Jumpman
The Making and Meaning of Michael Jordan
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- US$18.99
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How Michael Jordan’s path to greatness was shaped by race, politics, and the consequences of fame
To become the most revered basketball player in America, it wasn’t enough for Michael Jordan to merely excel on the court. He also had to become something he never intended: a hero.
Reconstructing the defining moment of Jordan’s career—winning his first NBA championship during the 1990-1991 season—sports historian Johnny Smith examines Jordan’s ubiquitous rise in American culture and the burden he carried as a national symbol of racial progress. Jumpman reveals how Jordan maintained a “mystique” that allowed him to seem more likable to Americans who wanted to believe race no longer mattered. In the process of achieving greatness, he remade himself into a paradox: universally known, yet distant and unknowable.
Blending dramatic game action with grand evocations of the social forces sweeping the early nineties, Jumpman demonstrates how the man and the myth together created the legend we remember today.
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Smith (The Sons of Westwood), a history professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, justifies yet another book about Jordan by offering a smart appraisal of the superstar's relationship with race. Jordan avoided discussing racism and politics during his NBA career in a bid to "appear more likable to people living under the illusion that the nation had solved its racial dilemmas," Smith argues, noting that in 1990 Jordan, who had his own sneaker line with Nike, justified not endorsing Black Democratic senatorial candidate Harvey Gantt against racist incumbent Jesse Helms with the comment, "Republicans buy shoes, too." Smith argues that Jordan downplayed to the press the ways in which racism shaped his life; he writes that Jordan has omitted in accounts of his youth that he was enraged by the prejudice he faced attending a newly desegregated high school in Wilmington, N.C., in the late 1970s and took to the court as a means of "disproving any notion of weakness or inferiority." Smith places Jordan's apoliticism in context, describing how O.J. Simpson and Julius Erving sought to present themselves as "colorless" to better appeal to white America. Jordan remains something of an enigma throughout, but readers will come away with a better sense of how that mystery was a product of the Hall of Famer's aspirations for universal admiration. It's a fascinating account of how Jordan navigated America's fraught racial politics during his rise to the top.
