that insecurity as motivation. He burned and thought if he succeeded he would demand an equal share of love. His whole life has been about proving things to the people around him, to strangers, to himself. This has been successful and spectacularly unhealthy. If the boy in those letters from Chapel Hill is gone, it is this appetite to prove—to attack and to dominate and to win—that killed him. In the many biographies written about Jordan, most notably in David Halberstam’s Playing for Keeps, a common word used to describe Jordan is “rage.” Jordan might have stopped playing basketball, but the rage is still there. The fire remains, which is why he searches for release, on the golf course or at a blackjack table, why he spends so much time and energy on his basketball team and why he dreams of returning to play.

  He’s in his suite at the Bobcats arena, just before tip-off of another loss, annoyed that one of his players is talking to the opponents. Tonight he’s going to sit on the bench to send a message that the boss is watching. He used to sit there a lot, but he got a few phone calls from NBA commissioner David Stern telling him to chill with the screaming at officials. Mostly he watches in private, for good reason. Once, when he was an executive with the Wizards, mad at how the team was playing, he hurled a beer can at his office TV, then launched nearly everything on his desk after it, a fusillade of workplace missiles. Now, ten years later, he mostly just yells.

  “I’m going downstairs,” he says.

  “Be nice,” someone in the suite says.

  “I’ll try,” he says, and he’s out the door.

  • • •

  The inner circle stays behind, gathered in suite 27, just across the concourse from the executive offices. They’ve all been around for years, some from the very beginning. Estee Portnoy is here, and George. Rod Higgins and Bobcats president Fred Whitfield, an old friend from North Carolina, come and go. They’re waiting on Jordan to return after the game, killing time, handling work stuff, telling stories.

  Back when they used to shoot a lot of commercials, Jordan’s 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 eighties, 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 has 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 as he sat at a dinner table, with people laughing and eating home-cooked food, he remembered 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 fifty.”

  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 eight with his friends, reeling in big yellowfin tuna, which hit a trolling bait like a submarine. They make great sushi. Four other couples came along, and they celebrated New Year’s Eve. 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 fiftieth birthday party. But in his mind, there’s a target: 218, a familiar and dangerous number in Jordan’s world.