Roland Lazenby - Michael Jordan: The Life

T HE DEFENDERS EYES grow wide, as they well should. Hes about to face the kind of kinesthetic brilliance that first motivated humans to invent slow-motion technologysomething, anything, that would allow them to review exactly what happens when movement plays tricks on the mind.

The setting is painfully familiar. Something in the offensive structure has broken down at the other end of the floor, igniting a fast break. The entire defense is retreating. The defender has sprinted back down the floor and, as he turns, he sees the blur. The dark form in red has the ball, dribbling and winding his way through the chaos at great speed. He crosses the ball over from right to left and draws it up in two hands just off his left hip in midstride.

At this exact moment, the tongue falls out of his face. Sometimes, it shows just slightly between the teeth, but at this moment, the full tongue drops grotesquely, like some comic doll silently mocking the defender. Theres a leering, obscene quality to the expression, as if the coming dunk itself wont be insult enough. For ages, warriors have instinctively made such faces to frighten one another. Perhaps theres some of that going on here, or perhaps its just what he has said it isa unique expression of concentration picked up from his father.

Whatever, the twenty-two-year-old Michael Jordan gains full clarity now, flashing his tongue at the defender like he is Shiva himself, the ancient god of death and destruction, driving the lane. Just as quickly, the tongue disappears and, as he strides, Jordan brings the ball up to his left shoulder, then rotates it in front of his face with his two hands as he leaves the floor just inside the foul line. The defense has collapsed to the lane, but the spindly form is already airborne, floating through them, switching the ball to his mammoth right hand as he approaches the goal. For an instant, his arm is cocked, cobra-like, ready to strike as he glides toward the rim, hanging alone, time seemingly suspended, as he calmly measures the finish. For spectators, the singular thunk of the throwdown is deeply stirring. It elicits a Pavlovian response, perhaps almost carnivorous, like watching a lion devour an antelope on the Nature channel.

The arc of the attack has formed a seemingly perfect parabola from takeoff to landing. In time, physics professors and even an Air Force colonel will take up an intense study of the phenomenon, trying to answer the question that obsessed a global audience: Is Michael Jordan flying? They will all measure his hang time and declare that his flight is an illusion made possible by the momentum delivered by his speed at liftoff. The more they talk of extraordinary thigh and calf muscles and fast-twitch fibers, of his center of balance, the more they sound like men grasping at air.

Jordans entire journey from the foul line to the rim lasts barely one second.

Yes, Elgin Baylor and Julius Erving, too, were capable of extraordinary hang timebut they performed mostly before video technology allowed the audience to savor their feats. Air Jordan was something altogether different, a phenomenon of the age, a departure from the past that surely seemed immune to the future.

Of the millions who had played the game, he was the one who could fly.

Jordan himself considered the question in those early months of his pro career, after viewing videotape of himself. Was I flying? he asked. It sure seemed like it, at least for a short time.

The rarest talent is like a comet streaking briefly across the sky, captured only by the trailing flash of its brilliance. Michael Jordans entire mesmerizing playing career left fans, the media, his former coaches and teammates, even Jordan himself, still struggling to comprehend what had happened years after he last played.

Sometimes I wonder what it will be like to look back on all of this, he once observed, whether it will even seem real.

Was it real? The time would come in his later years when a plumper Jordan with a drawn face would find himself the target of great ridicule and Internet invective over his missteps as an executive or his personal shortcomings, yet even that couldnt dim the light he had cast as a player, when he was nothing short of otherworldly.

In the beginning he was simply Mike Jordan, just another adolescent from North Carolina with an uncertain future, contemplating a stint in the Air Force after high school. The early 1980s marked his startling transformation into Michael, the archangel of the rims. In the process, his persona propelled the rise of Nikes business empire, which soon made him its young emperor, a role that both freed and imprisoned him. He became the very picture of competence. Nobody, it seemed, could do anything quite as well as Michael Jordan played basketball. His competence was exceeded only by his confidence, noted longtime Chicago sportswriter Lacy Banks.