12/11/2023 0 Comments Michael jordan im back chicago tribune![]() ![]() ![]() "Michael would have been just another great athlete admired by basketball fans if it weren't for Nike." "What if Nike had said, `Let's put $100 million behind Magic Johnson'? " asked Michael Rosenberg, a sports and entertainment agent who has worked with Tonya Harding, Peggy Lee, Aretha Franklin and Johnny Rivers. Even the company's name, which means "victory" in Greek, lends to the aura, recalling the Greek sporting ideals that led a person to undergo the rigors of exercise, as Plato put it, to improve the soul. With Nike, he has become Apollo, the sun god, the embodiment of beauty and creativity. Without Nike to sculpt his image, Jordan would merely be Agamemnon or Hector or Achilles, heroes who did divine bidding. Nike, the sporting goods company, has been a primary ingredient in making the expressions of Jordan's personality and basketball skills into a quasi-artistic panorama, one that would fit into a contemporary Parthenon frieze. Even the `bad stuff' he does is so removed from the commonplace citizen it doesn't relate to me." I don't know anyone who bets $1 million on golf. "He is so far removed from day-to-day life. Jordan is from another planet he is not a mere mortal," said Anita DeFrantz, president of the Amateur Athletic Federation of Los Angeles. The expression "once in a lifetime," so misused and overused, seems to apply fairly to him. All those are what define Jordan or make him so deliciously undefinable that the inability to categorize him becomes appealing. The ability to do what seems physically impossible and, once done, becomes merely impossible to describe. "I've worked with every rock star in the business, and none of them comes close to Michael Jordan's appeal." "There is something special about the guy no one in sports has," said Tom Collins, a skating tour promoter. Impermanence no longer is an impediment to genius. Jordan expresses that perfection in "art" that lasts bare seconds, yet it is the art for our times, which demands a continuous succession of novelties. Michelangelo's vision changed the way the human body was perceived for the four centuries that followed, making it an object capable of perfection rather than an impediment to religious perfectability. It is unlikely we will watch videotapes of Jordan a century from now, savoring his genius the way we do Michelangelo's or Shakespeare's or Mozart's. Television commercials and slam dunks-or, better yet, a commercial with a slam dunk-are often what pass for art to most of the image-consuming public. Ours is a world with an extremely short attention span experiencing the ephemeral is infinitely easier than trying to understand the eternal. It seems like an SAT question: "Which one does not belong in this group?" The answer is none, because our perceptions of genius have been expanded to include those whose achievements have no transcendental significance. Gandhi, Einstein, Michelangelo, Michael Jordan. "If I were charged with introducing an alien life form to the epitome of human potential, creativity, perseverance and spirit, I would introduce that alien life form to Michael Jordan." Because of that dimension of the extraordinary, he represents the best and greatest potential of the species-a Gandhi, an Einstein, a Michelangelo. "The critical point is to have someone of extraordinary genius in a particular endeavor," said sociologist Harry Edwards of the University of California, "even if that endeavor is of relative unimportance to the condition of society. Yet even that does not begin to explain what has happened in the last couple weeks, why this 32-year-old basketball player is so cherished, why he is granted unconditional love and respect despite his faults and his mistakes, not the least of which was a form of abandonment. ![]()
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