Playing for Keeps, David Halberstam (2019)

In the fall of 1997, Michael Jeffrey Jordan, once of Wilmington, North Carolina, and now of Chicago, Illinois, arrived in Paris, France, with his team, the Chicago Bulls, to play a preseason tournament run by McDonald’s, one of his principal corporate sponsors, as well as a very important corporate sponsor of the National Basketball Association. Even though it featured some of the better European teams, the tournament was not, in terms of the level of play, likely to be competitive for a top NBA team like the Bulls. Nor was it supposed to be: It was a part of the NBA’s relentless and exceptionally successful attempt to showcase the game and its star players in parts of the world where basketball was gaining in popularity, particularly among the young. It was also done in no small part because it delighted the league’s corporate sponsors by opening up and solidifying critical international markets. Not surprisingly, the American players did not take the competition very seriously. (Nor did their announcers. When the Celtics played in the tournament a few years earlier, their longtime announcer, Johnny Most, a man who did not always have an easy time with the names of American players, gave up completely, and fans back in Boston were treated to, “And so the short guy with the mustache throws it in to the tall guy with the beard. ...”)
The Bulls arrived to play for the hamburger championship of the world, as they often did these days, with all the fanfare of a great touring rock band. They were the Beatles of basketball, one writer had said years before, and in fact they flew over in the 747 normally used by the Rolling Stones for their tours. There had been a time when Michael Jordan had regarded France as a kind of sanctuary, a place where he could vacation and escape the burden of his fame, sitting outdoors in front of a cafe and savoring the role of anonymous tourist. His appearance on the Olympic Dream Team five years earlier and his subsequent mounting international fame had ended that. His gross income had more than doubled, but he had lost Paris; he was as recognizable and as mobbed here as anywhere else. Huge crowds waited outside his hotel all day long hoping for the briefest glimpse of the man French journalists called the world’s greatest basketteur. At the games themselves, the French ball boys seemed unwilling to serve their own team and wanted to work only with the Bulls. Some of the French players inked Michael’s number, 23, on their sneakers as a means of commemorating their brush with greatness. At Bercy, the arena in which the games were played, copies of his uniform jersey sold for the equivalent of a mere eighty dollars. JORDAN AWAITED LIKE A KING read the headline announcing his arrival in the sports daily L’Equipe. The games had been sold out for weeks, and the French press seemed ready to give Jordan head-of-state treatment and cut him some slack — when, during a press conference, he confused the Louvre, a great museum, with the luge, a dangerous winter sport, no one came down hard on him, though it was just the kind of mistake an American might make that normally the French would have seized on with great enthusiasm, to show the barbarity of the new world. MICHAEL HAS CAPTURED PARIS said another newspaper, and a writer added, “The young Parisians lucky enough to get into the Bercy must have dreamed beautiful dreams, for their hero had been everything they could have hoped for.” Noting that Jordan was wearing his celebrated beret, journalist Thierry Marchand enthused, “We shall be able to call him Michel.” France-Soir went even further: “Michael Jordan is in Paris,” it said. “That’s better than the Pope. It’s God in person.” The games themselves were not, in fact, very good; if anything, they were just short of an embarrassment. The Bulls performed sluggishly but managed to beat Olympiakos Piraeus of Greece in the Final. Jordan’s celebrated teammates Dennis Rodman and Scottie Pippen were not there, and Toni Kukoc, once the best player in all of Europe, scored five points. Jordan scored twenty-seven, but was not pleased to have to play without two critically important teammates. Staying home would have been more restful, as his toe was infected. Jordan was well aware that the true triumph of Paris belonged less to him than to David Stern, the commissioner of the league. The tournament was not merely a reflection of the growing internationalization of the sport, which Stern helped engineer, but a celebration of the NBA’s connection with McDonald’s, one of America’s blue-chip companies.
Stern, surrounded by most of the NBA executive staff and all sorts of McDonald’s executives, had a wonderful time. Almost everybody in the basketball structure who was anybody had come. There was one notable exception, and that was the absence of Jerry Reinsdorf, the Bulls’ owner, who rarely showed at things like this. Stern had pushed Reinsdorf to come and enjoy some nachas, a Yiddish word for pleasure, but that kind of nachas did not seem to appeal to the Bulls’ owner, a man who seemed to prefer his privacy to the semidubious glitter and adulation that even an owner could be a part of at occasions like this. In addition, there had been a good deal of speculation at the last moment among the NBA people as to whether one other VIP, Dick Ebersol, the head of sports for NBC, would come. There was a powerful rumor sweeping Paris that even though the McDonald’s championship coincided with the start of the World Series, Ebersol, whose heart was said to belong to basketball rather than baseball, would come to Paris instead of sitting in some highly visible box seat being seen by his own cameras at the Series. Appropriately, given the symbiotic relationship between television and big-time sports, Stern and Ebersol were very close. Ebersol was wont to call Stern his boss, and Stern was wont to call Ebersol his. Stern was the most passionate and sophisticated of modern imagemakers, and it was Ebersol’s company that determined which images went out to the nation. Stern understood, as not everyone in the world of sports did yet, that image was more important than reality in their business. He monitored the league’s coverage of his sport very closely, and often seemed to take quite personally any departure on the part of the broadcasters and their cameras from what might be considered an image upgrade. In fact, when he had first ascended at the NBA, at a time when the league’s image was still largely negative, he had been famous for calling network executives on Monday to complain about any image downgrade that might have taken place on Sunday.
Both Ebersol and Stern had a shared stake in the good name and the public image of basketball, especially in the public behavior of its best players, and the two men had worked closely in a collaboration that had seen a dramatic rise in the popularity of the sport, and in time in its network ratings as well. That the question even arose of whether Ebersol would bag the World Series for exhibition basketball games against weak opponents in a foreign land for a cup handed out by a hamburger company showed how much the fortunes of the two sports had changed in recent years. This World Series, between Cleveland and Florida, did not, as it was about to begin, seem to the average fan a particularly tantalizing one; it seemed to lack the sense of a traditional rivalry, or at the least, some degree of geographical animosity. It pitted a Miami team, one that few fans knew very much about, against a Cleveland team that was talented but not well known. Neither team, to the general sports public, had yet created any kind of persona. There was no rivalry, neither historic nor geographic, between the two teams. Eventually Ebersol had stayed in America to watch the Series. Stern had teased him about that—“Dick, if you want to stay back in the States and watch the lowest-rated World Series in history, feel free to," he had said. (Stern was wrong: It was not the lowest-rated World Series; the one in 1993, when for the first time the NBA Finals had been rated higher than the World Series, was.)