It was one of those situations around which National Basketball Association marketeers had grown accustomed to building highlights packages and home-video fortunes. MichaelJordan with the game on the line – Jordan as a symbol for hope that is never dimmed and that will never fail. In Memphis, many of the fans had gone home; among the customers who flocked to see him inballparks around the Southern League, the ““Is this all there is?’’ feeling usually set in by the third or fourth inning. So the place was dotted with empty seats, and those fans who remained leaned toward home plate, watching him.
Strike one. Strike two. Strike three. There was a fireworks display scheduled for after the game, so within a second or two ofJordan’s third strike the stadium’s lights were switched off. I saw him there in the blackness – standing at the plate, having lost, the game over and gone and all the illumination extinguished. His teammates were already walking down the right-field line toward the visitors’ locker room, but Jordan remained in the batter’s box, alone in the midst of darkness, not leaving, not moving, looking toward the pitcher’s mound on which there was no pitcher, looking toward the ground, waiting for something, one more pitch, one more chance, waiting for something that was not going to come.
His leaving the NBA and pursuing a big-league baseball career was widely characterized in the imagery of dreams, as if it were all some silly flight of fancy, but in the aftermath of his father’s murder I often sensed in him underlying themes of death and fear. He would bring it up all the time when we talked. Driving to early-morning hitting instruction in the hour before dawn, he said, he would turn to the empty seat beside him and see his dad: ““He’s with me in that car. I look over at the next seat, and I think: “We’re doing this. We’re doing this together. You and I, Pops’.’’ After the death of Richard Nixon last April, Jordan said, ““Maybe, when you die, people forget the adversities in your life. Maybe when you die they are willingto remember the good things.’’ At spring training a year ago, we were sitting on a terrace behind the house he had rented in Sarasota and he said, out of nowhere: ““Sometimes I’ll sit out here at night. Just sit here and look up at the sky and think. The stars will be out, and it will be very quiet, and it’s just so peaceful. I’m not afraid. Everything is changing, but I look at the sky and nothing scares me.''
The pursuit of the baseball ideal was genuine; he willed himself to be ordinary again, to be the 15-year-old kid who was cut from his high-school basketball team, to find out if he could start over and make the ascent from nothing. Being a minor leaguer didn’t bother him at all; in a way, that’s who he was inside. At the beginning of the baseball quest, he told me he had a fantasy of his first major league at-bat. He knocks the ball over the fence, he said: ““And as I’m running toward home, I see that a gate is open. I cross home plate, but I don’t stop. I run right out the gate, and through the tunnel and out of the stadium. I’m still in my uniform, and I’m running away, down the streets, as fast asI can. I can still hear the crowd back in the stadium, and I just keep on running. Keep on running forever.''
By last autumn the Chicago Bulls had unveiled a bronze statue of him outside the new basketball arena in Chicago, and he was inthe Arizona Fall League, still trying to learn to be better at baseball. ““I’m not a statue,‘‘he said as we talked before one of the games. ““I’m a person. I’m alive.’’ Across the way,his minor-league teammates were looking at a TV set in the clubhouse, on which a commercial featuring Jordan was playing. ““It happens all the time,’’ he said. ““They’ll watch that on the screen, and they won’t turn their heads away from it. And meanwhile I’m over here. I guess it’s like the statue. I’m not dead yet. I see them looking at the TV, and I think, here I am, guys, over here. That’s not me. This is me.’’
One other moment from this time just past: Jordan, in the midst of a baseball game, went to a back practice diamond to work with a coach on his hitting. From the stadium itself, the sound ofthe crowd was like a faraway echo – the happy sounds of cheers and pleasure.
Jordan lost track of time. Suddenly, his next turn at bat was nearing. ““Michael,’’ the coach said. ““You’ve got to get over there.’’ With a bat in his hand, Jordan, all by himself, began running, as fast as he could, running across an open field, a solitary figure sprinting toward the sound of distant joy.
