| 11 September 2009
I posted this article back on January 15th of this year and thought that I'd repost it today. Even though Michael Jordan doesn't want his time with the Wizards talked about during his Hall of Fame ceremony, I feel like it was unfairly skewed in the public eye. In fact, to me it was the most impressive athletic accomplishment I have ever seen. I don't want to ignore his time with the Wizards on a day like today. People don't realize just how truly impossible it should have been for a 40-year old who wasn't in NBA shape to just come back after a hiatus of a couple of seasons and still be a force on the basketball court. Was he the Jordan we remembered from his days in Chicago? No. But was he still better than most guys in the NBA as a Wizard. Yes. And that's what people tend to forget.
As I was perusing the interweb Tuesday, finding more basketball content to take in, digest, and store as informational fat into my cerebellum, I came across a very good article by J.A. Adande that reminisced about Michael Jordan and his retirement in 1998. It did a beautiful job of weaving his legacy with how the culture has changed to a point where there never could be another athlete like him. Adande explained that Jordan created such a cultural and business environment that we will never allow another MJ to be created. It's really a great piece of writing that is short, simple, and yet wildly complex in the thoughts it provoked in me.
This article took me back throughout Jordan's career that still stick with me more than most memories that I can piece together about my family, self, and friends combined. I vividly remember as a four-year old child watching an NBA game in which some team in red was going against a team in green. And there was one particular man in red who was excelling at what was explained to me as the object of the game - scoring. This was the double overtime game in which Michael Jordan scored 63 points against arguably the best NBA team of all time in the 1986 Boston Celtics. I had no idea who any of these people were. I just remember five guys not being able to stop one guy. I never knew who won the game at the time. I don't know that I had the cognitive wherewithal to know that there were winners and losers that day. I just remember that it was the first NBA game that I had ever watched and I was instantly obsessed, infatuated and in love with basketball.
It seems fitting that the greatest basketball player of all time and the man that not only changed a city, team, league, sport, industry but changed athletic and economical culture around the world as we know it is the same man that gave me my first true love. He's also the same man that was constantly knocked down by a Detroit Pistons team that I hated with a passion because they constantly cheated and frustrated me (or at least that's what I thought at the ages of seven and eight). He's the same man that beat Magic Johnson and then Clyde Drexler and then Charles Barkley, all by being a perfect form of tenacity, basketball skill and an undying will to win.
He's also the same man that ruined my sister's 16th birthday for me in 1993 when he retired from the game of basketball that day to pursue other ventures (professional baseball).
Looking back, his attempt at pro baseball was the third most impressive display of athletic accomplishment that I've ever seen. I didn't know it at the time and it seemed like he was a complete failure that was embarrassing himself but knowing that Michael Jordan went from the NBA Finals to AA baseball and still hit .200 and played a decent at best outfield position is truly incredible. A man who hadn't played baseball in probably a minimum of 15 years, decided to cut bait on being the greatest basketball player of all time, went to AA baseball and got a base hit 88 times in 436 at bats. He also stole 30 bases in 127 games.
Did he just beat out Rafael Belliard as the worst offensive player in the history of Major League Baseball? Absolutely. But how many 31-year old men could quit their day job and perform that well? I'd say about 0.002% of the population could even approach this. And yet it was a failure because the greatest sports icon in the world didn't turn into Ken Griffey, Jr. (pre hamstring tears). It was one of the three greatest athletic accomplishments that I've ever seen/experienced.
In fact, Michael Jordan is responsible for all three of these greatest athletic accomplishments that I can recall. Number three on the list is his assault on minor league baseball. Look at it as a failure if you will but it's the same as looking at the Leaning Tower of Pisa as a faux pas. Number two on this list would have to be the way he defined and tyrannized the game of basketball from 1984 to 1993 and then again from 1995 to 1998. It's silly that people try to compare the media manufactured hype of today's NBA stars to what this man did day in and day out for over 1200 professional basketball contests.
But above all, the greatest athletic accomplishment that I've ever witnessed was his second comeback from 2001 to 2003 with the Washington Wizards. It was an attempt by an aging man (well, aren't all men technically "aging men?") to show that he still had something left in the tank. It was the old guy at the gym, being inspired by the song "Glory Days" as he blasts Springsteen in his Corvette that compensates for a shortage more than any federal bailout could ever dream of accomplishing, trying to prove that he can still play with the guys in their 20s. It was a grasp at youth to prove he wasn't old yet. It was a born competitor trying to salvage something from his growing failure at competing with other Vice Presidents of Personnel around the NBA. And it was truly remarkable to see what he accomplished.
Not many people understand the depth and intricacies of competing in professional sports. We rarely see the day to day work put in by athletes who are trying to keep up with the movement of players becoming better across the board thanks to new technology, training methods, and dietary understanding. We rarely see that these men and women have sacrificed any semblance of a normal life since the age of 12 in order to someday make it to the top percentile of their targeted profession. These children who eventually become pro athletes rarely have to deal with diminishing skills or something I like to call "athletic atrophy" as they start and build their careers. It's something that is saved for those pro athletes who can't let go and move on to the next phase of their professional lives, which usually includes real estate, business ownership or in the case of O.J. Simpson - Court TV celebrity.
But it's rare that outside of the boxing world or the daytime soap opera that is Brett Favre, we have a player who renounces his retirement and is eventually reinstated back into the world of superior young athletes. It's even more rare that a player does that in basketball. We've had plenty of guys hang onto their careers well into their 40s - Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kevin Willis, Dikembe Mutombo, Greg Oden (C'mon, that joke was too obvious to pass up, right?). But guys don't usually retire and come back at the age of 38 after taking off three seasons. Definitely, Michael Jordan retired early in an effort reminiscent of Barry Sanders and Jim Brown. But that was still a nearly impossible task, even for the greatest player of all time.
At the risk of sounding too cliché or too Charley Rosen, there was a certain romance to what Michael Jordan was able to do as a player on the Wizards. It was like watching a typical Dennis Quaid movie that lasted 164 games over two seasons. Sure, the guy was clearly too old to be in the position he was in and he was probably trying to persevere against guys almost half his age who were better suited for the grind, but he still looked good enough to fill the role and we all remembered the love affair with Melanie Griffith. What MJ was able to do with such a pathetic Wizards roster was truly remarkable. It wasn't a failure. It was an inspiring display of determination, will to win, and greatness.
Jordan was at a disadvantage from the get-go, but not directly because of his age at the time. He had suffered broken ribs in a pick-up game in Chicago over that previous summer at the accidental hands of Ron Artest and therefore his conditioning program was shortened. It was an impossible task for Jordan to try to get past since he hadn't played at this level in so long and his body wasn't apt to recover like it used to. And that's what made it such a prodigious acc
omplishment to get that Wizards team to go 74-90 over those two seasons.
Jordan wasn't in the physical condition to allow a person of his age to perform at a high level. He battled constant knee tendonitis through those two seasons. His foolish pride and immeasurable confidence figured that he was too good to simply let knee tendonitis get in his way. He led a team that was comprised of himself, Richard Hamilton, Chris Whitney, Popeye Jones, Tyrone Nesby, Tyronn Lue, Christian Laettner, Jahidi White, and the immortal Courtney Alexander as the top nine players in minutes played that season. The only way I can think of making that team worst is putting Mike James on it.
And yet, that team won 37 games. Not to mention, they had Doug Collins as the head coach because Mike knew that he could bully him into doing whatever Mike wanted him to do. I don't know how many more things could be working against him there. But he still scored 22.9 points per game in 60 games after three full seasons away. He still accompanied that scoring average with 5.7 rebounds and 5.2 assists per game. At the age of 38!
And the next season, he played all 82 games at the age of 39 while logging 37 minutes per game. That year, the scoring averaged dipped to an even 20.0 points per game. The assists went down to 3.8 per game but he raised his shooting percentage from 41.6% from the floor to 44.5% (by the way when he came back from baseball for the final 17 games of the regular season in 1995, he shot 41.1% from the field). The talent on the team was slightly different with Larry Hughes added to the roster and Jerry Stackhouse acquired for Richard Hamilton. The team still won 37 games as Michael Jordan said goodbye to the NBA, again, and finished his goodbye tour in a much more respectable fashion than Kareem did.
So what does any of this mean? After all, Michael Jordan didn't lead his team to the playoffs in those years (they missed the post-season by five games each season). We remember his amazing moments in the All-Star game in 2003 in which he hit an improbable shot over Shawn Marion to keep the game going even when everyone in the building knew he was getting a final shot at heroics. But we also remember countless missed dunks and short jumpers because his old legs were simply not strong enough to endure. People who were expecting him to dominate and were subsequently disappointed often say that he should have stayed retired because he "ruined his legacy."
I completely refute that. What I saw was a man that had no business being on the court anymore and the only reason he was allowed to come back is because we all held him in such high regard before he shed his young snake skin talent for the inevitable layer of aging and growing old. What I saw was a man able to persevere through basic biological stages in a human's body that can't be reversed. I saw a man that used to be able to fly to anywhere he wanted to go, find a way to get to those same places on the ground. I saw a man defy popular opinion and prove that he was still a force to be wary of on the basketball court.
I saw the greatest athletic accomplishment that I've ever seen.
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