Off the Iron: The Endurance of MJ’s Perfection
With apologies to Hakeem Olajuwon and Kevin McHale, there are two post moves in the history of basketball that reign above all others in the unstoppable category: Kareem’s skyhook and MJ’s fadeaway. With both of those shots, the defender was irrelevant. If Mike missed, it was just cause he happened to miss; it wasn’t because of something the guy guarding him did.
Above, you can watch Mike, even at 46-years-old, toying with a defender on the block, making fadeaway after fadeaway. (via Slam)
While it’s interesting to see that Money’s still got it, the more enduring abstraction that struck me while watching this video is what Mike’s fadeaway represents: A key reason that few people who ever saw Mike play will ever admit that anyone else is better.
I’m not saying anyone is better yet, but someday, somewhere, some kid will come along who is better than Mike. It’s inevitable. Still, 99% of the people who watched Mike play will still say Mike was better. These people will use Mike’s undeniable on-court greatness as evidence. They will list his accomplishments. They will reference all the other NBA players and experts who believe Mike was the best ever.
But all those valid points will not be the ultimate rationale behind why most MJ-era NBA fans will never admit that some new kid is better than Mike. The reason they will not admit that is because Mike had a perfect career trajectory that is (almost certainly) inimitable. And there are two separate, yet equally memory-engraving ways in which Mike’s career trajectory was perfect.
Reason #1 That MJ Had a Perfect Career Trajectory
If Hollywood made “The Michael Jordan Story” into a movie, you would say “This plot is some Mighty Ducks-esque derivative nonsense.”
Here’s the MJ career arc of lore as it’s most widely spun:
- Mike gets cut from his high-school basketball team.
- Mike overcomes that adversity to become a high-school star and enroll in one of the biggest college programs in the country, where he hits an NCAA Championship-winning shot as a freshman.
- Mike becomes the best college basketball player in the country.
- Mike gets drafted by a middling NBA team that has never won anything and instantly becomes an unstoppable player in the League who is way better than anyone else to the point that Larry Bird (who was either the number 1 or 1A player in the league previously) called him “God disguised as Michael Jordan” — yet many people still see Mike as too flashy and too much of a ball-hog to be considered a true all-time great.
- Mike elevates his team to contender status but still can never quite oust his arch rival (Chuck Daly’s Pistons).
- Mike not only defeats his nemesis and then knocks off the best team of the 80s (Magic Johnson’s Lakers) to win his first professional championship, but he goes 15-2 in the Playoffs on his way to the title.
- Mike never loses again.
Obviously, the last item is excluding the Wizards part of his career (which I think most people don’t consider to be an actual part of the MJ mythos) and the tail end of the 1994-95 season when he came back to the NBA — out-of-shape and out-of-sync — for 17 regular season games before losing to the Orlando Magic in the second round of the Playoffs (which I think most people also generally disregard).
In short, he rose from nothing (getting cut from Laney High), overcame his biggest hurdle (the Pistons), become the king of basketball and wore the crown with such undisputed supremacy that he eventually decided to relinquish the thrown on his own terms. Every other all-time great in the history of the NBA (and, to my knowledge, every other all-time great in any sport ever minus maybe Rocky Marciano) has ascended to the thrown, worn the crown for a while and then had it taken away from him by a younger up-and-comer. But no one ever took Mike’s crown. He just gave it away, seemingly because he was tired of participating in the ongoing charade that the sport of basketball was even still an exercise in competition.
Mike actually reached the status that Jay-Z once boasted about his crew achieving: “The game is ours, we will never foul out; yall just better hope we gracefully bow out.”
Reason #2 That MJ Had a Perfect Career Trajectory
In the classic film Office Space, Ron Livingston’s character Peter Gibbons details a startling revelation about the depths of his depression to a hypnotherapist. “Ever since I started working,” he says, “every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that’s on the worst day of my life.”
Mike’s professional career was the exact opposite. Every single day that you saw him, that was on the best day of his life. He got better every day of his career. He may have averaged 37 ppg, 5 apg and 5 rpg in 1987, but he was a better player in 1998. And on the final day you ever saw him in a Bulls uniform — right down to his final 30 seconds ever on the court — he was the best he had ever been. If you don’t remember, just ask Karl Malone and Bryon Russell. The 1987 Mike doesn’t embarrass the third best power forward of all time (or second, depending how you feel about Charles Barkley) by stripping him in the post and then walking down and calmly hitting a jumper 15 seconds later to win the NBA Championship — in front of the hostile Utah fans no less.
His Bulls career trajectory did not follow the path of nearly every other professional athlete we have ever seen. He didn’t improve rapidly in his early years, peak during his prime and then decline until retirement. He may have slowed down athletically, but his abilities never stopped improving. His improvement was steady, upward and seemingly limitless. (At least the perception of his improvement was, and that’s what is really at issue here. Only a few people — Scottie Pippen, Phil Jackson, Doug Collins and Tim Grover likely among them — could really tell you with any semblance of certainty if 1998 Mike was actually better than 1993 Mike.)
Nike, Gatorade, Hanes, McDonald’s and Mike himself have a lot to do with how we view the MJ mythos and how he never stopped improving. One apt example is the Gatorade “You Reach, I Teach” commercial that pits Old Mike vs. Young Mike. In just 60 seconds, we see why Old Mike is better, and the fadeaway is not-so-coincidentally the move he goes to after telling the youngster “I teach.”
An even more illustrative point is made when Old Mike swats a layup attempt from Young Mike. Following the play, Young Mike bombastically shrugs off the block with some slick posturing that alludes to the fact that he wasn’t really trying, a remark to which Old Mike offers the simple, sage advice of a basketball master.
Young Mike: “Coulda dunked.”
Old Mike: “Shoulda dunked.”
The lesson here is that 1987 Mike might have been capable of doing anything on a basketball court, but 1998 Mike was the guy who knew exactly when to do everything. He never failed. He was, for all intents and purposes, an infallible basketball player. He was perfect.
Mike’s fadeaway was the incarnation of this perfection. His at-the-time unparalleled athleticism started to fade in the mid-90s, but the development of that fadeaway (and, more generally, his entire post game) superceded any physical slowdown. His increasingly flawless fadeaway was what made his improvement seem limitless. Honestly, had the whole Wizards thing never happened, the above video would likely prompt many people to think that a 46-year-old MJ could still dominate the NBA today.
The potential of an ever-escalating career trajectory towards perfection is why guys like Bo Jackson have become John Henry-like folk heroes. If not for that career-ending hip injury, he might have continued honing his craft, getting better and better until he morphed into some untackaleable half-Jim Brown/half-Walter Payton hybrid. It’s why when Duke’s Coach K says something like (paraphrasing) “There are two players I’ve seen in the ACC that were clearly better than everyone else: Michael Jordan and Len Bias” it makes people like the Sports Guy wonder whether a Bird/Bias-led Celtics team would have won five straight titles or six.
In the real world, people always decline. They reach a peak and we celebrate them and then we lament their fall. But once we accept it as inevitable, we hope to see some flashes of their previous greatness. It’s why we lionize Jack Nicklaus so greatly for his 1986 Master’s victory. And, conversely, it’s why we don’t criticize Jack Nicholson for messing up The Departed or phoning in The Bucket List.
Mike, of course, clearly declined in the public eye while playing for Washington. But I think his two-year lay-off away from daily scrutiny makes people differentiate the vibrant, Bulls-era, Superman MJ with the aged, Wizards-era, mere mortal Mike to the point that his Washington days are simply an irrelevant epilogue to his career arc.
Mike, the human, declined. But MJ, the immortal, never did.
And, most importantly, never will — regardless of whether or not some young kid drops 63 in a playoff loss against LeBron and the 2017 Cleveland Cavaliers.
[...] Oh, right. Here’s the MJ piece I wrote for Hardwood Paroxysm. [...]
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