Michael Jordan gave roughly 9.5 million Chicago area fans six unforgettable years of pride, pleasure and happiness in the 1990s.
But he likely gave us a lot more than that, which TV viewers nationwide will come to understand at 8 p.m. Sunday if they watch “The Last Dance,” ESPN’s 10-part documentary on the Chicago Bulls’ final championship year.
I remember vacationing in Key West in 2000, browsing gift shops near Mallory Square with my wife, when I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“Jawdan killed (Patrick) Ewing. Killed everybody.” This from a 40-something man in dark sunglasses, speaking in a husky voice and an unmistakable New Yawk City dialect. “You got us good,” he said.
It took a few seconds to remember I was wearing a red Chicago Bulls 1997 Championship T-shirt. And with the realization came my sheepish smile, along with a feeling of pride and the urge almost to apologize for the Second City besting the Big Apple’s Knicks throughout the previous decade.
But that would likely have sounded like sarcasm to the New Yorker who was, after all, paying his respects to the Bulls, to Michael Jordan, to our city and to me.
In that brief moment, Michael Jordan was giving me my own 15 minutes of fame. What a feeling!
As a Chicago sports fan, I confess to previously scoffing at the sports mania in other cities, which boasted winning baseball, football or hockey teams in all those decades when we could not.
What sense did it make for rabid Packer fans, for example, to derive so much joy and honor from a professional sports team that had no players from their home town? How could they take credit for a battalion of millionaires paid to wear the team’s green and gold, employing skills and talents the fans could only dream of having possessed? How could they worship a superstar quarterback who would not hesitate to play at the same level for any other city willing to pay him more?
And when the mania finally happened here after Jordan’s arrival in 1984 — happened to me as I was covered, ears to ankles, in goosebumps each time players were introduced in a darkened stadium vibrating with the sci-fi guitar riff of the Alan Parsons Project rock band — I still did not quite understand.
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But writing in Psychology Today, psychologist Nigel Barber had an explanation: “… fans are highly committed to their favored stars and teams in a way that gives focus and meaning to their daily lives. … Sports spectatorship is a transformative experience through which fans escape their humdrum lives, just as religious experiences help the faithful to transcend their everyday existence” (“Is Sports Religion?” Nov.11, 2009).
Guilty as charged. In 1991-93, the Bulls first three championship seasons in a row, I barely minded my humdrum routine of shoveling snow, paying a steadily and suspiciously rising cable TV bill or even visiting my in-laws on Christmas, Easter or whenever Marianne had a notion to do so.
That’s because every moment of our lives was either a day after Jordan pulled off a fourth quarter victory with a superhuman feat or a day or two before an upcoming contest in which my team was favored against a hated rival like the Detroit (“Bad Boys”) Pistons.
Even better, during the second “three-peat” from 1996-98, it was devotion to the same “religion” that kept me in a chronic state of positivism and joy.
Understand that I was a grown man, of course, and not literally clicking my heels. But think for a minute of how it is to feel your best, such as when you just achieved a goal like losing 15 pounds. And you stay at or below that weight for weeks on end, looking good, feeling strong, confident, and uninhibited from doling out compliments and spreading joy at work and at home.
Now multiply that electric sense of wellbeing by 10 million people in the Chicago area for three years straight, and is it any wonder that “The Last Dance” documentary has been moved up from its originally scheduled date in June to this Sunday, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, the worst thing to happen to us since World War II?
Full disclosure: I have not seen “The Last Dance.” But the short clips that have been previewing this past week were sufficient to take me back to that blissful time, when the effect of Jordan’s Bulls arriving in other cities was oft compared to Beatlemania.
Many of us were not able to derive the solace we would have liked from attending church with other worshipers on Easter Sunday because of stay-at-home order. But what promises to be a therapeutic escape and non-denominational “service” should prove to be a balm to Chicago and the rest of the country for two hours on Sunday night.
May God bless America, Michael Jordan and ESPN!
David McGrath is an emeritus English professor at the College of DuPage and the author of “South Siders,” a recently completed collections of columns on life in the Midwest.