FACING THE COURT OF APPEAL

FACING THE COURT OF APPEAL

Michael Jordan is an idol to some, but to others he is a fallen hero for not endorsing social causes such as the abject poverty of the neighbourhoods around the arena where he performs.

By Gare Joyce
Dateline: Chicago

THERE'S no escaping Michael Jordan in Chicago, which means the city is like the rest of the civilized world, only more so.

His name is attached to a restaurant, but any near-celebrity can do that. There is his own shrine, Niketown on Michigan Avenue. He looks down on the city from billboards.

At the United Center, his image, that splayed-legged dunk, appears immense on the scoreboard's video screen. It appears in miniature on the heels of his and his teammates' shoes and on the lapel pins of the security guards and ushers.

Yet on one count there is no finding Michael Jordan. In one way you can look for him and he will never be there, not on a grand scale, not in miniature. In just this one regard, the man whose image is ever present wants to be never present. When talk turns in one direction, that most famous of names aspires to anonymity.

What does Michael Jordan believe in beyond the court? What are the causes he is committed to? What is just one thing he believes in?

 

MOST respected, most popular, best known, best ever: Start with a sampling of superlatives attached to Michael Jordan and understand that none is over the top. In a poll of young people, Jordan tied with God as the most respected individual. Perhaps it was God who tied with Him.

The Sporting News recently named Jordan the most powerful person in sport, the first athlete so named. His annual income is an estimated $80-million (U.S.), more than half of that earned off the court in endorsements. Though Jordan is in a position to exercise tremendous influence for social good, he is content to just cash in. His seal of approval guarantees sales of shoes, pop, cologne, whatever. Michael and (Your Product Here). No people's cause need apply.

"There's scarcely any comparing Jordan to figures such as Jackie Robinson and Arthur Ashe, outspoken leaders on issues of race and class," says John Hoberman, author of Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race. "He's thoroughly a corporate phenomenon with no apparent social or political conscience."

An illustrative anecdote: In his home state of North Carolina a few years ago, Jordan declined to endorse Harvey Gantt, a black Democratic candidate who opposed Republican incumbent Jesse Helms. Though Helms is one of the last holdovers from the bad old Jim Crow South, the type who's nostalgic about black-only fountains, Jordan begged off. He noted, "Republicans buy shoes, too."

It's not that he's Republican (though in a recent poll of National Basketball Association players, Republicans outnumbered Democrats 2 to 1). It's simply that he couldn't be against anybody, even someone who would have kept Jordan on the back of the bus.

Writer David Remnick summed up the Jordan strategy laid out by his agent, David Falk. "Every one of Jordan's endorsements is designed to make him [and therefore the product] heroic, available, pleasant, elegant, 'beyond race,' " Remnick wrote in The New Yorker. By extension, Jordan's avoidance of lending his name to Gantt, to worthy others or to good causes, might be calculated to put him "beyond race," but hardly establishes him as heroic or available.

Where does he stand on affirmative action? On Nike's exploitive sweatshops in East Asia where Air Jordans are manufactured? Nobody knows.

He'll make public-service announcements on behalf of NBA-approved causes, but otherwise, nothing any deeper than Just Do It or Be Like Mike. The lone exception: Jordan did come out for the decertification of the NBA Players Association during the last round of collective bargaining. When Jordan spoke up on that occasion, however, you could see Falk's lips moving. (Falk declined numerous requests to be interviewed for this story.)

It's hard to miss what was never there, yet Jordan's silence is conspicuous. We know everything there is to know about him, except what he believes in and what is in his heart.

The media have been curiously silent about Jordan's political and social remove.

One would imagine that white liberals in the media would weigh in, yet that's not the case. The liberal bona fides of journalist David Halberstam are in order. His most recent work, The Children, recounts his experiences covering Martin Luther King and the civil-rights struggle in the Deep South in the sixties. Still, Halberstam maintains that he does not look to Jordan for such leadership. Evidently, that was then, this is now.

"Michael is what he is," said Halberstam, who has followed the Bulls this season for a coming book. "There are too many . . . celebrities who have opinions and political causes without a lot to back them up. I respect Michael's right to not have an agenda."

It's unclear whether black journalists who cover the game withhold judgment out of sympathies shared with Jordan or professional convenience. "You don't make waves," offered one black journalist, who asked that his name be withheld. "Play along. Michael has a long memory."

Even black media outlets that do not cover the Bulls daily won't upbraid Jordan. For one, James Muhammad, editor of the Nation of Islam newspaper The Final Call, declined to comment on Jordan's unexercised influence.

A few years ago, filmmaker Spike Lee criticized his friend Jordan for not being more socially involved. "Today's Afro-American athlete is not going to stick his neck out [and] jeopardize a contract or sneaker deal," Lee said.

Lee was a voice in the wilderness because Jordan is above reproach. Challenging Jordan or other prominent black athletes on matters of social or political leadership remains a no-win situation: Whites will be tagged as racists and blacks criticized for beating up on their own, a flagrant foul on the court of political correctness either way.

While Hoberman allows that there are fewer fights for Jordan to take up than were presented to Jackie Robinson and Arthur Ashe, he does lament Jordan's squandering an opportunity. "If Jordan and the 10 highest-paid African-American NBA players were to pool their resources, they'd instantly form one of the most powerful PACs [political action committees] in Washington," Hoberman says.

"Just by stepping forward and engaging the community, Michael Jordan could put an end to gang violence in Chicago," said Jim Brown, the Hall of Fame football player who these days heads a program for gang members and former convicts. "But like so many of today's athletes, he allows his agent to do his thinking for him. And for an agent, everything is driven by the dollar. The agent and Jordan are afraid of a backlash if Michael took up a cause, but would anyone really question his intentions? Therewouldn't be a backlash. He'd just go up in people's eyes."

How does Jordan respond to these criticisms? We'll never know. His relationship with the media has soured through the years. In what he has vowed to be his final season, he has cut back access to the bare minimum. At practices before playoff games, he was hiding out in the trainer's room.

After the first two games of the second-round playoff series against the Charlotte Hornets this week, he met with reporters, but only in the setting of a news conference. And at the news conferences, questions about his retirement or any other uncomfortable subject only prompted a quick wrapup of the proceedings. Any life-of-Michael queries had to clear Falk Associates Management Enterprises, and, as noted, agent Falk wasn't playing ball.

 

AT Ground Zero in Jordanville, there might be respect but not a lot of love for No. 23. Perhaps this place was passed over by the pollsters.

"Jordan," Danny Graves says. "He's a [expletive] hog. Print that."

Graves, a little freshman at Marshall High, dribbles upcourt during a four-on-four game at a playground on Van Buren, overlooking the expressway. The school and the playground are a few blocks from the United Center. None of the young men on the playground have seen the Bulls in person or been inside the arena. And none will ever bump into Jordan and company on these streets.

Everyone on the playground, save the fellow with the notebook, is black. It's not as threatening a neighbourhood as the Cabrini Green projects. It's still a long way from the Magnificent Mile. Infant mortality rates in this area and others nearby are comparable with those in the Third World. Around the city's housing authority high-rises, you can see drive-through drug deals go down. Unemployment is a multiple of the national average. It was a nearby neighbourhood like this one that once inspired Mother Teresa after a visit to dispatch missionaries to Chicago.

The court is a refuge from all this, and Graves sees no point in breaking up a game to conduct an interview.

"Scottie Pippen is the greatest player in the universe," he says, and then pulls up for a jump shot at the top of the key. The ball swishes through the net. "Jordan? Jordan this, Jordan that. Too much Jordan. Jordan's old."

Has Jordan ever made his presence felt in this neighbourhood or come down to Marshall High?

"Hell no," yells Danny Graves, his voice joined by seven others on the court.

"Too busy golfing," another kid yells.

Does he care about the players on this court? Does he know that they exist?

"Hell no," the chorus says.

Their avowed distaste notwithstanding, Jordan has exercised a considerable influence on these kids. The players wear oversize shorts, a point of style popularized by Jordan, though well before their time. All dream of jamming the ball like him, too.

Jordan and his advisers would recognize these young men as a thin slice of the demographic pie chart -- under 18, black and inner-city males. They would not likely dine at his restaurant. Indeed, there's a good chance that they'd be eyeballed suspiciously if they walked in. Still, Jordan and Nike would recognize them as a market for footwear.

"Look, no matter what people think about him, if he wears the shoes, then that's gonna be what they'll all be wearing," says Thomas Smith, a Marshall High sophomore.

All the players on the court wear Nike shoes. A couple wear top-of-the-line Jordans.

"Nike is just the shoes," Danny Graves says. "I don't give a damn about the man [Jordan]. I wish the best shoes were called Pippens."

All on this court will give Jordan his due as a player, but aren't impressed with him as a person.

"There are other players who have gone back to their neighbourhoods and tried to clean up things," Graves says as the court starts to crowd up with older guys, out of school, out of work, killing time, playing for money.

"What's Jordan do? Man, he spends all his time golfing, living high and everything and doing commercials. Do we like him? No. Do we want to be like Mike? Sure. Rich and out of here. He sure doesn't want to be like us."

 

MARSHALL High School rises like a four-storey fortress on Chicago's West Side. No lawns border the building. No groomed pathway leads to the front door, where a police officer does a gun check. Brick and impressive stonework rise from the sidewalk. That's what it takes to endure there. Nearby frame storefronts are in a tumbled-down state, and most abandoned.

Marshall recently celebrated its centenary, and Luther Bedford has contributed to nearly a third of that span. His first five years, he served as football coach; the next 25 as basketball coach.

"The game has changed a lot in my time," the 61-year-old Bedford says in his almost bare office off the school's dark gym. "It's a more running-and-jumping game now, more fast-paced, sometimes out of control. That's a carryover from the playground."

Bedford says he believes that his students "care too much" about the game, that their commitment turns to obsession. "For too many of them, it's the only reason they're in school. And for a lot of them, some of the best players who walked through these doors, they played so much that they didn't have the marks to play for my team. They see Jordan and think they're like him. They see Kevin Garnett come right out of Farragut [a Chicago high school] into the NBA and think they'll be just like him, too.

"Jordan could be a more positive influence," Bedford says. "He'll tell kids to drink Gatorade, but not that school and family are the important things. He'll sell soap, but not hope. And he'll never put his money back in this community. It's okay for him to give his name to a boy's club down here, but that's just his name."

A native of Rockford, Ill., and a graduate of Illinois Wesleyan University, Bedford has given his whole adult life to Marshall and the West Side community. He passed over chances to coach elsewhere -- bigger programs and schools with more resources. He has stayed with the Marshall Commandoes, though he's eligible for retirement. He has stayed on in a city school system choked off from resources, a system described by the Chicago Tribune as "the worst in America."

Bedford and Marshall might sound vaguely familiar; several years ago, a group of filmmakers traced the high-school careers of two Chicago basketball players. One was Arthur Agee, whose family lived below the poverty line and whose father was struggling with a drug habit. Agee played for Bedford as a senior and led the Commandoes to the city championship, inspiring events captured in the prize-winning documentary Hoop Dreams.

"The Hoop Dreams people set up annual scholarships, $1,000 for a male athlete, $1,000 for a female athlete," Bedford said. "I don't know how much money Hoop Dreams will ever make, but it's a lot less than the Chicago Bulls. Still, they've managed to make a bigger contribution to Marshall than the Bulls ever did.

"Maybe some people thought that Arthur's was a sad story. To me it wasn't. He had a loving family, a lot more support than most kids have here. He wasn't typical. He had it a lot better than most. There are some sad stories down here."

 

WHEN the Bulls were invited to the White House after a championship a few years back, guard Craig Hodges felt a tugging. It was his conscience.

Hodges and his teammates were going to appear in the usual photo-op with President George Bush. Hodges had a message for Bush. He wrote a letter to Bush, a simple thing from the heart. He asked that the President pay as much attention to domestic affairs as he did to foreign policy, that he care about "those without a voice and issues involving poor people." He had no idea that this letter would contribute to the premature end of his career, to what he maintains was a blacklisting.

"Craig has an open heart and time for everybody," Luther Bedford says.

"Of all the athletes in the last few years that I've met, it's Craig Hodges who really stands as someone who cares about working in the community," Jim Brown says.

Hodges always sensed "a standoffishness in the dressing room" -- that his teammates resented his involvement in inner-city programs. He was no Republican country-clubber. Hodges, likewise, did not conceal his disappointment in Jordan and other teammates who worried about living in style rather than the common good.

"I wore regal African garments to honour President Bush," Hodges remembers. "And some people were angry about the protocol and the letter I wrote. Then after my second championship season, after three NBA three-point titles, at age 32, I'm waived by the Bulls and not one NBA team offers me even a tryout. I wasn't a troublemaker. I never had one technical in 10 years in the league."

A couple of things were clear to Hodges. First, the Bulls and the league regarded him as too hot, too radical. And second, when the Bulls cut him loose, no one, and especially not Jordan, objected. One expression of support from Jordan would have assured Hodges's job. With his silence this time, Jordan made a bold statement and, as Hodges points out, "took food out of the mouths of children, mine."

"The whole idea now is to not speak up or be engaged in the community," Hodges says. "Everybody is making money, so why disrupt it? Why go back? Don't rock the boat."

Hodges continues to go back to hard places in the inner-city, and it is history that sends him back.

"I remember growing up in Chicago Heights and my grandfather, Bruce Hodges, spent time with young people in our community, reinforcing the idea of commitment to the Creator and family," Hodges says. "I learned from him. I learned from my mother, Ada, who was a civil-rights worker, who marched in the South with Dr. Martin Luther King. I remember watching my mother cry when I was eight years old, the night Dr. King was shot. In college, I studied African-American history -- the stuff my family lived through.

"I wish that I could have kept playing," says Hodges, who is interim coach for the women's pro team in Chicago. "Those next couple of NBA contracts would have been the important ones in getting security for my family. It wasn't just the letter. It was bigger than just that. But I'm not sorry that I did what I did or that I believe in what I believe. I don't know where leadership will come from in this next hip-hop generation of players. Kevin Garnett? Kobe Bryant? I don't know, but there has to be a voice, someone who'll understand the importance of history and community."

Sadly, the next generation is far more likely to embrace Jordan's cool detachment from political and social causes, especially if they're familiar with the history of Hodges, if they worship Jordan and if they heed their agents' advice.

 

SIDEBAR: Verbatim

In breaking every significant National Football League rushing record, Jim Brown of the Cleveland Browns established himself as the greatest player of his era and perhaps the most dominant athlete of the 1960s. Today, the 61-year-old Brown lives in Los Angeles, where he heads Amer-I-Can, a U.S. group that delivers a message of responsibility and non-violence to former gang members and former convicts.

"African-American athletes in the sixties were far more motivated to speak up and more importantly act for political causes," Brown says. "There was a degree of educated activism then that is sorely missed today. It was the time and our character, too.

"I was a member of a group of prominent black athletes -- along with the likes of Bill Russell -- who formed a black athletes economic union. And when Muhammad Ali fought the Vietnam draft and was stripped of his title, we went to him to offer our help and support his just cause. We weren't ostracized by our peers for doing this. We were respected and emboldened by it.

"The agents are a big part of this now. Money dictates everything for so many athletes today -- do what will make the most money immediately.

"To improve life in the inner city, and in all of America, it comes down to bringing capital and technical knowledge into the community. Keeping resources in the community rather than running to the suburbs. That's what succeeded for the Koreans, for the Jews and for other ethnic groups. So many successful black people turn their back on the community, and none more than black athletes."