THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 10, 1995 TAG: 9512120439
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY TIM WARREN
LENGTH: Long : 108 lines
REBOUND
The Odyssey of Michael Jordan
BOB GREENE
Viking. 275 pp. $22.95.
FALLING FROM GRACE
Can Pro Basketball Be Saved?
TERRY PLUTO
Simon & Schuster. 319 pp. $23.
Ken Burns and his fellow baseball-worshipers notwithstanding, basketball is really the national pastime these days. The stars of the National Basketball Association are among the highest-paid athletes in the world, as well as the best known. The NBA is fast-paced and aggressive - much like '90s America - media-savvy and well-attuned to marketing itself. And because most of its players come from an urban background, it reflects contemporary urban America more than baseball.
Michael Jordan, more than anyone else, was responsible for helping make the NBA the global success story it became in the late 1980s and early '90s. He was supremely talented; he was quotable and eminently marketable. When he retired in 1993, after winning seven straight scoring titles and leading the Chicago Bulls to three consecutive championships, Jordan was almost universally acknowledged as the greatest player ever.
As even most non-sports fans know by now, Jordan then proceeded to surprise almost everyone by announcing he wanted to be a pro baseball player. He spent a season with the Double-A Birmingham Barons, playing in parks in such places as Chattanooga, Tenn., and Greenville, S.C., before deciding to return to pro basketball last season.
Rebound: The Odyssey of Michael Jordan chronicles Jordan's last year in the minors and his return to the NBA, and for the most part it's an intelligent, well-crafted book. Bob Greene, a columnist for The Chicago Tribune, had gotten close to Jordan during the writing of his 1992 book, Hang Time: Days and Dreams with Michael Jordan, which was an absorbing and sometimes chilling account of a man struggling to deal with his fame.
In Rebound, Greene is interested in seeing how Jordan, after his abrupt retirement from basketball and the murder of his beloved father in the summer of 1993, conducted ``an odyssey that, I am convinced, Jordan had no true idea he was embarking upon.''
Few could figure out why Jordan would bother to live the life of a minor-leaguer. He was accused of making a mockery of baseball, of being an egomaniac who could not retreat from the spotlight. But, as Jordan told Greene, ``This is something my father always wanted me to do.''
How successful was his quest? Jordan finished with a poor batting average of .202, but did earn a lot of respect for his willingness to pursue a baseball career at the age of 32, and endure the indignities of minor-league ball - long bus rides, bad food - when he clearly didn't have to do so.
Rebound gives a good sense of the crush of attention that Jordan endures daily, and particularly so during that curious time. Even Jordan was surprised: He told Greene that the public's interest was so great that ``I was getting a feeling . . . like I was being put in the position of having to take care of all these people. Like I was somehow responsible for them - like whatever decisions I made, they thought it was going to affect their lives.''
You could argue that Jordan, by raising his public image through countless commercials over the years, more or less put himself in that uncomfortable spot, and Jordan himself acknowledges as much. But a reader might also wonder about the desperation of some of these fans. It's almost as if a celebrity can't be just a celebrity anymore. Perhaps, through a decade of exposure on TV, Jordan has become so familiar for some that all barriers are gone.
Jordan emerges in this book as a thoughtful and decent sort - it's hard not to respect a guy who took a chance as he did. Still, Greene, while asking good questions and being an observant chronicler, doesn't go far enough.
He notes that Jordan enjoyed the camaraderie of his minor-league teammates, may of them just out of high school. The inference was that Jordan just wanted to be a regular guy. But wait: Isn't that sad that a man in his 30s would want to hang out with a bunch of youths? Does this, perhaps, indicate how badly Jordan wants a ``normal'' life? Greene seems unwilling to explore what might be negative or unflattering about Jordan, and the book suffers for it.
Terry Pluto, on the other hand, has no trouble telling what he thinks is wrong with the NBA. A sports columnist for the Akron-Beacon-Journal and the author of a number of sports books, Pluto obviously loves basketball - but not as it's being played in the NBA. The league that Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird helped build into a model professional sports enterprise has developed serious flaws. Pluto laments:
``We went through a period of taunting, brawling and championship teams that couldn't shoot straight. More important, we have too many players running amok, consumed by their own wants and needs, oblivious to what has made the game great.''
Certainly anyone who loves basketball has to be disturbed by the changes in the game over the past few years. The culprits, Pluto writes, include overpaid, pampered players; control-obsessed coaches who slow down games to a crawl; an obsession with dunking that has produced a generation of players who can't make outside shots; a corporate mentality in the league that takes the game away from the ordinary fan; a rise in thuggish play that the NBA not only did not stop in time, but actually promoted for a while; and a general culture of disrespect and anger among contemporary players.
Pluto does a good job in articulating these concerns, and offers a number of solutions (allow zone defenses, for one). But you get the sense that the NBA is still in for some bad times. Ultimately, Pluto suggests, pro basketball is not just about basketball anymore. That's something Michael Jordan would understand perfectly. MEMO: Tim Warren is a free-lance book critic and writer who lives in Silver
Spring, Md. by CNB