Everything They Had by David Halberstam & Glenn Stout

Author:David Halberstam & Glenn Stout
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2015-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

A HERO FOR THE WIRED WORLD

From Sports Illustrated, December 23, 1991

IN SOME MYSTERIOUS WAY THE WORD HAS GOTTEN OUT. The Chicago Bulls bus, the bus that he rides on (which is as close as most of these fans will ever get to the street where he lives), is to leave the Westin Hotel in Seattle at 5 P.M., and by 4:20 the crowd has begun to gather in the lobby, concentric rings of fans or, more properly, worshipers: They are more white than black, more young than old, more male than female, but they cut across every ethnic and demographic line. It seems almost ceremonial, a certain hum of anticipation rising each time the elevator opens. Finally at 4:50—for he likes to be the last man on the bus—the door opens, and out he comes, in his Michael Mode: His smile-and-sign-and-move-and-smile-and-sign-and-keep-moving drill is flawless. He is the seigneur—swift, deft, graceful, never rude—in the splits of the second in which he at once enters and departs their lives. “I actually saw him live,” a boy says. Fame is indeed fleeting for those whose closest connection to it is to stand and work the 60 yards from the Westin elevator to the team bus.

I have not seen fame like this in almost 30 years. I think of the time, in 1960, when I was the one reporter in the country allowed to ride the train bearing Elvis Presley back to Memphis from the Army, and I think of John Kennedy in that same year, when he campaigned in California, and I watched the teenyboppers and saw the first reflection that in a television age, politics had become theater. I do not cover rock concerts, but I presume Mick Jagger and others who play at his level deal with this all the time. In a pretelevision age, Joe DiMaggio had fame like this and was comparably imprisoned, though his fame was limited largely by the boundaries of the 48 contiguous states.

There is an even greater dimension to the fame of Michael Jordan. He is one of only two black American athletes who, almost 45 years after Jackie Robinson broke into baseball, have finally become true crossover heroes—that is, they receive more commercial endorsement deals from the predominantly white, middle-class purveyors of public taste than do white athletes (the other is the pre-HIV Magic Johnson; the jury is out on Bo Jackson now that he’s a mere one-sport man). But unlike Johnson, Jordan has created a kind of fame that exceeds sports; he is both athlete and entertainer. He plays in the age of the satellite to an audience vastly larger than was possible in the past and is thus the first great athlete of the wired world.

His good looks—indeed his beauty, for that is the right word—are a surprise to older white Americans, who by cultural instinct grew up thinking that Gary Cooper and Gregory Peck and Robert Redford and Paul Newman were handsome but did not see beauty in a young black athlete with a shaved head.

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