The Athletic Jazz Of Michael Jordan

BASKETBALL MAY BE "THE CITY GAME," BUT ITS greatest performer soared out of Wilmington, N.C. That is how it should have been. As "Hoosiers," one of the best sports movies, made vivid, basketball often means most in small towns where the community gathers in a cramped gym on winter nights, imagining their boys teaching humility to some team from an arrogant metropolis. By the time Michael Jordan stepped away from the game, he had given Chicago the inestimable pleasure of several times slam-dunking in the playoffs the team from the most arrogant of metropolises. The Knicks represent the city that produced the smarty-pants journalist (A. J. Liebling) who hung on Chicago the label the "Second City." The stacker of wheat and hog butcher showed the Big Apple how to play hoops.

Jordan caused Chicago to square its broad shoulders, and he helped make professional basketball boom. The NBA came of age because of three players. One was called Magic. Another, "the hick from French Lick"--a Hoosier town--seemed to have 360-degree vision, peripheral vision with no periphery. The third as Michael. Baseball once had the stars known merely by first names or nicknames--Babe, Willie, Mickey, the Duke.

One reason for the NBA's success is that the pleasures of professional basketball are so immediate, so accessible to spectators. It fits an age in which people seem to want their music illustrated by videos and expect life to have a soundtrack by Metallica. The NBA is MTV as sport--entertainment as sensory blitzkrieg. Many of the pleasures of baseball require a trained eye and a sense of strategic choices in particular situations that arise in a game of constant pauses. The kaleidoscopic spectacle of professional basketball--muscular Swirl in a small space--requires no mediating thought.

Explaining why basketball is a simple game, Red Auerbach, philosopher--king of the Boston Celtics, said, "The ball is round and the floor is smooth." Yes, but. Basketball may be the athletic equivalent of another American invention, jazz, but just because jazz often is improvisational does not mean jazz is simple. Because basketball is a game of flow rather than, like baseball or football, of episodes, and because today's basketball players combine balletic grace with furious speed and stunning strength, it is easy to believe that the game is all adrenaline and instinct, with no mind involved. That is not true. But basketball at the NBA level does require a consistency of high energy that cannot long exist without joy. For Jordan, the joy is gone, for now.

The ethics of excellence can be construed in several ways. Jordan's way is: I've done my best and been the best, so I have nothing left to prove. However, another way is: There is a special virtue to continuing to perform at a high level after you have nothing to prove, just for the sake of the craft, and out of respect for anyone who seeking refuge from a world full of the slipshod and second rate, will come out on a cold winter night to an arena to see excellence.

But in "Henry IV," Shakespeare's Prince Hal says, "If all the year were playing holidays,/To sport would be as tedious as to work." The grinding everydayness of sports like baseball and basketball takes a toll on the players' zest, and zest is an indispensable ingredient of consistent excellence. So when, two weeks ago, George Brett, perhaps the greatest hitter of his generation and still a star, announced his retirement after 20 years with the Kansas City Royals, he said simply, "The game had become a job for me, and I thought baseball deserved better than that." If only the sort of respect that America's best athletic craftsmen have for their crafts were infectious. If it were, our entire society could catch a wholesome contagion from the men and women who rise to the top of the stern meritocracy of sport.

Some of Jordan's performances--"the shot" at the buzzer that crushed the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 1989 playoffs; the 54 points that brought the Bulls back against the Knicks last May--are etched in America's sporting history as deeply as Red Grange's 265 yards and four touchdowns for Illinois in the first 12 minutes of the Michigan game in 1924, or "the catch" by Willie Mays against the Indians in the 1954 World Series. But Jordan's manner of leaving the game was also memorable.

His decision was in part an act of filial piety, a way of preserving the bittersweet satisfaction of knowing that his father, who was murdered last summer, saw his last game. Jordan's farewell press conference was satisfyingly rich with talk of father and family, subjects much in need of celebration in the unhappy sections of our cities where Jordan's glittering career in "the city game" has exerted hypnotic fascination.

Jordan's greatness is attested by the "Oh, you must mean who other than" test. A few years ago, while writing a book on baseball, I would ask managers and coaches who they considered the best player and the best pitcher they had ever seen. Often I got first a quizzical look as though I got this response: "Oh, you must mean who other than Mays and Koufax." Today, when basketball people are asked to name the best player they ever saw, that quizzical look flickers on their faces, and then they say, "Oh, you must mean who other than Michael."

An ailing arm forced Koufax to retire when he was Jordan's age, 30, and at the peak of his powers, so no one ever saw him, as they saw Mays, in seasons when his skills were sadly diminished. Poignancy is inherent in sport because so much of life's trajectory--the birth, flowering and withering of capacities--is compressed into a short span. By retiring now, Jordan controls our retrospection, leaving only memories from the apogee of his career.

What he cannot control are the consequences of the emulation a career such as his inspires. Somewhere, perhaps on a playground along the mean streets of some city's concrete canyons, where the rusted rims have no nets and where the in-your-face style of play is captured in the rule "no autopsy, no foul," or perhaps in a small town beneath a basket hung over a driveway that is illuminated only by light spilling from a nearby kitchen window, there is the 11 p.m. slap-slap-slap-swish, slap-slap-slap-swish of a boy practicing a jump shot that someday will have people saying that he is like Michael--maybe even a bit better.