MICHAEL JORDAN: The Life
Roland Lazenby
Little, Brown & Company; 708 pages; $30
Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player who ever lived. Of that, there is very little dispute. He was also, at the apex of his career, a global ambassador for the game and for Nike (not necessarily in that order), a veritable ATM for various corporate partners, a hero to millions, if not billions, of fans, and very likely the most famous person in the world. I know this because everyone knows it, and also because I witnessed at least a little bit of it all. I covered Jordan and the Bulls for an all-sports radio station in Chicago for four years while he was at the height of his power and fame.
It was an experience I never cease reliving, in the same way you would never forget being allowed to watch Picasso paint or Mozart tinker at a piano. I have made these analogies before and will defend them to the death. Michael Jordan absolutely was an artist on the basketball court, every bit the equal in his milieu of any of the great masters in theirs. Whatever his flaws away from the game, they were easily overshadowed by the grandeur of his talent. It was, after all, difficult to speak ill of a man when your jaw was agape, having just watched him glide through the air with a combination of grace and strength that could rightly be described as superhuman.
In his thoughtful, extraordinarily well-researched biography Michael Jordan: The Life, Roland Lazenby, the author of books on Phil Jackson, Kobe Bryant and Jerry West, gives us the life and much more. His jaw is as wide open as anyone's; the exhaustive narrative of Jordan's basketball career is written with appropriate awe. But what makes this portrayal especially worthwhile is everything else. Mr Lazenby begins before the beginning, in a shotgun shack in rural North Carolina some 70 years before Michael's birth, with a beautifully written account of the life of his great-grandfather. The long trail Mr Lazenby follows offers an explanation of how Michael developed the competitiveness for which he became legendary. And the psychology is worth the investment even if no new ground is broken (Michael's father, James Sr, loved his older brother Larry more), because with the foundation of Jordan's personality set, the rest of the life can be better appreciated: Michael Jordan not simply as a superhero, but as a Man in Full.
For me, the book's most interesting section concerns Michael's adolescence, first as the skinny kid who was left off the varsity roster his sophomore year in high school, then through a summer spent at an elite basketball camp that Jordan says was "the turning point of my life". Even Jordan's most ardent fans will not have heard every story Mr Lazenby tells about these early years.
The true Jordan phenomenon began, of course, with his freshman year at the University of North Carolina, when he was playing for the renowned Dean Smith and made the shot that won the national championship in 1982. Mr Lazenby covers Jordan's college and pro careers, including his two Olympic gold medals, spicing the account with the firsthand recollections of friends and foes alike. All the familiar stories are here: the disappointing losses in his final two NCAA tournaments before he turned pro after his junior year, the frustration of his early NBA years, the championships he won both before and after his first, premature, retirement. Through it all, Jordan is depicted as restless, driven and often angry. But given the full context it reads differently from the way Jordan is often perceived: this is a Michael Jordan who is confused and naïve more than conniving. Mr Lazenby is particularly insightful about the relationships that shaped Jordan's career: the feud with Isiah Thomas, the grudging respect for his childhood idol Magic Johnson, the disdain for the Bulls' general manager Jerry Krause, the connection with Phil Jackson that elevated both men to the top of their profession.
Not much time is spent on Jordan's life after his final retirement from the game, and that is just as well. His tenure as owner of the Charlotte Bobcats has been mostly disastrous and rarely interesting. It is painful for those of us who remember Jordan's genius so fondly to see him diminished in this way.
What many will seek from this book are answers to certain questions about Jordan that seem sure to be asked forever. Questions about his enormous gambling debts, the personal check that connected him to a convicted drug dealer, and the murky circumstances surrounding his father's murder. Those questions are not answered here, which might count as a criticism of Mr Lazenby, except that they most likely never will be answered, and it is unfair to ask an author to do the impossible. Mr Lazenby lays out the facts and allows us to draw our own conclusions.
There is a poignant moment near the beginning of the book in which Jordan, as a young man, asks himself "what it will be like to look back on all of this, whether it will even seem real". Seeing him today with his new wife, his twin baby girls, in his role as owner of a struggling franchise, heavier than we remember him but still looking every bit the best baller in the room, I wonder what he thinks of his past. He is more guarded today. Does it all seem real to him, or does it seem as far away for him as it does for the rest of us?
If you are one who takes joy in recalling what it was like when he, and we, were younger, you will enjoy this journey. Mr Lazenby navigates both the peaks and valleys with an easy style. Reading Michael Jordan: The Life, you are sure to find yourself shaking your head in wonder at some of the memories. After all, there is nothing better than genuinely believing a man can fly.
©2014 The New York Times News Service
