Michael Jordan looked out the 16th-floor window at the relentless rain drenching the downtown Atlanta streets.
“I was over there earlier,” I said to him. “There was hardly anyone in the store. You could just wander around.”
This was one morning last spring, during the NBA regular season; the Chicago Bulls would be playing the Atlanta Hawks in a virtually meaningless game that night, and the day stretched out ahead. As always, Jordan was in his hotel room, behind the DO NOT DISTURB sign and the deadbolt lock. Among the things I had seen in the quiet, all-but-deserted department store was a display of Jordan-logo clothing, and I thought it might provide a light and other worldly moment for him: going to Macy’s and paying an unannounced visit to the racks of goods bearing his face and his name.
“It’s right across Peachtree Street,” I said. “Ten seconds from the hotel. Let’s just go over.”
“You know I can’t do that,” Jordan said.
Meaning: You know I can’t go out for a walk. Even if it’s just across a single street. You know I can’t stroll around a department store. Even if it’s a store that, on a weekday morning, is just about devoid of customers. Privileges like that–taking a walk, browsing in a store–were things that he had forfeited long ago. You know I can’t do that. In a way, those words had become the credo of his life.
Once Jordan told me that he had not gone out for a walk by himself since high school, and I don’t think he was kidding or exaggerating. Once, in Houston, we got out of a hotel elevator and headed down the hallway toward his room, and as we were on our way a woman opened the door of her own room. She caught sight of Jordan and she screamed-not the giddy, excited scream of a fan, not the silly scream of someone trying to attract a celebrity’s attention, but a nightmare scream. It was a scream of something not far from terror, an involuntary scream that said: I should not be seeing this. I should not be looking at Michael Jordan. I was startled by the scream, and later, when I would think about it, I was haunted. But that day Jordan did not pause and did not comment on it. He just continued on his way until we were inside his room.
When Jordan announced his retirement from basketball last week, the news did not surprise me. No one could have predicted the precise date or hour he would retire, of course, but for a while it has seemed all but inevitable. The great irony: a boy who, at 15, was cut from his high-school basketball team turned himself into a player so good that his own life closed in on him. How could he have been expected even to imagine that? When you’re 15 and you’re told you’re no good, you don’t know that someday you will be Michael Jordan. You know only that in the one thing that matters to you, you have been found lacking.
“The basketball court for me, during a game, is the most peaceful place I can imagine,” he said one night. He said that for the two-and-a-half hours of an NBA game the boundary lines of the court served as invisible walls. The walls did more than seal him in; they kept everyone else out.
He wasn’t really in the business of basketball, anyway. He was in the business of making people happy. Whatever your troubles, whatever was worrying you in your own daily life, on a game night you could push all of that aside and watch something wonderful. A person didn’t have to know a thing about basketball to be warmed by what Jordan did out there.
I asked him one afternoon what he would do if he were to walk away from the game and retire. “You can’t play golf every day of your life,” I said. He said: “I can certainly try.” He laughed, but he seemed to mean it. Already, now that it has happened, people are beginning to predict he will come back next year, or the year after. They aren’t really thinking about him, or about his life; they’re thinking about theirs. In a way it’s like the people who insist that Elvis Presley is alive. If Elvis is alive, then their own lives can go back to a time when things were better. If Jordan plays basketball again, the world stands still.
For so long he has made millions of other people happy; now it is time for him to try to find some of that for himself “A lot of times I sit by myself and try to figure out what it is that has happened in my life, and why I’m the one it has happened to,” he told me once. “But I can’t ever sit and think for too long, because the phone rings or someone comes to tell me that I have to be somewhere, so I get up and do what I’m committed to do.” Maybe the happiness he discovers will not be of the outlandish sort maybe it won’t be as extreme as a walk around the block or a quiet visit to a store but whatever he can find for himself, he surely has earned. For the rest of us, winter nights just got a lot colder.
