John Riordan: Like Mike? Jordan at 60 still an inspiration to generations
Chicago Bulls talisman Michael Jordan in the victorious locker room after winning Game 6 and the championship in 1993. Picture: John W. McDonough/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images
Happy birthday, Michael Jordan. He's 60 today and he remains the benchmark for every great achievement in American sports and culture.
The great and the good of the NBA gather in Salt Lake City over the next three days for their All-Star Weekend and, as ever, the greatest to ever do it will cast his extensive shadow across proceedings.
The rising stars and the flamboyant slam dunkers and even the current crop of established game changers are all just trying to keep their balance in the slipstream Jordan forged and flew through in the '80s and '90s.
LeBron James, who last week hurried through the all-time points record for the NBA, is the only player seeking to muscle out Jordan of the reckoning, vocal about his opinion that it is now he who should be elevated to the throne.
Every other player is happy to jostle for a spot in the all-time top 30 while enjoying the fruits of endorsement deals which are only lucrative and empowering because a young North Carolina student-athlete called Michael Jordan made it so, fully 40 years ago.
Ten years Jordan's junior is hip-hop. In the run-up to August 11, the 50th anniversary of a Bronx creation which took over the world will be celebrated in New York City and everywhere. That was the date that Clive Campbell and his younger sister Cindy gathered a few of their young peers at a community space situated on the ground floor of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the South Bronx, the most abandoned congressional district in the entire country.
It was a "Back to School Jam", an annual party to help a forgotten community mark the end of a hot summer (in more ways than the weather) and welcome in the new year of education and public school sanctuary. That's the agreed upon theme remembered by most, including Cindy. What's certain is that her older brother, dj-ing under his stage name DJ Kool Herc devised a new technique of music production and performance.
Most households contained your run-of-the-mill turntable record player and adolescent Kool Herc was among many Bronx kids who could borrow their parents' equipment for a shindig like this one. His world-changing genius involved combining a pair of these turntables and a pair of matching records, isolating a familiar hook and looping over and over to give his peers something to dance to.
As New York City's poorest neighbourhoods became poorer and more populated, hip-hop culture offered an escape to young people through music, fashion, art and eventually protest lyrics targeting the racist system in which they were trapped.
By the time Jordan was the hottest prospect in the 1984 NBA draft, hip-hop was emerging confidently out of its first decade, taking over the country and readying itself to take over the world. And here was a basketball star whose power and purpose matched the artistic intent of Run DMC, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five and Afrika Bambaataa.
The oft told Jordan deal with Nike, scrambled together in a panicked rush before he even turned professional at the Chicago Bulls, will get cinematic treatment in a few weeks when Ben Affleck directs and stars with his old buddy Matt Damon in a film called Air, telling the story of the desperate Oregon executives travelling across country to the Carolinas to try and convince a sceptical family that their son should attach his name to a company trailing limply behind Reebok.
This was at a time when budgets for marketing and advertising were plunging in response to shifting markets of aging white Baby Boomers who preferred a combination of quality and cheapness over brand recognition.
It was a time when Reaganomics created favourable conditions for larger retailers to start gobbling up both Main Street and the outskirts, prioritising the convenience of generic products, a climate of consumerism which didn't work well for the ad agencies on Madison Avenue.
That's how companies such as Adidas and Pepsi found new markets, figuring out that youth of colour, perpetually ignored, were the more brand-conscious and possibly even brand-leading sector of society. It's happening these days with Generation Z and their offspring, Generation Alpha. Neither you nor me are the future and anyone relying on us might as well close up shop.
In 1986, Run DMC had turned Adidas into a hip-hop brand with a song named after the shows and then two years later, the hottest young film director of the late 1980s, Spike Lee, was asked by Nike to merge his particular style of Brooklyn vibrancy with the hottest young NBAer in the game.
Nike had fired their advertising agency and hired Wieden and Kennedy, ploughing $40 million into their marketing efforts. Around this time, two of their admen saw Lee's 1986 production She's Gotta Have It, the first feature-length directed by the NYU Film School graduate. In it, Lee played Mars Blackmon whose Nike Air Jordans were an extension of his personality, marching around his turf and looking good and sharp while he did so.
In 1988, when Spike and Mike paired up to shoot a brilliant black and white series of funny and artsy ads which sent tremors through the always gossipy and snipey advertising world, Reebok was a $1.8 billion company and Nike trailed behind them at $1.2 billion. The campaign helped push the young pretenders to the top and the company never looked back.
As Jeff Chang wrote in Can't Stop, Won't Stop, his brilliant book chronicling the history of hip-hop, "not only did Nike's success confirm that niches were the future, it also confirmed that a massive shift in tastes was occurring-from baby boomer to youth, from suburb to city, from whiteness to Blackness".
"My game did all my talking," recalled Jordan for the incredible ESPN documentary which saved us almost three years ago during the height of lockdown. If it wasn't for his on-the-court exploits, none of this genius marketing would have mattered.
It was his laser-like focus on his game which would go on to help steer his Bulls to six NBA titles in the 1990s, a pair of three-peats that would entertain the world and lift the NBA to comfortably second behind soccer, a position still easily held to this day.
And it was also his resultant economic prowess which pushed him on to a divergent path away from the root mission of hip-hop. Infamously, his off-the-cuff “Republicans buy sneakers, too” comment to teammates on a bus in 1990 - which he claims was more in jest than a steadfast rule he lived by - rendered him as individualistic as every other successful white rich man.
"I do commend Muhammad Ali for standing up for what he believed in,” is how he addressed the utterance which dogged him for decades afterwards. “But I never thought of myself as an activist. I thought of myself as a basketball player. I wasn't a politician when I was playing my sport. I was focused on my craft. Was that selfish? Probably. But that was my energy."
It stands in contrast to the career of another iconic sportsman who shared the activist stage with Ali in the late 1960s and who shares a birthday today with Jordan. Jim Brown was a Cleveland Browns running back who used his platform to advocate for civil rights as the US went through seismic change during the 1960s.
He retired before the Super Bowl era began, leaving the sport to focus on injustice and Hollywood acting with an NFL title in his pocket and rushing records to his name which to this day make him stand out as an all-time great.
But if Jordan can be criticised for ignoring social ills to help him focus on his career, one of the most significant reasons his 60th birthday will be celebrated much more than the 87th of Brown is that the footballer’s track record of domestic abuse, victimising some of the women in his life, has tarnished his accomplishments.
There was uproar last week when the Hall of Fame running back who was accused of abuse multiple times had the rushing yards title renamed in his honour. Brown has himself acknowledged slapping women in his book, Out of Bounds.
“His role as a leader off the field showed his unwavering strength and commitment to the community,” Las Vegas Raider Josh Jacobs, the first recipient of the Jim Brown Award, said in the NFL’s misguided press release in the run up to the Super Bowl.
It was a brutal contradiction of everything the NFL claims it stands for and it was a vicious oversight that helps offer context to the one throwaway comment of Michael Jordan who can enjoy today as an inspiration to the generations that followed him across all sports.
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