Crashing the Borders by Harvey Araton

Author:Harvey Araton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

1998: Beyond Jordan

ON THE NIGHT of Michael Jordan’s last home game as a member of the Bulls, many came early to worship the mythology as much as they did the man. Ninety minutes before game five of the 1998 NBA Finals, the statue stood so tall, so proud, as the guardian of the United Center, as the bronze messiah of professional sports. Fathers with cameras dangling from their necks dispatched their children to pose by the shrine. Fans who had walked past it countless times without stopping to read the inscription now mouthed the words: “The best there ever was. The greatest there ever will be.” On a pleasant June evening, pen in hand, my reporter’s notebook out, I sampled the gathering crowd, and breathed in its belief that the night would be unforgettable.

Among their numbers were: a longtime season ticket holder who customarily shared two seats with friends but decided to bring his young son just so the boy could someday tell his own child, or grandchild, that he was there for Jordan’s last game; a young man from familiar territory, Staten Island, engaged to be married that summer, whose brother had scored the most treasured of gifts, two in the rafters, for the presumed clincher against the Utah Jazz; a couple in from Los Angeles, self-described Jordan fanatics, carting an infant and a toddler, praying the little ones would cooperate by sleeping through the bedlam; and many others who had fought their way through Friday rush-hour traffic, without a ticket, without hope or the small fortune necessary to score one, just wanting to be near the building, around the statue, in Jordan’s air space.

They all had followed the saga of championship number six, the last running of the Bulls, as orchestrated by Phil Jackson, who believed that in the completion of a second three-peat would come a sense of symmetry, an understanding that the time had come for everyone to move on. Time for the increasingly restless Jackson to take a sabbatical from the sport … for the cessation of hostilities between the front office and the team’s core players … for Dennis Rodman to take his disruptive freak show someplace else … for David Stern to start hoping that another ratings-friendly superstar could step up, or grow up, and triumphantly carry the exceedingly Jordan-centric NBA into the twenty-first century.

Jordan and the Bulls were a global phenomenon, a television monolith, the sports equivalent of the ensemble sitcom smash. The 1998 Finals’ overall Nielsen rating, 18.7, was the largest in NBA history, more than double what Magic Johnson’s first championship scored in 1980, triple what the San Antonio Spurs and New Jersey Nets would record five years later. By early 1998, Jordan was Seinfeld, the runaway hit that also happened to be in its last season of original episodes on NBC. This network-crushing coincidence provided the muse for a whimsical column that I had more fun writing than any other I can recall: a fictitious chance meeting between the

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