No one expects the world to change its calendar from A.D. to A.J., After Jordan, or in keeping this thing on the informal first-name basis it has become, A.M., After Michael. But it is the least the NBA can do.
Whatever there is of this season will be Year 1 A.J. and the next 2 A.J., and so on. The Super Bowl uses Roman numerals and Romans didn’t even play football. Not only did Jordan play basketball, he defined it for his time, for all time. Whatever basketball was before Jordan, it was not the same after him.
Someday, say in 50 A.J., maybe it will become something else, maybe there will be another such as Jordan. Sure, and maybe we’ve overlooked the next Mozart the last 200 years.
Jordan cannot just leave, just be himself one day and nobody the next, there being no residue of his time except numbers in a record book or banners in someone else’s building or trophies in the possession of fortuitous clerks.
Sure, there are our memories and all that videotape. No one was ever more photographed, followed, fawned over and highlighted. Jordan put the illustrated in sports.
But to think Jordan’s legacy is as narrow as a playground game or the cover of a magazine is to miss the meaning of the man.
Basketball never looked for the next Wilt Chamberlain, not really, and Chamberlain remains the greatest individual force ever in the NBA. No one asked who the next Oscar Robertson would be, not even when Magic Johnson was every bit the Big O and a few more letters of the alphabet.
But right now the NBA wonders and wishes and needs to know that the light will not go out when Jordan begins again the rest of his life. It does not need the next Michael Jordan, it needs the only Michael Jordan.
Jordan is the phylum, the genus, the species, so singular and entire an entity that basketball must measure itself against everything Jordan is: player, competitor, icon, celebrity, salesman, champion, winner. The next Jordan must be found because basketball can never again be what it was until he is.
Has any other athlete ever left a sport so dispossessed and desperate as is Jordan? Not even Babe Ruth. Not Muhammad Ali. When Wayne Gretzky leaves, will he cause the world to stop and sigh? I think not.
More than the standard for his own game, Jordan became the measurement for all, a whole special, exaggerated classification, like the difference between model and supermodel, man and superman.
Who is Tiger Woods? The Michael Jordan of golf. I recall this vividly at one of those Buffalo Super Bowls when Thurman Thomas pouted to the press that he, and not Jim Kelly, was the Michael Jordan of the Bills. Only Jordan could get into a huddle of a game he didn’t even play.
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The year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when East Germany was still a backwater of capitalism, I happened to be visiting the town of Weimar, the home of Schiller, Liszt and Goethe, the Jordans of German culture.
Weimar was supposed to be an Iron Curtain showplace, but storefronts were shabby and store windows were bare. One had a pyramid display of seven toilet paper rolls–no paper, just rolls–and nothing else.
I popped around a corner of a narrow street and there in front of me, occupying the store window of a sporting goods store, was Michael Jordan, or at least a full-size replica of No. 23, his cardboard feet stuck in the last pair of Air Jordans.
I can’t say for sure that Jordan had anything to do with the fall of communism, but I’ve never argued against it either.
Last summer during the World Cup in France, I did a very informal survey of who was the most famous athlete in the world, Jordan or Ronaldo, the Brazilian soccer player. Ronaldo won my pool, but I did conduct it under a 30-foot-high billboard of the soccer star. And I will say this: I heard Ronaldo referred to often as the Jordan of soccer, but never have I heard Jordan called the Ronaldo of basketball.
That’s how it is. Starbucks is the Jordan of coffee. Cadillac the Jordan of cars. The Jordan of businessmen is Bill Gates, or was it Sam Walton? All that matters is that the comparison works in only one direction and the criteria are simple: unqualified, unarguable, the best there is.
This one is the best there ever will be, the Jordan of Jordans.