Jordan Michael - When nothing else matters: michael jordans last comeback

IT BEGAN DERAILING AFTER SEASON ONE. HIS WORLD WAS FUBAR by then. A promising young teammate, Richard Hamilton, had dared to stand up to him in a mutual searing of egos, and found himself traded. The mounting dissension on the team called to mind a word that Michael Jordan and some of his old Chicago Bulls associates exchanged during the Bulls glory days to describe something or someone gone bad indefinitely. It was a code word, an acronym. FUBAR: Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. By his last season, the Washington Wizards were hopelessly FUBAR.

Michael Jordans three years in Washingtonabout a year and nine months as an official executive and two seasons as a playerwere troubled from the start. Before his comeback began, The Washington Post dispatched me to watch him for an entire season, and much of a second. I valued the experience, even the awfulness, which I hesitate admitting because I realize it sounds peculiar and a little perverse. But if you wanted to know what forcesmoney and a sense of entitlement, most of allcoarsened professional sports in the last gasps of the 20th century and the beginning of the new millennium, it behooved you to have been witness to the Wizards and the Michael Show.

Not everybody around me thought so. The Wizards coach, Doug Collins, called me a stalker. Someone at my own paper, a sportswriter friend of Jordan, let it be known that he wouldnt talk to me, wouldnt read me. The coolest, savviest person was always Michael Jordan. Looking for a solution to the problem my presence caused, unable to banish me like an irksome teammate, he quietly turned toward his people for a solution, leading one of his publicists to advise me that I would perhaps enjoy more cooperation from Jordan if I could assure her that I would not be writing a book. Besides orchestrating deals and advancing fables, the protectors of a sports god have only a few essential duties: to shelter Him from taxable income and any unseemly truths, not always in that orderand to keep people like me away. Seduction is part of the game, and writers are often easy prey, anxious to have the cachet that accompanies being regarded as a Jordan favorite.

Hes Jordans guy, someone would say of a journalist who made it known he was a Jordan friend. You never heard such an admission, or description, outside of sports journalism. No one ever refers to a top political columnist in this country as, say, Bushs guy or Clintons guy or Kerrys guy, because for a political columnist to be regarded as anybodys guy would be the ultimate insult. By contrast, the sports industry is filled with athletes buddies and mouthpieces.

Michael Jordan offered them the celebritys form of friendship: small morsels of self-serving information in exchange for the tacit understanding that theyd never write or say anything critical about him. So you didnt read much, say, about how he called a teammate a faggot.

Understand this: Truth, or complete truth, is a deferred commodity in sports when it comes to idols. It isnt only some of the media that stay quiet. No one is more responsible for hiding truths than a teams management and ownership. The big truths are placed in a lockbox as long as the god makes the franchise a lot of money. And Michael Jordan made a lot of money for a lot of people.

But ownership at least saw a tangible benefit. For the media, the rewards were scant. Jordan sometimes would tell his media favorites about a teammate or club official hed lost confidence in, or a trade he wanted to see happen. In special cases, hed invite them to parties. He wouldnt give them much, but theyd be grateful just the same.

The consequence? The consequence is that sometimes sportswriting is a fairy tale, and that youre reading this because you hope its not.

Now that it is over, I can tell you this: You can have all the money and power in this world, and while it might protect you against all sorts of intrusions, it doesnt insulate you from somebody like me. I am not gleeful about that. It just is. I am the paid voyeur with a press pass following you from city to city, and staring at you in locker rooms and other public settings, and glimpsing too many of your quasi-private moments in hallways, and asking you questions in Wilmington, Washington, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Indianapolis, New Jersey, Houston, Milwaukee, Miami, Phoenix, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, Boston, Atlanta, San Antonio, Philadelphia, L.A., New York, Dallas, Everywhere, and who has nothing to lose if my omnipresence has come to make you uncomfortable.

Nothing to lose is the key. A subject cant possess a hold over you, cant be allowed to block you from writing what you know by hinting that hell never talk to you again if you cross him. There cant be anything the celebrated athlete can take away from younotably special access to him. I had nothing special, and so nothing to lose. It freed me. How did it work each night? people ask me, and I never know how to answer that, because I never really abided by any of the normsthe protocol, the emphasis on limiting the number of questions that werent about the game that evening, the silly deference to officials dissembling, the interest in numbing questions about that turning point in the second half, the discretion not to ask anything the subject didnt want posed, the nodding of a head to some babble being spouted by a self-serving coach, the complicity of some of the media in what was seldom more than a public relations exercise by that coach, that star, the Washington Wizards executives and NBA officials.

It was that babble that so offended, and that babble that triggered the urge to know what was really happening.

FROM HIS START IN WIZARDS MANAGEMENT, MICHAEL JORDAN courted danger. He liked to signal that he did not have many equals and certainly not any superiors. He referred to the teams principal owner, Abe Pollin, who had bought the team before Jordan entered kindergarten and hired Jordan as club president, as nothing more than a partner. He spoke about him in a kind of modified conditional tense, couching explanations of his possible future moves by saying once that he would be consulting my guys and Abe, if hes still a part of the situation. His lieutenants dropped hints that Pollin blocked trades and acquisitions; that Michael couldnt wait for the tightfisted elderly owner to sell the team, so he could be replaced by a younger, bigger-spending visionarysomeone who would be a suitable match for Michaels style and ambition. They sent signals that Michael wanted to dump or demote the owners right-hand woman, Susan OMalley, who was as close as a daughter to Pollin.