Jordan Rules
I was a freshman in college when, after a season in the Chicago White Sox minor league system, Michael Jordan returned to professional basketball. A native Milwaukeean – and congenitally partial to the underdog – I had always hated Jordan, and in the years that followed, during which he would win three consecutive championships for the second time in his career, I would continue to hate him lustfully. But every time a Bulls game was televised in the weeks after his 1995 comeback, my best friend Jesse and I would get on our bikes and head over to Jesse’s Uncle TJ’s house, some eight or ten miles from campus, to watch. It takes a lot for a pair of college freshmen preoccupied with forty ouncers they can’t finish and girls they don’t have a chance with – kids whose universe is contained to a collection of dormitories on the shores of a small lake in the middle of southern Wisconsin – to bike ten miles, up hills and through traffic, into the world of houses and regular people with kids and jobs. But that’s how badly we wanted to see Jordan play. Not because we liked him, mind you, but because there would never be another basketball player like him, and we did not need the help of hindsight to know it.
That brings us to LeBron James, the one who famously took his talents to South Beach this season, leaving behind the Cleveland Cavaliers team for which he’d played his entire NBA career and, in the process, a state’s worth of historically star-crossed sports fans who, calling themselves “witnesses” (at the encouragement of Nike, LeBron’s earliest and most steadfast sponsor), had supported him with a faith of which he turned out not to be worthy. More than a decade ago, now, James was anointed the “next Jordan,” a promise all agreed he could not fulfill except by winning championships. Now that, for the first time, he appears to have better than a puncher’s shot at winning his first, and perhaps many more after that on a Miami Heat team stacked with all-stars, some contend that the old prophecy – one of many “next Jordan” prophecies, in fact – is, at long last, coming true. Henry Abbott, the most self-consciously (and self-congratulatory) cerebral of ESPN’s TrueHoops bloggers, entitled the short column he posted before the first game of this year’s NBA Finals between the Miami Heat and the Dallas Mavericks “LeBron James is the Next Michael Jordan.” All you need to see it, he wrote there, is “a pair of open eyes.”
But even as we face the possibility of James accumulating championships for years to come – even if he were to eventually win not six, like Jordan, but the seven, or eight, or more, that he boldly predicted when he signed with Miami last summer – perhaps we would be well advised to keep in mind that there can never be a “next” anyone, in so far as there can always only be one who was the first one: the one who didn’t fit the mold but cast it; the one who, like Picasso, did not seek but found. LeBron James is a massive human being with a massive ego who is massively talented at basketball. Jordan was (and still is) all of those things, as well, but on the court he was a true work of art. And one thing about the true work of art is that even the most perfect reproduction always somehow pales in comparison.