The greatest basketball player ever, Michael Jordan, turned 50 yesterday. Wright Thompson wrote an article about Jordan on ESPN last week, looking at his present life as well as his past. It’s a fascinating article.
The article illustrates the pure joy the game of basketball is for Jordan. He loves everything about it. It also displays Jordan’s idolatry of basketball. An idol is anything we put in the place of God. This idol promised Jordan eternal significance and self-worth. It never delivered. No idol does.
Below are some excerpts (bolding mine):
He discovered old home movies [in the process of moving], seeing his young kids. They’re all in or out of college now. Warmups had collected dust alongside his baseball cleats and a collection of bats and gloves. The astonishing thing to him was how much he enjoyed this. “At 30 I was moving so fast,” he says. “I never had time to think about all the things I was encountering, all the things I was touching. Now when I go back and find these things, it triggers so many different thoughts: God, I forgot about that. That’s how fast we were moving. Now I can slow it down and hopefully remember what that meant. That’s when I know I’m getting old.”
[…]
“I like reminiscing. I do it more now watching basketball than anything. Man, I wish I was playing right now. I would give up everything now to go back and play the game of basketball.“
“How do you replace it?” he’s asked.
“You don’t. You learn to live with it.”
[…]
THE OPPOSITE OF this creeping nostalgia is the way Jordan has always collected slights, inventing them — nurturing them. He can be a breathtaking asshole: self-centered, bullying and cruel. That’s the ugly side of greatness. He’s a killer, in the Darwinian sense of the word, immediately sensing and attacking someone’s weakest spot. He’d moo like a cow when the overweight general manager of the Bulls, Jerry Krause, would get onto the team bus. When the Bulls signed the injury-prone Bill Cartwright, Jordan teased him as Medical Bill, and he once punched Will Perdue during practice. He punched Steve Kerr too, and who knows how many other people.
This started at an early age. Jordan genuinely believed his father liked his older brother, Larry, more than he liked him, and he used that insecurity as motivation. He burned, and thought if he succeeded, he would demand an equal share of affection. His whole life has been about proving things, to the people around him, to strangers, to himself. This has been successful and spectacularly unhealthy.
[…]
He described what the game meant to him [in his Hall-of-Fame speech]. He called it his “refuge” and the “place where I’ve gone when I needed to find comfort and peace.” Basketball made him feel complete, and it was gone.
[…]
There’s no way to measure these things, but there’s a strong case to be made that Jordan is the most intense competitor on the planet. …”I can’t help myself,” he says. “It’s an addiction. You ask for this special power to achieve these heights, and now you got it and you want to give it back, but you can’t. If I could, then I could breathe.”
[…]
His self-esteem has always been, as he says, “tied directly to the
game.” Without it, he feels adrift. Who am I? What am I doing?
[…]
“It’s consumed me so much [the idea of playing again],” he says. “I’m my own worst enemy. I drove myself so much that I’m still living with some of those drives. I’m living with that. I don’t know how to get rid of it. I don’t know if I could. And here I am, still connected to the game.”
[…]
“How can I enjoy the next 20 years without so much of this consuming me?” he asks, sitting behind his desk as his cellphone buzzes with trade offers. “How can I find peace away from the game of basketball?“
[…]
He hates being alone, because that means it’s quiet, and he doesn’t like silence. He can’t sleep without noise. Sleep has always been a struggle for him. All the late-night card games, the trips to the casino during the playoffs, they’ve been misunderstood. They weren’t the disease, they were the cure. They provided noise, distraction, a line of defense.
