Playing for Keeps
David Halberstan
Yellow Jersey, £12.50, 430pp
Buy it at BOL
Only at the roulette wheel, or perhaps in Liverpool, would you find young male sports enthusiasts for whom "Red 23" meant anything other than Chicago Bulls basketball star Michael Jordan. When Jordan finally retired in 1998 the Bulls also "retired" the Red 23 uniform. For who could really fill it - or, indeed, produce the dollars which still flowed from it?
Jordan; MJ; Michael. Here in England, the use of tabloid monikers for male sports stars - Gazza, Becks - signals a downmarket over-familiarity. But when US TV sports commentators uniquely started to call Jordan "Michael" towards the end of his career, it was out of a combination of affection, corporate reverence and the sheer pleasure of being witness to an athlete who so utterly and perfectly dominated his sport for a decade - and who, with his commercial image-makers around him, so effortlessly smeared the "American way" and its brands and products over the planet.
Harry Edwards, the veteran sociologist from the University of California, thought that Jordan represented the "highest levels of human achievement", in the order of Ghandi, Einstein or Michelangelo. Scott Turow said: "Michael Jordan plays basketball better than anyone else in the world does anything else." In a professional sport dominated by skyscraperbodies and religious obsessives - the new muscular Christians - a fellow basketball player's description of Jordan as "Jesus in Nikes"seems especially apposite. More darkly, coach Doug Collins was in awe of Jordan's legendary competitive instincts, both on the court and in the boardroom. "He wants to cut out your heart," said Collins, bleakly, "and then show it to you."
Jordan's real importance, of course, as David Halberstam's compelling new biography shows, lies in his role as the first focal point for the new global sports nexus. The Jordan/Nike partnership, perhaps more than any other, signalled the moment in global capitalism when commodities became symbols in their own right. Our own sports bodies - from the rapacious Manchester United to the genteel All-English Tennis Club at Wimbledon - all owe something of their vision of a lucrative sporting future to Michael Jordan and his advisers and sponsors.
When Jordan emerged from college basketball in North Carolina in 1984, the pro game in the US was in the early stages of a revival, building around the court rivalry between Larry Bird's Boston Celtics and Earvin "Magic" Johnson's LA Lakers. For the corporate giants the game had previously been "too black", riddled with drugs scandals and lazy greed; in short, too "street" black. But new agreements on drug-testing and salary caps plus a new commissioner began to increase its appeal among the corporate elites.
The arrival of sports networks on US cable TV did the rest - basketball offered an intimacy and an aesthetic on television lacking in either the brutal National Football League or the technical and leisurely baseball. Crucially, in an era of multinational sports commerce, it also travelled much better abroad than did America's "own" sports. Finally, the emerging stars of basketball wore sneakers - the new signifiers of urban leisure and street style. Basketball boomed. By the time Jordan waved goodbye in 1998, the new US arenas were filled with piped crowd noise and a detached corporate clientele.
Before Jordan, Nike had been losing the US "sneaker wars" to Converse and Reebok, at a time when the post-jogging boom in sports-as-leisurewear was just getting moving. Nike, which is essentially an irreverent promotional and marketing business (the actual manufacture of its products is franchised out), made the young, beautiful and brilliant Jordan the focal point of its campaign to launch a new kind of symbolic capital - effectively, a life philosophy shaped around designer labels. Nike's ad campaign for the new Air Jordan shoe range featured Jordan "talking trash" with Spike Lee. Lee was in character as Mars Blackmon, the shoe-fixated character from his movie She's Gotta Have It who refused to have sex with his girlfriend without wearing his Air Jordans.
The ad offered the sort of self-referential, intertextual and humorous style which seems so commonplace now. It presented Jordan as both athletic hero and an accessible and authentic leader of what US sociologists Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson have called the "celebrity democracy" constructed by Nike. (Jordan had a unique "love of the game" clause in his Bulls contracts, which allowed him to play in any street "pick-up" game he happened to drive by.) "What Nike have done," commented Jordan, "is to turn me into a dream."
It has been a lucrative snooze. The Air Jordan shoe grossed $130m for Nike's initial $5m stake in Jordan. In 1998, Fortune magazine estimated that Jordan had helped earn around $10bn for his various corporate partners. At the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 - the first time professionals were allowed to take part in the Olympics and the moment when Michael really went global - he demonstrated his sneaker patriotism at the medal ceremony by draping the US flag over rival Reebok's logo on the team tracksuit.
The Air Jordan ads also endorsed Jordan's racially neutral middle-class identity and displaced his "blackness" by setting it against the more troubled blue-collar African-American guise of Spike Lee's Mars. The way Jordan publicly "does" race has stoked up his political detractors. He is no Muhammad Ali, or even Arthur Ashe (who once described being famous and black in the US as having a second full-time job). For Nike, Jordan transcends race. When asked to endorse civil-rights activist Harvey Gannt against hard-line Republican Jesse Helms in North Carolina, Jordan shrugged and simply said that Republicans buy sneakers too.
It's clear from this book - and from Mike Marqusee's recent biography of Ali - that the two are very different icons for very different eras. While Ali was "the man" and a Madison Avenue turn-off, Jordan - appropriately enough for one heralding the age of global sport - truly was "the money".
