Introduction
It is early in June of 1996. The greatest and arguably the most captivating athlete that I have ever seen play in any sport in my lifetime is about to play in what is effectively a showdown game for him against a team from Seattle. The varying elevator and doormen who work in our building and the other buildings on our block on the West side of Manhattan, knowing that I occasionally write about professional basketball, want to talk to me about the player and the game. None of these men, to my knowledge, was born in the United States. They come from all over the world, the Dominican Republic, Panama, the Philippines, the Indian subcontinent. I doubt that any of these men played basketball as a boy, just as I doubt that many of them seriously watched a basketball game until he was well into his twenties. Yet he is "Michael" to them. No one refers to him by his last name. Their relationship is far too intimate for that. They root for him and for his team even though they are not from Chicago; indeed, I am not sure any of them has ever been to Chicago, or for that matter to Seattle.It takes me back to memories from my boyhood. I am younger, and living in a suburb of New York, and the Yankees are in their annual cliffhanger of a pennant race, or have finally reached the World Series, and when this happens men and boys who might otherwise be strangers talk to each other about what Joe or, in this case, "DiMag" or DiMaggio, will do against assorted Red Sox, Brooklyn Dodger or St. Louis Cardinal pitchers. They referred, of course, to the great DiMaggio, the surpassing big game athlete who bound us together in my youth and whose deeds allowed strangers to find commonality and community with each other.
There are a number of things about this dramatic change in the world of sports that I find striking. The first is that basketball, because of the stunning talents of its great athletes and the speed of the sport, has at the very least gained parity with baseball and football as a national spectator sport, at least among younger Americans. This is something that goes beyond mere rating points during the Finals, compared to the World Series or the Super Bowl. Rather it is something that has happened -- it is the psyche of the nation, particularly among younger Americans; the deeper into the playoffs, the more schedules in all kinds of Americans' homes are set according to the schedule dictated by the NBA for the games, so that a crucial big game not be missed.
The second thing is that the most idolized and admired athletic hero in America, some fifty years after the color barrier was broken by Jackie Robinson, is a young, gifted black man, and that even Madison Avenue realizes this and that the proof is there in commercial endorsements -- Michael Jordan is by far the greatest salesman of sneakers, underwear, soft drinks, breakfast foods, and above all himself and his sport, not just in America, but in the world today. Here in a country that until very recently has liked to think of itself as being white and where until very recently black athletes did not get anywhere near their share of commercial endorsements, he is not merely an athletic superstar, but a cultural icon who has given us a new and far broader definition of beauty.
And the third thing is that this sport, with the intensity of its play, and the physical beauty and balletic ability of its signature athletes, has become the hot sport in the modern era, when the competition among different forms of entertainment for viewer time is more intense every year. In a nation where the pace of life, driven by jet planes, by television, by computers and faxes and e-mail gets faster all the time, basketball seems to fit the changed national appetite, and supply the requisite amount of action in the limited amount of time people now have to watch.
The action of football is fast and brilliant, but its athletes wear all kinds of clunky armor and the men themselves therefore seem more distant. Baseball is slow, it is by and large not an adrenaline game, the emotions of its players, perhaps because of the traditional culture of the game, perhaps because if you celebrate too readily the pitcher may throw at you the next time up, are more often than not rather guarded. But basketball is played in a fury, offense to defense and back to offense again in micro seconds, and the emotions born of that ferocity cannot be hidden; the emotions are raw, and they are naked to the camera. It is, not surprisingly, the fastest growing sport in the world and the NBA game has become the signature of that growth; at the Olympics, it is the American stars from the NBA that all the other world-class athletes want to meet, pose for candid photo shots with, and get autographs from. No other sport, it appears, lends itself so brilliantly to the modern era, to an audience that has all kinds of entertainment competing for its ever more limited attention span.
It is in our bloodstream now, and has been for some 15 years, since the Magic Johnson/Larry Bird, Los Angeles Lakers/Boston Celtics rivalry first flowered. The baseball season starts in April, but in any real sense the baseball season now has to wait to catch the attention of the American sports fan until the NBA Finals are completed. Basketball, in no small part because of a handful of gifted and unusually winning athletes such as Jordan and Johnson, captivated the young at precisely the moment that the nation was ready to tune in. Recently, former governor Mario Cuomo of New York wondered aloud where all the American athletic heroes have gone -- and wondered why today's youth did not seem to have heroes comparable to those of his own youth, like Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams. A friend of mine named Dick Holbrooke, then a Wall Street broker, later the principal United States negotiator in Bosnia, wrote Cuomo that these heroes still exist, but that they played a different sport, basketball, and that their names were Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan. I stand corrected, Cuomo wrote him.
---Introduction by David Halberstam
