As sure as I am of the identity of my biological father (that is, pretty sure - the other day a girl told me I looked like a boy who had gone missing at her college, never to turn up again), I am equally confident that I can establish the identity(/-ies) of my spiritual father(s). And just as my biological father (if, after all, he is who he claims to be [and I do not suffer a form of selective amnesia]) has endowed me with genetic, practical, and financial nourishment, my spiritual fathers have guided my dreams and kindled a spiritual incandescence within me, glowing whitehot in the ill-lit caverns of my consciousness.
Michael Jordan is one such spiritual sire, perhaps even the earliest one chronologically. It was impossibly clear to me - from a very early age - that just as I was my father's heir apparent, I was Jordan's air apparent. I am aware that it is not the conviction of many slightly-above-average-height Jewish boys from Suburbia, U.S.A. that they will one day succeed the greatest player in the history of basketball (or is it?), but what can I say? I was a brash little boy, and for several ambitious years during elementary school, it seemed to me that I was on track to supplant His Airness.
Jordan was - to put it simply - the most breathtaking athlete I had, and still have, ever seen. His physical abilities were simply transcendent, even in a league that boasted some of the world's greatest athletes and at a time when the league's talent was particularly concentrated. He was blessed with skills and capabilities at which his peers marveled and the rest of us could only watch, awestruck, as he displayed - in person and on television - abstract qualities us common-folk normally associate with the gods. Jordan was, as David Foster Wallace so eloquently and skillfully describes a great athlete, "profundity in motion."
But beyond his on-court guts and grace (please excuse the graininess of the footage, but as a longtime Jordan fanatic - one who has seen reams upon reams of highlight clips - this compilation contains some of the most jaw-dropping, eyebrow-raising, sit-back-and-rewind gems I've ever seen. Not to mention a great Indio-techno beat) and his indefatigable work ethic off it, Michael Jordan was outstanding for his sheer will to win, and this - more so than any of his aerodynamic basketball gymnastics, was what truly inspired me, what made me really want to Be Like Mike.
Not only did he garner all the significant individual hardware the NBA had to offer, but he won. Not always though; it took Jordan seven agonizing seasons to reach the climactic realm of being a champion, a painfully lengthy odyssey for a man who lustily thirsted for, needed to win, as a dehydrated desert wanderer needs water. Jordan was singularly compelled and borderline prurient about satisfying his hunger. And once he reached the summit, he refused to relinquish even an inch of that precious and hallowed ground.
Perhaps I can attribute it to my then-boyish naivete or the youthful male tendency for hero-worship that I drew my immature conclusion from Jordan's body of work, his career. That conclusion was this: resolute perfectionism. There had to be a secret, I surmised, to his success. How could this man be so dominant, so conquering? I deduced that it must have been his lionhearted will that enabled him to do the things he did - make the off-balance and in-the-air and buzzer-beating shots that he did. That his confidence in himself was so great that it overwhelmed any doubt. That the only route to such success was by a rigid standard of perfection and overflowing confidence. Few things, after all, are more repellent in a young man than a dearth of self-confidence. My conclusion was not wrong or improperly drawn so much as it was unhelpful.
"Why would I worry about missing a shot I hadn't taken yet?" This was Michael Jordan's response to a question about his mentality after nailing the buzzer-beater in Game 6 of the '98 NBA Finals that reined in another championship season, and (or so I thought) spread the fairy tale icing over the cake of his career. It sounds arrogant, perhaps, or almost inane and frustratingly simple in its reasoning. But Jordan's Zen-ish response actually reveals what is so terribly essential about Michael Jordan and other athletic geniuses.
After so many years, here finally I received the lesson I was meant to learn from Michael Jordan. Like so many other mere mortals, I have suffered from pangs of doubt in important moments. Indeed, at times of great importance it sometimes seems damned impossible to not consider the consequences of a negative outcome. I had fought this in either of two ways: 1) bravely talking myself into confidence (sometimes) or 2) avoiding or bailing on an uncertain situation, like a coward (more often).
It wasn't that Jordan had allowed his confidence to triumph eternally over his doubt - to swallow it whole like that Great White devouring a seal on Planet Earth - it was that he hadn't even thought to think about doubting himself. Yes, it was his ardent will that had fueled the hours of practice and passion for competition and delivered him to the moment, but in that moment - the moment that Jordan lived for - he could free himself from doubt or confidence or even thought. He simply waited for the moment, and then did what came naturally.
Returning to DFW, he articulates in his essay "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" (an inspiration for this piece) precisely what Jordan's comment suggests; that in this moment - when the typical person, you or I, could crumble under the crushing weight of doubt and/or fear of negative consequence - these athletic geniuses (surely they are geniuses) can simply think nothing at all. For DFW, this "thinking nothing" business helps to explain the dichotomy of the great athlete - that one can be transcendent and godly on the court or field but inarticulate and laconic when a thousand microphones and cameras are shoved at one's face. I am neither insightful (or old) enough to have made this observation originally, nor bold enough to plagiarize it as my own. For me, though, despite my new insight into Michael Jordan, I'm still left wanting. Are our attitudes so fundamentally different that the difference begins at the root? Were we born this way - with this capacity for thinking or non-thinking - or was it acquired developmentally? Is there any way I can reconcile the differences of his spirit with mine?
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