Last night, Michael Jordan cried as he was given perhaps the finest accolade of his basketball career by being inducted into the NBA Hall of Fame, along with his Dream Team teammates David Robinson and John Stockton, and coaching legends Jerry Sloan and C. Vivian Stringer. Jordan, a former University of North Carolina standout, was introduced by fellow HOFer David Thompson, an alum of North Carolina State.
As a die-hard Chicago sports fan, this diary takes on a special significance for me. Join me below the fold as I reflect on my favorite Michael Jordan memories through the years (with video!).
Before I get to my personal favorite MJ clips, a story about me:
I was fortunate to have grown up in a suburb north of Chicago during Jordan's playing days. My life-long love of sports started with this man and the Chicago Bulls (I know, strange that I would pick my username to reflect the '85 Bears....whatever).
The first sport I ever played and followed with a real passion was basketball, starting at the age of 6 in 1989 -- that is, if you don't count the awkward 6 months or so that I tried to learn how to skateboard at the age of 5 (I have my older brother to thank for both). At the time, Jordan was coming into his prime, leading the league in scoring and averaging 32.5 points per game, along with 8.0 rebounds, 8.0 assists, and 2.9 steals during the '88-89 season. Seriously, just look at those numbers again. They're absolutely ridiculous.
Before we had a hoop of our own, I used to take a basketball and throw it against the garage. I would pretend that there was an invisible hoop at the front of the garage roof, and I would spin and twist and perform the greatest moves you ever did see. I'd throw the ball against the garage door to pretend that I was passing the ball to a teammate, receiving a pass when it bounced back to me. The passing aspect was difficult because the garage door was designed with sunken grooves that, if you hit them on an angle, the ball would bounce off in the wrong direction, and you'd have to retrieve it as it rolled into the bushes. The shooting part was even stranger -- not just because there was this little boy shooting a basketball at an imaginary basket. Sometimes the ball would get trapped by the roof gutter, and you'd have to fish it down with a hockey stick or a pole of some variety.
My parents would watch me do all of these things, a young boy playing outside pretending to be just like Mike. Every boy my age did. As my Mom once told me, she eventually just thought to herself, "That poor kid." So they caved and bought us a hoop. For the next 10 years, I would practice on that (real) hoop for at least two hours a day, hoping to one day be as good as the greatest player on Earth. Shortly after, I collected Bulls T-shirts, NBA video games, basketball trading cards, Bulls caps, championship VHS tapes, the works. And each night during the NBA season, we would watch the Bulls whenever they were on TV, or failing that, listen to Neil Funk's broadcast of the games on the radio. We didn't have cable, so I was limited to watching only about 30 local games per year, not counting the nationally televised games on CBS or NBC in later years.
As an aside, when I was a kid I even invented a couple of players in my own head who not only played for the Bulls but were BETTER than Michael Jordan -- players who made impossible shots and scored 60 points per game. I think one of them was named "Brow Python." I really don't know what caused that name -- I think it was a combination of both Dick Tracy (based on the gangster named The Brow) and Monty Python, or something like that. Thank goodness I didn't convince my parents to let me name our cats.
When the Bulls reached their first NBA Finals in 1991, we watched every single game and treated it like a party. We invited friends over, ordered pizza, and cheered the team on for all four quarters. Even my Mom and Dad, never big basketball fans to begin with, got into it. I imagine that the entire city was like this, eagerly anticipating the biggest star in all of sports to win his first championship trophy and going bananas when he did. In 1992, I got to attend my first Bulls game at the old Chicago Stadium. Man, could that place get LOUD, much noisier than the United Center of today -- even a lay-up in the first quarter could really get the crowd rolling.
During Game 6 of the 1993 Finals, when John Paxson hit the 3-pointer that put the Bulls up by 1 with 3.9 seconds to go, I ran upstairs to get my Mom, who was blow-drying her hair. I ran so fast and was so excited and short of breath that all I could say were a bunch of barely coherent two- or three-word phrases like, "John Paxson. 3-pointer. Bulls up. 3.9 seconds left. Come downstairs." After Horace Grant blocked Kevin Johnson's final runner at the buzzer, I distinctly remember having the exact same reaction that MJ did -- a jump in the air, followed by an ecstatic swing of my fist. That's what following the season and playing basketball was all about for me as a child: A winning team, the best player on the planet, and a championship. It was like clockwork. From Day 1, I was only accustomed to seeing my team win.
A few months later, just as I started the 4th grade, my Dad glumly told me that MJ retired. I hadn't heard the news on the radio or read it in the newspaper. I also don't recall going to school quite as depressed as I was that day. It was like a member of the family had passed away. How could he leave the game when everything was going so great? To say that MJ was the best athlete in the world didn't go far enough -- he was the world. Every day you saw him on TV, in magazine ads, on billboards; he was the face of an entire sport and everybody in the world knew him, wanted to see him play, wanted to be like him. I can think of very few athletes or celebrities whose star power ever reached anything even approaching that of Michael Jordan when he was at the top of his game -- and I don't consider any athletes of today to be there (not even Roger Federer or Tiger Woods, although I admit I'm biased as I've never been a fan of either tennis or golf).
Though I've never been religious, I basically worshiped at the man's altar. That's why you could say that MJ was both perhaps the best and worst thing to happen to me as a sports fan. He was so good and so passionate about the game, that his fierce competitive nature seeped over into me into everything I did. Every Bulls loss felt like a dagger, every game where my team in youth JV leagues lost would make me feel like a failure, every time I made a mistake on my homework made me feel like I was dumb....and when Jordan said goodbye to the game that first time, let me tell you, THAT was devastating beyond all belief.
That's also probably why the Bulls second three-peat from 1996-1998 was even more satisfying for me than was the first. I had learned to grow up and accept defeat along the way -- the playoff losses in 1994 and 1995, losses each year by my other favorite team (the Bears), and most importantly, the realization that I would never be as good a player as Michael Jordan, so I began to treat the game more as a fun activity rather than a matter of life-and-death.....although some of those games were certainly more than heartbreaking for me, like Game 4 of the 1998 Eastern Conference Finals, where Reggie Miller hit the game-winning three to beat us with 1 second left.
Looking back on it all, despite the huge emotional roller coaster that I experienced, I can safely say that I would never, ever trade any of it for what I got to witness from 1989-1998 as a Bulls fan. And because I happened to be born in Chicago and grew up watching the Bulls, it was like I was a real part of it all. It wasn't just that they won every year -- 6 championships in 8 years -- it's that they were without question the biggest attraction in the world, and they weren't a universally hated team. You might have rooted for other teams, but you still sat and watched in awe whenever MJ performed. I watched the Bulls win the 1997 championship with Steve Kerr's jumper on the big screen in Times Square, and when the final buzzer sounded, the entire city exploded around me with cheering basketball fans and honking cars. There were men with Yankees hats running into the streets shouting, "They did it! They did it!" This was in New York, for crying out loud -- you'd think they should have been cursing me out because I was cheering for Patrick Ewing's rival in their own city. But then again, to this day I suspect that even Knicks fans liked MJ more than Ewing during their playing days because MJ won championships, and Ewing didn't.
Jordan was certainly not a perfect individual, as a general manager of the Wizards and Bobcats, in his personal life, or even necessarily as a teammate (just type "Kwame Brown" into Google and you'll see what I'm talking about). But the man was a legend on the court. He could score from in close, he could shoot the 3, he could rebound, he could defend, he could pass, and he could do it all against the best in the game. Take a look at some of his mind-boggling career accolades -- 10 scoring titles, 9 All-Defensive First Teams, 6 Finals MVPs, to go with 6 championship trophies -- fairly or unfairly, these are just some of the benchmarks by which we now measure the greatness of players like Kobe Bryant and LeBron James. Will they get to that level? And if not, will we ever see another basketball player of Jordan's caliber? Hard to say.
So with that, in honor of Jordan's induction into the Hall of Fame, I will now present some of my favorite MJ moments and videos, in no particular order. Jordan actually said during an interview with ESPN's Michael Wilbon that he couldn't pick out a favorite highlight of his own, because doing so would be like trying to pick his favorite child. Well, this is no doubt an incredibly difficult challenge for me, but I think I've compiled a pretty good list. There's no doubt that I've left out some great moments.
Important note: I have excluded MJ's game-winning shot from 1982 while at UNC because I wasn't born at the time.
1. Jordan dunks from the free throw line.
Needing a 49 out of 50 points from the judges to beat Dominique Wilkins in the 1988 Slam Dunk Contest, Jordan paid homage to Julius "Dr. J" Erving by throwing down a one-handed slam from the charity stripe during All-Star Weekend. And better yet, he did it at the Stadium in front of the Chicago fans.
2. Jordan slams back home a missed free throw from Scottie Pippen in 1993.
This wasn't the most meaningful game during the regular season, but it's just stunning to watch him soar in there and put the ball back in the hoop and make it look EASY, as though he knew it was coming.
3. The Shot.
1989 Playoffs, first round, best-of-five series tied at 2-2. One of the most famous shots in NBA history, a lot of people forget that Jordan actually made two clutch shots in the final seconds, and that Craig Ehlo (the man forever immortalized as the guy defending Jordan in this sequence) had a clutch moment of his own. This video shows the final 19 seconds of the game, with Dick Stockton and Hubie Brown doing the play-by-play. I highly suggest watching the whole thing, but if you're in a hurry, Jordan's big moments come at 1:00 and 5:30.
4. The Shot II.
Same sequence as The Shot. Cleveland up by 1. Chicago was going for the sweep of the Cavs in the second round of the 1993 Playoffs. Lenny Wilkins decided to let Gerald Wilkins guard MJ, and, well, you can guess what happens.
5. Jordan switches hands.
In Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Finals, Jordan made a ridiculous 13 shots in a row against the Lakers, culminating with this shot in the video. Jordan drove the lane and, with A.C. Green and former UNC teammate Sam Perkins closing in on him, he rose up to dunk with his right hand, only to lower the ball in mid-air and switch to his left hand for a diving layup. Somehow, I imagine that if he dunked it, this field goal would have been treated in NBA lore as just another dunk from MJ. Have you ever seen someone who could make a lay-up seem so breathtaking?
6. The Shrug.
Michael went berserk from the 3-point line in Game 1 of the 1992 NBA Finals against Portland, hitting 6 bombs in the first half (an NBA record at the time). The last one (at 4:27 of the video) prompted him to look over towards Magic Johnson at the play-by-play booth and shrug, as if to say, "I have no idea what's going on." I also think the dunk he scored in the second half on an alley-oop from out of bounds (at 5:15) was equally impressive, but the Bulls were already dominating the game at that point.
7. Jordan scores 55 against Phoenix.
In Game 4 of the 1993 NBA Finals, Jordan went off. This video shows how he scored 55 against Barkley and the Suns, including a clutch flip towards the basket (at 4:39) when the game was on the line. Then-Suns coach Paul Westphal had this to say about him: "I don't think Michael Jordan could guard Michael Jordan."
8. Jordan sinks the Jazz.
After Karl Malone missed two free throws at the end of regulation in Game 1 of the 1997 NBA Finals, Jordan made the Jazz pay by allowing Bryon Russell to single-team Superman in the final seconds. Big mistake. You can watch all the highlights in the video, but the key sequence starts at 9:00.
9. The Flu Game.
In one of the guttiest performances in sports history, Jordan, stricken by a flu virus, poured in 38 points and a clutch 3-pointer when his team needed him most in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals against Utah. The man was absolutely dead on his feet. He was exhausted, sick, and probably on the verge of collapsing at least 50 times during the game. And yet, he just rose to another level. Unreal. This video shows the highlights from the game, both for the Bulls and the Jazz. You could make a case that this was the finest performance of Jordan's career, given the stakes and his depleted physical condition.
10. The Final Shot.
- Game 6. Nuff said.