Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Michael Jordan: Great Man

Michael Jordan is universally revered as a great basketball player (even by Jazz fans), but he has, as of late, come under scrutiny for his non-basketball personality. He's said to be a nearly intolerably competitive guy (rumor has it after a teammate blew a game, Jordan snatched the man's plate away during a team dinner and said something to the effect of "Only good players get to eat"). This competitive behavior that drove Jordan to a place of Mellevillean obsession and psychosis was on full display during his hall of fame inductee speech. He jokingly, in jokes that weren't funny because they were barely veiled aggressive challenges, thanked those who had cut him from teams, underestimated him, or made the mistake of thinking they could guard him. After this speech everyone turned on their inner psychoanalyst abilities and declared that they had discovered the secret to Jordan's success. The cause of his obviously great talent was declared to be his competitiveness. It drove him to be great, but it also obviously made him an egotistical mess. A man who would never be happy. This was a great story because it had the full heft of a Shakespearean tragedy. It also had the unstated assumption that greatness might not be worth it. The rest of us didn't have to feel as bad that we weren't Jordan because, when you really saw what it was like to be the man, would you really want to?


This is all a pretty good analysis, as far as it goes, but it doesn't really capture the truth. Simply put, a lot of guys are really competitive pricks. And a lot of them have insane basketball talent. The best example of one of these is Kobe Bryant, who yesterday, called a ref a gay slur that refers to the pile of sticks used to burn gay people in the past. Kobe was visibly upset after getting a technical foul called on him. He stormed to the bench, nearly punched his teammate, threw a towel, and then yelled out to the ref. Basically he threw a nationally televised fit. Here's some video. Today he gave a milquetoast apology saying what he said wasn't meant to be taken literally (the guy isn't literally a pile of sticks, I guess) and that he didn't mean to offend anyone. Some (my good friend representing them) think this is just the kind of thing that Michael Jordan would do if he were around today. They argue that basketball players, or at least the hyper competitive kind, are small minded, quick to fly off the handle, and can get pretty offensive and pretty scary quite rapidly. If we have no examples from Jordan's actual career of incidents like this one it is because the media have advanced to such a point that everything is now covered. There is some truth in the idea that today's players face increased media scrutiny. Still, we have a love of heroes. LeBron was one up until the decision, where most of the criticism coming at him was pretty lame and was squashed by people in the media themselves. LeBron, up until the decision, had something else in common with Jordan too. Something that Kobe lacks: he was a deft handler of his image.

I think the forgotten piece in the Jordan puzzle (or a forgotten piece, as we'll never fully recreate the man) was his ability to handle his image; to make his own story into something that we would root for above and beyond the game. He has oft been mocked for saying that he wouldn't endorse a Democratic candidate because "Republicans buy shoes too," but this mockery totally misses the point of the man and his comment. All great men and women, from Catherine the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte to Teddy Roosevelt to Mahatma Gandhi knew how to spin their own legacy. They were, each one of them, shameless self promoters. They also knew, almost instinctively how to blend their stories into larger themes and how to rewrite their pasts so that they fit the day's narrative and appealed to a broad spectrum of people. A huge part of Napoleon's legacy comes from his memoirs, written when he was imprisoned, which reinterpret his rule through the prism of pro-republicanism and freedom loving grandness. I believe that all the great persons of history have either done this, or had it done for them by those who followed (which may be the case with Leonardo Da Vinci and William Shakespeare). How else could their trials and tribulations remain timeless, if they didn't change to speak to each time that considered them?

Michael Jordan did the same, albeit on a much smaller scale. In his youth he was the hotshot scorer. The dunker and leaper with unparalleled athletic ability.



Then he was the hero valiantly fighting a losing battle against superior teams from Detroit and Boston (it was a sole man vs. the hordes, the same concept as 300).



Then his story changed again, he became on top of the world, the best ever. He dunked less, but he was just as murderous for his passing and shooting abilities.



Then he was too good for basketball even. Then he returned, world weary, like the man going in for just one last heist. He was still on top of the world, but he dominated through sheer will power instead of talent. He relied more on teammates and played defense to win.



Of course each of these transitions was punctuated with the appropriate spin and commercials. Jordan launched Space Jam at the height of his (nearly) final career stage (then he came back for the Wizards, spinning himself both as the returned hero and now wise master).

The thing is, none of these stages of Jordan are really discrete. He could dunk against the Jazz and he could shoot, pass, and play D back in his North Carolina days. He chose to emphasize different aspects of his game and hinted to the media what needed emphasis so as to fit his personal narrative into what was big at the time. The media shaped a lot of this on its own, but Jordan was smart enough to take their cues and play along. His ability to appeal to so many different people in so many different ways made him a wonderful basketball player, but also a great man. I'm still in awe that I lived during his time and got to witness his legend unfold first hand.

Every great person has the talent and skills that inflame our imaginations, that lead us to speculate about them and even worship them. What separates the great from the merely talented is the ability to shift their personal stories into the realm of the mythic. Michael Jordan would have never thrown a fit like Kobe, not because he wasn't as big of an asshole, but because that would have marred the Michael Jordan legend. He craved not only Ws but a legacy as well; his ambition was big enough that it contained his name in the history books, not merely a list of the number of rings he won. He is still working on it, still trying to prove himself great, this time as the builder and runner of a basketball team. The kind of largeness that Jordan sought is so big that Kobe has no clue it exists. He stands next to it in all his petty smallness, not knowing the chill he feels is from a colossus' shadow blocking out the sun. As he enters into the playoffs, obsessed with tying Jordan's ring record and putting his name in the conversation for best basketball player ever to live, he is completely unaware that he has already lost.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Good-Bye To All That: So Long Free Darko


I have been pretty far away from basketball for a while -- there have been other things going on in my life, and it always becomes hard to watch when your team sucks and it is obviously not going to get any better for a while. So it came as a bit of a shock to me when I found out just now that freedarko is no more. I have a somewhat fraught relationship with the blog. I deeply admire its beautiful artwork, the creativity of its post subjects, and some of the many brilliant things it has done for basketball (popularizing and epitomizing the basketball blogging culture is just the most obvious). I also hated the blog at times. Mostly this was out of jealousy and a certain iconoclastic position I've always taken -- I always do the Nietzchean inversion of morals thing and determine that any given popular thing is bad precisely for the reasons its proponents think its good (mostly, this is probably just jealousy). But in addition to reasons of envy, the freedarko site has frequently offended me in aesthetic ways. The writing is mannered in a particular style that I find pretty obnoxious, lazy, and much less smart than it takes itself to be. Very frequently sentences are packed with too many ideas and, instead of appearing deep or something, they seem like the results of muddled thinking that didn't reveal anything at all. Reading this stuff was pretty frustrating. It seemed more an excuse to name drop and show of the eclecticism of its creator's interests than to inform or engage with the reader. If only they had an editor, I often opined. This sort of writing -- similar to that which can be found at pitchfork, which was brilliantly lampooned by David Cross -- seemed to represent the worst of do it yourself internet journalism: it was out of touch, masturbatory, and off putting. It exemplified, at least to me, HL Mencken's dictum that people were bad writers because they were bad thinkers (I'm not above name dropping and self congratulatory masturbation). Then there were the images: that crazy lolzcats internet aesthetic where everything is as grainy and unrelated to the article as possible, while appearing designed to leave the viewer with a feeling of queasiness and/or general disgust (we too, have not always been above this).

That stuff has annoyed me at times, but it has also made freedarko a unique website. One that really felt better suited to its medium than almost any other. The writers, particularly Shoals, in addition to annoying me with their individual sentences and ideas, were also courageous. I mean that in the highest sense it can be applied to an activity done from the safety of your own bed (note: not that courageous). They were unafraid of tackling any issue no matter how controversial or inane. And a lot of the ill-formed writing I mentioned above (articles comparing Jordan opponents to forgotten genesis games; ranking stadiums by horror film appeal; what have you) were often the result of creativity pushed as far as it would go. Writers on freedarko took on issues of real substance. I am incredibly grateful for their attempts to deal with race in the NBA, and for their insistence on challenging the received wisdom, often showing the arrogant and reactionary assumptions it was based on. These are issues that are incredibly important for anyone seriously interested in sports. And they are anathema to many major sports outlets where, much like in the NBA itself, what matters is keeping everyone happy and not upsetting the boat. Freedarko offered a break from that kind of thinking. It also offered a break from the strict confines of sports journalism, providing essays that were surprising, funny, thought provoking, and delightfully weird. It was often a romp to check out their site. I'll miss that irreverent fun.

The good news is that what freedarko started lives on in sites too numerous to count. They got in when the getting was good. They popularized blogging about basketball and forever defined what its aesthetic would look like. If I may steal a line from another faceless basketball blog, they really were the Velvet Underground of this enterprise. As long as semi-articulate, over educated people are spending too much of their time writing about basketball and giving their content away free, freedarko will live on. The joke that informs the blog's title has already come to pass: Darko is a semi-important part on an NBA team; he is freed (unless the blog was asking for Milicic to be freed from his physical imprisonment on Earth through assasination, which is pretty uncool, I think) from his former unhappiness. It's time Shoals and his coterie of writers are freed along with him; no longer fettered to the format they developed, which must have become, at least a little bit, restricting after six years, they can begin to exert their influence elsewhere. They'll go on to do bigger and better things, having left their mark on all of us who read them (I read Shoals in the Atlantic a few weeks ago, which blew my mind). This blog and many others wouldn't exist without their pioneering work, for which I want to say thanks. So... be free Darkos, go forth and prosper. I wish you the best. Thanks for the memories.