The Mythos of Michael Jordan Continues
Michael Jordan, clad in a draping suit and a fitted beret, is ambling toward a makeshift Chicago Bulls locker room before the 1997 McDonald’s Championship, an international summer basketball exhibition tournament, held in Paris. An NBA Entertainment cameraman films the jaunt, then pauses to capture some watercooler talk between Jordan and the NBA commissioner at the time, David Stern. The cameraman continues walking as Stern enters the room, but stops when Jordan’s broad frame fills up the doorway. Jordan swiftly turns back, his smile warping into a scowl. He dismisses the film crew. “You guys are not allowed,” he says, and the cameraman instinctively turns the camera away before Jordan even finishes uttering a perfunctory “Sorry.” He’s kidding, of course. But lesson learned: MJ didn’t need a ball to get people to bite on a fake.
This scene in Paris is one of many candid, never-before-seen moments in the new 10-part Netflix-ESPN joint documentary, It’s also perhaps the most explicit in establishing Jordan as the series’, who wanted to make the documentary. In sports parlance, “legacy” is a nebulous measurement of one’s accomplishments. But in those 500 hours of archival tape was a bit of Jordan’s legacy rendered tangible. It was leverage against any prospects of irrelevance, something that would have to be shared in a manner befitting the cultural monolith he became in his prime.
