Sadly, Jordan’s silence on social issues made loud impression
THE MOST visible athlete in the world spent most of his 53 years being invisible on the social issues of his day, hiding out in plain sight instead of ever speaking out against the injustice of his world.
This is part of Michael Jordan’s legacy to the public. In front of an entire generation of sports fans, Michael Jordan, Chicago Bulls guard, American icon, never took a stand until Monday, when he pledged dollars to help promote peace between the police and the black community, never had a thought about any social conversation. To an entire generation, he’s the athlete whose political views were long summed up by one infamous quote: “Republicans buy sneakers, too.”
Yet here come the Michael Jordan apologists anyway, doing everything possible to claim he wasn’t what we all saw, suggesting now that he may not have even said that infamous quote. Here comes the parade of MJ stories about all the things he did when the cameras were off, and here comes ESPN’s Michael Wilbon (and plenty of other journalists like him) talking about all the things Jordan did in “private.”
“He usually preferred not to speak publicly on these things,” Wilbon said on SportsCenter, “even though there would be quite a bit of conversation privately, and sometimes actions privately.”
Wilbon was just one high-pro-
file example of a plethora of people who seem to think that Jordan squandering the grandest of platforms for decades was somehow all right because he cut a few checks and signed some basketballs for charity.
But there’s nothing to be commended about any of that, not when we’ve heard it so many times, about so many athletes. It’s the go-to excuse for the fans of blank-billboard athletes, the vague tale of how so-and-so does so much “behind-the-scenes,” and goes to so many charity events where they’re pampered, and makes a bunch of charitable donations, which almost always happen to have excellent tax consequences, a really good thing once you reach the financial stratosphere.
But how much more impact would he have attaching his name to a cause, risking his standing by supporting one group over another? How much more could he have accomplished if he came out from behind his desk and put his face out there, the most famous athlete on the planet in his time? He could have done so much more, especially now that we know he actually cared about issues beyond the triangle offense.
Except an entire generation didn’t watch any of those actions, and, in the case of Jordan, was left to watch — and learn from — so much Michael Jordan inaction. It’s what he did for far too long, and that’s the lasting influence he left on a generation of athletes and sport fans alike.
Michael was the model, and for two decades in basketball, that model never used the grandest of platforms for anything past the business of sport. And that’s colored the thinking of every single one of us.
Long before Derek Jeter and Tiger Woods made careers of being blank slates on all social issues, they’d watched a decade of Jordan.
And Jordan was so successful on the court that all of sports fandom came to believe that tunnel vision was the key to championships. So when Carmelo Anthony chose to speak out about violence instead of basketball earlier this month, there were plenty of fans who suddenly expressed “worry” on social media, concerned that the Knicks best player might not be focused enough on basketball. Those attitudes and ideas were born of Jordan’s silent treatment of the issues that mattered, of all the “behind the scenes” work that the MJ apologists hold in such high regard. The strongest indictment of the Jordan approach is that it never came close to solving the problem. Three decades ago, Michael Jordan said nothing of the violence around him in Chicago, said nothing of anything.
Three decades later, he broke his silence to speak about the violence around him in the nation.