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Go Away MJ
By: Alex Anderson

Long before Steve Nash won my basketball heart by appearing in the 2001 NBA All-Star 3-Point Shootout Competition, donning the old style Mavericks jersey and what the announcer could only describe as bed hair, I was obsessed with another player.  Like so many young children of the nineties I became captivated by the great Michael Jordan.  Especially in the years following his first comeback I watched tons of his games and watched him re-invent himself with a turn-around fade away jump shot.  In the few games I had seen him play in live and also (more predictably so) in the highlight reels, I saw a Jordan that scored the majority of his points with a combination of aggressiveness in driving through the lane and an amazing ability to keep his soft touch.  When contested his fierce dunks turned into hand-switching suave lay-ups, an ability that made old-fashioned 3-point plays a staple of his game.  So to see Jordan, after his first retirement, come back and start draining 18-foot fade away jumpers was my proof that he was the greatest of all-time.  Just try making one sometime, you’ll see what I mean – just the strength it takes to shoot the ball that distance while your momentum is carrying you the complete opposite direction is enough to impress, but to be accurate and shoot it at a near 50% clip is truly insane.

Its no wonder I was more than a little pissed off when the media and everyone close to basketball all but forced Jordan to retire the second time after his game-winning shot against the Utah Jazz in the ’98 NBA Finals.  I’ll never forget it.  It was so horrible to hear people calling for his retirement and his consistent “I’m not sure” message.  The whole problem was that Jordan and the Chicago Bulls had just accomplished a “3-Peat Repeat,” which is gay for “winning three things in a row two separate times.”  Not only had they won the NBA Finals three years in a row, again; but it was the way they did it that made every sports announcer and historian literally fucking flip out over the notion that a star could leave their sport gracefully and on top.  They kept saying, “he has nothing left to prove,” and “he can only go down from here,” and “I like men.”  It was so retarded.  As if winning four straight championships and winning another MVP would be proving nothing at all.  So basically, we had Michael Jordan who clearly still wanted to be playing basketball getting dicked around by the media who for some reason wanted him gone in his prime.  It didn’t help that the following season was put on hold after a lockout that would eventually shorten the season to 50 games.  The extra month or so of time with no basketball made every basketball story into, “Michael Jordan: the end of an era?  Will he ride into the sunset on top or will he risk falling from grace and looking like an idiot?”  Way to go losers,  he wanted to play a couple more years and eventually he would, except he’d do it with the Washington Wizards, a shit ass team with “hustle players” like Popeye Jones and “budding stars” like Kwame Brown.  Brilliant, just brilliant.

The Washington Wizards era of Michael Jordan was indeed pretty pathetic, not so much because Jordan wasn’t scoring 30 a game like he used to, but because he was actually not that bad.  It was pathetic because he was still the best player on the team and he clearly shouldn’t have been.  He was an old fucking asshole who insisted on winning with a team of losers that he had a part in drafting.  He had horrible knees and relied highly on his aforementioned fade away, something that becomes all the more difficult with legs as stiff as 2 by 4’s.  For the most part it was painful to watch though.  There were some moments that made you remember the good old days but by and large it was moments that made you quickly forget how great he once was.  Moments that made you wonder if he’d be any good in the new NBA if he were younger.  I say he would, because as stated before, he was still good; an all-star caliber player (that arguably played more consistently than either Rip Hamilton or Jerry Stackhouse) even without the explosiveness the league and his fans had become accustomed to throughout the nineties.  Of course, its all worthless conjecture anyway.

A few years later and another retirement passed and another comeback that has in all probability been mulled over long and hard, Jordan is still making news.  Still confidently sauntering into and out of the limelight whenever he so chooses.  Sometimes the media is at fault.  Covering Michael Jordan’s divorce from his wife with ESPN stories that hook viewers with lead-ins like, “Is Jordan about to make a big decision about his future? – Stay tuned to find out.”  Assholes.  But most of the time its his own doing.  Jordan is now pulling the same starved for attention gimmicks that Magic Johnson has become know for.  If Jordan mysteriously ends up with HIV or a late night comedy show in the coming months I wouldn’t be surprised.

This all started awhile ago when Jordan acquired a stake in the Bobcats organization.  Ever since he’s been making news as the wise old man who used to play basketball.  At this point he is like the grandfather of the game’s up and coming stars.  A few months back, I think around the time that Kobe Bryant was amassing a flurry of 50-point performances, there was a story on ESPN.com about how Jordan and Kobe have been text messaging one another back and forth.  Apparently Jordan is said to have told Kobe Bryant something along the lines of, “You just have one more step to go…”(not exact quote)  he was basically suggesting that Kobe was very close to the same type of clairvoyance that made himself: Himself – that is worthy of God-like capital letters on pronouns.  I sort of had to cringe when I read the article.  I like my sports stars to be either laughably arrogant or annoyingly humble.  This was annoying arrogant, a combination of the two that I don’t much enjoy.  Then just recently, he did it again.  He took another star at the top of his game and made it into a story about himself.  Lebron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers had an historic game against the Detroit Pistons and then went on to win the series, putting him in the NBA Finals at the tender age of 22.  I’m not joking, the ESPN.com article about this is titled: “Jordan says next step for LeBron is consistency.”  Thanks Michael Jordan for bestowing upon Lebron and the rest of the world the knowledge of what makes a player great.  And there’s more… 

"What just transpired was something I felt was needed for the league, was needed for Cleveland, was needed for LeBron," Jordan said in Monday editions of the Chicago Tribune.

Now Jordan is even taking on the story that everyone in the media has been peddling in between and after his comebacks and retirements.  And that story is of course, what the NBA will do without Michael Jordan.  People keep pretending that this matters.  People keep saying the NBA needs a new Jordan.  Who will it be?  Will it be (12 years ago) Grant Hill?  Will it be (7 years ago) Vince Carter?  Will it be (2 years ago) Kobe Bryant?  Will it be (2 days ago) Lebron James?  Who will it be?  Who fucking cares?  What the NBA really needs is new storylines, because the Michael Jordan replacement saga was old about a month after its conception over a decade ago.  The NBA is still popular and I’m convinced that Jordan could disappear and it would stay popular.  Superstars will remain, regardless of whether Jordan is around to help point them out and furthermore, they will remain, regardless of whether they remind us of Jordan at all.  Honestly, I think that many NBA games are just as fun to watch now if not more-so than the ones that MJ played in.  On a consistent basis the games played in the top tier of the Western Conference are good enough to take off work for.  Sure the Finals can be a drag lately, but that’s just because we have a couple of teams right now that play a boring efficient style and an Eastern Conference that is sorely lacking.  But for anyone watching the regular season or the majority of the playoffs it is clear that there are very few teams like this and that these teams won’t last forever; besides, its kind of fun to watch good efficient championship basketball anyway.  What’s the problem here?  Getting back to the Jordan being a loser thing… 

"Making 'The Leap' is where you do it every single night," Jordan said. "It's expected of you, and you do it. ... Not one game, not two games. It's consistent. Every defense comes in and they focus on you and you still impact the game. I think he's shown signs of that." 

"This next series is going to say, 'How far do you want to take it?'" said Jordan, speaking from Elkhart Lake, Wis., where his motorcycle team was participating in a racing event.

Thanks again Jordan for taking time out of your busy day of, wait, what? -  Moto-racing… WHAT!? – to explain more thoroughly just what James needs to do next.  Moto-racing?  You have to be kidding me.  The point is Michael Jordan needs to shut-up and stick to his apparent racing commitments.  The NBA needs him as much as he allows them to need him.  In other words, if he just shuts up and goes away maybe some of this bullshit will die down.  If he stays in the basketball eye by continuing to make public comments about up and coming stars then the Jordan Replacement Saga might never end.

One last point I’d like to make, that really doesn’t fit in with the rest of this article, but that has to be made sooner or later: STOP PREFACING THE WORD basketball, WITH THE WORDS: the game of.  We know that when somebody says the word basketball that they are referring to the game called basketball.  We don’t get confused.  If someone says, “I think I am good at basketball,” we don’t say, “Huh?  Whatever do you mean.  How can you be good at a round orange ball?”  This is the most annoying thing ever.  I don’t know how it started or why but it has to stop.  What’s really strange is that it only seems to happen with basketball.  I hardly ever hear people saying “the game of football/soccer/baseball,”  why is this practice so prevalent with basketball?

"It's great," the Cavaliers star said after practice on Monday. "Anytime you get praise from the guy who basically laid down all the stones for you to get here. I grew up idolizing his game and how he played the game of basketball…”

So my plea to the up and coming stars of the game of basketball is that you stop saying “the game of basketball,” and just say, “basketball.”  And my plea to Jordan is to stop saying anything and just go away.