Julian Borger Basketball
`Please say it ain’t so”, pleaded the headline in the Chicago Tribune. But the moment the city prayed would never come has arrived. This week Michael Jordan, arguably the best basketball player of all time, retired.
The 1,95m gravity-defying Chicago Bulls phenomenon, who seemed to float high above opposing defences, his tongue out in trademark cheeky contempt, broke the news in the city’s United Centre arena which was built specially to accommodate his legions of fans.
This is the second time that Jordan, one of the best-known athletes in the world, has announced his retirement. In October 1993, after an extravagant goodbye party, he left to pursue a childhood dream of playing baseball.
The experiment was short-lived. After six unimpressive months, much of it in a minor league, he was back with the Bulls. That was then. This time, with the player approaching his 36th birthday, the Jordan entourage says it is final.
His departure will be a devastating blow to the legendary Chicago Bulls team, which may now fall apart without Jordan’s inspirational leadership. The lack of his spectacular style could also grievously wound a sport which is dominated and symbolised like no other by a single towering personality.
The National Basketball Association emerged only last week from a gruelling six-month lockout, and is scrambling to retain its disgruntled fans for a rump season of 52 games starting next month.
There will almost certainly be empty seats in Chicago, where the grieving was already under way this week. The Bulls’ Internet message board was heavy with laments and valedictories to a player who won a record 10 highest-scorer titles, two Olympic gold medals, and had been declared the league’s “most valued player” five times. Memories are still fresh of his championship-winning basket in the final seconds against the Utah Jazz in Salt Lake City last season.
Hoop pundits pointed to the warning signs. By December, Jordan had appeared to lose interest in the players’ negotiations with the owners over proposed caps on the athletes’ huge salaries. He has been smoking a lot of cigars and is reportedly out of shape. Even when a pay deal was struck, imposing a ceiling of $14-million on veteran players, he did not show up for January training, preferring to take part in the Bob Hope Pro-Am golf tournament in California.
The pay cap would not have affected his $33-million annual salary, nor his celebrity earnings from endorsing sports shoes and telephone networks, but the lockout is thought to have contributed to the decision.
Jordan transformed the Chicago Bulls, which was a mediocre team playing in a half-empty stadium, when he arrived in 1984. He immediately emerged as a star. On his third season, he scored a record 63 points in a playoff game against the Boston Celtics.
When he left in 1993, to play baseball for the Chicago White Sox, many of his fans put it down to depression following the murder of his father in an apparently random violent robbery in North Carolina. He returned in March 1994 with the ominous words: “I’m back.”
The Chicago Bulls owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, is now faced with the choice of trying to keep the rest of his star- studded team together, or to start from scratch. Paying household names like Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman would mean he would have no money left over to look for new talent. Pippen, who at 33 is recovering from back surgery, is demanding a four-year contract with the new maximum starting pay level of $14- million.
But even before this week’s announcement, the Jordan legend has already been set in bronze. A dramatic statue of the player outside the stadium is inscribed: “The best there ever was.”
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