Michael Jordan: Playing For Keeps

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Michael Jordan: Playing for Keeps
By David Halberstam, 426 pages
$17.47 at Amazon.com, 30% off the list price of $24.95

By Sean Davis

Nowadays you see people wearing wrist-bands and tee-shirts with the inscription “W.W.J.D.?” The letters stand for the expression “What Would Jesus Do?”

No disrespect to the Almighty, but sometimes when I’m playing basketball, I ask myself, “What Would Jordan Do?” It’s the golden rule of basketball, and not a bad question to ask yourself in any undertaking, because to emulate Michael Jordan is to strive for excellence.

You may not have as much talent for whatever you love to do as Jordan has for basketball, but work as hard he does and you are bound to succeed - if at nothing else than at winning the respect of yourself and others.

Learning this lesson is good enough reason to read David Halberstam’s Playing For Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made. Halberstam correctly discerns that what sets Jordan apart from his peers in the NBA, and from 99.9% of humankind, is his uncompromising determination to excel.

Like the composer of a musical score, Halberstam returns to this leitmotif throughout his work, typically at the moments of highest drama, as in the following passage, when he describes Jordan’s final, game-winning shot against the Utah Jazz last spring through the eyes of Jordan’s personal trainer, Tim Grover:

Grover loved the moment: All that exhausting training all year long had allowed Michael to be the dominant player in a deciding game when by all rights his legs should have been disappearing on him. What Grover the teacher had learned from Jordan the pupil was the most critical lesson of all, the price for greatness: Only from endlessly practiced technique, enabled by carefully stored-up energy and singularly determined training habits, did great last-second shots go in.

For Jordan, the quest for excellence began early. He was a star pitcher in Little League before his basketball skills became apparent. Yet he was no basketball late-bloomer, as legend would have it. It’s true he didn’t make the varsity at Laney High School in Wilmington, N.C., as a sophomore, but only because his coaches wanted him to get more playing time on the junior varsity team. (His electrifying play on the J.V. drew crowds to rival those of the varsity.)

At the University of North Carolina he started as a freshman, coolly stroking the game-winning shot in the national championship game against Georgetown, one of the best college games ever.

After three years under Dean Smith’s tutelage, Jordan had nothing left to learn on the basketball court (he would return to get his diploma), so he went professional, picking up a gold medal in the Olympic Games between his final season as a collegiate and his first as a Chicago Bull.

We know the rest of Jordan’s story well. He was rookie of the year in the 1984-85 season, but he made his name his second year, scoring 63 points in a playoff loss to the eventual NBA champs, the Boston Celtics. So awesome were his talent and his will that no less a basketball deity than Larry Bird, then at the zenith of his career, said after the game, “That was God disguised as Michael Jordan.”

For this reviewer, who came of age in Boston watching the Bird-era Celtics, the chapter on this game, with its splendid recapitulation of the 1985-86 Celts, was a particular pleasure to read.

After years of scoring titles and playoff losses, Jordan and the Bulls finally won the title in 1991. Jordan wept uncontrollably as he hugged the championship trophy. He would win five more, the last in 1998, when he played his last game, hitting the final shot of his professional career.

Has anyone, in any sport, ended his career with such a burst of unmitigated greatness? Those last 41.9 seconds of Game Six were a perfect – no, that’s not too strong a word – summation of Jordan’s career: He drew on his athleticism, his guile, his determination and his tireless preparation to play his best when only his best would win the game.

In addition to conveying the drama of Jordan’s greatest moments quite well, Halberstam has a great sense of the game's history, comparing Jordan to players of other eras, and describing with vivid and entertaining detail the basketball lifers - scouts and coaches - who, in earlier eras, canvassed the country in search of undiscovered talent.

One thing that makes Halberstam’s book especially enjoyable for readers in their late 20s and early 30s is that the story of Jordan’s career is the story of their basketball consciousness. The first college basketball game this reviewer remembers watching was the 1982 North Carolina-Georgetown classic, in which a skinny Patrick Ewing, then a Georgetown freshman, was called for goaltending on five of Carolina’s first nine shots.

Halberstam also gives Bird and Magic Johnson their props, observing, as others have countless times before, that their skill, artistry and commitment to excellence pulled the NBA back from the brink when Jordan was still wearing Carolina blue.

Halberstam has written one other basketball book, The Breaks of the Game. His baseball books, including Summer of ’49, are better known. But most of all, Halberstam is known for his reporting on the Vietnam War and The Best and the Brightest, a book about the generation of political leaders who brought the U.S. into that ill-advised conflict.

Playing for Keeps resembles another Halberstam book, The Fifties, and therein lies its shortcomings. In The Fifties, Halberstam attempts to show how many forces that had been latent in American culture combined to create a booming postwar society.

In Playing for Keeps, he tries the same trick, linking Jordan in a holy trinity with ESPN and Nike to show how entertainment values and brand power transformed commerce in the late 20th century. Halberstam should have decided between writing a book about Jordan and writing one about sports in the 1990s. He doesn’t, and the reader suffers for it. Long digressions into the histories of ESPN and Nike, for instance, have some intrinsic interest, but not enough to justify inclusion in a book about Jordan.

Halberstam is too clever by half when he begins his book in Paris in 1997, where Jordan’s Bulls are playing for the “hamburger championship of the world” in an exhibition sponsored by McDonald’s. Do we really need Halberstam to point out how excessively commercial most popular entertainment has become?

A more satisfying place to begin a book about Jordan would have been the beginning, with Jordan’s childhood. I doubt if Nike or McDonald’s contributed much to Jordan’s success, whereas his parents, James and Deloris, clearly had a lot to do with it.

(Halberstam does provide some useful background about Jordan’s parents, showing how the came from humble beginnings themselves to give Jordan an idyllic – and somewhat privileged – childhood. The murder of James Jordan in 1993 is all the sadder to this reviewer in light of what Halberstam reveals about that fine man.)

Playing for Keeps has one other big problem: the quality of the writing is uneven. Certain passages are needlessly repetitive, with paragraph after paragraph seeming to say the same thing.

At other times, Halberstam’s diction can be downright sloppy. He uses the word “self-evident” to describe a number of things and qualities that are anything but, apparently in the belief that this frees him from having to support his assertions.

Frankly, the book has the feel of a rush-job. The lack of an index, which a long nonfiction book like this should have, points to that conclusion. One more draft would have done the book – and its readers – a lot of good. But then, perhaps the book would have come out too late to benefit from its obvious news peg - Jordan’s retirement in January.

Despite its shortcomings, Playing for Keeps is an entertaining and worthwhile read. Hard-core hoop fans may prefer older Jordan titles such as sportswriter Sam Smith’s The Jordan Rules. But for the fan not just of basketball but of excellence in all its forms, Halberstam’s book is bound to please.

And finally, for anyone who thinks he or she has the stuff of which greatness is made, this book is a how-to guide to making the most of one’s God-given talent.

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