Everything They Had (27 page)

The black athletes feel that while they may have an edge in natural athletic ability, the white fan and white journalist do not see the endless hours they spend working on playgrounds and in gyms, perfecting moves, improving, refining, adjusting their games, exploiting the natural God-given ability by dint of ambition and intelligence. These, they feel, are the qualities that set the playground player apart from the college player, the college player apart from the pro, and the great professional player apart from the journeyman. Bird, to them, is therefore an interesting example of what might be called the adjective phenomenon—whites are hard workers and intelligent; blacks, when described by announcers and writers, are gifted athletes who come naturally by their skills. Bird is perceived as the lunch-box player who only by dint of hard work and high intelligence has created himself as a great basketball player, whereas what is seen of Johnson or Worthy is simply his natural skills, not the endless hours spent honing those skills and the intelligence to employ them constantly in making split-second decisions.

Of the comments that Isiah Thomas made, some were silly, but one important point, obscured by all the furor, was stated with great eloquence: “When Bird makes a play, it's due to his thinking and his work habits. It's all planned out by him. It's not the case for blacks. All we do is run and jump. We never practice or give a thought to how we play. It's like I came dribbling out of my mother's womb.”

That was what was so important about Magic Johnson in this series. This was a great player at the height of his game, forcing his skills and will upon a team that quite regularly rejects the imposition of alien tempo and alien style and prefers to set its own rhythm. He was able, for six games against an extremely tough team, to play at a remarkably furious level with very few mistakes. Statistics are often misleading, but Johnson's assist-to-turnover ratio (78 to 13) for the series and his 19 assists and 3 turnovers in the decisive sixth game tell their own truth. The intelligence is in those statistics.

Bill Walton has said that when he was injured and with the Clippers a few seasons ago, he decided to do nothing for one game except watch Magic. Johnson's ability and intelligence, he said, were absolutely remarkable. “I watched him all game, and he was on the fast break all night,” Walton said. “Split-second decisions every time, and he never made a single wrong pass. Not once.”

There is no small amount of irony in all this: The NBA, as American institutions go, may be the greatest showcase of black talent and intelligence. Unlike pro football, where the issue of the black quarterback is still unresolved and where there has been no black head coach, in the NBA most point guards—the quarterbacks of the teams—are black, and there have been a number of black head coaches. The NBA is, in fact, the league most capable of producing genuine equity and real friendship among its black and white players.

Yet for all the progress in the NBA, the racial tensions and racial byplay are at times strikingly visible there, simply because it is where black players have advanced the furthest. The fault is not the league's or the players'; it is simply that on both sides we bring more baggage to the arena from the exterior society than we are aware of. Professional basketball may be an essentially black game, but the owners are white, most of the general managers and referees are white, and the media—with their ability to define and their innate reflection of the norms of the white culture—are primarily white. The black crossover athlete, who not only excels in his sport but also gains enough public identification (and white goodwill) to achieve major endorsements and a prominent broadcasting job, is still relatively rare: One thinks of O.J. Simpson, Reggie Jackson, Julius Erving, Bill Russell, Ray Leonard and probably Magic Johnson now, as well. It is still a select crew.

Indeed one of the ironies about the resentment of Bird by some blacks is that it is about media attention. Yet, in truth, when Bird and Johnson entered the league as rookies, it was Magic who had an instinct—a virtual homing device—for the media, particularly television, and Bird who was warier and more suspicious and who rejected the media's glare. Johnson was about basketball and the media; Bird was about basketball. He largely regarded the media as an unwanted intrusion. That was a reversal of the normal racial order, in which white journalists are far more comfortable with white players than with black players, and white players are more comfortable with (or less suspicious of) the white media than are blacks. From the start, Magic seemed to love the hype, which came principally from network television. CBS, desperate to create rivalries in a league savaged by expansion, seized on both him and Bird from the very beginning.

After a dozen years in which black athletes had seemed alternately resentful and political, after endless dour interviews with Kareem, here was a charming, ebullient young black athlete who seemed to like the game, like the camera and even like white people. One's first sight of Magic Johnson was of a pleasant young man with television journalists fawning all over him.

The remaining impression of him from those early years is that he seemed to be teamed in the backcourt not so much with Norm Nixon as with Brent Musburger.

“The Magic Man Versus the Bird Man,” went the hype for their early NBA games. Bird wanted none of it at the time. “Guards don't play forwards,” he said. Over the years Bird slowly came out of his cocoon and became more confident of his place in the league and of his ability to deal with journalists, eventually becoming surprisingly deft with the media (and delighting, one suspects, in the use of double negatives, thereby getting back at a generation of Indiana English teachers).

Slowly, inevitably, as they raised their teams to the highest professional level, as their teams became perennial challengers for the title, the connection between them, which had once been hyped and artificial, gradually became real. In a league in which expansion had ruined traditional rivalries, their rivalry and that of their teams remained genuine, and they reached the rare point where rivalry turns into respect and even affection. Bird led the campaign for Magic as MVP this year, and Magic talked during the playoffs about how playing against Bird raised his game, made him better, and how he thought that when Bird retired he, too, might retire, that the special challenge implicit in their careers and their mutual era would be over. It was the statement of an athlete thinking not so much of a given series as of the athletic history books.

So linked are the two that last week Leigh Montville in
The Boston Globe
had a lovely column entitled “Friends, Foes for Life.” Set some 40 years in the future, it portrays Bird and Johnson together at a nursing home, all the celebrity softball games, the celebrity tennis, the celebrity bowling behind them. Their game now is checkers. Theirs is an endless series. Magic leads 2,993–2,992.

“‘Who's ahead anyway?' Magic Johnson asks. ‘You know damn well who's ahead,' Larry Bird says. ‘Just get playing. This thing will be even when I'm through with you today.'”

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. Jordan has given us, then, among other things, a new definition of American male beauty. Not surprisingly, in many households it has been the children who have taught the parents about him and about his fame, artistry and beauty. About a year ago New York Governor Mario Cuomo gave a speech bemoaning the disappearance of the athlete as hero in America. Where have you gone Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio? he asked. A friend of mine named Dick Holbrooke, a former U.S. State Department official, wrote him that comparable heroes still existed, but that their names were Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson and that today's children were inspired by the grace and ease with which they carried their fame. Cuomo called back and said, I stand corrected.

Jordan, infinitely disciplined, product of a very strong, very ambitious family, knows innately how to handle this staggering role—to deal with the media, to know what to say and what not to say and when to hide and when to go public, and to smile always. He is the first new-age athlete. And he is the right athlete at the right time. He plays the right sport, for its purpose is easily comprehensible even in a country where basketball has not yet taken root. Had the satellite been pervasive 20 years later, Pelé, also playing an international sport—soccer—on a level above even the best players of his day and with a charm that radiated easily across national boundaries, might have been first. Perhaps Muhammad Ali might have been first, but he was politicized by his conversion to Islam and the Vietnam War. Besides, Ali's considerable charm notwithstanding, boxing was never the ideal sport for the young, with whom all idolatry of this kind must start. Ali, far more graceful than most boxers, conquered his opponents by stylishly punching them senseless; Jordan meets his opponents and conquers by gracefully soaring over them.

More, he does this for an audience that greatly exceeds that of the ballet. This is sports as ballet, something utterly new and modern, its roots African-American, ballet as a contested sport. No one, after all, ever guarded Baryshnikov. When we talk in Jordan's hotel room, I talk to him about Baryshnikov and Nureyev and their beauty and grace, and he listens, curious, patient, intrigued by these stories of potential rivals, and when I am through, he asks only one question about Baryshnikov: “How tall is he?” Short, I answer, quite short—low center of gravity. I detect a small smile, a category 4 smile, almost invisible, a smile of private victory: Michael's pleasure as he thinks about posting up Mischa.

Jordan's is the most original of performance. What thrills the fans—and the other players and his coaches—is that almost every night there is something unique in his moves. It is not, says Bulls coach Phil Jackson, that Jordan's hangtime is so great; there may well be others in the league with greater hangtime. What sets Jordan apart, Jackson says, is what he does in the air, the control, the vision, the ability to move his body after he has seemingly committed it. If Jordan, Jackson notes with a certain delight, is the lineal descendant of those great basketball innovators who went before—Elgin Baylor, Connie Hawkins and Julius Erving, each learning from and expanding upon the accomplishments of his predecessors—then the most exciting question is, What is the next great player going to be able to do?

Ever since the coming of the communications satellite, there has been an inevitability to all this—that there would be an athlete of Jordan's surpassing international fame, that he would most likely come from soccer or basketball, because they are the most readily understandable of international games, the games that essentially explain themselves. Since America is the home team in the wired world, it would likely be an American sport. But American football has too many rules and cloaks its players in uniforms that deny individuality. Baseball has complicated rules too and seems, in contrast with basketball, a languid sport to the uninitiated, building slowly over an entire season. That left basketball. It was therefore almost a given that the first athletic superstar of the wired world would be a black American basketball player who played above the rim.